The Body Electric - Special Edition (25 page)

The woman starts screaming. “That way! She went that way!” I hear her footsteps clacking on the wooden planks as she races to the opposite side of the boat, pointing to her own son, already several boats away.

I can see land nearby, a narrow strip of beach crowded with people and huts, lit up by small campfires. I could swim that. It wouldn’t be hard. But there are less boats here. I’d be too easy to spot.

The waters of the Mediterranean are gray, almost black, speckled with litter and refuse. I hang near the prow of the woman’s boat, clinging to the wood just beneath the luzzu’s painted eyes. The wood is cracked and the paint is peeling, large chunks of dingy yellow flaking off in the water.

The boat rocks so violently that I nearly lose my grip. Dirty salt water fills my mouth, and I spit it out, scrambling to hold onto the wooden planks again.

“She was here,” a deep male voice barks. Shit. It’s one of the cops.

“She jumped in, yes, she made a mess of my bed.” Those pile of rags I crash-landed into—that was her bed?

A loud smack resounds, followed by a heavy thud. The cop’s hit her so hard that the woman fell down against the boat.

“Know what I think? I think maybe you’re helping her run. Is she hiding here?” the cop growls.

I cower in the water. I sink so low beneath the surface that only my nose peeks out. I should be brave. I should help defend this woman, who sent her son running in my place to distract the cops. I should… I don’t know what I should do. But it feels wrong, hiding here, while she’s being beaten.

I close my eyes and pray I’m not discovered.

I hate myself.

I’m such a coward.

Rags and cloths spill over the side of the boat, and the woman screams. He’s dumping her belongings out. The cloth was just worthless scraps, but it was also her bed, one of the few things she owned, and he’s dumping them into the water. A water-drenched photograph of a baby—Charlie?—drifts by. My hand snakes out and I grab it. I can’t do much, but I can save that at least. The woman starts to scream, pleading with the cop to stop.

Another crack of fist meeting flesh. She stops speaking, but I can hear her silent sobs. They’re the loudest thing I’ve ever heard.

Heavy footsteps grow closer to me. He’s going to look into the water.

I take one deep, silent breath, and plunge under the surface. I hope the junk in the water is enough cover to hide my kicking legs as I force myself below the boat.

I count the seconds. One… two… three…

Ten…

Twenty…

When will it be safe for me to surface? Will I rise from the water only to be captured?

Forty…

Sixty seconds—a full minute.

My heart’s thudding, and I clutch the picture of baby Charlie in one hand, the other hand touching the bottom of the woman’s luzzu boat.

Eighty…

One hundred…

One hundred twenty—two minutes.

I would have thought my lungs would burn from holding my breath so long, but I’m okay. I can do this. I can hide.

One hundred and fifty seconds.

How long should I be able to hold my breath?

Three minutes.

Shouldn’t I need air by now? Why am I able to hold my breath this long? My heart’s still racing; I feel panicked—shouldn’t I
need
to breathe?

Four minutes.

The boat feels stable and quiet, but even though inside I’m panicking at the thought of being underwater so long, I stay. The longer I’m here, the further the police will be when I surface.

Five minutes.

I don’t even feel pain. I remember learning to swim as a little kid, the way I’d try to stay under longer than Akilah, the way my lungs would ache, my face would burn. But here, now—nothing.

Six minutes.

I should be dead, shouldn’t I? Six minutes under water… surely that would kill me.

Seven minutes.

Out of habit, I glance at my cuff, looking for the official time. Maybe I’m just counting down the seconds
really
fast, maybe it hasn’t
actually
been seven minutes. When I look at my cuff, though, I see what made it malfunction. A tiny taze crystal is embedded in the thin tech foil. I hold my arm out, marveling at what I see. A dozen or more taze stuns prick my flesh, studding it with crystals.

I pluck one from my arm and squeeze it between two fingers. The thing shatters underwater, emitting a brief flash of sparks.

