Earth Thirst (16 page)

“Why do they want to kill you?”

“For the same reason any homeowner wants to get rid of any pernicious weed that is marring their otherwise pristine lawn.”

She nods. “You said ‘steward' earlier. You mean it, don't you? In, like, a
global
sense.”

“Yes. But it's more than just us versus whoever wants us gone.” I nod around at the other passengers. “Everyone is contributing to the disease that is slowly wiping us out. These companies think they can fix things with GMO seeds and new pesticides, but they don't have the long view. They're denying what the rest of humanity is doing every day.”

“Doing what?”

“You're killing the planet, Mere. All of you. It's ecocide.”

EIGHTEEN

O
nce we reach Rapa Nui, we pass through customs at Mataveri International Airport without much trouble. The agent inspecting our single suitcase raises an eyebrow at our minimalist packing until I say the word “honeymoon” and glance suggestively at Mere, who has the good grace to blush appropriately. The agent smirks, his eyes lingering on Mere's breasts, and stamps our passports, a quaint custom that hasn't gone out of style on Rapa Nui. It's the first real mark of approval these papers have seen.

Outside the airport, the air is warm and turgid. I have a headache from all the sun, and I collapse on the hard seats in the back of a cab, leaning to the side so that my head is out of the direct sunlight. I'm wearing my optics and they're dialed all the way down. I hear Mere ask the cabbie to take us to the best hotel on the island. “Yes,” she says in response to his reply. “The Hanga Roa Royal Resort is fine.”

The car lurches off, and we ride in silence for a few minutes. The windows of the cab are rolled down, and there is little breeze. The scent of Mere's skin wafts through the cab.

“Are they all like that?” she asks suddenly. “Looking inland.”

I don't have to open my eyes to know what she's talking about. The
moai,
one of the impassive stone heads the island is known for.

I grunt enough of a response for her to know I'm listening.

“I've seen pictures,” she says, “but it's a matter of context, I guess. You see the heads, and you know they're on an island and that they're remnants of some strange Cargo Cult religion. You just assume, I guess, that they're all facing outward.”

“They were tribute, built by the natives in recognition of the clan leaders,” I tell her. “Kind of like the pyramids in Egypt. Most of the
moai
were knocked over and broken shortly after the European discovery of the island. Inter-clan conflicts. You tend to break the other team's stuff, you know?”

She slaps my leg playfully and her touch is almost enough to get me to open my eyes. “Men,” she says. “It never changes, does it?”

I think of the reasons why the Achaeans came east, their army covering the Plain of Skamandros like black ants. “No, it doesn't.”

* * *

The day clerk at the hotel finds us a mid-sized suite on the inland side of the hotel, and I hang back as Mere crosses to the heavy curtains and pulls them open. There's a sliding door behind them, and a narrow balcony. Mere opens the door and lets the warm air in as she steps out onto the balcony. The sun is a hand's-width over the horizon—the ragged edge of the dome of Rano Kau, one of the three volcanoes that make up the island. Lightening my optics a few clicks, I step up to the sliding glass door, bracing myself for what I'm going to see, what I've been avoiding.

But I have to.

“You look like someone ran over your dog,” she says when she notices my expression.

“This island used to be covered with trees,” I sigh. “I knew there had been a collapse, but I hadn't been…” I hadn't been paying attention.

“What are you, the Lorax?” She means the question as a joke, but it comes off too brittle, too close to the truth, and I can tell she regrets the jab as soon as she says it.

I've been trying to remember when I was here last, and my memory has holes. Has it been that long? When did the Dutch discover the island? Seventeenth century? Eighteenth?

“This used to be covered with a forest of broadleaf trees.” I sweep my arm to indicate the nearby hills, covered with green grasses. “Toromiro and palm trees.” I lean heavily against the frame of the door. “It takes more than a hundred years for the palms to grow to their full height. Why didn't they replant? Why was this place abandoned?”

“By who?” she asks quietly. “Arcadia or the natives? We're hundreds of miles from anywhere. If the ecosystem of the island gave out, how could the residents survive?”

