The Water Wars - Cameron Stracher [36]
Nasri blinked rapidly. He looked like he wanted to hop again, but there was no room to hop in the small cargo hold.
“We’re poisoning the land to save it,” he spat. “When the great dams and reservoirs are destroyed, the water will return to the land, and people will remember its precious gift.”
“That’s crazy.”
Nasri raised his hand, and I flinched, but he merely scratched his stubbly head. “Look after your brother,” he said. Then he opened the hatch to the carrier’s main compartment and disappeared into the front of the truck.
I sat in the darkness and listened to Will breathe. I would not let him lose his leg. I would find him a doctor—a real doctor—who would give him proper medicine and stitch it up. And what of Kai? Was he already dead? The seriousness of our predicament was not lost on me. We were now in Canada, a country with which we were at war. We had no travel papers and were dependent on the kindness of environmental mercenaries—lowlife thugs who couldn’t be trusted. There was something suspicious about PELA’s avowed alliance with the Canadians—the very people who had dammed Earth’s water and melted the giant icebergs. I lay down next to Will, gripping his hand with my fingers. I could feel the pulse in his wrist, strong and steady. Will was a fighter. As long as his heart kept beating, he would not give up. I remembered how he pumped for both of us on the pedi-cycle, pushing past the point of exhaustion. It seemed like another lifetime ago. The dusty road where I had witnessed a boy spilling water from a cup was as far away as the girl I had once been—a girl who had never heard gunfire or seen a man swollen and dead.
I fell into a restless sleep. In my dreams, my parents and Will were gliding down a giant river on a floating device that looked like a pedicycle with its wheels turned sideways. I tried to warn them they were not safe. Water was leaking in through the wheels and swamping their seats. They were pedaling while slowly sinking. But they just waved happily back at me, oblivious to the danger. The river moved swiftly and silently, torrents of water rushing to the ocean. Dark and violent, it swirled around them like a gathering storm. I watched helplessly from the muddy shoreline as my family was swept away into the unforgiving sea.
I awoke to find Will still lying next to me. It took a moment to realize that he had one eye open and was staring at me, just as he used to do back home when we pulled our mattresses together in my room.
“Vera,” he whispered.
“Will!”
“Where are we?”
I explained we were in the back of a hover-carrier, traveling with PELA along the Canadian border.
“PELA?” he croaked.
“They blew up the dam,” I said. “It wiped out everything. Ulysses and the pirates are dead.”
Will shut his one open eye as if trying to block the loss, but when he opened both eyes, all he said was, “My leg hurts.” He reached down to pull up his trouser leg. His skin was red and raw, and blood and yellow fluid oozed down his calf. But a scab had begun to form around the edges, and purplish bruising mottled his shin.
“They gave you some medicine,” I said.
“Why would they do that?”
“They want to sell us.”
Healthy children of working age were needed at the drilling sites, Nasri had said. They were small enough to scramble down the narrow shafts but took in one-tenth the pay of adults. Plenty of orphans were apprenticed to the mines, their lives as miserable as the nineteenth-century urchins we’d learned about in school. As far as PELA was concerned, we were orphans they had found on the road.
“But we have parents!” protested Will.
“They don’t care. They just want money.”
“Maybe PELA kidnapped Kai.”
I had considered this. Several years ago three brothers were kidnapped from a Skate ’n’ Sand arena. They never returned, although rumors circulated that they were working for a drilling company on the Great Coast. This was why our father insisted that we shouldn’t talk to strangers and that we