The Water Knife

by Paolo Bacigalupi

  She had her bottles ready. She’d guessed right. Market price, falling like an angel coming down from Heaven to kiss her black hair and whisper hope.

  Free fall.

  $5.85.

  $4.70.

  $3.60.

  It was lower than she’d ever seen. Maria began shoving bills into the slot, locking in prices as they kept falling. It didn’t matter. In a couple more seconds the big boys would sit up. Automated systems would catch the fall and start pumping. She kept jamming in bills. It was almost like buying futures.

  She used up all her cash, and still the price was dropping.

  “You got any money?” she shouted over to Sarah, not caring now who knew what she was doing. Not caring. She just wanted more of this chance.

  “You serious?”

  “I’ll pay you back!”

  Others were swarming over to gawp at the price, then running to tell others about the miraculous plunge. People began crowding the other spigots.

  “Hurry up!” Maria was almost shouting with frustration. It was a huge score. And she was here at the perfect moment.

  “What if the price doesn’t go back up?”

  “It’ll go up! It’ll go up!”

  Reluctantly, Sarah handed her a twenty. “This is my rent.”

  “I need small bills! Nothing big! They won’t let you buy big!”

  Sarah pulled out more cash, digging fuck money out of her bra.

  In the old days, the hydrologist had said, you could do stuff like stick a cool hundred dollars into the machine and walk away with all those gallons. But at the top end of the system some bureaucrat with a sharp pencil had figured out what was going on, and now you could only buy five-dollar increments. So Maria fed fives, watching the price, locking in gallons. Each increment a locked amount. $2.44. She’d never seen it go so low. Maria shoved bills in as fast as she could.

  The machine jammed. She tried to put more bills in, but it fought her. More people were crowding around now, plugging their own money into spigots, but hers was jammed. Maria swore and slammed her palm against the pump. She’d bought fifty dollars’ worth of water, and with Sarah’s cash she had more than eighty. And now what? All the other spigots were in use.

  Maria gave up and started filling. Already the price was rising. Kicking up as rich people’s automated household systems caught the price break and started pumping gallons into cisterns. Or maybe it was the Taiyang Arcology getting in on the action, accelerating the buy as it realized the surplus was worth gorging on. The numbers flickered: $2.90…$3.10…$4.50…$4.45…

  $5.50.

  $6.50.

  $7.05.

  $7.10.

  Order restored.

  Maria lugged her sloshing bottles over to the red wagon and dumped them in. Fifty dollars’ worth of water had just become $120, and as soon as she hauled it away from the oasis…

  “How much did we make?”

  Maria was afraid to say, it felt so good. Once she got the water into the center of town and sidled up beside the Taiyang construction work—people wanted a cool cup of water there. And they had money. She knew the place from when her father had worked the high beams—all those crews coming off shift. And she would be there waiting for them. Offering them relief from the heat. The workers weren’t allowed to tap the factory, so if they wanted water out of work, they could either go line up at a Friendship pump and pay the humanitarian pump price, or they could pay Maria and get water conveniently.

  “Two hundred,” Maria said. “By the time we get all this water away from here, at least two hundred.”

  “How much for me?”

  “Ninety.”

  Maria could tell Sarah was impressed. The girl chattered the whole way home, thinking about her cut, excited that she’d made a three-day score just from tagging along in the dark with Maria.

  “You’re just like my fiver,” Sarah said. “You get this water thing.”

  “I’m not a player like that.”

  But inside, a part of Maria thrilled at the compliment.

  Sarah’s fiver saw the world clear.

  And now Maria did, too.

  CHAPTER 4

  Catherine Case’s entourage of black Escalades crunched over broken glass and Sheetrock fragments, leaving chalky trails.

  The lead vehicle filled Angel’s rearview mirror, steel grillwork grinning. Matte-black monster, sagging low under the weight of bomb-resistant armor, mirrored bulletproof windows, and high-efficiency batteries. No logos to identify the Southern Nevada Water Authority. Black and anonymous. The photovoltaic skin of the lead Escalade barely gleamed, even under the blinding burn of noonday Vegas sun.