It was working. It was working, and it was in my skin, and I didn’t feel a thing.

I look up at the bottom of the boat I’m hiding under. It has to have been at least ten minutes. Ten minutes under water, and I don’t feel a thing. I’m fine. I was hit by a dozen or more taze crystals and I didn’t even notice.

That’s… that’s not human.

forty-four

I let a full half hour slide by, then I let go of the boat, bobbing up next to it. I shiver in the cool, shadowed water. On a boat closer to the bay, an old man stands up next to the edge and pees directly into the sea. His watery eyes drift to me, but he doesn’t seem to care about a girl clinging to the side of an old luzzu.

I kick up in the water enough that my hand can slap the water-logged photograph of the baby I salvaged onto the wooden railing.

A tiny squeak of surprise comes from the boat, and a small hand clasps around my wrist. “Thank you,” the woman who owns the boat whispers to me. “I don’t know how you saved this, but thank you.”

“Thank you for protecting me,” I say. Her face is bruised, her lip is cut. A sodden pile of rags leaves a dark stain on the floor of her boat—the belongings she was able to salvage from the water.

“Is Charlie—?” I cannot bring myself to voice the question.

“He’ll be fine,” the woman says, but I’m not so sure of that, and I don’t think she is, either.

My skin is wrinkled and my hair is stiff with salt—and whatever else is floating in this dirty water—by the time I finally swim to the narrow, crowded beach. As I approach, a few people look up, but they don’t seem to particularly care about me or my presence. They’re caught up in their own microcosm, and even the reward offered by the police is not enough to entice them to get involved with my affairs. In the distance, at the edge of the boats, I see flashing lights, police boats, and men and women dressed in military-grade black. But they hang on the edges of the Foqra District. Even they know that this is a no-man’s land.

Houses made of trash—scrap tin and broken boards that clearly came from luzzu boats and cardboard and plastic tarps—are built right up to the water’s edge, every spare bit of space used. Despite the fact that it’s summer, there are glimmers of small campfires throughout this makeshift city.

I cough. The stench of smoke—both from old engines and from cooking—is overwhelming. It clings to me, slimy on my skin as I start to dry. I glance down at my clothes. They’re ruined, soaked through with the polluted sea water. Bits of trash stick to my body and are caught up in my hair.

But I don’t care about that. I only think about how I don’t need to breathe air, how taze stuns didn’t even make me twinge with pain.

I’m not human.

The words resound in my head with every step I take up the shore.

I’m not human.

A human couldn’t do those things. And more—I think of how, when the androids first issued their warning, I threw Rosie down to rip off her bypass panel. I shouldn’t have been strong enough for that. I threw Jack off me when he attacked as if he were nothing, injuring him despite the fact I’ve never fought anyone in my life.

I’m not human.

I stare down at my own hands. What is under my skin—wires and circuitry or flesh and bone?

I’m not human. I can’t be human. But then…

What am I?

I choke back a sob. All I want is to strip down and take a scalding shower, then wrap myself up in my fluffy bathrobe and curl up in Mom’s bed with her. But that reminds me of the woman who wore Mom’s face, and my stomach churns. I don’t even know what’s
real
any more.

“Ella?” A man stands up, moving around a lean-to toward me.

Jack.

There’s nothing about the way he looks that implies he should belong in the Foqra District, but despite this, he walks as if he’s inherently at home here.

“Jack,” I say, relieved, rushing toward him. The mad dash through the boats left me breathless, but my lungs reject this thick, polluted air, and I would hold my breath if holding my breath didn’t remind me that I was other. He holds his arms out as if to embrace me, but I stop short, suddenly conscious and self-aware.

“They almost got me,” I say, pointing back to the now-silent boats in the bay.

Jack nods grimly. “I know.”

“And Mom? What happened to my mom?” The words spill out of me. “What was that… that thing? What happened?” My voice cracks, and for a moment, I’m afraid I’ll cry. I shut my eyes, willing the burning inside them to not spill out.

