Read Horizon (03) for Free Online Page B

heartbeat and marveling for the hundredth, the thousandth time at the perfection of her eyelids. They were porcelain fair, with a single faint crease and long curved dark lashes, a tiny miracle, evidence of grace she didn’t deserve.
    Her head was thickly cottoned, sharp thorns of ache punctuating the fuzz. Her stomach rolled and burned, and she had a powerful dry-lipped thirst and a faint dizziness. She eased herself out of the covers and crawled onto the carpet, then carefully stood, holding on to the small end table that served as a nightstand for support. A tremor, a shake. A sheen of sweat on her forehead, the backs of her hands.
    Self-contempt as real as salt and poison on her tongue.
    This morning Cass would not go to the shower house, where a primitive plumbing system had been cobbled together by Earl and his men. The women gathered there, breathing misty clouds in the morning chill, while they scrubbed their faces and brushed their teeth with split kaysev twigs. Cass couldn’t face anyone until she got her daytime mask in place.
    She retraced last night’s path down to the water, keeping an eye on the ground in front of her. Not many people came here; besides the problem of the disintegrating dock, the shore sloped too gently to be good for fishing, especially when a steeper drop-off on the other side of the island meant you could practically hang a line into the water and catch bass or sturgeon. Still, there had been enough foot traffic to wear a path from which roots and jagged rocks protruded, ready to trip the inattentive.
    Cass reached the water’s edge, and shuffled slowly out onto the dock. The river was wide here, the water calm and lazy; it seemed to flow more rapidly on the other side of the island where the bridge to the mainland was. She knelt at the point where it sagged, and a thin skim of water slid over the slimy wood, inches from her knees. Cass watched the water’s behavior for a moment as she lined up her things—a toothbrush, a cloth, the plastic box of baking soda that she used under her arms—and thought about how pretty it was, the way it followed a design as endless in its variety as it was inevitable. Lapping, dripping, sluicing into every crevice in the wood, every pock and hollow in the shore.
    It would be so easy to slip soundlessly into the water, let it find its way into her nostrils, her eyes, her mouth, the breath bubbling out of her as she drifted slowly down into the reeds and muck.
    The February-cold water would scour away the stale film left by last night’s wine, the guilt-pall from Dor’s bruising kiss.
    A sound interrupted her treacherous train of thought: a crowing burbled cry carried across the water, sharp on the misty morning, sharp and close. Cass jerked her head up, and there, across the twenty yards of sluggish river that separated the island from the shore, were Beaters.
    Cass fell back on her ass, the impact jarring her body, and scuttled backward several feet until she got herself under control. Twelve, fifteen… eighteen of them. They saw her and started screaming at her like desperate lovers, reaching and testing the water with their knobbed and scabbed and mostly shoeless feet before retreating back to the shore.
    So many of them. Their rage was nothing new, but ever since the first wave appeared, nearly a year back, they had steadily evolved, like the old Time-Life picture books Cass’s mother brought home from garage sales—evolution presented in glorious saturated colors, ancient dogs and apes turned slyly toward the reader with expressions of self-confident conspiracy. In no time the Beaters started searching each other out and building nests. In mere months they had learned to work together to take down a citizen, in groups of four so there would be one to pin each of the victim’s flailing limbs. Not too much later, they discovered that larger groups could divide responsibilities so that some kept would-be rescuers at bay while others spirited the