  More Escalades rolled in behind, packing the alley.

  SNWA security teams climbed from the vehicles and spread out, ducking into dusty abandoned houses, scouting angles. Mercenaries—SwissExec people with M-16s and bulletproof vests and mirrored military glass.

  Angel tilted the rearview, watching the teams ghost in and out of the alley’s flanking ruins. He recognized a few. Chisolm and Sobel. Ortiz. The products of patriotic wars gone wrong. Military discards without VA or promised pensions, doing just fine in their new gig.

  Sobel appeared on a flat roof overhead, scanning sight lines for snipers. Angel remembered the man in a strip club deep below Cypress 1’s casinos, guzzling beer as a girl gyrated over him.

  “I get five times what I got in the army!” Sobel had shouted over the bass thump. “Don’t got to work out-country at all! Plus no drones fragging you from three miles up! I’m telling you, Velasquez, it’s a goddamn gold rush. You go private, you’ll make a mint!”

  “Easy work?” Angel had asked.

  “This gig? Shit, no. Last time it was this bad…had to be President Sapienza in Mexico City, right after he jacked the Sinaloans and the Cartel States at the same time, tried to go indy.”

  “How’d that go?”

  Sobel rolled his eyes as he pulled the girl into his lap. “Well, I made it out alive.”

  Angel waited patiently. The SNWA teams worked. Icy air filled the Tesla, A/C running off the solar skin of the vehicle. Another team slipped past the Tesla’s tinted windows—Ortiz and a woman Angel didn’t recognize—carefully stalking the edge of a ripped-to-pieces triplex, kicking through drifts of discarded Clearsacs. The stucco walls of the condos were scrawled with sun-bleached epithets and images of Catherine Case, showing her where she could stick it if she thought she was going to get people to move out.

  The cleverest was a stylized coffin with the caption A case for Case. The rest were less so.

  DRIN—ISS YOU WATE—UNT—FUC—

  The spray-painted curses and sexual threats were interrupted by jagged gashes in the siding where looters had stripped swamp coolers and chopped through walls to yank out wiring and copper water pipes. Cookie-cutter sprawl transformed into cookie-cutter litter.

  It was striking to Angel how similar every town looked after it lost its water. It didn’t matter whether it was at the top of the Colorado River or the bottom. It could be Las Vegas or Phoenix, Tucson or Grand Junction, Moab or Delta. In the end it was always the same: traffic lights swinging blind on tumbleweed streets; shadowy echoing shopping malls with shattered window displays; golf courses drifted with sand and spiked with dead stick trees.

  At this very moment Carver City was headed to the same place as the ruins here, just another victim of Catherine Case’s clear, sharp eyes and sharper water knives. Ortiz appeared atop the triplex, looking down on the alley. Behind him the jumbled curvatures of Catherine Case’s latest venture, Cypress 3, stood tall against the muddy smoky blue of the sky—the future, gleaming arrogantly over old Las Vegas wreckage.

  The arcology’s solar panels fluttered, tracking the sun, shading its walls, controlling temperature as they soaked up heat and light. Behind Cypress 3, sister arcologies 1 and 2 were also visible, and to their west, the borehole of Cypress 4 was marked by the rising latticed towers of construction cranes, flamboyantly
draped with banners dangling down the sides in red and gold.

  Even from two miles away, Angel could read the Chinese characters. Yuan Da Ji Tuan. Angel couldn’t sound out much Chinese, but those words he recognized. The Broad Group, a badass construction firm out of Changsha. Did all the work for Case’s husband and his real estate group.

  The Chinese knew how to get shit done, Case said. Knew how to make a joint venture profitable for everyone. With three examples of her arcology concept already up and running, it was easy to sell slots in the new ones. Now Cypress 4 was already oversubscribed, and Cypress 5 was on the drawing boards.

  Angel could still remember how hard the saleslady had pitched him as they walked through the central atriums of Cypress 1. They’d been surrounded by waterfalls and climbing vines, and yet this saleslady had tapped away on her tablet, showing him schematics, explaining how reliable the recycling systems were, describing how Cypress could run on its own water for up to three months at a stretch without even having to dip into the Colorado River. Trying to explain something that Angel himself had helped create.

