Earth Thirst

by Mark Teppo

  There are bananas of differing sizes and colors on the plate, along with slices of oranges, papayas, passion fruit, lemons, as well as a couple of other fruits I don't immediately recognize. I try to savor them, to not grab the plate and immediately shovel all of it in my mouth, but the fresh fruit is a cup of water to a man dying of thirst. We eat in silence for a few minutes, as if we can put off plunging back into a strange reality we both set aside for a few days.

  The round fruit with the shadowed green skin is dark inside—it isn't a date or a plum or a persimmon, though it tastes like the mixture of all three. I scrape the skin with my teeth, getting every last bit, and then I chew on pieces of the rind. “What is this?”

  “Sapote,” Mere says. There's half of one left, which she shoves toward me as she goes for a long slice of papaya.

  I don't give her a chance to change her mind, and my fingers are stained black when I'm done, like I've been dipping them in ink or as if I've been burned.

  “If I close my eyes and wish really hard, I can imagine that it is just the two of us,” Mere says, lightly sucking at the tips of her fingers. “Look at you. Sleeping in until nearly sunset. A plate of fresh fruit prepared for you by a beautiful woman. An entire valley filled with vineyards. The quintessential romantic vacation.”

  “That would be nice,” I tell her.

  She raises her head and takes a long, hard look at me. The corner of her mouth turns up, and there's a glimmer of something in her eyes that I can't quite capture, and then she looks down at her hands again. “I've had some time to think,” she says. “Lots of time. And Phoebe… well, she's not the best conversationalist, but once I figured out how to interpret her silences, it got easier.”

  “She tell you what happened? How she got to Santiago?”

  “A little. Talus drove her off the boat. Says she knew something was wrong as soon as you reached the tender, but that Talus was already coming at her. She had no choice but to go overboard.”

  I wince at the idea. “And?”

  Mere shakes her head. “She won't say. I think she swam.”

  I shook my head. “That's not possible.”

  “Well, she's here, isn't she?” Mere rubs her arms. “Is that what did it to her?”

  I think back about how different Phoebe had looked in the car. So dark, like a vengeful shadow. “She's been out in the sun,” I say.

  “But it's only been a few weeks since we were all aboard the boat. You can't get that good of a tan in that time. And her hair? It's purple. Almost black, but not quite.”

  “It's what happens,” I say with a shrug.

  “But I thought you didn't like sunlight.”

  “It's not sunlight that's bad for us. It's what's in the air that causes grief. It's like any viral infection. As long as you can keep the bad stuff out, you can shrug off a lot of things that could kill you. Once it gets in, things get a little dicier.” I remember a summer—in Iceland, a long time ago—and smile. “Sunlight is good, Mere. It makes things grow.” I hold up one of the small bananas. So green and sweet. “But then the Industrial Revolution came along and changed so much.”

  “Yeah,” she says, dropping her gaze. “Things changed.” She wrestles with something for a minute, arguing with herself. “Look,” she starts, “I should probably apologize for—ah, maybe, I don't know…”

  “It's okay. You don't need to. We survived. That's all that matters.”

  “Yes, but—” She breaks off, and I wait—patiently, anxiously—wondering why my heart is tripping in my chest. “How many died in Santiago? How many men did you kill?”

  I shrug as if the number isn't that important, even though I realize such indifference isn't the right answer. But what can I tell her? I've killed a lot of men over the centuries. These last dozen or so don't change the total that much.

  “And Alberto Montoya. You killed Escobar's wife and grandson. You've killed his family, Silas. You're just perpetuating a cycle. Don't you see?”

  I think of Priam, wreathed in silence, collecting the mutilated body of his son from the Grecian camp. All the violence and destruction that had come prior to Hector's duel with Achilles, and how Hector's death—the brief peace surrounding the funeral notwithstanding—did nothing to quell the bloodlust that burned in the hearts of both armies.

  This is what Mother does. She hides the past from us, so that we don't get caught up in regret. So that we don't overthink what it is that we are supposed to do.

