Rootless (13 page)

Almost drown once and then try drowning a second time. It’s so much worse than the first. I knew what was coming before it even happened, my mind one step ahead of my body as my eyes started pulsing too hard and my throat seized up. My limbs thrashed. Twitched. And then stiffened.

I didn’t want to give up and keep sinking, but after all your shit stops working, there ain’t much else you can do. I’m not going to tell you my life went flashing before me, because it didn’t. Something about the way my arms stretched out, though, it’s crazy, but I swear I felt like I was dancing. And I never danced once in my whole lousy life.

It was like I became her for a moment. Hina. The statue. And then my feet started kicking all over again. As if my heart had just remembered to beat.

Didn’t do any good though. Just another round of pushing and splashing. But I got a hand out the top of the water and for a moment I felt the air and tried to hold on. Then I was sinking again. Darkening. I know I blacked out for a second because there was a moment where nothing happened but a murky drift.

Then I was being lifted. Hands clutched at my shirt and my pants, tugging me up through the gloom.

My face broke the surface, but I still couldn’t breathe. My jaws were clamped shut and my eyes fluttered, water sticky inside me. I blacked out again. Came to on a stretch of mud. Then my lungs kicked back in like a frozen engine and I shuddered with every breath.

The underside of the walkways formed a concrete sky above me, a patchwork of stone woven with steel. I tried sitting up but stayed resting. And Sal squatted there beside me, like he was waiting on me to speak.

You never seen someone float like Sal could. Son of a bitch was unsinkable. Took him all he had to keep plunging down below the surface, groping around for the nail gun like I’d asked him, his feet sticking up in the air, then disappearing before he came up empty-handed. Over and over again.

“I can’t find it.” Sal sputtered and gasped as he paddled back to the mud. “It’s too deep.” He stretched out on the bank and shook his head at me.

I stared up at the city, feeling like I was just shit in its pants. I knew I had to get gone. Far away and quick about it. I thought about Pop. The trees.

But then I thought about Alpha.

“I’m heading back up there,” I said.

“You’re insane. The women have gone loopy. And those men, you’ve never seen so many guns.”

“Where’s the pit?”

He pointed. “Full of water now. And bodies. You can’t go that way if you don’t know how to swim.”

“Then follow me,” I said. “We’ll head back to the forest. From there I can double back around.”

“There’s a forest?” Sal said as we began slipping through the mud.

“Yeah,” I told him, glancing up through the slats in the walkways. “And that ain’t all.”

Beneath the ferns, I found a pillar we could climb and I pushed Sal out of the mud, shoving at him till he was clear to the top. He stared at the statue of Hina like his brain had stopped working.

“It’s her,” the kid whispered.

“Wait till you get on the inside.”

I pushed him off toward the statue, told him how to get up under its foot. And then I turned back to the city.

The bullets had faded to a dribble. Just the occasional burst of gunfire breaking the silence. Smoke had cleared off the walkways, and as I ran through the mess, the clouds began to open again, washing away the remains, turning the piles of bodies into mush.

At the center of town I’d still not seen a soul, and finally I began to holler for Alpha, screaming her name at the top of my lungs.

I heard her long before I could see her, and when I saw her I barely knew who she was. She was stood atop the walls of the city, her legs wide and her head thrown back. And she was making a noise like a creature that had just figured out it could fly.

I stared up through the smoke at her. She was like something you’d try to build, if you could. As if she represented something no words could say.

She was slick with mud and her vest had been matted stringy, soaked with the blood of others. I watched as she raised both arms in
the air, waving her gun above her head, still whooping that battle cry that no soul could have taught her.

When I finally found nerve to call up, she spun and stared down upon me and I felt naked beneath the wildness of her eyes. I felt alive. Unknown. And I knew then that the world contained so many things I would never understand.

I ran up to her, though she stood still. And when I reached her, I held her the way I longed to be held. She folded into me and I gazed across the top of her, staring out at the plains where the remains of Harvest’s troops had scattered in the mud.

