The Water Wars (7 page)

It was getting dark by the time we made our way to Kai’s building, and I knew my father would not want me cycling home. I called him from the lobby to pick me up. Kai apologized for not inviting me inside, but I understood. Germs spread more easily indoors, and it wasn’t worth alarming his neighbors.

We waited together downstairs. Kai’s father remained upstairs. The security guards kept their distance. There was a single hard-backed chair, and Kai offered it to me, but I was content to keep standing. An old digital clock on the wall kept time. Minutes blinked slowly past. The intimacy we had shared in the abandoned ruins felt as far away as the buildings themselves. It was as if Kai weren’t there, even though he was standing right next to me. I listened intently and could just hear him breathing. I wondered whether he was embarrassed that he had kissed me and wished he hadn’t. Then I wondered if the kiss had been any good and if he had kissed many other girls. But he was staring off into the distance, and all I could see in front of him were the walls of the building and a bank of security lights. The lights blinked and flickered, sending their coded messages into the night.

“Kai,” I finally said.

“Yes?”

We heard a car honk outside.

“It’s my father,” I told him.

“Will I see you tomorrow?”

“Sure.”

“Tomorrow, then.”

My concerns were silly, I told myself as I ran out the door. Kai wasn’t upset or disappointed. He was just naturally distracted, like a boy who listened to a different voice. And I knew he trusted me; he had shown me the underground spring. Maybe I wasn’t ready to be his girlfriend, but that didn’t mean I had to stop seeing him. It didn’t mean either that we knew what the weeks or months ahead would bring. I wouldn’t be fifteen forever.

That night I told Will nearly everything—except the part about the kiss. I was certain Kai didn’t want me to keep a secret from Will. He was my brother, after all. But Will didn’t believe me. Everyone knew there was no water for miles, he insisted. We must have come upon a leaking cistern or a buried tank. Will raised his voice, and I raised mine back, and the fight ended with our father coming upstairs to separate us. I decided Will wasn’t worth telling anyway. I didn’t care about his opinion. It was just as well he didn’t believe me.

But the next morning, Will asked about the spring again. I repeated what I had told him, and this time he seemed interested.

“Let’s go see it,” he said.

“We’ve got school.”

“After school.”

“It’s behind the old mill.”

“We don’t have to say where we’re going.”

I nodded. Of course I wouldn’t say anything to our father. Will knew that. He pursed his lips and solemnly shook my hand. I understood then—he was jealous that Kai had shown me the spring. But if he suspected anything else, he didn’t let on.

The school day seemed to take forever. Every word the teachers said hung in the air as if coated with thick paste. I tried to get my mind around the words, but they landed back on my desk with a splat. They were unrecognizable, and my brain was dulled with the effort of trying to discern their meaning. I forced myself to sit upright, but all I could think about was showing Will that patch of wet earth.

Finally the bell rang, and with a whoop, the kids raced down the hallway. Normally I took my time gathering my belongings, but today I joined the others in the mad dash for the buses.

Will was waiting for me. We boarded the bus and sat next to each other without speaking. Other kids jostled for Will’s attention, but he ignored them. He gripped the seat in front of him and stared straight ahead. I knew what he was thinking. It was the same thing I had thought when I first saw the spring. A free-flowing source of water could mean more water nearby. More water could mean the aquifers were replenished. Replenished aquifers meant clean water—water that wouldn’t have to be purified, treated with harmful chemicals, poisoned. It was water our mother could drink.

Maybe Kai was wrong about there being very little water. He couldn’t know for certain. Geologists would have to drill and test. Sometimes the water could be a kilometer or more below the surface. A trickle could mean huge reservoirs underneath. These were complicated matters to be divined by scientists and hydrologists.

But when we got off the bus, Kai wasn’t there. At first I assumed he was just late. I realized how much I had counted on him being there every day; not seeing him was jarring, like walking past the same building and suddenly noticing it was gone and there was a huge hole where it once stood. In the last two months, I had almost forgotten the time before he existed, and now his absence felt like a sharp ache. The longer we waited, however, the more we realized Kai wasn’t coming. I wasn’t worried; not yet.

“We could go without him,” I suggested.

“What’s the fun in that?”

“He would be upset,” I agreed.

“Let’s go find him.”

It wasn’t far to the Wellington Pavilion. We got our pedicyles from the locked storage room and cycled down the familiar road. Several cars passed, the drivers steering wide to avoid us. The sun hung low in the sky, a dull orange-brown ball filtered through haze and dust. Finally we saw the triple spires of the Wellington Pavilion over the next hill and picked up our pace. Will raced me to the driveway, then let me win.

The guards stopped us at the gate.

“We’re going to see Kai,” said Will.

“Kai?” asked one of the guards.

“Tall, about my height,” said Will. “Blond. Hangs around outside all day.”

“You know me,” I said to the guard. “I’ve been here before.”

The guard shook his head. “You got a certification?”

Of course we didn’t have our certificates with us. I looked at Will to see what he would do next. I was certain he would find a way to talk himself inside. Instead he shrugged and said, “Oh, well, I guess we’ll see him back at school.” He walked off, pushing his cycle, and I followed.

“Will!” I hissed. “Why didn’t you say something?”

“Can’t talk sense to a guard,” said Will. “Follow me.”

Although the Wellington Pavilion was one of the fanciest housing complexes, it too suffered from a lack of regular maintenance. Without water it was difficult to fix nearly anything. Road crews used dry-crete, a waterless cement, but it crumbled easily in the heat. Asphalt was practically nonexistent, because even petroleum substitutes were impossible to find. As I followed my brother, circling the compound, we soon came to a part of the fence that had rusted out, and the concrete had disintegrated below. We leaned our cycles against a pole, and Will pushed at the fence. It quickly broke away in his hands. “In here,” he said.

