The Water Wars

by Cameron Stracher

  All the time in captivity, Kai said, he was thinking how to get a message to me. He said this without blushing, which only made me blush harder—especially because I could feel Will’s eyes boring into me. Then Kai added, “The food was terrible. Not like your dad’s guacamole.”

  I had to laugh that he would think about food at a time like this. But remembering my father’s cooking made me miss it as well. There was a potato and soy cheese dish where the potato skins were crunchy and the cheese oozed from the top like caramel. There was another dish made of cactus and local grains that he cooked slowly for two days until it turned into a sweet pudding. My mouth watered at the memory of the meals, and I couldn’t wait to dig into them again.

  “Dad’s going to be surprised,” said Will. He tried to pretend he was brushing the hair from his eyes, but I could tell he was brushing away a tear.

  For once I didn’t feel like crying. I was too excited to tell our parents everything. In the safety of our home, our adventures would become like tall tales, hard to believe but fun to recount until truth and fiction became mashed together in one kaleidoscopic whole. I hugged Will and forgot all about the pain in my shoulder. It didn’t matter, because soon I would have hours to lie on my bed.

  We never saw the rocket. It exploded about five hundred meters in front of the left wing. The explosion shook the jet, sending us spiraling in a dangerous plunge until Sula regained control of the ailerons.

  “Bluewater!” she cursed.

  “I thought you left them behind.”

  “I was flying slower to conserve fuel. But looks like I miscalculated.”

  “Can we outrun them?” Will asked.

  Sula shook her head. “No. They’ve got the same equipment we do. Hold on. It’s going to be a dogfight.”

  The plane went into a steep dive. I screamed, although I didn’t mean to. Kai gripped my arm. Will practically tumbled out of his seat. My ears popped and then popped again as I tried to gulp down oxygen. When it felt like the ride couldn’t get any sicker, when we had fallen about as far as possible, Sula turned so we were actually upside down, hanging from our seat belts. For an instant we were weightless, floating in an air pocket. Then just as swiftly, gravity slammed us back into our seats. The plane groaned and vibrated madly. Kai moaned and held his stomach. I didn’t feel much better.

  “There may be worse to come,” said Sula. She put the jet into a sharp bank left, then a hard bank right. Now we were behind the attacker. Somehow she had managed to flip on our pursuer by looping behind him. The other jet swirled and dipped, trying to shake us. It shrieked against the sky, then tore for the earth. Smoke spewed from its engines as the turbines worked at their highest thrust. But Sula dogged it like thread on a needle.

  “Gotcha!” she whooped. She fired the rockets.

  Two white lines burst from beneath the wings and raced across the blue. One exploded harmlessly behind the attacker’s tail fin, but the other caught the rear stabilizer, which burst into flames. The jet shuddered and fluttered in the air like a butterfly. Then all at once, it exploded into a ball of fire.

  “Heads down!” shouted Sula as we struck debris flying toward the windshield. Several large pieces slammed into the wing but none badly enough to crash us. Sula maintained control until we cleared the damage, then eased the plane to a lower altitude. Smoking bits of plastene and metal tumbled from the sky. But we were not safe—not yet.

  “We’ve got trouble,” said Sula when she reviewed the instrument panel. “You want the good news or the bad news?”

  “Give us the bad first,” said Ulysses.

  “Even if we hadn’t burned up most of our fuel in that dogfight, it seems we’ve punched a hole in the auxiliary tank.”

  “And the good news?”

  “There is no good news.”

  The plane was vibrating severely now. Ominous red lights blinked on the control panel. I reached out for Will. “We’ll be okay, right?” I asked.

  “Sula can drive anything, remember?”

  “Anything with an engine,” said Sula. She was toggling the controls furiously, trying to maintain a level flight as the plane rapidly descended.

  “There’s a workable landing strip near the research lab,” said Driesen. “They used it for copters, but it’s long enough to land a plane.”

  She nodded, her eyes slits pinned to the ground below. “I can see it.”