  People called Catherine Case a killer because her water knives cut so hard along the Colorado, but when Angel inhaled the eucalyptus and honeysuckle scents of Cypress, he knew they were wrong.

  Outside, there was only desert and death. But inside, surrounded by jungle greenery and koi ponds, there was life, and Catherine Case was a saint, offering salvation to her flock as she guided them to safety inside the technological wonders of her foresight.

  Ortiz passed Angel’s Tesla again, peering inside, confirming that Angel was the only one in the car. A couple more SwissExec people posted sentry at the alley mouth.

  Finally Case’s own Escalade crept into the alley, and the Queen of the Colorado stepped out. Slight and blond, skirt clinging to her hips. Her high heels clicked over broken glass. Tiny waist. Half-jacket in dark blue over the gold shimmer of her blouse. A splash of makeup that made her eyes large and dark. In the blistering heat of the sun, the woman seemed too small and delicate to be the mastermind who turned towns into blowing dust.

  Angel could still remember standing in front of her, wearing ballistic armor as she announced that she was cutting this very suburb’s throat. One of her first conquests. He could still hear the angry rumble of the crowds, the way his military glass had lit up on activists’ faces, a rainbow of threat assessment and object recognition, pattern-matching for the raised handgun that would tell him it was time to take a bullet for his queen…

  What a fucking assignment.

  What a fucking offer.

  “You want to stay?” she’d asked when they’d first met.

  That had been before the training. Before Angel had an ID or a permit to live in Cypress. Before the guardies. He’d barely been a person then. He remembered the heat and fear of the cages. The ammonia reek of Clearsacs that had been used too many times. Thirty people packed in a prison cell. All the pickpockets and hookers and bangers and cons who hadn’t had the sense to make their cash the way Vegas wanted them to. And now Vegas was going to lock them all into eighteen-wheelers and drive them south. Whoever made it down to the border, made it. Whoever roasted, roasted.

  The garbage truck, street crews called it.

  Don’t get busted, homes. They put you in the garbage truck for sure.

  Catherine Case had had expensive shoes then, too—strappy delicate heels that clicked on the prison’s cracked concrete, sharply punctuating the heavier tread of her guardie escorts’ boots. Angel remembered the high heels for how they’d announced a change in the routine of the cages and made him peer out through the bars. He remembered staring at the strange doll-like woman, thinking that if he could just get his hands around her neck, all her gold and diamonds would make him one seriously rich cabrón. He remembered how she’d gazed back at him, her blue eyes intense and fascinated, as if he were an animal in a zoo and she were making a study of him. He remembered the purity of her concentration, how she’d seemed to be hunting for something, and how he’d wanted to lash out at her and teach her a lesson.

  And then she’d surprised him completely. She’d reached through the bars all on her own, to caress the dampness on his brow. Just stuck her hand in, despite the warning hiss from her bodyguards.

  “Do you want to stay?” she’d asked, and her blue eyes had been steady and unafraid.

  And Angel had nodded, sensing opportunity.

  The bodyguards had pulled him out of the cell and put him in a room without windows. Made him wait, sweltering, for her to come. “I hear you’ve taken bullets,” she said when she finally sat across from him.

  Angel looked at her with contempt and lifted his shirt, all machismo, showing puckered scars. “I took a few.”

  “That’s good. The work I’ve got for you might involve a few.”

  “Why’d I want to get shot for you?”

  “Because I pay better.” She smiled slightly. “And I’ll give you decent ballistic armor. With a little luck, you might even live.”

  “I ain’t afraid of dying.”

  It made Angel smile now, thinking back. He hadn’t been afraid. Not of dying in a Vegas garbage truck, and not of Catherine Case. He’d faced his own death for so long by that time that it had become a best friend. This doll lady wasn’t nothing. Angel had La Santa Muerte tattooed on his back. He’d put his life in the Skinny Lady’s hands. Death was his best girl now.

  “Why me?” he’d asked.

