The Water Wars - Cameron Stracher [3]
When I awoke, my blanket was bunched around my neck, and my hair was damp with sweat. Will was already downstairs, dry-showered and eating a bowl of Oatios in front of the wireless. I skipped the shower and grabbed a Toasty Bar as our father ushered us to the door.
“No time for texting,” he said.
I reached for a controller on the kitchen table.
“Signal’s out anyway,” said Will.
The wireless played a news feed about a pirate attack, and Will also had a couple of game channels open, but the wi-text screen was down. My father had explained that bandwidth and signal strength varied depending on the grid, but it didn’t seem a coincidence that propaganda and entertainment were always easiest to find while communication was more difficult. You could play YouToo! almost anywhere in the world, but sending a simple message across republics was unpredictable and sometimes impossible.
I hurried to follow Will and barely had time to finish my breakfast because he walked so fast.
We didn’t see Kai at the bus stop. We waited until the last possible minute, staring down the road in the hope that he would materialize out of the dust. Then the driver barked for us to get on board, and we scampered up the steps. The ride to school was agonizingly slow and bumpy. Though it was fall, it felt like summer, and the bus was hot and airless even with the windows cranked open. My lips were chapped, and I was thirsty already, but of course there was nothing to drink and there wouldn’t be anything until lunchtime. I licked my lips and plunged into the pages of my screen, where the seas were always blue and the skies heavy with thunder.
Our school was a one-story cinder-block building that looked as if it had once been larger. At each end the hallways simply stopped and were bricked off without windows or doors. The classrooms were overcrowded, and there wasn’t enough space in the gym or lunchroom for everyone to play or eat at the same time. Fortunately on most days one-quarter of the kids were sick or absent, which meant the school was nearly the right size for the rest of us. At least there were enough chairs in my class for everyone to find a seat.
The school’s venti-unit blew at full power. I could feel the air coursing over my head like a current as I walked down the hallway. It was crackly and dry, alive with static electricity. The unit was supposed to filter dirt and chemicals, but it made the air taste like something metallic. The teachers kept the windows open anyway, because the school was so hot.
I found my class and sat at my usual seat near the window. The other kids chatted noisily and tossed things at each other while I opened my screen and adjusted my pen-writer. A boy named Ryark tried to get my attention by tapping my shoulder with a calculating stick. He had hair that stuck up like a toilet brush. I ignored him. When the teacher arrived, Ryark sat back quickly in his seat, and the class quieted down. No one dared aggravate the teachers, who freely dispensed electric zaps with a battery-powered teacher’s aid.
We were doing a unit on weather. Mrs. Delfina used her laser pencil to show how the jet stream carried storm systems from west to east. Variations in Earth’s temperature made the jet stream dip and twist, curving north when it should be headed east. This made it snow where it should be warm and brought rain to the colder regions. Predicting weather, she said, was more art than science, because you had to take into account the changing temperature of the land and water and the competing forces of high and low pressure systems that jockeyed for position over the continent. Even the slightest variation could wreak enormous havoc.
“A butterfly beating its wings over Basin today,” Mrs. D. said, “can change tomorrow’s weather two thousand kilometers away.”
I pictured a butterfly floating in the jet stream—beating its wings furiously to stay