The Water Wars

by Cameron Stracher

  “I’ve fought twenty men and killed them all.”

  “Were they armed?”

  “Of course they were armed!”

  “Listen to me. You’ll not beat these people by killing them. For every one you kill, there will be two more coming at you. And what about the children? What do you plan to do with them? Give them weapons?”

  “I can fire a gun,” said Will.

  Sula turned to him as if she might consider it, then she swung back to Ulysses. “You have a better idea?”

  “We’ll need a distraction.

  “Such as?”

  “Bluewater needs water. What if it were dammed?”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Easier than killing hundreds.”

  Sula was not a listener, but she remained silent while Ulysses outlined his plan. Soon she was nodding while Ulysses scratched a rough schematic in the dust.

  “It will be a race to get out of here,” he concluded, “You’ll have to prepare the skimmer for all of us.”

  “Sula can fly jets,” said Will.

  Ulysses stared at her with newfound admiration. “Bluewater has jets.”

  “What was your first clue?” asked Sula as if she were talking to an infant.

  I watched Ulysses recalibrate this information. His brow furrowed, and the bird tattooed on his neck dipped its wing. “The jetport will have a security detail.”

  “They’ll be looking for us on the water,” said Sula.

  “It won’t take long for them to figure out their mistake.”

  “I’ll need five minutes.”

  Ulysses nodded. I knew that pirates worked together, their groups small but well-coordinated. I surveyed our group. Two of us had never handled a weapon, three of us were injured, and the four of us were badly outnumbered. Yet our survival—and Kai’s—depended on our collective effort. Ulysses divvied up the tasks. Sula and I would cause the diversion. Ulysses and Will would make their way to the presentation room. If everything went as planned, we would meet on the roof, where the jets were parked.

  “Be careful,” Ulysses instructed. “Stay low, and keep to the corners. Avoid the open halls. If there’s shooting, don’t engage; keep moving.”

  “You be careful too,” I said to him. The drug Sula had given him was wearing off, and he flinched when I took his hand. His skin was sallow. Beads of perspiration lined his forehead. But his grip was strong, and his eyes were focused and intense. He pulled me closer, and his warm body and pirate smell enveloped me: wood smoke and sand.

  “After this, no matter what happens, no more rescues,” he said softly to my ear. “Promise me that.”

  I nodded solemnly. If we didn’t rescue Kai, there wasn’t going to be a second chance. We would never see our parents again.

  As if he sensed my fear, Ulysses said, “I’ll get you home. Word of honor.”

  “No one’s going home if we don’t hurry,” said Sula. I gave Will a hug, but there was no time to linger. Sula moved swiftly for the stairwell, and I hurried to catch up.

  The steel steps glistened, but rust had already begun to wear through on the risers. Like everything else about Bluewater, the shiny surfaces hid corrosion and corruption. The entire edifice was a monument to ignorance. The truth was that butterflies could not disrupt an entire ecosystem simply by beating their wings. It took willful neglect and deliberate blindness, the refusal to see the obvious even as the land grew toxic before our eyes. But I still held out hope that we could change our ways.

  “How far?” I gasped.

  “Sea room,” she said. “Lowest level.”

  Ulysses had taken Nasri’s gun; Sula had scavenged his knife and laser-taser. As we walked she showed me how to use the laser, aiming its precise beam at any large muscle group but avoiding the head, where it could incapacitate an enemy. “Legs, stomach, or groin,” she said. “Shoot first, then ask your questions.”

  I couldn’t imagine shooting a man, but I knew it might be possible. At least the laser-taser wouldn’t kill anyone. I hoped Sula wouldn’t either.

  We went down the stairwell, back in the direction from which we had climbed. The drone of the desalinating machinery was like the advancing rumble of a convoy. Sula was explaining how much power desalination required, but by the time we reached the double safety doors, I could barely hear a word she was saying.

  The doors were bolted, but Sula blew them easily with an explosive cap. Bluewater’s defenses were directed outward: toward the coast and the ragtag boats that troubled its boundaries. Frontal attack, not sabotage, was its main concern.