  From the air the broken dam looked like a row of cracked teeth with the two largest ones missing. Water still spilled through the gap even though the Minnesotans had made an effort—with rubble and dirt—to close it. A flowing river was a strange sight, and it gave me a vision of the world in which my parents were born. It twisted and coursed, foaming white and brown, a thing alive and vibrant as it rushed uncontrolled toward the sea. Green vegetation had sprouted along its banks, like a holo of an ancient world.

  “Hold on!” said Sula.

  I tried to steady myself, but my breath came in quick short bursts and would not slow down. My nails dug into my palms, but I could barely feel the pain. I looked to Will. His face was as pale as I had ever seen it. Kai laid his hand on my forearm, but his fingertips trembled and moisture pearled his brow. There was nothing to do except put our faith in Sula and hang on.

  The jet began to plummet. One moment I could see the low tops of buildings, the next moment we hit the ground hard enough to blow two tires. We screeched and veered off the runway, then careened through dirt and scrub at three hundred kilometers an hour, spinning crazily in a dust vortex. A window popped, and the door burst open. Sand, soot, and black smoke swirled into the plane. Someone was coughing, and someone else was yelling instructions. But somehow we slowed and came to a rest. “Everyone okay?” asked Sula.

  We were, miraculously. No one was hurt, although my bad shoulder ached painfully where it had been restrained by the safety belt. Kai looked as if he might be sick, and Will’s face had shaded from pale to green. Our stomachs settled as the air cleared.

  Ulysses wasted no time in securing our position. He grabbed the laser-taser and his knife and pushed through the mangled door.

  “Wait!” Sula shouted after him. “Men on the ground!”

  It was too late. We heard the yelling. The roar of an engine. A sound like a dog barking. Ulysses bellowed as if in great pain, and then his voice was buried. We braced for the onslaught.

  I was outside before anyone could stop me. My feet touched ground, and my hands went up defensively, but I was knocked backward by something large and heavy. It sat on my chest and its hot breath washed over me.

  I waited, eyes shut, for the jaws to clamp on my throat.

  Cheetah barked, then licked my face again and again.

  CHAPTER 21

  We left Ulysses’s men at the border.

  The Minnesotans wouldn’t let them cross without a bribe, and as Ulysses explained, the pirates had little to offer. They had lost ten men, much of their equipment, and Pooch in the flood. They needed to conserve resources for the next campaign. Besides, too many men would stir suspicion and cause a diversion before the job was done. Ulysses alone would come the rest of the way.

  We took a truck, two sidearms, water for the journey, and Cheetah.

  After all our travels, the trip south through Illinowa was like a Sunday jaunt. The roads were empty, and no one stopped or harassed us. Will and Kai slept most of the way, and I played Quarts with Sula while Cheetah rested on my lap. It was late afternoon by the time we arrived.

  Torq found us at the gaming center. He appeared in a convoy of combat vehicles bristling with heavily armed men clad in black and blue. They surrounded the center and sealed access from the road. A bat-winged drone kept a lookout in the sky. Torq himself led a dozen gunmen through the doors. His shiny head gleamed in the artificial light, and his perfectly manicured hands caressed a machine pistol.

  The gaming center was filled with the usual assortment of players. Boys and girls gathered at the consoles, competing for high score
s and each other’s attention while solitary men fed their chips into credit readers. On the walls, the screens broadcast a constant stream of content from across the globe: song and dance routines from YouToo!, news reports and info oddities in obscure languages—anything to distract people from their misery. The popular clips rose to the top, while the disfavored sank without a trace. The wireless was truly the most democratic forum in the world. Governments tried to filter it, but the signal could not be stopped. Any user with an uploader and a transmitter could post anything for the world to see: truth and lies in equal measure.

  Torq couldn’t kill us in the open. Not even he was brazen enough to shoot three people in plain view of a crowd. Besides, although his men were well-equipped and protected by kev-armor, it would have been a close battle against Ulysses and Sula. Torq told us to line up at the wall, but Ulysses refused, and Sula stepped in front of me.

  “There’ll be no heroes here,” said Torq.