What happened? My legs are weak, and I'm oddly short of breath. The skin on my back starts to prickle, a thousand needles jabbing at my burned skin. The thirst is building and, deep in my blood, something bubbles. An alien presence trying to change me. “I need to lie down,” is what I say, but what I need is to sleep in the ground. I need to be covered in humus, the rich loam of the earth. My hands ache. The desire to dig is overwhelming.

As is the desire to hurt someone.

There were trees here the last time I was on Rapa Nui. Why can't I remember what happened? What has Mother taken from me?

* * *

When I open my eyes again, the sun has slipped from the sky. A tiny breeze is flowing through the open glass door, and it toys with the bottom edge of the curtain. I smell cooked food and spices—lots of spices—and the potpourri of scents drags me upright.

Mere is sitting at the table, on which are several trays from room service. “I ordered a couple of things,” she says, “figuring maybe some food would do you some good. It's mostly vegetarian with some fish. Is that okay? I didn't know if you needed raw meat or something…”

“It's fine,” I manage. I take off my optics and blink heavily for a moment or two as my eyes water. “I don't eat a lot of meat.”

“Really? But, don't you—?”

“I'm not a meat sucker, Mere. I don't need to cut up cubes of sirloin and stick them in my cheek for an hour.”

“Thank God for that. You'd have the nastiest breath.”

I sit down at the table with her, and my stomach makes a noisy rumble as I reach for a plate. I am hungry, and the hotel has a surprisingly good menu. There is baked shrimp with fennel and feta. Pan-seared cauliflower with wild rice and a rich tomato pesto colored like the heart of the sun. A plate of marinated eggplant, chilis, and—I have to taste the sauce to be sure—burrata over brown rice pasta. A slab of seared salmon with a black and shiny tapenade of anchovies and olive, complete with a sprig of freshly harvested rosemary lying idly across the top.

The food will help me not think about the fluttering pulse in her neck. She's pulled back her hair, showing a lot of the pale skin there.

“You were angry,” she says after I've loaded my plate and started to shovel the food into my mouth. “While you were …
resting
, I guess you could call it. I tried to talk to you once or twice, but you snarled at me.” She shows me her teeth like she's an angry dog. “I figured it was best to leave you alone. I was going to go out, but I didn't want to leave you here on the off-chance that…” She shrugs. “So I ordered food. It's always a good idea when you don't know what to do next, right? Get a meal in because you can't be sure when the next one is going to happen.”

“It's a good plan,” I say around a mouthful of broccoli.

She smiles, and her hand drifts up to the scar at the base of her throat. It's not very deep, but it will always be there, a curling reminder of how close she came to dying. Kirkov had been an old soldier; his brain didn't even need to tell his muscles what to do anymore. He operated on instinct, and part of him had sensed me coming. He had already started cutting when I put my hand through his chest.

“When you and the others came onboard the
Liberty
, you brought your best
don't fuck with us
vibe. It worked well, didn't it? They left you alone, but then, most of the kids on the boat had never been at sea before, much less taking part of in an environmental protest. I could make any number of them cry just by raising my voice. I've been around meth heads who've totally lost it, some bad-ass mercenaries who could probably kill me as easily as they picked their teeth with a toothpick, and a couple of political lobbyists who would sell a busload of their own children if it meant ramming a bill through Congress. It was going to take a little more to scare me off.”

She shakes her head slightly, gathering a bit of courage, and continues. “You know what frightened me the most about being held over the railing? It's wasn't being held out like that. That was terrifying, sure, but what really scared me was the look on your face.”

I pause, half a wide rice noodle hanging out of my mouth. “Like this?” I squint at her.

She smiles politely, but her fingers are still toying with the flesh of her throat. “No,” she says. “I saw it on the others too. That day, on the
Cetacean Liberty
, when the harpoon boats got into trouble…”

She's reticent to talk about it and I haven't pressed her so far, knowing she'd tell me when the time came.

“I tried to get onto the bridge after you came storming out, but the other one—Talus?—he ordered the crewmen to take me below deck. I nailed one of the pair in the groin, but the other one got his arms around me. They were more frightened of Talus than me—and I can't blame them—and they were only going to get rougher with me if I kept fighting them. So I let them take me, and just as we were going down the stairs, I heard the first of the gun shots. That was Phoebe, right? With some sort of sniper rifle?”

