called, laughing.
Zo gave me a strange sort of look that was meant to be commiserating, a look that confused me.
“Maybe,” she said, “or maybe because I know he’s really a daemon?”
“Nobody’s perfect.” Olivia shrugged. Asa blushed even more brilliantly.
“You’re hopeless,” Zo said. “Anyway, I gotta tend to the food. It’ll be ready in a minute.”
On a homemade spit they had a skewered calf-size grasshopper roasting. Cassandra and Judith were sitting by the fire, and Zo was setting up some feed-sack targets to shoot with the slingshot in her belt. Susanah had brought one of the metal horses out and it lay folded at her feet as she tinkered with it. Meanwhile, Mowse chased lizards on the edge of the firelight. And as I stood there among them in the warm glow of the fire, I thought that, with just a few tweaks it could be the world’s strangest Norman Rockwell painting. Then I saw Judith pull out a big metal barrel marked moonshine.
“I’ve been saving this for a special occasion.” Judith winked. “Olivia and I had to go all the way to our western cache to get it.” She carefully poured some moonshine and cactus juice into a few Coke bottles and handed one to me and one to Asa.
“Rookies first!”
I sniffed it. It smelled acrid and dangerous. Everyone watched us, waiting.
I looked at Asa, to see what he’d do.
Asa shrugged and we took a swig together. It was terrible—exactly like I thought battery acid must taste—and everyone laughed as we coughed and spluttered.
“You get used to it.” Judith clapped me on the back.
I tried another sip of it, and coughing, I went and took my seat next to Asa. “I’ve only had one sip and I can’t feel my lips anymore,” I whispered to him.
“It’s not that bad,” Asa whispered back. “If you imagine you’re an airplane in need of fuel.”
He threw back his head and downed another swallow of it. Meanwhile, I discreetly set the bottle down behind me on the ground to give myself reason to “forget” it later.
“Ugh! Electricity,” Susanah said across the fire where the horse she was trying to Frankenstein into life refused to cooperate. “It surges with the dust storms, then goes away.” She stared down at the horse. “Maybe I need more wiring.…”
“Susanah, I can’t find my doll,” Mowse said. “I looked everywhere and I can’t find it.”
“You had it with you when we went out today,” Susanah said. “Maybe you dropped it.”
“Noooo,” Mowse groaned. “It took me all day to make it.”
Next to me, I saw Olivia scoot closer to Asa. Her eyes were on his lips. His were on hers. They started to lean closer together, just for a moment, then Asa leapt up like he’d been burned and said, “I can get some wiring for you, Susanah. I think there’s a radio in the machine room.” Then he excused himself with a bow and went to find it.
Beside me, Olivia laughed.
“He’s something, isn’t he?” she said.
“He’s something, all right. It… doesn’t bother you that he’s a daemon?”
Olivia shrugged. “He seems more human to me than a lot of men I’ve seen in my life.”
“Like Samson, you mean?”
“Him, yeah,” she said. “But the worst was back in Elysium.”
There was a heaviness to that response that took me aback. She had to mean Mr. Robertson, the man she murdered. There had been dark, ridiculous-sounding murmurings about Mr. Robertson shortly after the murder, but what had he done to be included with the likes of Samson? For a moment, I wasn’t sure what to say—if I was welcome to ask what she meant. But before I could respond, Asa was back, a tiny radio in hand, looking much less flustered than before.
Olivia stood and said, “Let’s get this started, shall we?” She clinked her knife against her own Coke bottle for attention and we all went quiet.
“Everyone, today we lived through the toughest fight we’ve ever had. And we got away with only a few bruises and bloody lips.” She looked around the circle at all of them. “We know how Sal and Asa got here. But I think we should each say something about how we got here, and how we found each other: the best and only female-led settlement in the desert. It only seems right.”
Around the circle, there was nodding and murmuring. Everyone was sitting by the fire now, their faces illuminated by its orange glow.
“Who wants to start us off?” Olivia said.
“I’ll go,” said Judith. She cleared her