The Water Wars - Cameron Stracher [21]
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.
CHAPTER 6
The 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