The Water Wars (20 page)

What seemed merely uncomfortable and dangerous, however, became nauseating once the skimmer got moving. Each bounce on the waves knocked Will’s head against the hard seat. Each dip and crest made my arches ache as I tried desperately not to push the steering paddles. It was so loud in the skimmer that even if we wanted to complain, Sula could not hear us. The venti-unit pumped only enough fresh air for one, and it soon grew stale and rank as odor of our filthy clothes mixed with the smell of fear and sweat.

“Hold tight,” said Sula, as if there were something to hold to. The skimmer lurched on the crest of a wave, then tumbled sidelong into a pylon. The collision knocked my head into Sula’s chin. I didn’t know who had it worse, but my skull felt like someone had driven a stake into it.

“You’ve got a hard head,” she said.

“Not as hard as your chin.”

Sula rubbed her injured jaw with one hand as she navigated the skimmer away from the pylon. Then she cut the engines, and the boat bobbed on the waves. When we were directly below a large water-release hatch, she fired a grappling hook that snagged the hatch’s metal wheel. The boat steadied in the water, held tautly by the rope. Satisfied that we weren’t floating off anywhere, Sula unlatched the outer door of the skimmer, and the three of us climbed onto the deck.

“How do you drive this thing?” asked Will as he examined the bulbous stern and flattened bow.

“I can drive anything,” said Sula. “I was raised on a military base. My father flew jets. He taught me to fly when I was still a teenager. After that everything else was easy.”

“You can fly a jet?” asked Will with a low whistle of appreciation.

“Anything with an engine,” said Sula.

“Is he still in the army, your father?”

“He’s dead. Help me with this.”

Before Will could ask another question, she flipped him a second coil of rope that he caught with both hands. She knotted the other end and tossed it through an open arm of the hook. Then she grabbed the dangling end and pulled it down, securing another line to the hatch. “Can you climb?” she asked me, holding out the second rope.

I shook my head. I remembered trying to escape the prison cell and Will rescuing me.

“I’ll have to carry you, then.” She handed the loose rope to Will. “Hold this, and I’ll pull you up. When you get to the top, you’ll have to open the hatch. Do you think you can do that?”

Will nodded.

“There’s no water in it now, so you don’t have to worry about that. Turn the hatch hard to the left, and it will pop open. You’ll see climbing rungs as soon as you get inside.”

Will took the loose rope in one hand and grasped the taut one in his other hand. “Ready,” he said.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked.

Sula’s eyes were so deep blue that they could have been black. It was impossible to discern where the pupil ended and the iris began. But her eyelashes were a pale and fine gold, lighter than her hair, nearly invisible. When she lifted me into her arms, her eyelids fluttered slightly but never closed. The faintest lines spidered from the corners into the broad plane of her face. I held her, and felt the breath as it went through her lungs.

“It isn’t natural, what they’re doing here,” she finally said.

“Are you a natural-earther?” I asked.

“Never heard of them,” she said. “I don’t believe in slogans.”

Bluewater had factories on the entire coast, she went on. Across the world there were other companies like Bluewater, poisoning the sea so people could turn on the tap without worrying about the consequences. To gain access to water, the lower republics were fighting a war against Canada and the Arctic Archipelago. Across the globe there were other wars between Japan and China, between Australia and New Zealand, between Argentina and the Kingdom of Brazil. Earth existed in perfect balance, but humanity did not.

Sula’s words exhausted me, and I suddenly wanted nothing more than to take a nap right there. I slumped in her arms, my body heavy and weary, muscles sapped, without the strength to go on.

“Vera!” Sula pinched my cheeks. Everything was blurred and wavering. I felt myself slipping into darkness, into a deep endless hole. If only I could sleep. But a sharp smell brought me back to consciousness.

Will’s face, then Sula’s, came into a too-bright focus.

“Smelling salts,” Sula explained. “Old-fashioned, but effective. I keep them for when the skimmer gets really bad.”

