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But the sting of that fresh wound highlighted something even worse: the dull, lifeless memories of older wounds that went much, much deeper.
Her eyes glided to her mother, zeroing in on the ghastly bones of her hand clutching her brother’s sturdy arm. His strength and vitality morbidly contrasted with the sickly frailty of her mom’s wasted body. When Mom died not three months later, it was the worst tragedy of Della’s life. In retrospect, it shattered her heart, yet it was only a preview of what was to come.
Then there were Rakesh’s parents, grinning broadly, and all his sisters with their colorful saris and glossy black hair. And next to Rakesh, sitting in a place of honor, his beloved grandmother, hisAmma. Amma, who’d pressed this very book into Della’s hands with an admonishment to “keep it with you, and if your house burns, you know what to grab first.”
“Amma,” Rakesh had laughed as Della flipped through the glossy wedding photos in the palm-sized album, “all the photos are safe in the cloud.”
“Pssh,” Amma scoffed, “thecloud. Have you ever seen anything less permanent than a cloud?”
Della’s cheek quivered, remembering the elderly woman chiding her tech mogul husband. Amma had been right in the end, hadn’t she? Maybe the cloud existed somewhere, in some secret server farm that hadn’t been blasted to smithereens, in some place where electricity flowed unbroken... but she doubted it. In a strange and sadly poetic way, it mirrored her relationship with her own fraught memories: the emotions existed somewhere, but remained largely inaccessible. Unplugged and devoid of power, they languished in permanent statis, a part of her and forever separated from her.
Tired of reminiscing, Della flipped past the rest of the wedding photos, past her honeymoon and a few others tucked in from other adventures, saying another silent thank you to Amma and another silent prayer that she had died peacefully and unaffected by the end of the world.
That was one of the cruelest things, theunknowingof it all. Once communications went down and failsafe after failsafe failed, everything was cut off from everything else. The only situation you knew was your immediate environment; your only sources of information were the people you spoke with and the rumors and lies they passed along as truth. When things went wrong, as everything did, there was no one to call for help.
No one to call when wildfires raced through your beautiful town and ate up the houses like a ravenous beast of mythical proportions. No one to call when a tree fell, blocking the escape route and splitting your fleeing group in two. No one to call when you screamed goodbyes to your husband over the roaring flames as your neighbors dragged you away.
No one to call when the things she’d believed in, worked for, devoted her life to amounted to nothing more than fanciful, quaint notions of a pseudo-civilization. Government’s responsibility to its citizens, its ability to guide a traumatized populace through a catastrophe, the ability of leadership to provide a steadying hand in a time of crisis, the social contract and citizens’ commitments to each other for the good of all... all of it gone in a frenzy of panic and a rapid descent into everyone out for themselves.
Della sighed, letting the photo book flutter closed on her lap. She reached for her now-cold tea, taking a slow sip of the bitter liquid. What, precisely, drove her back to the album? What was the value in revisiting this again and again? To remember? To grieve? To honor?
No. Nothing so sympathetic as all that. In the deepest recesses of her heart, Della could admit she did it to recall a time when feelings zipped and swooped inside of her, when emotions were something more than abstract concepts, something more than the dulled wash of vague recognition. Della would never utter that trite colloquialism, to say a part of her died at TheEnd. She hadn’t died with Rakesh and her father and her brother and millions of others. She’d lived through it all. Each successive year wore her thinner and thinner, yet life never fully relinquished its hold. Her aging slowed, she lived well past human life expectancy, and then kept on living. But each year, more and more of Adeline Cabrese washed away.
She hadn’t died. She’deroded.
All of her edges worn smooth, a twenty-first-century woman in a world dominated by beastly Alphas, she’d accepted her position of relative unimportance in Morris Hill. She’d accepted her status as neither Alpha, nor Beta, nor Omega, butOther. She’d accepted her dreary reality, the dull monotony of subsistence farming, the endless laundry, and reading and rereading the same books. In the time after TheEnd, she’d lived through far more dangerous situations, so she accepted the boredom of the relative safety of Morris Hill and blended into the background like a smooth river rock, unfeeling and inert. Yet she returned to the photos again and again, dissected her most poignant memories, compelled to locate a trace of her once-powerful emotions in the wreckage of her life, only to come up empty.
A shuffling noise at the door kicked Della’s pulse up into her throat as Cal’s vow whispered across her mind, “If you’re not in the mess hall, I’ll come for you.”He wouldn’t barge in her cabin, would he?
The door opened, and Rue skittered in like a frightened squirrel, giving a timid little head dip in greeting. Della leaned back in her chair as her heart rate settled. An odd, wistful feeling took the momentary excitement’s place as if, for absolutely no good reason whatsoever, she’dhopedit was Cal for one split second.
“Did you have a nice dinner?” Della asked, mostly to distract herself from the disquieting disappointment.
“Yeah, some kinda stew. Rabbit, maybe?” Rue scratched absently at her stubbled head. When the slight Omega had first arrived, someone explained to Dellasotto vocethat the Alphas had shaved her head because she was infested with lice and it was the only way not to introduce it to the entire Pack. Several weeks later, defiant black stubble sprouted all over, sticking straight up like a constantly surprised cat. It would be months before it fully returned.
Della downed the rest of her tea. “Did you get enough?”
“Uh-huh. I had seconds...” Rue screwed up her face as if thinking hard, the expression making her appear not much older than a teen when Della knew her to be older than that. “And thirds.” A wide yawn contorted the woman’s mouth, revealing several black holes of missing teeth. She bent to remove her shoes. “I ate so much it made me tired, so I came back.”
Intrusively, her thoughts strayed back to Cal and his uttered promise to find her. “Was… uh…” Della cleared her throat. “Were the new Alphas at dinner? Did you by any chance see Cal?”
His name stole past her lips. She hadn’t yet spoken it aloud, but her tongue curled around the spare three letters, and the tip of her tongue brushed the roof of her mouth like a caress. Silently repeating the syllable, the sensuous dance of her lips and tongue had awareness crackling along her nerves.
Wait. Whatthe hellwas going on with her?
Rue crossed the room and sat heavily on her bed, puckering her brow. “Which one is he?”
Della stood from the chair and moved to her bed, automatically tucking the small photo album beneath her mattress. She reached for her pillow, fluffing it simply to do something with her hands. “He’s… uh… tall… dark hair, has an accent, and uh…”—she cleared another sudden catch from her throat—“smiles a lot?”
She cringed as the paltry and unremarkable description blundered out of her mouth. But how to describe the sheer overwhelmingpresenceof him?
If she wanted to describe him in truth, she’d describe the fluttery expectancy in her belly as he loped his way over to her along the corral. She’d detail how his inspection turned her insides into a melty, gooey pool. She’d explain the heart-stopping allure that held her in its grip whenever he stood near, leaving her unable to do anything more than sputter out wholly ineffective snubs.
Rue crawled under her blankets, no trace of recognition on her face. “Not sure I’ve met him, so I couldn’t really say.” She snuggled down with another wide yawn. “They were talking about how the Alphas that went out on north patrol hadn’t come back.”
An uncomfortable ringing filled Della’s ears, and a highly suspect concern condensed in her belly. Immediately followed by an attempt to reassure herself with all the reasons Cal’s misadventures on patrol didn’t concern her in the least. No doubt Colt would be all over this. Hadn’t they gotten a late start anyway? Surely a very logical, sensible explanation for their delayed return existed. Maybe one of the horses threw a shoe, or maybe they got lost or were being extra thorough since it was Cal’s first day.
And, most importantly,why did she care? He was nothing to her, absolutely nothing.