  She rubs her face with her hands. “I'm an accessory. Don't you get that? I'm responsible.”

  “No you aren't,” I say softly. “What happened in Santiago is not your fault.”

  “I took us to the restaurant. I knew who owned the place. Come on, Silas. I knew what was going to happen.”

  “Did you want it to happen?”

  “No,” she sputters, “but that's beside the point.”

  I shake my head. “There's a difference between seeking to cause bloodshed and being capable of doing it. That's the difference between being an animal and being a warrior.”

  “It doesn't make it right.”

  “Whatever you have to do to survive is the right thing to do.” I reach over and catch her hands. “It's okay, Mere. No one will fault you for wanting to live.”

  She shivers slightly, but doesn't pull her hands away. “But that is what frightens me,” she whispers. “That I'm going to be okay with wanting to live. With doing whatever…”

  She's fighting the loss of her innocence, and I wish I could undo what has been done. That I could keep her safe and untouched by the bloodshed that surrounds me. But it's too late. War changes everyone—not for the better, most of the time. Mere is going to have to find her own way to deal with the emotional and psychological trauma. In her own time.

  Mere is staring at my mouth, her teeth worrying her own bottom lip. “Phoebe said if we couldn't find good soil that you would need blood.”

  “I don't,” I tell her.

  “But that's part of how it works, isn't it? It's part of being an Arcadian. You really do drink blood. Like a…”

  “Like a vampire? Yes.”

  Her teeth nip harder at her lip. “Would you have…?”

  “You're not my type,” I tell her, but my gaze belies my words. I'm fascinated with her lower lip. I can see her pulse in her throat, a tiny butterfly moving beneath her skin.

  She smiles, a curl of her mouth that is both shy and sensual. “I'm O negative,” she says, trying for some levity. “I'm everyone's type.”

  I laugh, and the noise tears something in my chest. She laughs too, and yes, for a moment, I can imagine the same dream she did. It's just the two of us. A romantic vacation. Nothing else exists. Nothing else is true.

  And then the distant buzz of a tiny motor outside breaks the illusion. I go completely still and hold her in place too. “Are you expecting anyone?”

  Her shoulders sag and she sits back in her chair. “That's, ah, that's probably Pedro,” she says.

  “Pedro?”

  “He's just a kid. My local scout. I recruited him a day or so after we arrived.” Mere extricates her hands from mine, and the last glimmer of the illusion vanishes as soon as the connection between our flesh goes away. “He comes by around now. Brings us groceries and gossip.”

  She gets up and comes around the table, laying her hand on my shoulder in a signal for me to stay seated. “He doesn't know you. You'll spook him. Plus—” She brushes dust off my shoulder. “You're dirty.”

  * * *

  I settle for listening from around the corner. Pedro sounds like nothing more than an eager teenager taken with the flame-haired American woman hiding out in this villa. His Spanish is inflected by a syllable-swallowing accent, and it's a bit hard to follow the torrent of words that come out of his mouth, but at the very least, it is clear he takes his job of being Mere's eyes in the valley seriously. Either he doesn't know that she understands little of what he is saying or he doesn't care. He delivers his report
earnestly and breathlessly. I pay attention when he starts talking about cars. Mercedes and Land Rovers. Or maybe it is the same car; it is hard to be sure.

  Mere knows how to work a source, and she makes the appropriate noises during his rapid-fire monologue. When he finishes, she congratulates him on his diligence, and in my mind, I can see him standing taller upon receiving her warm encouragement.

  “He's too eager to please.”

  I glance over my shoulder. Phoebe is sitting in the chair Mere was recently in. Phoebe's skin is a warm bronze color and her hair is a dark and vibrant purple. She doesn't have it pulled back into a pony tail, and it lies loosely about her shoulders like a bruised shadow. How clean is the air here? I wonder. My chest aches at the thought of being able to walk about so freely in the sun. She's calmly cutting a papaya into long wedges, completely oblivious to my scrutiny.

