The Water Wars (6 page)

But Will and Kai hooted loudly as if they were engaged in a neck-and-neck race instead of a blowout. Their excitement spread to the small crowd of teens who had gathered around them. The girls, who had figured out Will was my brother, wanted to know where we lived and what classes we took. The boys shouted advice to Kai, giving him tips on how to avoid the treacherous roads and packs of bears who tried to ambush him. I couldn’t stop smiling. It was more fun than we’d had in a long time. It didn’t matter that it was just a game—and not even a very good one. Playing together, being there with Kai and my brother and a group of kids I could imagine were friends, made me forget that our mother lay sick in her bed, dreadfully, inexplicably sick. The narcotic of the game worked its magic, and we were drawn inside.

The cars raced toward the finish line. Over and under, around and through. Will was unbeatable and unstoppable, and I was proud to be his sister.

Then I had an uncomfortable sensation, a prickling at the back of my neck, as if someone were watching me. From the corner of my eye, I saw the two men in the blue shirts staring at us, heads angled low, gazes slanted in our direction. They seemed unnaturally interested, with eyes for no one else in the room.

But when I turned, the men were gone, and I wondered whether I had seen them at all.

T
he next afternoon Kai wi-texted me to see if I wanted to go scavenging. In the short hills behind his apartment were the remains of an old mill. It had been abandoned in the Great Panic, before we were born. The factory was now a decaying agglomeration of empty buildings, busted silos, and broken-down trucks. Lizards and snakes coiled in the ruins. Our father had warned us never to go there—he claimed there were diseases and dangers—but Kai said it was safe.

It was Sunday, and Will was at water mission class. This summer he would have to spend a month bringing water to less fortunate towns. It didn’t matter that we barely had enough water ourselves; the government ordered public service, and there was little choice but to obey. Will said it was just an excuse to get free labor, but even he didn’t dare risk defiance. There were “education camps” where they took people who objected and taught them social responsibility. The “lessons” left them damaged and disfigured.

I rode my pedicycle to Kai’s complex and locked it outside the front gate. Kai was waiting at the end of the drive. He smiled with one side of his mouth when he saw me and gave a small wave with his hand. Whenever I saw him standing like that, face poised in careful expectation, my heart went out to him. There was something cautious, something held back, in his smile. Drillers trusted no one, and their children learned to be wary and shrewd.

Kai led me through the scraggly cactus-like plants that survived for months without water. He didn’t say much, so I kept all the questions to myself. The hills were gradual and gentle, but I soon tired of walking uphill. We stopped for a few minutes, and he gave me a sealed bottle of water that was sweet and still cold. We sat on the side of a concrete barrier overgrown with a grayish lichen that brushed off on our clothes. I drank, and then Kai drank. Our feet kicked up dust.

Before the Great Panic, the mill had produced cornmeal and flour that was shipped across the country. But once the Canadians had dammed the rivers and the lower states began fighting over the trickles that remained, there wasn’t enough water for any industry, let alone something as water-intensive as milling. The snow masses and ice packs were gone, victims of warmer temperatures and higher sea levels. The aquifers and surface lakes had dried up or had been polluted. Forests were denuded, wetlands drained. Fresh, drinkable water was in the hands of a very few whose grip grew tighter as the world grew drier.

In truth there hadn’t been enough water for years. Our father told us the story they wouldn’t tell in school. Rain fell, but it couldn’t replenish what was gone. Growing populations made shortages worse. Although the planet was mostly water, less than one-tenth of one percent was drinkable. Riots broke out in the cities. Countries divided into factionalized republics. Wars erupted along their borders. In the aftermath hundreds of millions had died—most from disease and malnutrition. The Great Panic punctuated what men already knew but still somehow refused to accept: the world had run out of water.

“Where do you think the workers went?” I asked. “After the mill shut down?”

Kai shook his head. “There was nowhere to go.”

“The planes never bombed it.”

“They didn’t need to.”