  Inside, the sea room was louder than jet engines. Five enormous pipes sucked in water and transported it to steel cisterns. But much worse than the noise was the smell. Foul, rank, and fetid—tons of seaweed and other waste rotted in giant holding tanks from which they would eventually be dumped back into the ocean. Sula knew that the waste had to be cleared from screens inside the pipes twice daily, or else they would clog, and the desalination process would grind to a halt.

  We had no gloves or masks. Sula fashioned them as best she could from the remaining cloth of my shirt’s sleeves and her own wet suit. But they were clumsy, and soon both of us were scooping rotting seaweed from the containers with our bare hands. At first I nearly passed out from the stink. Then when I grew used to the odor, my hands burned from the chemicals. My eyes filled with tears, and the back of my throat felt as if someone had scratched it raw.

  We removed the filtering screens from the intake pipes easily enough. But stuffing them with rotten seaweed required pressing the debris into the tiny mesh so that it would not fall out. A foul brown liquid seeped between our fingers, and my hands were red and blistered before we had even completed one screen.

  We worked as if in a fever, horrific fumes filling our lungs, our bodies clammy and wet. At any moment we expected the guards to burst in, and Sula’s hand was never too far from her harpoon. Seawater roared through the pipes as we packed each screen with garbage. The floor of the sea room was slick with slime. Each step grew more treacherous, each breath more perilous.

  When the five screens were packed with garbage, and Sula had made certain no liquid could leak through, we lifted the first screen gently so as not to dislodge the seaweed. Then we tried to slide it back into its slot as seawater rushed madly about our hands. It slipped in easily at first, but jammed near the end as the water pressure grew. I tried to help shove it in, but my bad shoulder made it impossible to push on anything. Even my good shoulder hurt when I tried pushing with that arm. But Sula’s strength made up for my weakness. The muscles in her forearms knotted and bulged as she shoved the screen with all her might and forced it to lock into place.

  The remaining screens were easier. With each one we improved on the angle. I discovered that if we lifted the screen several millimeters off its track, it slid in with less resistance. One by one we shut down the intake of water from the ocean until the pipes were completely blocked and the holding tanks were emptied.

  The sound of the clogged water was unlike anything on this Earth: a low keening, like some prehistoric animal bellowing in its death throes. Without the polluted sea to process, the pumps sucked nothing but air, creating a vacuum in the pipes that strained and threatened to buckle them.

  But the pumps had been constructed to handle just such an emergency. After twenty seconds an alarm sounded, and the machinery shut down. Strobe lights flashed. A recorded voice blared warnings through amplified speakers. To compensate for the loss in pressure, steam blasted through the pipes, leaking from cracks in the fittings and spilling into the room like smoke.

  Sula grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the doors. We raced for the stairs even as we could hear voices shouting nearby. There was no going down. The only direction was up. We took two steps at a time, tripping but not falling, running as fast as we could manage. The flashing lights made it seem as if we were in a holo-cast: flickering images and half-seen pursuers in the iridescent blackness. />
  Sula’s hand went to the harpoon. She held it above her head as she pushed me ahead of her on the stairs.

  That’s when I heard the staccato burst of gunfire and felt the pulse of concussion grenades. They were close—plaster rained from the ceiling, and the walls exploded. Then my feet left the ground, and I was falling down, down, down…

  CHAPTER 19

  I landed hard on my back. Grit blanketed my lips and eyes. My neck ached, and there was a lump on my skull. Sula lay beside me, one arm cradling my head. I tried to sit up, but she stopped me. “Stay put,” she ordered.

  We had fallen two floors. Bullets ricocheted above us like angry sand hornets. Below us all was silent.

  “Who’s shooting?” I whispered.

  “Stop talking,” she hissed.

  The alarms continued to sound. Emergency lights cast a yellow glow, while strobes flashed intermittently. While we lay in the semidarkness, hidden behind the broken wall, six black-booted men thumped past us in stairwell. I folded myself into Sula, burying my head in her ribs. Stray wisps of blond hair brushed my face. Her sea-soap smell was in my mouth. My head rose on the sharp intake of her breath. Then the men passed.

