Cut Off (27 page)

"Every day." He swung his cup in a circle. "She's around back. Doing her thing."

She nodded and headed around the deck to the stairs to the back yard. This featured a large number of fruit trees; disorganized but plentiful crops; a tarp-protected work station cluttered with saws, chisels, squares, and stacks and scraps of raw bamboo and wood repurposed from furniture and homes; a system of tarps, flues, and trash bins to collect rain water; and an automobile graveyard of cars propped up by pieces of other cars (doors, fenders, etc.), bits of their engines torn out and strewn about, rusting in the shadows.

Within this stationary chaos, it took Tristan a moment to spot Robi at the back of it all, standing before an easel in a small clearing, painting. She glanced up briefly, smiling. "Hi, Tristan."

"I didn't know you painted."

"After, I was just so
bored
. Three years ago, I was wandering around houses and found a little studio. Been at it ever since."

Tristan moved around for a look. She half expected to find a portrait of Alden, but Robi was recreating the sunrise they were now watching, the pink-blue skies behind the dark leaves. "What will you do when you run out of paint?"

Robi shrugged a lithe shoulder. "Go into town for more? Learn to make my own? Find something else to do? I'll worry when it happens."

"I suppose it's just paint." She watched as Robi continued to dab at the canvas, smearing pink around its upper third. "What do you think about what happened the other day?"

"I'll tell you what I
know
. Hell if I'm going back to that beach. It's too far anyway."

"I've been talking to Alden. I think we should move."

Robi lowered the ice cube tray she was using for a palette and cocked her head. "Why would we do that?"

"Because we're not safe here."

"Where would we be safe?"

"I think we should try the Big Island," Tristan said. "But I wanted to talk to you about it. See if you had a better idea."

Robi turned back to her canvas. "Stay here."

"Robi, if we stay here—"

"Have you been to any of the other islands?"

Tristan folded her arms. "Maui was the first one we came to."

"We started in Oahu, then Molokai, then here," Robi said. "Here is the only place we haven't had to hurt someone."

"I can't let my brother stay here. How much simpler can this be? There's
aliens
."

"The one you think you saw in the cave didn't hurt you, did it? Either they don't know about us, or they want to be left in peace, same as us."

"And if I take Alden with me, then what?"

Robi laughed and slashed a red sunbeam across her sky. "He doesn't want to go, does he? That's why you're here. Why you're talking to me like a person instead of some thirteen-year-old you know you won't see again once he goes off to high school."

Tristan clenched her jaw. "Watch what you say."

"Or what? You'll ground him?"

She interposed herself between Robi and the canvas, bumping the girl's thin shoulder with her chest, pressing her face close. "You're right. You can keep him here. Where you'll both die. Can you see the only move that leaves me with?"

"Enlighten me."

"Eliminating the thing keeping him here."

Robi's brows and mouth flickered. She stepped around Tristan to continue working on her canvas. "You need to spend less time thinking about what you think is best for Alden and more time thinking about what he wants. Until then, get the hell out of my yard."

Tristan felt her hand clasping. She had to leave before she said or did more. Ke called something from the elevated front porch. She waved vaguely and continued down the hill. Alden wasn't at the house. If she was going to be able to convince everyone to depart Maui, it was beyond clear she wouldn't be able to do so with an outrigger canoe. With the morning still young and cool, she jogged down the shore to Papa Ohe'o's. He was doddering around his yard, poking at weeds with a hoe.

He straightened, mouth half open as he identified her. "Lady Hermes, always on the go. Can I help you with something, or are you just passing through?"

"Random question," Tristan said. "But did Oprah really live here?"

"That would depend on your definition of 'live,'" he said. "I doubt she ran the empire from our little island. Did she own a house here, though? Yes."

"Where was it?"

"A few miles down the road. Past the old farmer's market. Boy, does it have a nice macadamia farm. But the Aweaus live there now."

She thanked him and headed up to the road. By the time she reached the farmer's market, where the canvas tarps had been pulled down by long-ago rains, and the wooden sign by the road had faded, paint falling from it in chips, it was mid-afternoon, hot and sunny. Past the market, she found a path to the shore and followed it along the rocks.