Will knelt beside me. I wished I could have taken a holo of him at that moment and played it for him the next time he kicked me out of his room. He never would believe he was the same brother who had once tried to knock me out with a pillow.

Sula held a bottle to my lips. “She’s dehydrated. The salt, the sun, and all that time locked up.”

The water was brackish and warm, but nothing had tasted better. I swallowed the whole bottle before I realized how thirsty I was. She handed me a second canteen and cautioned me to drink it more slowly. There was seaweed extract in the water, which gave it the brackish taste, but also replenished lost sugars and electrolytes. “Nothing artificial, but your body’s not used to it,” she said.

Sure enough I felt faintly nauseated. I put my head between my legs until the feeling passed. Then I stood—a little woozily—with Will and Sula supporting me.

“I can walk,” I said, annoyed by all the sudden attention.

Sula smiled and let me go. Will held on a moment longer until I shrugged his arm free. Sula tested the ropes. They held firm. She coiled one end of the first rope into a loose knot around Will’s wrist. As she pulled it taut, Will scampered up the second rope to the hatch. I held my breath as he swayed in the wind. Then he reached the top and turned the wheel on the hatch once clockwise, just as Sula had instructed. A quick splash of water doused him, but Sula was right that the drain was mostly empty. He waved down to us and shouted that he was going inside.

With one arm circled around me, Sula gripped the rope. “Ready?” she asked. I nodded. With Sula holding me, I could feel how strong she was. The muscles in her back were nearly as hard as bones. There was no softness anywhere on her body except for her fine, long hair, which had burst free from her cap. It brushed my cheek as we shimmied up the rope.

When we reached the hatch, we followed Will inside. The metal steps embedded in the side of the drain led to the surface, and though there was barely enough room for Sula to squeeze through, Will and I had no problem climbing to the top. We emerged on the steel lower deck—the same deck from which Will and I had just escaped. We stopped to catch our breath and survey the surroundings.

Although it was now closer to winter than summer and we were on the water, the air was warm and still. Two centuries ago the beach would have been chilled and frozen and the water as cold as ice. Now snow was rarer than rain, and frozen seawater was rarer still.

“The holding cells are on sub-three,” said Sula.

“They kept us on the main level,” I said.

“Those are temporary quarters. The secured level is at sub-three. If they need to extract information, that’s where they get it.”

“You mean torture?” asked Will.

Sula nodded. Her hand went involuntarily to the harpoons she carried in a rubber satchel that crossed her back. A knife and three canteens hung on a belt around her waist, along with a handful of explosives and a device she called a “destabilizer” that would knock men off their feet.

“There’s all kinds of security,” said Will. “Once we get in, how will we get out?”

“Leave that to me,” said Sula.

She led us through a maze of corridors as if she knew them by heart. Up an emergency stairwell to the sub-levels. From there another corridor to the deeper recesses of the blue octagon. As we walked we could hear the machines: constant and deep, a low pulsing that thrummed in my bones. The stairs and handrail vibrated, and the dirty yellow lights flickered and blinked. Sula walked with grim determination, like a woman returning to the scene of a crime. Will limped as he followed her. I tried to keep my mind off the pain in my shoulder by recalling the color of the sheets in my bedroom, the way the floor creaked when our father rose in the morning, the smell of my mother’s hair when she unclipped it from her barrette and let it fan across the pillows.

Finally we emerged into the gloom of sub-level three. There was hardly any light except for what filtered through the poorly riveted walls and the glow cast from two sodium lamps at either end of a narrow hallway. The smell was loathsome, as if the ocean had coughed up its dead and decayed, then retreated. I could barely breathe. Will stumbled but grabbed the wall and held himself upright.

Sula raised one hand, signaling quiet.

We listened, but the only sounds were the familiar ones of pylons creaking in the tide, the rattling of rusty metal, and the ever-present drone of seawater under pressure, turning dross into gold.