He held out his hand to help me up. We continued climbing until we reached the entrance to the old mill. We knew it was the entrance, because part of a broken sign still hung above the ground. Otherwise we would not have recognized it. Wooden and steel beams blocked our passage, and a tangled mass of circuitry dangled from the ceiling like webbing.

Kai said the factory had so much power that the workers never turned off the lights and used the venti-units all night long, even when the buildings were empty. I already knew this from school, but I let Kai lecture me. He said water ran through the pipes that didn’t need to be filtered or treated; it could be drunk right out of the tap. This wasn’t entirely true. There were giant treatment plants that purified water and added chemicals like chlorine to kill bacteria. I had seen the holos in the archive. Still, things were safer then, and no one got sick just from taking a shower.

Kai held my hand the entire time he talked. Neither of us said anything about it, but I could feel his heart beating in the pulse of his palm. I wondered if this made me his girlfriend. When the girls in school got boyfriends, they usually wore a locket or an old article of the boy’s clothing. Maybe, I thought, that’s what the water was. I held tight to the empty bottle.

We threaded our way through the beams and wires. At each step Kai cautioned me to avoid a hole, a nail, a plank. Finally we emerged into the center of the factory floor. The old milling machines hunkered like animals, all rusted gears and broken parts. They had run on diesel fuel, which was refined and processed from oil sucked up from deep within the ground. But oil was too precious now to burn in a machine. These days it was rationed and used only to power tanks, jets, and the cars of wealthy men like Kai’s father. It was hard to believe oil had ever been so plentiful that people could burn it whenever they chose. But so many of the old ways were wasteful, like letting water spray onto the streets for no other reason than to run around beneath it on a hot day.

I thought about the other costs involved in milling grain. Not only were there oil and electricity for the machines, trucks, venti-units, lights, and refrigerators, but there was all the water to grow the grain in the first place. Millions of hectares of farmland were devoted to corn, soybeans, wheat, and rye. The government built thousands of kilometers of aqueducts that took water from rivers halfway across the country and brought it to the farms. There were places in the desert that suddenly bloomed with vineyards and orange groves. Towns without water were transformed into green paradises where people played games on tracts of perfect grass. Entire cities sprang from dust and clay, their spires reaching into the sky and their roots deep into the earth. They sucked up water as if it were their birthright and spat out sewage back onto the land. There was no limit to Earth’s resources—until there wasn’t anything left anymore.

We hiked over and around machines as big as trucks. In every building the windows were shattered, and the walls were scoured of anything valuable. Floors and ceilings had collapsed, and splintered trusses lay everywhere. Some of the interior offices were intact, but they were completely empty of furniture, paneling, and anything else that would burn. The copper wiring had been stripped away, and the machines had ben robbed clean of fuel for use during the cold winters that followed.

The rear of the factory was open to the hills behind it. It was here that the trucks stopped to fill up with their loads of milled grain. There was a road that looped around the buildings, then made its way beneath a stack of elevators. The road was badly eroded—more sand and rock than concrete—but it was flat and clear of debris. We walked through the factory and out onto the road, then followed it until we came to a gully that cut the road in two. A short steel bridge had provided passage across, but it lay collapsed in the ditch, the victim of too many crossings and too much time.

“This way,” said Kai, stepping down into the ditch. He did not turn around and walked as if he knew where he was leading. It occurred to me then that this trip to explore the mill was not what it appeared: not a random wandering among the ruins, but a planned tour with a knowledgeable guide. Kai walked with purpose, navigating the rutted path like someone who had trudged there before. He released my hand and expected me to follow.

“Where are we going?”

“I want to show you a secret.”

We walked about five hundred meters down the gully, and then Kai climbed up the steep side away from the mill. There was no sound except our footsteps. No wind. No shade. Not a cloud in the sky. Everything was brown, burned, dried, or cracked.

“There,” he said. He was pointing to a nondescript patch of ground on which there was nothing but some gravel and broken glass.