The transport lay split and smoldering below us, and I studied the broken shell that just a day before had seemed to me like a city that could move.

“This is the way the world ends,” Alpha whispered, her head slippery on my shoulder.

“No,” I said, squeezing her against me. “There’s more.”

It didn’t take much time to persuade her. As the rain poured down and the darkness gathered, I told Alpha everything. All of my secrets. All that I knew. I told her about the tattoo that pointed to a place that was different. A place that wasn’t just locked in an old story or stuck inside an old world song. I told her about my father. And I told her about the trees. About how beautiful they were and how they were more even than that. How they were something built for survival. Something that might put food on the table and burn bright the dark. And as I talked, I wondered if my father had once made a promise as he sat on the walls of this city, his arms holding the world through a woman, his eyes straining out at the mysterious night.

“What if we don’t find them?” Alpha said, shivering in the rain as it mingled with the blood on her skin.

“Then I’ll keep building them,” I said. “Best as I can.”

She studied my face, like she was reading something.

“Where my dad was taken,” I told her. “Could be that’s where your mom got dragged off, too.”

“Been a long time, bud.” She stared down into the city. The pirates had begun to gather below us, waiting for a new captain to call.

“I don’t think they can come,” I said, looking down. “If you’re coming with me.”

“I’ll go with you, bud. They’ll call me queen of every pirate army, I come home with trees to grow and fruit to eat.”

I stared at her. Wanting her. And I wanted to be more than just her means to some end. I wanted to be someone with which she’d become rooted and tangled.

I leaned into her. And I would have kissed her. Never mind all the guts on the ground, never mind her face being covered in filth. I would have kissed her. Tried to, at least. But I heard a voice rise up from the city below us. And the voice belonged to no pirate.

“That you, little man?” Crow called through the darkness. “That you?”

My heart sank in my guts as I staggered back down into the city. It was pitch black now, the clouds plugging the stars and painting the moon. The rain had settled into a drizzle. Harvesters lay broken on the ground, and the surviving pirates were huddled in stooped patches. But Crow stood tall and wide, towering above everyone. And everything.

He’d lost his beard. All the hair on his head had been singed off, replaced by blood and blisters. His clothes hung off him, torn and frayed, as if he’d been trying to shed them but had given up halfway through.

Crow’s grin split the dark as I approached him. “Happy to see you,” he said. “Though you look about as bad as I feel.”

“You got out,” I said, as if saying the words might make me believe them.

“Aye. With bodies before me. And bodies behind.” Crow studied his hands, his forearms. “Can still feel the poor bastards sticky on my skin.”

“Are there more?”

“Don’t know. Was a mighty big split in the hull. But Miss Zee was in there. Her mother also.”

“How’d they catch you?”

“In the corn.”

“Poachers?”

“Agents.”

“Agents don’t grab folk off the road.”

“They do now.”

I thought about what that could mean — GenTech agents handing off slaves to King Harvest. And I thought about how it made heading west now seem a whole lot more dangerous, seeing as the cornfields are never short of those bastards in the purple suits.

“What the hell was he gonna do with all those people?” I said.

“I don’t know.” Crow shrugged. “But a ship that size, I’d say whatever he been doing it for, he been doing it a long time.”

“Wait,” I said, remembering what Zee had told me. “You used to work for GenTech. Before you worked for Frost.”

Crow laughed that low rumble of his. “Indeed I did, little man. Indeed I did.”

“You were looking for trees.”

He quit laughing and his eyes changed. “Looking?” he said. “No, I wasn’t looking. But they found me, you might say. And now I think you’d better take me with you.”

“Take you with me?”

“Miss Zee said you hell bent on finding the Promised Land, in which case you need what I need. Vega’s the only place you can find the GPS. So you best head west. And that being so, I’d say you need me.”

“Why?” said Alpha, coming up behind me. “So you can get caught by agents again?”