  “Killing you wouldn’t be heroic,” said Sula.

  Torq smiled, but his gray-blue eyes slitted black. “Where’s the boy?”

  “What boy?”

  The sound of his safety catch clicked loudly.

  “Put your weapon down,” said Ulysses.

  “A shame to have to kill the girl.” His gun pointed at Sula, but I knew that when the shooting started, the bullets would go right through her.

  Three boys playing Death Racer inched toward the walls, out of the line of fire. Two girls at Geyser let the imaginary water spray harmlessly while they ducked behind a pillar. They were old enough to know when to run.

  “Not even Bluewater can cover up a massacre of innocents,” said Ulysses.

  “Don’t be too sure,” Torq said.

  I held my breath. My plan had been a good one, but it required just a few more seconds. If the shooting started now, it would all be ruined. I stepped out from behind Sula.

  “He’s back there,” I said, indicating the wi-booth behind us. “I’ll get him.”

  I moved toward the booth before Torq called out to me, as I knew he would. “Stop!”

  I stopped, turned slowly.

  “Yes?” I asked politely, as if I were still innocent.

  “I’m not a fool. Do you think I believe you’d just lead me to him? Come back here.”

  I walked as slowly as I could. Each step was excruciating, drawn out, as slow as I could make it. Naturally Torq thought I was frightened of him—he was so powerful with his weapons and muscles! And of course he didn’t trust me—not after my trick with the destabilizer. I shuffled the last few steps, sliding awkwardly across the hard floor. When I was close, he reached out and grasped my wrist, then twisted my arm behind my back. I cringed and stifled a cry. The pain in my shoulder was unbearable. Ulysses started but stopped when Torq pressed his gun against my skull.

  “Now,” he said, face so close I could smell his skin. “Where is he?”

  “In the booth,” I managed.

  “This is your last chance.”

  I didn’t want to die, but if it gave us the time we needed, I was not afraid. The irony of being killed when we were so close to home was wretched, but there was a certain perverse logic to ending at the beginning. I let the moment linger as long as I could, each second improving our odds. Then I said, “It’s the truth.”

  Before Torq could fire a shot, Kai emerged from the wi-booth, followed by Will and Driesen, as if they had been making a dance holo or posting wi-texts for everyone to see. They sauntered toward us. Torq released my wrist and pounced on Kai, who didn’t resist. Ulysses grabbed me and clutched me to his side like his own daughter.

  “This one’s coming with me,” Torq said to his men. “You can do what you want with the others.”

  “It’s over,” said Ulysses.

  “Save your regrets for later.”

  “Look up.”

  At first one of the wi-screens seemed to be displaying a bad home holo: sand, dust, and machinery. But as the camera zoomed in, the image came into clearer view: A blue stream like life itself, shimmering with luminous clarity.

  Water! It arced from the ground into the sky like the most extravagant fountain. It was Kai’s secret river, unleashed from the earth and sharing its bounty with the land. Water fell from the heavens like an impossible storm. It soaked the dry beds, washed over desert scrub, and covered the dirt with water. It rained and rained, not for forty days and forty nights but long enough to make men grateful for the blessing.

  The images flickered across the screens, and the number of viewers increased exponentially, drawn by the simple holo of water released into the sky. No one alive had seen a real geyser before, and the magic of water spraying into the air was like an apparition. The view count quickly climbed into the millions as the holo spread like a virus.

  “What have you done?” asked Torq, his voice shrouded with rage.

  “We’ve tapped the aquifer,” said Ulysses, “and shown everyone how it’s done.”

  The short holo played again and again. It had been made with the inexpensive security cameras at the dam site and uploaded to the wireless from the simple booth at the gaming center. It carried Will’s ID, because he was the one who had uploaded it, and the YouToo! record would soon be set in his name. But I didn’t mind, even though it was my idea. Let the world see its fortune: water, billions of liters, still pure and untouched, in hidden aquifers around the globe. Kai would show us, and we would drill, and the rivers would run free once more.