  We waited behind the wall until Sula was certain it was safe. In the sea room the men had probably found the clogged screens and were working to clean them. We could only hope the distraction served its purpose. While Bluewater guards rushed to contain the damage, Ulysses and Will gained precious minutes to get to the presentation room. But the gunfire meant something had gone wrong. Bluewater should have been hunting for Sula and me below, not Will and Ulysses above.

  Sula pushed me into the dusty hall and then onto the staircase. The walls were blown away, but the stairs were intact. We stepped over broken glass, plaster chunks, even a dead body—a guard, face down. We did not slow.

  The octagon fortress was not nearly as tall as it was wide. I realized now that it covered the sea floor and was barely visible from the shoreline. Anyone searching for two escaped fugitives would have a lot of ground to cover. They would naturally start near the water, where the sea room was located and the skimmer was docked: the most logical place to escape. The roof was the last place they would think to look.

  That’s why the two guards on the roof were more surprised than we were to see a young girl and a woman in a wet suit. Their hesitation was the only advantage Sula needed. She swiftly killed one man with her harpoon and knocked the other unconscious with a blow to the back of his head.

  “Did you have to kill him?” I protested.

  Sula retrieved her weapon. “What would you like me to do? Give him a kiss?”

  “Why can’t you use the destabilizer? Or the taser?”

  “In the time it takes to knock him out, his friend pulls a gun on me—and you.”

  I didn’t say anything, but it seemed to me that Sula preferred to kill people, as if she were harboring a grudge she could never pay back. “What did they do to you here?” I asked.

  “What didn’t they do?”

  “But you’re alive.”

  Sula stopped cleaning the harpoon and regarded me for a minute. Then she slowly pulled her wet suit away from her shoulder to reveal an ugly scar that ran beneath her collarbone and across her entire chest. It was purple and red, knotted and lumpy. It looked as if the skin had been ripped rather than cut. It had obviously bled for a long time and never been stitched or cared for properly. Whoever had injured her had wanted it to hurt.

  The wet suit snapped angrily as it fell back into place.

  “They called it a lesson,” she said. “But they should have found a better student.”

  I looked away, out to the flat gray expanse of the sea. Bluewater operated in a lawless vacuum. Governments—even the worst of them—had to answer to the people. History had proved that even the most brutal dictatorships collapsed. Wasn’t that what we’d learned in school, that Illinowa had to answer to its citizens? But to whom did Bluewater answer?

  We were adjacent to the runway but sheltered behind the emergency stairwell. We could see two jets and three helicopters. A platoon of soldiers guarded the planes, but they seemed distracted and bored. They were not yet missing their two dead comrades. Alarms still rang on the lower floors, although no one had fired a shot for a while. There was no sign of Ulysses or Will.

  “Where are they?” I asked.

  “They’ll come.”

  I wished I felt as confident as Sula. I told myself that Ulysses would protect Will. The pirate king had survived many scraps and scrapes, but surely nothing compared to infiltrating Bluewater’s global headquarters. He had his wits and Nasri’s gun and a shot of adrenaline that was wearing off. I hoped it would be enough.

  Then they appeared. Ulysses looked gray and weathered, while Will was flushed and breathing hard. But they were alone.

  “Where’s Kai?” I cried.

  “Everyone fled when the shooting started,” Ulysses answered.

  “Why didn’t you hold your fire?” Sula asked.

  Ulysses growled at her. “It wasn’t our shooting. Their cozy little meeting broke up in gunfire.”

  Sula’s eyebrows dipped and knitted as she tried to register this information. “Who was shooting?”

  Ulysses explained that before they had reached the presentation room, they’d heard a loud argument and then gunshots.

  “Put a damper on the rest of the gathering,” he concluded.

  “We might have gotten in too,” said Will. “But everyone scattered.”

  “What could they be fighting about?” I asked.

  “What they always fight about,” said Ulysses. “The future and who’ll control it.”

  “It’s bedlam now,” said Sula.

