The Water Wars (21 page)

“Ulysses!”

His face was battered and bruised; dried blood caked his beard; his trousers were sheared at the knees and crusted from his wound—but he was alive. His eyelids fluttered, but he couldn’t open them. He tried to speak, but no words emerged.

I put my lips next to his ear. “It’s okay,” I whispered. “I’m here. We’re going to take care of you.”

I wasn’t sure Ulysses understood me, but I kept repeating the words in the hope that he would.

Sula reached into a pouch on her belt and withdrew a syringe. I jumped to my feet and nearly grabbed it. “Adrenaline,” she explained. “His body needs energy.”

I tried to relax. I had to trust her, just as I’d trusted Ulysses. I helped Sula roll up Ulysses’s sleeve. Then Sula injected him. Nothing happened at first, but in a few moments he stirred, then moved his head and opened his eyes. They fixed on Sula.

“Who are you?” he asked gruffly.

“She’s Sula,” I said, stroking Ulysses’s bearded cheek.

“Where are we?”

I explained that we were still inside Bluewater. We had rescued him from the torture chamber, and Nasri was dead. “Sula knows how to escape.” I turned to her. “Don’t you?” I asked.

“Getting in is easy,” said Sula. “Getting out will be more difficult. If they see us boarding the skimmer, they’ll catch us. The boat is slower than anything they’ve got.”

“So we can’t let them see us,” I said.

“We’ll need to take out their eyes.” Her smile was lined and hard, but, like Ulysses’s, hid mischief.

I nodded.

“It won’t work,” Will said. “They’ll catch us on the beach. We need something faster.”

“Yes, and it’d be nice to have some commandos while we’re dreaming,” Sula muttered.

“You said you could drive anything,” Will continued. “They have jets.”

Sula’s eyes brightened.

“They’ll never expect it,” he went on.

“But we can’t leave Kai here,” I protested.

Sula frowned. “Who said anything about leaving without him? He’s worth too much to leave behind.”

“You’re not going to sell him!” I said, horrified.

“Sell him? Do I look like a merc?”

I hesitated. But her violet eyes made me trust her. Whatever suffering she’d endured had made her unblinking and resolute.

We helped Ulysses to his feet. He was weak, but the adrenaline helped. Sula quickly examined him and confirmed nothing was broken.

“I could have told you that,” Ulysses growled.

“Oh, Ulysses, she’s just worried about you.” For the first time since we had left home, I felt a surge of optimism. Our group of three had grown to four, and soon, I hoped, we would be six.

Sula led us out of the cell into the dim hallway. “So you’re the great pirate king?” she asked.

“Not a king,” he said. “I’ve explained that.”

“I always wondered what pirates did with all that water they stole.”

“We don’t
steal
water. We take it from people who don’t deserve it.”

“Ah, you mean from the pipelines that irrigate crops for innocent children?”

“And I suppose you deliver the water you’re skimming from this abomination to orphans and widows?”

They bickered like this for a while, but I could tell they admired each other. Two fighters; two survivors. Sula, the loner. Ulysses, the leader. Where she was impulsive, he was measured and deliberate. Where she would strike first, he would strike back. Their differences, however, were less important than their common enemy: Bluewater.

“The boy will be in the presentation room,” said Ulysses.

Sula put her hand on her harpoon. “We’ll need more weapons.”

“I don’t care how quick you are with that spear, you’ll not outfight the security forces of a half-dozen nations.”

“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…

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.