The Water Wars - Cameron Stracher [64]
So I was not dead. Or perhaps we both were.
Then the lights flickered on. Nasri’s chair had tipped over. The harpoon jutted from his chest. His lips were peeled back in a deathly grimace, and his eyes were fixed open. He looked like a man who did not expect to die and had left the earth as he had emerged: howling in agony.
Sula stood over me. “You’re bleeding,” she said.
I felt my face. My hands came away sticky. A great lump rose up in my throat, and my breath caught on something hard. “I’ve been shot?” It was a question more than a statement, because I didn’t feel wounded—although I had begun to feel cold and shaky.
“Sit tight,” Sula commanded. Her hands were in my hair, then on my head, pressing and probing. I tried hard not to panic, but the top of my head burned, and my forehead was wet with slickness.
Will stopped short when he saw me. “Vera?” he began, but could not finish. He looked to Sula for reassurance, but she was too busy examining me. There was nothing he could do but take my hand.
A bullet had grazed my scalp, Sula concluded. It had cleared a tiny path like a trail through the geno-soy fields and burned off the top layer of skin. A flesh wound, literally, but it bled like something worse. Sula tore off a sleeve from my shirt and bandaged it as best she could.
“It’s not pretty,” she said. “The scalp bleeds the worst. But it’s nothing to worry about. When it heals, you won’t even know it was there.”
I tried to smile but feared I would cry. “I always wondered what it was like to be shot.”
“Now you’ve lived to tell the tale.”
I touched my scalp where Sula had wrapped the cloth. It still burned, but it made me feel important. I’d been wounded in combat. Anyone could break a leg or dislocate a shoulder, but how many people got shot? I could tell by the way Will was looking at me that he was impressed too and not a little bit jealous. I would have quickly traded the head wound, however, for a glass of clean water.
“Who shut off the light?” I asked.
“I threw the switch,” Will said. He’d been leaning against a box that controlled power for the floor. He cut the voltage as soon as he’d heard Nasri’s voice.
“Quick thinking,” Sula remarked. She leaned over to pull the harpoon from Nasri’s chest. I covered my eyes in the crook of Will’s elbow.
“Where are they?” I asked, my voice muffled by Will’s arm.
“Not here.”
But Sula was wrong. A low moaning interrupted her efforts to retrieve the harpoon. In the dark corner of the small room—hard to believe we could miss it—a pile of blankets stirred. I ran over and tossed them aside.
“Ulysses!”
His face was battered and bruised; dried blood caked his beard; his trousers were sheared at the knees and crusted from his wound—but he was alive. His eyelids fluttered, but he couldn’t open them. He tried to speak, but no words emerged.
I put my lips next to his ear. “It’s okay,” I whispered. “I’m here. We’re going to take care of you.”
I wasn’t sure Ulysses understood me, but I kept repeating the words in the hope that he would.
Sula reached into a pouch on her belt and withdrew a syringe. I jumped to my feet and nearly grabbed it. “Adrenaline,” she explained. “His body needs energy.”
I tried to relax. I had to trust her, just as I’d trusted Ulysses. I helped Sula roll up Ulysses’s sleeve. Then Sula injected him. Nothing happened at first, but in a few moments he stirred, then moved his head and opened his eyes. They fixed on Sula.
“Who are you?” he asked gruffly.
“She’s Sula,” I said, stroking Ulysses’s bearded cheek.
“Where are we?”
I explained that we were still inside Bluewater. We had rescued him from the torture chamber, and Nasri was dead. “Sula knows how to escape.” I turned to her. “Don’t you?” I asked.
“Getting in is easy,” said Sula. “Getting out will be more difficult. If they see us boarding the skimmer, they’ll catch us. The boat is slower than anything they’ve got.”
“So we can’t let them see us,” I said.
“We’ll need to take out their eyes.” Her smile was lined and hard, but, like Ulysses’s, hid mischief.
I nodded.
“It won’t