  “You fit a profile I can use. You’re aggressive, but you have sufficient impulse control. You’re intelligent. You’re flexible to changing circumstances. You’re tenacious.” She’d looked up at him. “It doesn’t hurt that you’re a ghost as well. We don’t have any documentation on you. We have a few fingerprints from a juvie facility in El Paso, but that place…” She’d shrugged. “Maybe there’s something down in Mexico, but here you’re a ghost. I have uses for ghosts.”

  “What you need a ghost to do?”

  She’d smiled at that, too. “How are you at cutting throats?”

  There had been other recruits as well, but over time most of them evaporated. Some almost immediately, washing out of guardie training camps and police exercises. Some of them had wandered off on their own. Some failed Case’s increasingly complex requirements.

  When she’d first hired him, Angel had thought she’d wanted a shooter. But she had him learning how to do everything from read a legal contract to plant heavy explosives. Plenty of people washed out. Angel thrived.

  And in return the Queen of the Colorado knighted him. She gave him residence permits in Cypress 1. Bequeathed upon him driver’s licenses and bank accounts, badges and uniforms. Camel Corps first, but later others, and not all of them hers to give. Colorado State Patrol. Arizona Criminal Investigations Division. Utah National Guard. Bureau of Reclamation. Phoenix PD. Bureau of Land Management. FBI. Identities and vehicles and uniforms and badges came and went, depending on where the Queen needed a knife. Angel took on roles as easily as a chameleon, changing colors to fit each new task, shedding identities as easily as a snake sheds skin.

  Whoever he’d been in that prison cell, it was many skins ago.

  The Tesla’s door opened, letting in a blaze of heat. Ortiz held the door for his boss, deferential. Case settled into the passenger seat, folding her slim legs inside. Nodded to Ortiz. The door thudded closed, blocking out light and heat. A/C chill cocooned them.

  “Paranoid much?” Angel asked in the sudden silence.

  Case shrugged. “Threats are up again,” she said. “We’re in the final stage of the Eastern Pipeline.”

  “Thought that was stalled.”

  “Reyes finally smoked out the ranchers who were shooting at our digging crews. We’ve got drones patrolling all two hundred fifty miles now, so if anyone even comes close to that pipeline, we can drop Hades and Hellfire on them. Basin and Range country is about to get real damn dry.”

  It was only when Case smiled that Angel could make out
signs of aging. Whatever Hollywood treatments she was getting, they worked. Just the barest crow’s-feet at the edges of her eyes, but nothing else. Nothing was ever out of place with her. Her clothing was always perfect. Her makeup, her data, her planning—all perfectly analyzed and arranged. Case liked details, all details. She found patterns, fit them together, and then turned them to her use.

  “So now they’re coming after you,” Angel said.

  “Threat Assessment is tracking a half-dozen cells. Ortiz tells me a couple seem credible.” She jerked her head toward graffiti on the condominiums surrounding the car. “It sort of makes you miss the old days, when all they did was write editorials and Photoshop my face onto some porno.”

  “Still,” Angel said, “lot of security for some pissed-off ranchers.”

  “Ortiz keeps reminding me it only takes one bullet. And since they can’t shoot down a drone, they think that makes it easier to try for me.”

  “Bad news for them.”

  Case laughed. “If they weren’t trying to blow my brains out, I’d actually feel sorry for them. All those…fevered people, full of their”—she paused, picking through words—“faith. Their faith.” She nodded, settling on the word she liked. “And they think that because they have faith, they can wish the world to be anything they want it to be. They’re quite innocent when you think about it. All those boys and girls, playing pretend in the desert with their rifles, playing freedom fighters. Such innocent little children.”

  “Little children with guns.”

  “In my experience, children with guns typically shoot themselves.” She changed the subject. “Tell me about Carver City.”

  “Milk run.” Angel shrugged. “Yu tried to put himself back inside. Wanted to suicide. But I got him out.”

  “You’re getting soft.”

  “You’re the one who complains about wrongful death suits.”

  “We should reach out to Yu. I always liked his dedication. See if he wants to work this side of the river.”

  “When I dumped him out of the chopper, I told him he should keep his eye out for an offer.”