“There, where?”

“Dig there,” he instructed.

I bent down and scratched at the dirt, which came away surprisingly easily in my fingers. It felt soft and slightly wet, as if it had just rained, which was impossible. I dug a little more quickly, and the dirt got wetter, which was definitely impossible.

“Kai?” I looked up at him. For the first time I felt something like fear. We were nearly a kilometer away from the nearest building, and twice that far from any living being. I realized there were so many things I didn’t know about this boy. How come we had never seen his father? How did his mother die? Why didn’t he go to school? All of his explanations suddenly seemed unbelievable. A boy didn’t just stop going to school with his father’s blessing or wander abandoned grounds as if he owned them. Eventually the government came to get him, or he went away. But Kai was still here, pointing at the earth.

“It’s okay,” he said. “Dig.”

I scooped deeper into the dirt, which began to come away in soggy lumps. “What is it?” I asked, although I already knew.

“Water,” he said.

“How did it get here?”

“There’s a spring underground. A small one. It runs right under the mill.”

I shook my head. I couldn’t believe there was fresh water so close to our home. Yet there it was, trickling through the sand in my fingers. As mysterious as Kai himself.

“Does anyone know?”

Kai shook his head slowly.

“Where…how did you find it?”

He shrugged. “I knew it was there.”

Kai’s face shone, and the gold in his hair refracted the sunlight. Finding a source of free water was like finding oil—better, even. It could make a person wealthy beyond imagination. But Kai didn’t seem to care. He regarded me with drowsy eyes below his bangs.

“You could be rich,” I said.

“There’s not even enough water to fill a cistern.”

“There might be.”

“There isn’t.”

I placed my fingers to my lips and tasted the water that came from the ground. It was sandy and gritty, but there was no chemical aftertaste and no brackish residue. I wasn’t worried about poisons or toxins, because I could tell it was real water, filtered deep in the earth. I scooped up another handful and let it wash over my face, closing my eyes as the drops cut cool rivulets down my cheeks.

At first I thought I was dreaming. And then I realized the lips on my own were Kai’s. He pressed against me, his warm breath washing my face like night. The air chopped and eddied, and I felt like I was falling into something deep and bottomless from which there could be no rescue. When I opened my eyes, his eyes were bright and large before me. “You shouldn’t,” I said.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Stop, I mean.”

I leaned back into him, and we kissed again. My lungs inhaled him, and his breath was my breath. We kissed until I was dizzy from it, and swirls of color patterned beneath my eyelids. When we stopped, the softness of his mouth lingered like buzzing. I touched my lips, and they felt warm and liquid—not at all like the dry chapped feeling of wind and sun. Kai’s gaze mirrored mine, and I looked back into his eyes as if I could see my own emotions reflected in them. They were a clear limpid blue, without a hint of gray.

We stood that way for a moment, eyes locked, hands clasped, and then he moved toward me. This time I stepped back, and his lips brushed my cheek.

“I’m sorry. I’m all confused,” I said. “I mean, it’s not like I don’t want to keep on, but I don’t—I don’t know what it means.”

Kai nodded as if he understood. Another boy might have pushed himself on me or tried to change my mind. Kai simply covered the small hole I had dug, patting the sand back into place. “Want to see the rest of the site?” he asked.

He took my hand, and we continued our tour of the dry hills and dusty grounds. He showed me the tiny lizards that lived deep in the sand and were able to withstand the winter. He pushed aside broken pilings and showed me colonies of ants that feasted off water in the decayed wood. But nothing else made any impression on me during the rest of our afternoon together at the old mill. Later I would regret not asking him more. Part of me wished we could go back to the moment before the kiss. He had become my closest friend—my only real friend besides Will, if I was honest—and I worried what would happen to that friendship if we kept on. But the other part of me felt old enough to continue. He was the first boy for whom I’d felt anything but curiosity, and I didn’t know then how to speak my mind about the things I wanted.