The space was just big enough to slip through. Will went first, and I followed. So much for security.

“Three-B,” I said, remembering Kai’s apartment number.

We snuck across the sandy lot, colored green to resemble grass, although it didn’t look anything like it. We didn’t see a soul. This was what it was like to be rich: You didn’t have to leave your apartment, risking the outside air and the lack of water. You lived in a secure compound with guards who stopped visitors at the gate. When people came to visit, they had to be certified and cleared, or else they snuck in beneath the torn and tangled barbed wire.

At the stairwell Will pulled at the door, and it opened easily—either the lock had been removed or it was broken. We climbed three flights, our footsteps echoing eerily in the dim passage. A thin coat of sand made the banister gritty, and several times I had to wipe my hands on my trousers to clean them.

Something was wrong. We could tell as soon as we reached the third floor. A breeze blew down the hallway—not the familiar and comforting air of a venti-unit, but the hot, dry breath from outside. Sure enough, when we reached the end of the hallway, we could see an apartment door swinging open on a single hinge. Will slowed and signaled for quiet, although I wouldn’t have made a sound even if I could. We tiptoed the last several feet to the apartment door, and then Will peered around inside.

The intake of his breath was like a sharp cry.

I eased behind him and looked over his shoulder. The apartment appeared trashed, as if someone had set about to wreck it. Broken lamps on the floor. Shattered windows. An overturned table in the kitchen. Dishes scattered beside it. A rank odor, like spoiled food, filled the air. It was too much to take in at once, and for several seconds I didn’t see what had made Will cry out.

A bloodied body lay face down near the doorway to the bedrooms. I recognized him instantly, and my stomach turned: Martin the bodyguard, the machine pistol still in his hand, his broken sunglasses lying about two meters away. I noticed bullet holes in the walls now, and empty shell casings on the floor.

“Kai?” I called. “Kai?”

But my voice echoed hollowly in the empty apartment. Kai was gone.

T
he laser torches lit the hallway in streaks of purple and red. Will saw them first while I rummaged through a stack of paper and notebooks on a desk made of real wood.

“RGs,” he hissed.

RGs were members of the Republic Guard who were armed with high-tech gear. Feared and loathed in equal measure, they protected the republic’s border and what was left of its infrastructure. But there wasn’t enough time to wonder why the RGs were here. Their arrival was never a good thing. There was a dead body and spent ammunition and two kids old enough to be saboteurs. We had to flee before we were trapped.

The lights danced across the open doorway. Will and I huddled in the back of the small room that served as Kai’s father’s office. There was a second door that led into a bath, and from there into Kai’s bedroom. We tiptoed to the bathroom. Outside we could hear the guards’ electronic communications. They spoke in clipped military language, most of which I couldn’t understand, but I clearly heard them say we were cornered in the building.

The only thing that saved us was Kai’s medicine kit on the side of the sink. As I stopped to examine it, the RGs entered the bedroom. They would surely have seen us if we had continued into the room. Instead Will bumped into me and we both froze behind the door. Then we quickly retraced our steps to the office, back through the living room to the front hallway—and out the open door.

Two men stood just inside the perimeter of the fence by the front gate. They were dressed in the same blue shirts as the men I had seen at the gaming center, and each carried an automatic weapon.

Will raised a finger to his lips. He signaled toward the hole in the fence. We scurried quickly in the twilight and slipped through the opening before anyone noticed. Then we leapt on our pedi-cycles and rode silently like madmen until we were within sight of our building.

“We can’t stay here,” gasped Will as we stopped to catch our breath about fifty meters from our front door.

“What do you mean? Where else can we go?”

He nodded at the security cameras mounted on nearly every building corner. Of course: the cameras at the Wellington Pavilion had filmed our arrival. It wouldn’t take long for the RGs to review the logs and identify us in the database.

“But we didn’t do anything!” I protested.

“It won’t look that way.”

I was still gripping Kai’s medicine kit. Now I looked inside. Four neat, contoured insulin reservoirs were secured in an insulated pouch next to two boxes of blood-testing strips and a spare adapter for the injector pencil.

“He left without his insulin,” I said.

“Why would he do that?”

“He didn’t do it,” I said. “They took him.”

“We don’t know that. He could have been running.”

“You saw the bodyguard! Do you think he shot himself?”

“Maybe he got shot protecting Kai and his father, and they got away.”

“Then where’s the blood and the other bodies?”

“Could be no one else was wounded.”

But Will knew I was right. No matter how desperate Kai’s situation, he wouldn’t leave voluntarily without his insulin. It was a death sentence.

“We have to help him, Will.”

“We can’t go to the Guard, or the army. They’ll be looking for us.”

“Then we have to go ourselves.”

“Don’t be crazy. They’ll have guns, and we don’t even know who
they
are.”

“If we stay here, the Guard will arrest us. You said so yourself.” My voice cracked; my throat was bone dry.

“And what do we do if we find him? Shoot our way inside?”

“If we have proof, the Guard will come. Especially if there’s money in it.”

Will frowned. But he knew the Republic Guard would help a wealthy driller if we had a holo or even an audiogram—anything they could link to bank records.

“We should tell Dad,” said Will. “Just in case.”

I couldn’t believe Will was suggesting this. Our father would never let us leave. I told Will he was scared and making excuses. He said he was being rational and weighing the risks. The more we argued, the more forceful I became. For once I was the leader and Will the reluctant follower. He may have had logic, but I had passion and desire.

“If we lose Kai, we lose the river,” I said. “We lose everything.”