  Distantly, I hear the tiny motor of Pedro's scooter start up, the fierce roar of a tiny lion, and then it quickly starts to fade away.

  “Do you think he's drawing attention?” I ask.

  Phoebe nods as she finishes sectioning the papaya. She picks up a wedge, strips off the skin with a single smooth motion of the knife, and then—delicately, showing very little teeth—starts biting off pieces from one end.

  “Is it going to be a problem?”

  She pauses, a tiny slice poised to disappear into her mouth, and shrugs.

  Not a problem for us, apparently.

  I want to ask Phoebe about what happened on the Cetacean Liberty—where she's been for the last few weeks, how she managed to find us, did she really swim all the way back?—but Mere returns to the kitchen before I can start.

  “So,” Mere says as she enters the room, “what did he say?” She doesn't seem terribly surprised to see Phoebe.

  “Mercedes,” Phoebe says as she picks up a second piece, unconcerned about the strip of black seeds along the inner edge of the wedge. “G Class. They look like Land Rovers.”

  “I thought it might be something like that,” Mere says. “I heard him say ‘Mercedes' a couple of times. Expensive, right? Otherwise he wouldn't have noticed.”

  Phoebe nods.

  “And not just passing through,” I note.

  “Right,” Mere says. “What's our plan?”

  Phoebe finishes her second slice. “Where are we going?” she asks.

  We both look at Mere, who raises her hands helplessly. “I don't know. I'm still working on it.”

  “Work faster,” Phoebe suggests, reaching for another piece with more calm than her words suggest.

  Mere grabs my arm and hauls me from the kitchen. “Come on,” she says. “Now that you're awake, let me show you what I've got.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  She leads me down a narrow, unadorned hallway into a room that looks out over the front of the villa. The room is spartan—wooden chair, desk, and tiny chaise lounge—and a full-sized laptop, not the tiny netbook I had bought back in Santiago, is the only indicator that we're still in the twenty-first century. Tacked up on the opposite wall from the desk are Mere's charts: another version of the sheet from the hotel, even more byzantine now with its lines and bubbles, and a narrow strip of brown paper upon which she has drawn a crude map of the western side of South America.

  I wander over to the maps and start examining them, listening as Mere runs through the highlights of the news over the past week. The fire alarm at Montoya's penthouse turned out to be a fortuitous act on a resident's part as a bomb explosion not two hours later decimated the top floor of the building. The Chilean military wanted to call it a terrorist attack and the local Santiago police were claiming it was an assassination attempt by a industrial competitor of the Montoya family. Either way, most of the city got locked down and the news media was still scrambling to figure out which of the thousands of rumors flying around were true. The entire country was in an uproar over the event, even though no one knew anything specific.

  It sounds like a pretty standard cluster-fuck and cover-up. Montoya blows the penthouse, covering the dead strike team up there, and the resultant confusion allows him to spirit away the mess at the hotel as well. The martial lockdown might have been meant to seal us inside the city limits, but Phoebe did the right thing by getting us out immediately after rescuing Mere. We've done it a thousand times. Go in, do the deed, get out. Don't be there when the local media and police swarm the area. Keep moving as far away as fast as possible. In twelve hours, there won't be enough useful data to track anyone.

  Though only a day's drive was a little close to go to ground, and as I decipher Mere's notes on the geography map, I realize why they chose the spot they did. “You're charting Arcadian-friendly spots.”

  “Yes,” she agrees. “Phoebe gave me the idea when she said you needed good dirt. During the drive up from Santiago, I realized that was the way I was going to find them.”

  “Them?”

  “Hyacinth.” She joins me at the map and elucidates some of her squiggles. “You remember Mnemosysia? They're the ones out of Denver, Colorado, who are trying to create memory retention therapies. I thought they were running out of money, and I don't have my notes on hand to be sure, but over the last few days, I haven't been able to find nearly as much data as I had thought I had. I know it's impossible to scrub the Internet, but it certainly feels like someone has been trying. But let's stick with that basic assumption, okay? Let's assume Mnemosysia is having money troubles. They need a miracle to get them to their next milestone, and someone comes up with a shortcut.”