Crow turned to her. He licked his broken lips. And then he turned back to me. “The cornfields are a maze, tree builder. Big as the South Wall. And the forty ain’t the only way of crossing it.”

“There’s another way?”

“GenTech got plenty of ways. Some of them unguarded. Some of them unwatched.”

“Then why not just head there yourself?”

“Oh, I would, little man. I would. But where’s my wheels? Know what I mean? You get us moving, and I can show us the way.”

“What makes you think I got wheels?”

“The pirates got trucks. And this pirate girl likes you.” He stared at the two of us, lifting his chin as if that single motion made him in control of everything. “Course she does,” he said, his melted face suddenly bleeding he was grinning so hard. “Told you before, little man. You’re crazy cool.”

A mist rolled in from the south, and at the forest it was too dark to see. Just gray clouds moving through the metal, drizzle sprinkling at the trees. Alpha and Crow were passed out sleeping in the city, but I’d come back to retrieve Sal. And Hina.

I stepped through the slippery undergrowth, a dead Harvester’s plastic boots on my feet. I knocked at the base of the statue, called for Sal, but when there was no reply I rummaged through my soggy tools, found my headlamp, and then shimmied under the foot and pried the panel free.

They were all the way at the end of the outstretched leg, Sal curled up against Hina and both of them crashed out cold. There was a
sweetness they held in sleeping that neither of them showed awake. They looked peaceful. Calm. I lowered my headlamp and rested against the curve of the statue.

I tried to conjure some feeling for the mother whose arms I’d once slept in. She’d been from the northern lands, Pop had told me. And she’d starved to death before I was able to remember her. But she’d taught Pop to read, which I’d always thought a real good gift. I guess you got to take what you can get.

I leaned back and tried to picture what had happened between my father and this woman who now slept across from me, her arms held tight around her adopted son. Pop must have loved her real fierce to build such a statue, and I reckoned that meant she must have loved him in return. But I’d really little idea about the way of such things. And whatever had happened, whatever had been felt, their paths had got split in the end.

Hina wound up gambled away and ended up raising a daughter with a fat junky bastard. And my father met my mother and then dragged me around the Steel Cities, faking nature in a world where none survived.

Or did it?

I thought of waking the woman, staring into those silver eyes of hers and asking her what she knew. Ask her about my father. About that tree curved around her belly. Because it seemed strange that this tattoo Pop must have known so well now led to the same place he’d been taken.

The night felt heavy and my eyes drooped. And before I could think anymore or get up or move, I was sleeping, my headlamp still
shining, its batteries burning, and by the time I woke up the thing was useless.

But it didn’t matter. When I woke up, the sun was back out and I could hear Alpha calling my name from the forest.

“Where’s Crow?” I asked Alpha as I hurried out through the base of the statue, squinting at the sky.

“Still sleeping,” she said. “Like a dead man. If the dead could snore.”

“Good.” I didn’t want Crow to see the forest. Or the statue. I figured anything I knew that the watcher didn’t, just might prove useful somewhere down the line.

Sal crept out behind me, all sweaty and pale in the heat of morning. He slumped down, yawning.

“Your friend?” said Alpha.

“I guess.”

“So where’s the woman?”

As if she’d been summoned, Hina crawled out of the statue, all matted down and her muscles straining. I tell you, it was like watching that statue give birth to itself. And I remembered what Zee had said, how Frost had gotten this woman hooked on the crystal. So I reckoned Hina was now facing the worst kind of sober. Along with the fact that her daughter was dead.

“We’re heading to Vega,” I said, helping her to her feet. “And I reckon you should come on with us, but I ain’t gonna make you if you don’t want to go.”

“I can’t stay here,” Hina said, keeping her back to the statue. She seemed to shrink as the sun beat down. But her eyes were as cold as ever.

“You said something,” I said, dropping my voice. “About those fake Harvesters.”

She stared at me. Not blinking.

But I couldn’t talk to her about my old man. Not in front of Sal. He was someone else I might need advantages over, somewhere on down the line.