With its plate glass windows, columns, elaborate solar arrays, and guest home, the house was unmistakable. She walked past its frontage on the shore, staring straight ahead in case one of the Aweaus happened to see her. As she suspected, it had two docks, but these berthed a canoe and a rowboat.

She swore and moved on, thinking, rightly, that she was in a former "neighborhood" of high-powered estates, yet the best she found was a beached sloop, the sails of which had been completely destroyed. Even so, she dragged it to a shed near the beach while she hunted for spare sails or canvas. As she stepped outside, an engine rumbled dully overhead. She froze. This section of the jungle had been cleared for the manors, and although the grass and undergrowth had moved in as soon as the landscapers died, without the canopy of the trees, it felt horribly exposed.

She wasted the rest of the afternoon in a fruitless search for sails, then turned around for home. Alden wasn't there. This didn't surprise her, but her worries followed her as she rinsed herself off, sliced up fruit for the mash, and got the plastic tub of poi from its place beneath the counter. She ate outside to enjoy the breeze and the sunset—and thus it wasn't until the morning that she saw Alden's note tucked beneath the napkin holder on the kitchen table, her name scrawled in his awful handwriting. Inside, he declared that he had left with Robi and would not be back.

18

"That's kind of thin," Ness signed. "Not to say I think the Swimmers built their lab to cure cancer. But you're talking about traveling a quarter of the way around the world. That's an awful long ways to go when we've got aliens in our own back yard and we still don't know what they're up to."

Sebastian wagged his long head up and down. "The Swimmers here do the work of the Swimmers there. All arrows aim at Hawaii."

"They're working together? Doing what?"

"It is not said. It is not known."

"So all we know is that they're in Hawaii, they're working with the ones here, and they're probably up to no good? And for that, we're going to travel five thousand miles?"

Sebastian spread his tentacles. "Where else have we to go?"

Laughter bubbled up Ness' throat. It was the first time he'd laughed in days. "You got me there."

"Have you where?"

"Forget it. Just so we're clear, you want to use a boat we don't have to sail to Hawaii and mess with some Swimmers who might be up to nothing more sinister than learning human anatomy?"

"This is not the fool's thought you think it," Sebastian signed. "It is from my inside star. We must go. We must see."

After recent events, Ness wasn't exactly enamored with the wisdom of the inside star, but Sebastian was right. They had nowhere else to go, nothing else to do. Whatever the Swimmers were up to here, it would apparently lead them to Hawaii eventually. Might as well cut to the chase. If nothing else, it would keep his mind off his recurring memory of the sub going up in a cloud of fire.

Beside the river, Ness finished toweling off, then dressed and headed back to their new farmhouse. The sun was dropping into the water, its rays bouncing from the ocean and piercing the leaves. He found Sprite around the back of the house eyeing a broken window.

"Sebastian and I were talking," Ness said, "and we think our next move ought to be—"

"Yes," Sprite said.

Ness scowled. "You haven't even heard the idea."

"Don't care. It's got to be better than sitting around."

Ness thought hearing the details of the plan would dissuade him, but Sprite just nodded along.

"Awesome," he said. "Let's do this. Let's go conquer Hawaii."

"That's not what we're doing."

"Well, maybe it should be."

With Sprite on board, and the mission defined, the next step was logistics. An incredible, daunting amount of logistics. Something of this scale was beyond anything he'd ever been responsible for—in the past, the Collective had arranged all such matters; Ness' role had been to execute their goals, not to shape them—but when he got up in the morning, his mind was clear. He dragged a table outside to catch a breeze and sat before it with a pen and pad of paper.

The way he saw it, they really only needed two things: a boat, and the fuel to get it to Hawaii. Well, and the tools and ability to navigate. And, now that he thought about it, adequate food and water to last the journey. Four things, then. Two of these four areas would be trivial: he could start producing ethanol as soon as they could locate something sufficiently still-like. With the river right there and the farms surrounding them, food and water would provide themselves.

That left the boat and its navigation. And he thought they were likely to find the two of those together. With this much established, he found Sebastian standing in the river, stabbing his pointed feet at passing fish.

