MaddAddam (MaddAddam 3)

Toby stays in her cubicle, trying to nap but sulking instead. No sulking allowed, she tells herself. No wound-licking. She can't even be certain that there's a wound to lick. Though she does feel wounded.

Late afternoon, after the rain. Nobody's around, with the exception of Crozier and Manatee, standing sentinel. Toby's kneeling in the garden, killing slugs. It's an act that would once have made her feel guilty - For are not Slugs God's creatures too, Adam One would say, with as much claim to breathe the air, as long as they do it somewhere else in a place that is more congenial for them than our Edencliff Rooftop Garden? But right now killing them serves as an outlet for her. An outlet for what? She doesn't wish to ponder that.

Worse, she finds herself editorializing. Die, evil slug! She drops each plucked slug into a tin can with wood ash and water in the bottom. They'd used salt earlier, but there's little of that to spare. Perhaps a swift blow with a flat rock would be kinder to the slugs - the wood ash must be painful - but she's not in the mood to weigh the relative kindness of slug execution methods.

She yanks out a weed. How thoughtlessly we label and dismiss God's Holy Weeds! But Weed is simply our name for a plant that annoys us by getting in the way of our Human plans. Consider how useful and indeed edible and delicious so many of them are!

Right. Not this one. Ragweed, from the look of it. She tosses it onto the pile of discards.

"Hey there, Death Squad," says a voice. It's Zeb, grinning down at her.

Toby scrambles to her feet. Her hands are dirty; she doesn't know what to do with them. Has he been sleeping in until now, or what? She can't ask what happened with Swift Fox, or if anything did: she refuses to sound like a shrew.

"I'm glad you came back safe," she says. And she is glad, more glad t

han she can say, but even to herself her voice sounds fake.

"Me too," he says. "Trip was more than I bargained for. Wiped me out, slept like a log, must be getting old."

Is this a coverup? How suspicious can she get? "I missed you," she says. There. Was that so hard?

He grins more. "Counted on that," he says. "Brought you something." It's a compact, with a small round mirror.

"Thank you," she says. She manages a smile. Is it a guilt gift, an apology? The roses for the wife after the husband's furtive tumble with the office co-worker? But she's not a wife.

"Got you some paper too. Couple of school notebooks, drugstore still carried them, I guess for pleeb kids who couldn't afford the Wi-Fi tabs. Couple of rollerball pens, pencils. Felt markers."

"How did you know I wanted those?" she says.

"I worked with a mind reader, once upon a time," he says. "Cursive's a Gardener skill, right? Figured you'd want to be keeping track of the days. Hey, what about a hug?"

"I'd get you all muddy," she says, relenting, smiling.

"I've been dirtier."

How could she not put her arms around him, despite her slug-slippery fingers?

And the sun is shining, and there are bees, among the yellow squash flowers. "You know what I really need?" she says to Zeb's smoky beard. "Some reading glasses. And a hive."

"Consider them yours." There's a pause. "I wanted you to look at this."

From inside his sleeve he pulls out a shoe: a sandal. It's handmade, with recycled materials: tire-tread sole, bicycle inner tube straps, silver duct tape accents. Although earth-stained, it's not very worn. "Gardener," Toby says. She remembers the fashion well, or rather the lack of it. Then she qualifies: "Or maybe it is. Not that other people didn't make those, I guess."

Already she has a picture in her head: Adam One and the surviving Gardeners, hunkered down in one of their Ararat hidey holes - the old mushroom-growing cellars, for instance - cobbling away by candlelight at their handcrafted sandals like a burrowful of elves, nibbling on their stores of honey and soybits while above their heads the cities flamed and collapsed and the human race melted away to nothingness. She wants so much to believe it that it can't possibly be true.

"Where did you find it?" she asks.

"Near the piglet kill," Zeb says. "I didn't show the others."

"You think it's Adam. You think he's still alive. You think he left this for you - or for someone - on purpose." These aren't questions.

"So do you," says Zeb. "You think it too."

"Don't hope too much," she says. "Hope can ruin you."

"Okay. You're right. But still."

"If you're right," she says, "wouldn't Adam be looking for you?"