I nod, still eating, but listening intently to her story.

“I thought I had seen her, up in the prow,” Mere continues. “I didn't find out until later that she was clearing a path for you. You went out to one of the harpoon boats, didn't you? You and Nigel, both. You each took a boat.”

“Nigel went rogue,” I correct her. “He went off on his own and attacked the first boat. By the time Phoebe and I had gotten involved, it was already well underway.”

“Nigel? Rogue? Is that what you think happened?” She shook her head. “An hour before, I had run into him coming out of the cabin you all shared. He had
that look
on his face. He stopped when he saw me, and when I squeezed past him, I saw Talus standing in the room, watching me too. I'm pretty good at reading people, Silas. They had made a decision. I was terrified when I realized what it was, and I didn't know what to do. Who could I tell? You? I had no idea if you weren't part of it. Captain Morse would have shit himself with fear if I had gone to him, and then he would have jumped overboard and been happily eaten by a shark. I went down to the mess and sat with as many people as I could find. It wasn't a good solution, but all I could hope was that all those innocent kids would be enough of a deterrent to keep Nigel away from me. But I knew they wouldn't. If he had wanted to kill me, it wouldn't have mattered how many there were. He would have killed them all to get to me.”

She's not family. Remember your priorities.

I can't argue with anything she's said and so I don't try, keeping my attention on the food. There's a few slices of thin bread made from cassava flour on the tray, and I mop up the remaining bites on my plate. The tension in my muscles is easing and my skin is softening. I'm hydrating, but not quickly enough. I pour myself a glass of water from the pitcher and drain it quickly. The water is good too, untainted by too many cycles of filtering and chemical softening.

“But Nigel wasn't coming after you,” I say, prompting her to continue her story. Nigel was going over the railing to assault the first harpoon boat. And Talus knew. His orders on the bridge made an ugly sense in light of Mere's story. He knew I wouldn't have agreed with his decision to fight back, and so he had had to create a situation where I would be inclined to do what he wanted. Where I would
volunteer
. With me gone, there would only be Phoebe to protect the crew of the
Cetacean Liberty.

“When the shooting started, I was locked in my cabin,” she continues, her frustration at being kept away from the action clear in her voice. “I made a racket for a while, more angry than anything else, and then I started to hear other people shouting and… screaming. And then it got real quite. I hid, or tried to, actually. There's not a lot of places to hide in those cabins. After a few hours, I started to wonder what was going to happen if no one ever came looking for me. How was I going to get out of this cabin? Was there anyone piloting the boat?

“I was starting to get hungry and having my second or third panic attack about being trapped, when I heard someone tapping at my door. It was the old guy, Gus—the engineer who'd been in Vietnam. He had been hiding down in the engine room. Once things quieted down, he started to sneak around the boat to see who was still alive. He found me and a couple of others. Gus had the clever idea of hiding in your cabin—the room where you four all stayed. At first, I thought it was a terrible idea, but he explained that none of you were on the boat anymore.”

“What happened?”

She shakes her head. “I don't know. I asked everyone we rescued, but no one knew anything. They had all been below deck when things had gone sideways. By the time Gus let me out, the Japanese were running things.”

“The Japanese? From the whaling fleet?”

“Captain Morse—or whoever was in charge on the bridge—sailed the
Cetacean Liberty
right up to the processing ship and handed it over. The Japanese put a crew on board and turned the boat around for Adelaide.”

“Why?”

She shrugs. “I don't know. We stayed out of sight. They didn't come looking for us. But they had to know we were there. And they didn't care.”

“What happened?”

“There was some British guy with them. Hard-looking guy. At the time I thought he was military of some sort, but now, I realize he was probably Secutores. Short gray hair, well-groomed stubble like he'd just come from a fashion shoot. I only caught sight of him a couple of times before Gus insisted I stay in the cabin. Anyway, as soon as we hit the Bight, there was another boat. The enforcer and his crew took off; Gus said it sounded like they were using a go-fast boat. ‘Two engines, maybe a thousand horses,' is what he said. Ten minutes later, the bomb went off and the fire started.