"I'm thinking our first move is to put together a still," Ness signed. "I'll start cranking out fuel while you guys work on the other parts of the equation."

Sebastian nodded. "Done."

"Not until you get out of that water and give me hand, it isn't."

"Wrong. Done." He splashed from the water, legs scything, and strode across the shore into the woods.

Ness hurried to keep up. Sebastian led him to a barn made of rain-worn boards, unwrapped a chain from the two broad doors, and opened them with a proud creak. Sunlight filtered through the cracks in the dim walls, illuminating tumbling specks of dust and sprigs of grass that had managed to spring up in the gloom. Sebastian extended a tentacle at three towering metal stills dominating the back of the barn amid coils of metal pipe. The outsides were caked in dust and Ness could only imagine what the insides looked like, but they were perfect, complete with built-in thermometers and testing equipment.

"Holy cow," Ness muttered out loud, then signed, "You thought of everything when you found this place, didn't you?"

"The home should serve the lives it contains."

"I bet. Well, we'll need plenty of wood for the boilers. Not to mention plants to make the fuel itself. Fruit would work great. Anything with lots of sugar." He moved to the cabinets lining the side wall and began to root around, quickly locating a hydrometer and a sealed bin of foil packets. He opened the corner of one and smelled the yeast. "Seems like everything else is ready to go."

He assigned Sebastian and Sprite to gather fruit and combustibles, then went about opening the hatches on the stills and scraping out the thin, whitish crust inside. That done, he rounded up the house's trash cans and found an oar that would make for a fine fruit-masher. By then, the others had returned with the first wheelbarrow of round, green breadfruit. Ness cut away the knobby skin, dumped them in the trash cans, and mashed them up, then dragged the ox cart down to the river for water.

By day's end, he had six trash cans going and was beginning to understand the scope of his project. He had no idea what kind of fuel economy your average trawler or yacht got, but it couldn't be good. One mile per gallon? 5000+ gallons to cover the distance to Hawaii, then? That did not sound ultra plausible, either for a reasonably sized vessel to carry or for him to produce (in a timespan shorter than years, anyway). They were going to need something with a sail, too. And to school themselves in that sail's use.

In the morning, they ate sweet breadfruit and catfish, which, much to Sprite's consternation, Sebastian preferred raw and whole. After, Ness dispatched Sprite to the town to the north, assigning him two missions. The first was a supply-hunt for sailing manuals, yeast, and any large supplies of non-perishable fuel, if any were to be found. The second was to scout around for large sailing vessels. Sprite left with his rifle and a grin. Ness didn't have high hopes. The town looked much too small for a marina. Who knew, though. Maybe they'd get lucky and the place would be a tourist mecca or a haven for millionaires.

Sebastian continued harvesting plant matter while Ness went house to house nabbing trash cans and lugging them to the barn. By that afternoon, he'd mashed enough fruit to partially fill a dozen cans. He used the cart to haul two empty cans down to the river, along with a big red bucket he used to fill the garbage cans gallon by gallon.

Downstream, a honking noise carried over the water. Thinking it was one of the big white cranes that populated the marshes, Ness didn't look up. It honked again, then awkwardly squawked the tune of "Shave and a Haircut." Ness straightened, hoe in hand, and climbed a short hill overlooking the river. Fifty yards down, an aluminum boat no more than twelve feet long inched up the river, its sail struck.

"Ahoy!" Sprite called, one hand squeezing the rubber base of a bike horn. He had taken off his shirt and tied it around his head. In his other hand, he held a long bamboo pole he'd planted in the shallows to arrest the boat against the current. He saw Ness and resumed poling himself upstream. "Check out what I found while you were playing Farmer John."

"You fucking idiot," Ness said. "That won't get us ten miles from the Philippines, let alone Hawaii!"

"
You're
the fucking idiot who thinks I'm such an idiot that I wouldn't know that." Sprite poled the boat into the reeds lining the shore, then vaulted over the side, landing in the grass. He stood, pulled his pack from his back, and produced what appeared to be a map torn from the front of a phone book. He pointed to a black dot on the coast. "It only needs to get us here."