“Why is it so quiet?” I whispered.

Sula shook her head.

Perhaps everyone was asleep or unconscious. Maybe the prisoners had been moved. Or maybe there were no longer any prisoners. Maybe the bodies had been dumped into the ocean to decompose and disappear.

Our eyes adjusted, and then we could see a single light leaking from beneath a closed door—the only sign of life, but at least it was something. Sula unclipped an explosive cap from her belt. “Stand clear,” she commanded.

I nearly tripped as I backed into Will. He was holding on to a steel box that protruded from the wall. We barely had enough time to cover our faces when the cap blew, spewing smoke and steel into the corridor. The door swung open, spilling light into the hallway. Plastene and metal flakes filled the air, twirling, sparkling, then settling into darkness.

Sula advanced cautiously, hand on her harpoon. I trailed two steps behind. We stepped gingerly around the strewn metal, over the fallen door, and into the yawning opening of the cramped torture chamber.

There, facing us, gun drawn, sat Nasri.

“Welcome,” he said. Then the lights went out.

I
was never certain which came first: the gunshot or the scream. My head hit the floor, and all was still. In the darkness there was only the blur of motion—faint outlines and shadowy imagination. In that split second between vision and nothingness, I couldn’t distinguish between the two. Was I injured? Was I dead? I was surprised by how peaceful I felt, how tranquil and serene. I lay on the floor, and all was preternaturally calm, as in the moments before a sandstorm. It was Sula’s voice that awakened me from my reverie. “Vera? Vera?”

So I was not dead. Or perhaps we both were.

Then the lights flickered on. Nasri’s chair had tipped over. The harpoon jutted from his chest. His lips were peeled back in a deathly grimace, and his eyes were fixed open. He looked like a man who did not expect to die and had left the earth as he had emerged: howling in agony.

Sula stood over me. “You’re bleeding,” she said.

I felt my face. My hands came away sticky. A great lump rose up in my throat, and my breath caught on something hard. “I’ve been shot?” It was a question more than a statement, because I didn’t feel wounded—although I had begun to feel cold and shaky.

“Sit tight,” Sula commanded. Her hands were in my hair, then on my head, pressing and probing. I tried hard not to panic, but the top of my head burned, and my forehead was wet with slickness.

Will stopped short when he saw me. “Vera?” he began, but could not finish. He looked to Sula for reassurance, but she was too busy examining me. There was nothing he could do but take my hand.

A bullet had grazed my scalp, Sula concluded. It had cleared a tiny path like a trail through the geno-soy fields and burned off the top layer of skin. A flesh wound, literally, but it bled like something worse. Sula tore off a sleeve from my shirt and bandaged it as best she could.

“It’s not pretty,” she said. “The scalp bleeds the worst. But it’s nothing to worry about. When it heals, you won’t even know it was there.”

I tried to smile but feared I would cry. “I always wondered what it was like to be shot.”

“Now you’ve lived to tell the tale.”

I touched my scalp where Sula had wrapped the cloth. It still burned, but it made me feel important. I’d been wounded in combat. Anyone could break a leg or dislocate a shoulder, but how many people got shot? I could tell by the way Will was looking at me that he was impressed too and not a little bit jealous. I would have quickly traded the head wound, however, for a glass of clean water.

“Who shut off the light?” I asked.

“I threw the switch,” Will said. He’d been leaning against a box that controlled power for the floor. He cut the voltage as soon as he’d heard Nasri’s voice.

“Quick thinking,” Sula remarked. She leaned over to pull the harpoon from Nasri’s chest. I covered my eyes in the crook of Will’s elbow.

“Where are they?” I asked, my voice muffled by Will’s arm.

“Not here.”

But Sula was wrong. A low moaning interrupted her efforts to retrieve the harpoon. In the dark corner of the small room—hard to believe we could miss it—a pile of blankets stirred. I ran over and tossed them aside.