The Water Wars - Cameron Stracher [54]
“But Torq,” protested Nasri, “he’s a pirate.”
“And now he’s our prisoner. We will not let him die quietly.”
Nasri hopped from foot to foot but did not protest. Torq obviously frightened him as much as he frightened me. Nasri’s mouth worked silently, as if he were chewing over something. He glared at Will, and his hand went involuntarily to the scar on his face. Then he backed from the cell, never letting us out of his sight until the door closed behind him.
In his absence the room seemed to grow smaller. Torq moved closer.
“Why are you here?” Torq directed his question to Will.
“You brought us here,” said Will.
“Where did you get the rotorcraft?”
“Where did you get the jet?”
Torq slammed the wall behind Will’s head with such force that I was certain he would break something. He picked Will up by the hair and held him ten centimeters off the ground.
“I. Ask. The. Questions.” He spat out each word, then dropped Will back to the ground. “You answer!”
Will stammered out a partial version of the truth: We had been rescued by Ulysses from a drill site and were flying back to a pirate camp.
“Pirates don’t rescue children,” said Torq, raising one hand as if he might yank Will’s hair again.
“We’re his children!” I blurted.
Torq looked at me for the first time. I held his gaze. His eyes were like pools of dirty gray water—flat and dangerous.
“That may be useful,” said Torq.
Nasri arrived with the medic. He was a small man, skittery and nervous. There was dirt or dried blood on the front of his white tunic. He examined Ulysses quickly and gave him two injections. Ulysses did not stir. The medic cut away his bloody trouser leg with a scalpel. I averted my eyes. The sight of all that blood made me feel faint again. I heard the medic murmuring about sepsis and shock, but I put my head in my hands and blocked the sound.
There was some more cutting, and then some stitching. Another shot. Bloodied medi-pads discarded on the floor. A second medic wheeled a gurney into the room. Both men heaved Ulysses onto the bed.
“Where are you taking him?” I asked.
“Don’t you worry,” said Torq. “He’ll be better in no time. Then we’ll stick pins in him until he bleeds again.” Torq and Nasri laughed, and the medics wheeled Ulysses out of the cell. Nasri gave us a last violent look, then the steel door clanged shut behind both men, and Will and I were alone in the tiny cell.
“They’re going to torture him!” I cried.
“No, they won’t,” said Will. “Not right away. Didn’t you hear them? They need him awake.”
“So they can torture him!”
“That gives us time,” said Will. “Wherever they’ve taken him, I’ll bet that’s where they’ve got Kai. If we can find one, we can save the other.”
“But we’re trapped. It’s hopeless.”
“You told me not to say that!” Will snapped.
“But it is, Will. It is.”
He shook his head. The color had returned to his face, and he looked like the Will who once outraced a boy, three years older, on a dare. The medicine Nasri had given him back at the drilling site must have been powerful stuff, because he stood without much effort or visible pain. “You said Kai was our friend and we had to help him. Well, Ulysses is our friend too, and that means we’ve got twice the people to help, and we’ve got to work twice as hard.”
“But what can we do?”
Will looked around the cell. Except for a small air vent in the ceiling, and window grates in the steel door, the walls appeared solid and impenetrable. There was no handle on the door and no way to open it from the inside. His eyes darted back to the air vent.
“I know what you’re thinking,” I said. “But even if we knew where that went, we can’t possibly reach it.”
“Easy,” said Will. “Just like condenser duty.” He approached the wall, and felt its surface for imperfections. Although it appeared smooth, the wall had hundreds of cracks and fissures—the result of trying to build anything without water. The imperfections were small, but not so tiny that Will’s fingers could not grasp them, or his toes without shoes could not find footing.
“Give me a hand,” he said.
I