Dead Water Zone - Kenneth Oppel [39]
“Once, a few years back. I wanted to have a look. Everyone had these perfect lawns. You could see lines where they unrolled the grass.”
Paul smiled in the darkness of the cell. Governor’s Hill now seemed a very long time ago.
“I went to a mall,” she said. “The girls were pretty. They looked a little plastic, most of them, but I wished I was more like them. So I pickpocketed a couple, came back home. I was so angry at Mom for drinking the water, for making me a freak.”
“You’re not,” said Paul. “You’re very beautiful.” He’d never said that before.
She touched his hand. “Thank you. But it’s not just the outside, Paul.” She sighed. “I could build the biggest gate in the world, run my life with perfect control, but Mom’d still be inside me, running through my veins. And I’ll never be free of her.”
Paul thought achingly of Sam. They didn’t look like brothers; their blood and bodies were completely different, but Paul felt more bound to him than if they’d been identical twins. When he looked in the mirror, sometimes he saw his brother gazing back.
“I worry,” said Monica, “that I might be like Sam.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know what’s going to happen to us—anyone who had Waterdrinker parents. I think we might have shortened lives, too.”
“No,” he told her fiercely. “No!”
Her fingers tightened around his in a grip that was almost painful.
The creak of a door woke him with a start. He could make out a thin silhouette slipping into the cell and crouching against the opposite wall.
“You awake?”
“Sam?”
“I didn’t think you’d come, Paul. I really didn’t.”
“You kept running away—at Jailer’s Pier and that night at the stilt house. Why?”
“I didn’t want you to see me. You would have been shocked. That’s why I left the diskette for you at the boathouse.”
“You left it?” But his surprise quickly wore off. Of course. Sam was too exacting to leave something by accident. But Paul found it a little unnerving all the same, as if he’d fallen unknowingly into the steel grooves of some perfect strategy in one of Sam’s board games. Sam watching him, leaving clues for him to find, while Paul looked for him in desperation.
“Can I see you now?” he asked nervously.
A pale flashlight beam washed down the far wall. Paul squinted. He supposed he’d been expecting something far worse, something with tubes. But he was only concentrating on Sam’s face, afraid of what he might see if he looked lower. It was still recognizable, still Sam. The hollows of his cheeks were slightly deeper, the thin, black hair a little longer. His blue eyes seemed duller than Paul remembered, and he thought of Sturm’s eyes, cataract white, without pupils or color. As he stared, his vision seemed to contract, and everything else around him disappeared. For a few moments he actually forgot about his chains.
“It’s good to see you,” he whispered.
Now he let his eyes slide down from his brother’s face. The skin that showed through his tattered T-shirt and jeans was skeleton-white, and Paul could see the angles and planes of bones and ribs, alarmingly close to the surface. A dream image glittered dully in his mind—Sam lifting his shirt, Paul, watch.
“What’s happened, Sam?” Beside him, Monica shifted in her sleep; Paul glanced over, worried that their voices might wake her. He wanted to be alone with Sam.
“Don’t worry,” his brother said. “She needs deep sleep for a few hours. She’s been running off of the water for too long. She won’t wake up.”
“When did they catch you?” Paul asked.
“They didn’t. We caught them. They were using infrared scanning from their helicopter. They must have picked up the ship’s furnace. When they set down in Rat Castle, Sturm could feel them coming. We surprised them, took away their guns, shackled them. Sturm’s very powerful with the water now, very fast.”
“He was supposed to be dead.”
“Not dead—sleeping. He’d managed to give himself a total transfusion of the water, and that put him into a coma. The water was still contaminated. I gave him a partial transfusion of the filtered water I’d been using, and he came out of