  “You’re finished,” said Ulysses. The bird twitched on his neck. “The world doesn’t need you. It doesn’t need any of us.”

  Torq glared at him, but he was powerless. He could kill us, but it would be too late. Kai had given the people water. Where there was water—even just a little—there was hope. And hope was the enemy of despots and tyrants. It shimmered at the edge of the blue stream in the glint of the desert sun.

  “It’s not over,” said Torq. His brown body shook with fury, like a man whose kingdom had burned down around him. “We’ll see how long the people remember.” Then he turned, heels clicking, and led his men from the room.

  It was only then I noticed Sula holding the harpoon behind her back, her hand gripping so tight that her knuckles were white. I touched the woman’s arm until her hand relaxed and slipped mine between the warmth and the weapon.

  “Come,” I said. “Let’s go home.”

  CHAPTER 22

  We said good-bye to Kai and Driesen outside the gaming center. In front of everyone, Kai took my hand and kissed me. It was embarrassing but also sweet, even if Will did make a coyote whistle that turned my head at the last minute.

  “See you tomorrow?” Kai asked. He was still weak from high blood sugar, but his voice was strong and clear.

  Tomorrow was a school day, I realized, an ordinary day, although it seemed like it couldn’t be. “I’ll see you at the bus stop,” I said. I leaned into him, and this time I kissed him back—on the mouth—and I didn’t care who was watching.

  The black limo was waiting at the corner. Its gasoline engine purred, and the exhaust gathered lazily like a cloud. A new bodyguard held the rear door open, and Kai followed his father inside. For a moment he disappeared behind the darkened and reinforced glass, but as the limo pulled away, he opened the window and waved. The last thing I saw was his blond hair streaming wildly behind him and his mouth open to catch the wind.

  Ulysses drove Will and me in his pirates’ truck down the dusty road where I had first met Kai. But now I imagined trees shading the shoulders and tall grass swaying in the median. I saw children riding pedicycles and adults walking arm in arm beneath a cool evening sun. I saw the road leading to Basin and beyond, straight and clear and safe. A road that might take us anywhere.

  Ulysses parked the truck near the main entrance to our building. He and Sula descended first, and Cheetah bounded out behind them. Will and I stopped by the open gate, taking in the familiar sights of home. Our apartment was just as I remember
ed it. Painted shutters brightened the windows. Two cacti flowered in a terrarium by the door. A welcome wreath hung from the railing.

  We climbed the rickety steps. The lights were off in our neighbor’s apartment, although there was nothing unusual about trying to save credits on electricity. I knocked on our door, and the sound echoed hollowly inside.

  “Maybe they’ve gone shopping,” said Will dubiously.

  We both knew our mother could not leave the house. If our father was gone, something had happened.

  I knocked again. This time we heard shuffling and scraping, and then the door opened. Our father stood there, smiling wearily, not surprised at all, as if we had simply returned late from water team.

  “We’re home,” I said.

  The man who stepped between us was instantly recognizable. His trim beard and tight face. His white teeth razored perfectly between his lips.

  “Hello, Will. Hello, Vera,” said the chief administrator.

  There was something familiar as well about the two men in blue shirts who flanked him. Then it came to me: they had been watching Kai at the gaming center. But who were they? And why was the chief administrator here?

  “I’m sorry,” said our father. “He insisted on waiting for you.”

  “What’s going on, Dad?” asked Will.

  Before our father could respond, Cheetah sprang into the room, followed by Ulysses and Sula. One of the blue-shirted men went for his belt, but Sula knocked the gun out of his hand before he could even grip it. Ulysses pulled his gun on the other man while Cheetah held the chief administrator at bay.

  “Please!” said the administrator. “There is no need for fisticuffs.”

  “They just want to talk to you,” added our father.

  “Then talk,” said Ulysses, still holding the gun at the administrator’s temple.

  “It would be a more pleasant conversation if we could all be seated.”

  Cheetah growled.

  “Talk,” repeated Ulysses.

  The administrator harrumphed. He was not used to taking orders from pirates, but Cheetah looked as if she was hungry.