Cadence risked eye contact. “Are you?”
She’d considered it for her cover. It would make it easier to avoid men, but, it was men who were in charge. Avoiding them wasn’t going to get answers quickly. “No. Are you?”
Cadence’s eyes went back to her hands. “Dabbled in the decay, trying to work things out. Mostly I don’t find anyone attractive in that way. I’m different I guess. Sex isn’t important to me. But you can have sex with whoever you like. We don’t judge.”
Oh yeah, they did. They’d judged Cadence a good investment.
And no way it was all as easy as it sounded. “How does dating work?”
Cadence groaned. “Same as always. Just as awkward from what I can see.”
Rory laughed. She could get to like Cadence. “And sex without bonding?”
“So many questions.” Cadence waved a nail at her. “I have to sort these, and you should go unpack. If you look in the kitchen cupboard at home there might be some dried fruit, raisins maybe.”
Raisins were better than pickled onions. It didn’t matter if the Continuers enjoyed bi-sexual orgies on every flat surface, they were all being taken for a ride.
She left the general store and stepped out into the sunshine to take her first walk about the town square. They’d done aerial surveillance of the settlement, and from photographs she knew the basic layout of the place, but seeing it up close was more revealing.
The first thing to notice was that there was no one hanging about. Almost like it was siesta time, the streets were empty. That suited her purposes. Her casual stroll became a methodical survey of the places most likely to contain a cell jammer. She’d already discounted the kitchen. Too much traffic to the area, too many people around who could trip over a piece of equipment. The general store and the bakery she discounted for the same reason, but she was going to need a bandage, or a headache fix to explore inside the clinic during daylight, and a whole different set of excuses to get inside the nursery and the school.
That left headquarters, which was a sprawling low-slung building with a second story. It was the obvious place, which made it equally obvious the jammer was someplace else where fewer people might be tempted to turn it off and log on. It also left a host of buildings a five-minute walk away; the assembly hall and what looked like a sports equipment block, which sat at the edge of a playing field.
Beyond that was a series of outbuildings and the mystery barns where they hoped to uncover something reportable to shut this place down. For all she knew, Zeke had already made it that far and found the cell jammer.
Her hand went to her back pocket.
Shit.
She really wanted to talk to him, tell him about the kitchen catastrophe. He knew she was a girl who like to dine out and be cooked for. He’d get a laugh out of her predicament.
She went back to the cabin with the blue flowerpot and checked the cupboard. Two plates, two dishes, four glasses and some assorted silverware, candles, matches, fire starters, mousetraps, a lopsided pottery vase and homemade bug spray.
No raisins.
There wasn’t much of anything else either. The cabin was sparsely furnished, everything sturdy and practical, made for basic living rather than wallowing in comfort. She was going to miss comfort and her e-reader and Netflix and order-in and restaurants and alcohol and—
Stop.
Unpacking took all of ten minutes, so she went for a walk around the rows of cabins, maybe Zeke had thought to leave a sign. She’d do that when she got back. Turn a T-shirt he’d recognize into a flag. There were lots of unique markers but none of them looked like they’d been placed there recently or belonged to Zeke.
At five bells she went to the kitchen and took up her position in the corner. Nobody came near, spoke to her or made eye contact. If Macy wanted her to feel like she was being punished, it was working. When the noise in the dining room reached a crescendo, she went looking for Zeke. Short of standing on a chair and shouting his name, she was left with weaving her way around the room. He’d see her that way, just like everyone else who stared as she went by.
And how they stared. Whole tables of Continuers falling silent and gluing their eyes to her body. It took a real effort not to put a little swing in her step, give them something to look at.
Zeke was like raisins. Imagined.
She ate a plate of stew which might’ve been made from sawdust. She was so hungry and light-headed she’d have eaten anything, and the food made it easier not to care she sat alone and was entertainment for the locals, even though she wasn’t doing anything but forking carrot and potato into her mouth too quickly to be polite.
Meal complete, she went back to her place in the corner, like the useless recruit hoping for a reprieve she was, and when the next hour came around, she went looking for Zeke again. He’d be looking for her too, so this should be easy, especially given the silences and the head turning she attracted.
And no Zeke. She did the back-pocket pat and then cursed.
He could look after himself, but this was annoying, more so because it was deliberate.
There was one last stint of standing in her corner with the satisfaction of having Macy grunt at her as she came past, and then back at the cabin, she hung her Nasty Woman T-shirt in a front window so Zeke would know where she was. She spent her second night at Abundance under a pretty handmade quilt, in a single bed, in a tiny bedroom of a cabin she shared with a woman who said she was an addict and may well have been saved by coming here.
But then, sixteen-million Americans thought chocolate milk came from brown cows.