“It’s okay,” Koda intones, pulling up a genuine smile. “Taking a break?”

“Kinda,” Kirsten replies, relieved. “That soup smells delicious.”

“Unfortunately, it’s got several hours to go yet. I just put it on.”

“Ah well. There’s always the mess.”

The women exchange quiet laughs.

Approaching the couch, Kirsten looks down at her dog, who looks up at her without a care in the world. His tail beats a lazy tattoo against the arm of the sofa as his head continues to rest across the top of Koda’s thighs. “You’re a slut, you know that?”

Dakota laughs as Asi gives Kirsten a rather affronted look but deigns not to move from his appointed spot. Rolling her eyes—and secretly envying Asi his prime location—Kirsten perches on the couch’s other arm, peering again at the thick tome in Koda’s hands. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen someone read an actual book for pleasure.”

Looking down at the book in question, Koda lifts one broad shoulder in a shrug. “Disktexts never were my thing. I like the feel of a book in my hands.”

Kirsten nods, though she really can’t relate. She can, and has, read books when she must, but to her nothing compares with a minidisk filled to the byte with her favorite literature. She smiles. “In German, too. I’m impressed.” She touches the book’s binding. “How many languages do you know?”

“Twelve,” Koda replies, “though I can’t really take credit for most of them. Tali had a Master’s in Linguistics and Foreign Languages.” She smiles slightly, sweet memories surrounding her. “It got to be that if I wanted to talk to her at all, I’d have to learn the language she was currently studying.”

“Tali?”

The look of pain flashes briefly again, then is gone. “My wife.”

“Wife?” Kirsten echoes, stunned. A barrage of emotions run through her, none staying long enough for her to identify, though she knows that a bit of anger, shock, and disbelief are somewhere in the mix.

“She died seven years ago. SARS IV.”

“Oh, Dakota. I’m so sorry.”

“Thanks,” Koda replies, noting the obvious sincerity in the smaller woman’s tone. She hesitates a moment, then deliberately lowers another internal wall, needing to share some part of herself with this woman she is quickly coming to cherish. “We married when we were sixteen.”

“Sixteen?” Kirsten asks, though her voice is hesitant. She is fully aware of the precious gift she is about to receive, and is loath to have that gift taken back due to an inauspicious interruption on her part. To her vast relief, however, Koda doesn’t seem to mind.

“A little young, I know, but it was pretty much expected.” At Kirsten’s questioning look, she continues. “We grew up together. Her family owned the ranch next to ours, and we were born only three weeks apart. We were best friends from the cradle on, and when I got old enough to know what love was, I knew that I loved her.” Her sudden smile is lopsided and fond. “When I asked for her hand, let’s just say that no one was surprised.”

“It sounds like something out of a Fairy Tale,” Kirsten remarks quietly.

Koda laughs softly. “Maybe a little, yeah.” Her voice becomes serious. “We went off to school the week after we got married. We were both accepted at UPenn, on scholarship. I went to the Vet school, she studied linguists and foreign languages. When we graduated, we moved back here and refurbished our home. I had my clinic and rehab center, she had her students, and we had each other.” She pauses for a moment, her thumb rubbing on the book’s worn spine. “We were happy.”

Kirsten lays one hand almost reverently on Koda’s bowed head, brushing her palm against the silken strands of her thick, jet hair. “How…how did she get sick?”

“As near as anyone could tell,” Koda begins, comforted by the stroking hand, “it was a student who’d just come back from Asia. The epidemic was just starting up at that time, and quarantines weren’t in force. She went to school hale and healthy one morning, and was hooked up to a ventilator that same night.”

“But the treatment…!”

Koda shakes her head. “She wouldn’t take it.”

“Wouldn’t—? But why?”

As Koda looks up, Kirsten reads the answer within the fathomless grief in those too-blue eyes before Dakota even speaks a word.

“She was pregnant.”

*

Ellsworth is a large installation, and as Maggie makes her way from the brig back toward the base housing and home, the pain in her leg returns full force. Official rationing of gasoline has not begun, but unless they can find fresh supplies to exploit in Rapid City and the surrounding area, the time will come when all petroleum products will grow not just scarce but extinct.

Dionsaur thou art; to dinosaur thou shalt return. Amen.