  “Whale brains,” I provide, indicating that I remember our previous conversation.

  “Right. And so they need a supply of raw material.” Her finger traces along a line on the sheet. “Now, Kyodo Kujira is in similar financial straits. They happen to have a whaling fleet that's ready to go if someone would actually cover the costs of putting them out to sea.” There's a question mark in a triangle next to Mere's notation of Kyodo Kujira. “If Mnemosysia doesn't have the money, then who steps up? And what are they getting out of the deal? And why are they a silent partner?” Mere looks at me and raises her eyebrow.

  “Memory drugs,” I say.

  “Memory drugs,” she repeats. “I didn't make the connection earlier, but now, knowing you a little better—knowing what happens to Arcadians—it seems obvious. Arcadia would fund this research, wouldn't they?”

  “Except for the bit about having to kill whales for the research,” I point out.

  “True, but that's the hook, isn't it? That's what gets Arcadia interested. It's not about whaling. Whaling has been going on for centuries. It's about the reason why they're whaling, and that reason is one that Arcadia would be interested in, yes?”

  I nod. I wasn't privy to the Grove's decision to send the team—team members typically aren't informed of all the various intricacies of their missions—and, given what has happened since, it's easy to say that I was an idiot for going along without asking more questions. But there's never been a reason to ask questions before. We're good soldiers. Mother takes care of us.

  “But it's a trap. It's a way for someone to get their hands on an Arcadian.”

  “How is Hyacinth involved?” I ask. “If it is owned by the Montoyas, they already have access to Arcadians.”

  “Would you volunteer one of your own for what they did to Nigel?”

  I concede that point.

  “But that's what has been bugging me these last few days. Aren't there less invasive ways to get tissue samples? If that was the point, then you should be able to find a volunteer. Companies turn to their employees all the time for this sort of thing. Some of them even offer a pretty good honorarium for volunteering. So why the medical drama? Was that all just for us?”

  “No,” I say. “That went well beyond acceptable limits.”

  Mere nods. “So they were harvesting Nigel, which leads me to the burning question: Who are they?”

  I cock my head to the side. “Not why?”

  She
shakes her head as she runs her fingers over her chart. “The more I dig into Hyacinth Holdings, the more it seems like it has to be a front for Arcadian research, but it doesn't make sense that it would be completely covert from the rest of Arcadia, or that it would be involved in some scheme to trap one of their own.”

  “But they're not Arcadian any more, are they?” I realize.

  She nods. “You killed Jacinta. You wrecked the garden they were building. The garden that was going to create a place that wasn't beholden to Arcadian rules. You were supposed to bring them home again, but they didn't come home, did they? They went underground and kept working on how to be free of Arcadia.”

  How to be free of Mother, I think, trying to process what she is telling me.

  “Escobar was trying to convince you that Arcadia is poisoning you,” she continues. “When you go back home and… do whatever it is that happens there… you get injected with some sort of time-release virus—a mimetic agent, I guess—that makes you crave returning to Arcadia. Right? Your brain gets infected with this idea that you're going to die if you stay away. You self-sabotage, don't you? The longer you stay away, the harder it gets for you to stay healthy.”

  I don't disagree with her, but agreeing with her puts a lot of what Escobar was saying in a different light. And I'm not ready to make that jump yet.

  “But, here's the problem with this theory,” Mere says. “There's no money trail from Hyacinth to Mnemosysia.”

  “I thought you said someone was footing the bill?”

  “Someone is, but as near as I can tell, it isn't Hyacinth.” She taps the chart. “And here's the thing, why would Hyacinth get involved with Kyodo Kujira and all this mess with Arcadia if they already had access to Mnemosysia's data.”

  “They made a deal,” I say, following her line of thinking.

  She nods. “This is where Secutores comes in. They're the front for someone else. Their job is to get an Arcadian. They built the framework of the trap—one that would hold up to scrutiny and would tantalize Arcadia to send a team.”