  “This’ll suit our purposes,” said Ulysses. “When everyone’s running, they have to run somewhere.”

  “It’s the direction I’m worried about,” said Sula.

  “Patience.”

  I didn’t know how Ulysses could urge patience when things had gone so disastrously wrong. If the politicians were shooting at each other, Kai and his father were trapped. And when the shooting stopped, surely someone would spirit them away, making rescue impossible.

  But patience wasn’t necessary. The emergency doors on the far edge of the roof burst open, and a handful of guards emerged, leading a man who was nearly a head taller than any of them and a boy who was paler and thinner since the last time I saw him. My chest tightened.

  “Hello,” Ulysses whispered. He crouched low and thrust out an arm to prevent Sula from rising. “We have guests.”

  With all the shooting below, I could see now that the roof was the most logical escape route for Torq and his men. The guards were on high alert, and they moved cautiously, with guns extended and fingers on the triggers. Kai and his father were not cuffed or bound, but Torq grasped the father’s wrist in his hand. Next to Kai’s father, Torq didn’t look quite so tall, but he still outweighed the man by twenty kilos. Torq’s brown hairless body was shining like a genetically modified fruit—built to withstand drought, disease, and predators.

  “There’s fifteen rounds in that chamber,” said Sula, nodding at Ulysses’s gun, “and I can take two before they even start shooting.”

  “The gun’s half-empty,” Ulysses responded. “And there’s a dozen guards on the roof besides the men with baldy.”

  Sula scratched a tooth with the tip of one finger. “Once they’re on that jet, there’s no way to catch them.”

  “They won’t get on the jet.”

  I crawled to Will’s side and whispered in his ear. “Kai looks just like his father.”

  It was true: Driesen Smith was a more elongated version of the boy. Both were tall with blond hair and had the same way of standing, as if nothing were important, even as their lives were in the hands of corporate criminals. But Driesen glanced surreptitiously about the roof, and I could tell he was deciding whether there might still be an escape. A driller didn’t survive for long without being skil
led at seizing opportunity where others wouldn’t dare.

  They were probably less than a hundred meters away, yet the distance was nearly insurmountable. I wanted to wave to Kai, to tell him we had come to save him, but he was barely visible behind a phalanx of soldiers. A few steps, a quick dash, and I could pull Kai away, but I would never make it half that distance alive.

  As my stomach churned and the air filled with the crackling static of communicators, an idea came to me. It was simple, really—not dangerous at all—but I had to convince Ulysses and Sula to let me try.

  “I’m going to get him,” I said.

  “Don’t be crazy,” said Will.

  “I can do it. I’ll take the destabilizer.”

  Sula shook her head. “No. If anyone takes it, I will.”

  “They’ll shoot you before you get close enough,” I said. “They know you’re armed. I’m the only one who can get inside and use it.”

  I knew I was right, and I knew the others knew it as well. But Will refused to hear me. “I’ll do it,” he said. “They won’t shoot me.”

  “You’re too old. They’ll think you’re a soldier, and they won’t let you get near.”

  In normal circumstances Will might have been flattered to be considered a soldier. But the only way to walk unarmed into the midst of Bluewater’s elite security force was to appear harmless and nonthreatening. I was the only one with that chance.

  “We can intercept them at the plane,” Will offered.

  “It’ll be too late by then.”

  He turned to Ulysses. “Don’t let her do it.”

  “I want to,” I insisted. “Kai is my friend. It was my idea to come after him in the first place. Besides, I’ll be fine.”

  Ulysses frowned, but his eyes betrayed him. “She’s the only one who can slip past unchallenged,” he agreed. “It’s our best chance.” Will wanted to argue, but the decision was already made. “If there’s any sign of trouble,” said Ulysses, “dive to the floor, and don’t come up until the shooting stops.”

  Sula handed me the destabilizer. It was no larger than a bottle cap, and she strapped it to my wrist like a timepiece. She explained that when I pushed two small protruding buttons at the same time, it would generate a shock wave that would knock down anyone within a ten-meter radius. “But make sure you stand straight and have both feet on the ground, or it will take you with it,” she added.