She makes a mental note to have someone check on foot-driven transportation already available on base and to send a couple squads to raid the remaining inventories of bicycle shops in town. She will need to speak to Koda and the Mss. Tilbury-Laduque about the possibility of acquiring horses. She will also have to think about how—no, goddammit, somebody else can think about something. Let Boudreaux and the other goddam surviving CPA’s earn their keep.

She shifts that problem firmly off her desk. The bean counters will have to figure out how to pay for such things.

Then the rest of us can fill out the forms in triplicate. Requisition: individual personnel transportation and supply hauling unit, quadruped. Translation: horse.

The feeling that time is slipping out from under her returns: years, decades, centuries tilting drunkenly away as they did the morning of the battle of the Cheyenne. The armature of a whole civilization has collapsed, sending them back to . . . where? When? Maggie shivers a little under her uniform jacket, hunching her shoulders both to hoard the warmth and to ease the weight of her brief case. The most taken-for-granted, everyday facts of life have all suddenly acquired question marks, and she’s not sure there are good answers to all of them.

Maybe not to any of them.

Is there still a United States? If so, is there a Constitution?

Who decides?

How are goods to be paid for? Up until now, patrols from the base have been happily looting—there is no other name for it, no matter if they have been calling it ‘salvage’—and that is a thing that offends her orderly soul. Sergeant Tacoma Rivers, as honest a man as she has ever met, is at this moment heading a team to study the feasibility of appropriating electrical generators that had been private property a few short weeks ago. If any of the power co-op survives, how are they to be compensated? Is there such a thing as money any more?

And who decides?

The headache that has been tapping, tapping lightly at the edges of her consciousness becomes the full-blown assault of a jackhammer. She needs that bath. Thank god there is still lavender. She needs a cup of chamomile tea. She needs—

Something cold and wet and rubbery suddenly thrusts itself into her free hand swinging at her side, and it is all Maggie can do not to jump out of her skin. For half a nanosecond it takes her straight back to junior high school and haunted house fundraisers—one of the oldest tricks in the world, a kitchen glove filled with ice water and dragged over an unsuspecting hand or better yet, the back of a vulnerable neck. It had gotten satisfyingly terrified screams even out of the football jocks.

Especially out of the football jocks.

But this is not a trick, and she turns to ruffle Asi’s fur as he greets her, whining and twisting himself into Moebius strips of canine ecstacy. He barks twice, high and sharp, and the sound almost splits her skull, but she is almost as glad to see him as he is to see her. Anything to be dragged away from the train of thought that has become increasingly oppressive. He will allow her to think about something besides the minuscule but suddenly critical problems that have parked themselves like orphans outside her gate, and will not go away.

“Hey, fella,” she says, scratching his back in long, lazy strokes. “Where’s your lady?”

He barks again, a glass-shattering high B, and Maggie looks up to see Kirsten and Koda coming toward her from the bare woods to the west of the base residences, climbing the short slope that leads up to the sidewalk. Their faces are both flushed with the westerly breeze that is now carries with it the chill of dusk, Kirsten’s hair alight around her face like an aureole in the low sun.

There is something of peace in Koda’s face that she has never seen before, the quiet that follows cessation of pain. With it, too, is a new sense of intimacy between the two women. It is nothing overt, nothing that Maggie can easily put words to; only something in the tilt, perhaps, of Kirsten’s head, the inclination of Koda’s body. A lessening of the space between. Something, something of vital importance, has passed between them this day. Something that has Maggie, this time, on the outside, looking in.

The sight brings a small pang about her heart, but Maggie cannot pretend to any sweeping operatic emotion, neither jealousy or grand amour. Neither can she pretend that she does not see the obvious and instinctive bond between the two women. Her ancestors, plying the coast of East Africa with ivory and leopard pelts to trade for turquoise and myrrh in the incense fields of Oman, would have called it kismet.

Insh’allah.

As god wills.

Aloud she calls, “You guys headed home?”

“Yeah,” Koda answers as she gains the sidewalk, and Asi, fickle male that he is, bounds toward her and paws at her chest as if he has not seen her in a week. “Hey, boy. Down.” And to Maggie, again, “I put some soup on before we left. It ought to be done in an hour or so.”