Jack touches my arm, and when I open my eyes, I see his sad look. “She might still be okay,” he says. “This—thing—it’s not your mother. But you have to believe that she’s still out there, that she’s going to be okay.”

I can do that. I can pretend. I’ve spent the past few years of my life pretending that nothing was wrong with my mother.

That there’s nothing wrong with me.

I swipe my hands over my eyes, swearing silently to myself that I will discover what has happened to Mom. I will save her.

“How?” I ask softly, and even though Jack hasn’t been privy to my own silent ruminations, he understands my question.

“I don’t know how we can save her,” he says. “But we will.
That
is what the Zunzana does, Ella. We’re not terrorists. But we don’t accept what the government tells us to be true. When we see something wrong, we try to fix it.”

Like my mother.
Like me.

I still don’t know if I trust Jack and his Zunzana. But I know I don’t trust the government, not after they chased me down like a criminal, not after seeing the thing with my mother’s face, something that only the government labs could have made.

I will trust myself, whatever I may be now. And I will save my mother. My
real
mother.

I square my shoulders, then look around. “Where are we?” I finally say.

Jack barks in a bitter laugh. “It’s called Paradise Bay.” He sees my look and adds, “No, really. It was named before New Venice was built. It used to be a really beautiful beach.”

Those days are long gone, that’s for sure. In the water, the boats are so close together that it was easy to leap from one to the other. That had felt crowded, each wooden side bumping against another, but it was nothing to the claustrophobia here. People are
everywhere
. We have to squeeze past roughly hobbled-together walls of the makeshift housing. In some cases, Jack lifts a part of a shack out of our way and then replaces it behind us. Screaming children dart impossibly through the debris, but the one baby I see—a thin little girl nursing with her mother—seems to have already acquired an apathetic acceptance of her lot in life. Her eyes are listless, her body

already huddled and defeated.

There are—I don’t know, at least a thousand or more people destitute on this beach.

I look back at the boats crowded around the pillars in the water behind us. The boats further out are nicer. I can see their brightly colored finishes even from here. But the boats closer to shore are dingier, faded, damaged, broken. Like the people.

It’s even harder for the people not on the boats, the ones crowded on the shore and up against the cliffs that encircle it. There’s little space here, and little warmth, and no joy at all. I glance down at one of the pots over the fire. Food—scraps, really, carrot peelings and something I’m fairly sure is grass along with meat that I assume (I hope) was once a rabbit—simmer in an earthenware pot over a small stone kenur hearth. A girl about my age pokes the food around with a stick, fanning the steam with her hand.

She looks up and sees me staring at her. Her eyes grow narrow and mean, and she snatches the pot away from the flames and hides it behind her. She spins her stick-spoon around in her hand and jabs it toward me.

I put up both my hands and step back. She watches me suspiciously, then returns her pot to the fire.

I move closer to Jack. His face is grim, his jaw clenched as he leads me toward the towering cliffs at the end of the beach.

“How are there so many people here?” I ask. I wrap my arms around my chest and hurry to keep close to Jack.

“Some were born here,” Jack says. “Some families have hidden here since the Secessionary War.” Jack pauses, looking around. “Most, though, are just poor, and they’re not willing to do what the government wants them to do so they can stop being poor. Money doesn’t mean anything if you have to give up what you believe in to get it.”

The cliffs are spotty and even darker than the rest of the Foqra District, hollow caverns cut into the outer edges. Jack leads me past most of these, then stops in front of a narrow opening on the western side, so close to the edge of the water that I can see shafts of sunlight peering down.

It’s not until we are nearly at the cavernous opening at the cliff that I notice some of the people gathered at the entrance. Most of them are men, but there are a few women, too. All of them have sharp eyes, and those eyes are trained on us. Lumps with hard edges—weapons—move under the cloths in their laps.