We flew south.
From the sky, the earth looked like a flattened soy cake. The blues, greens, and whites familiar from the school screens were missing, as if they had always been a lie. At fifteen hundred meters I could see dried rivers like the spidery, cracked fingers of a dead man. The only thing of color was a brilliant red sun, burning low in the west.
On the ground I had never thought much about the earth, but from the sky it was all I could see. We could have been on Mercury or the moon, some barren place that creatures had once inhabited but now were long gone. Not a single living thing stirred, and the ever-present grayish dust spiraled in thousands of eddies. I saw something that could have been a road, but it was decomposed and swallowed up on either side. The remains of a truck or a tank were scattered like bones nearby. In the copter it was drier even than on land, and I couldn't lick my lips quick enough to keep them moist.
I knew if we could climb higher, I would see the silver pearls that dotted the planet's surface and were all that remained of the great lakes and rivers. Enormous reservoirs, they held all the fresh water left on the planet. Canals, aqueducts, pipes, and pumping stations funneled every drop into their well-guarded steel and concrete basins. Humans had finally made the world to suit their purposes. Even the weather was under their control, and the sun, moon, and stars were sure to follow.
A chill made my bones ache and muscles shudder.
"There's another blanket in the rear," said Ulysses.
Will reached for it and handed it to me. I let it fall to my lap. "How do you know he's there?" I asked.
"Don't know for certain," said Ulysses. The PELA mercenary who had told the pirates Kai was a prisoner of Bluewater had traded the information for his life. To him, Kai was just a boy and well worth the trade. PELA did the dirty work and asked no questions.
"So what's your plan?" asked Will.
"The plan?" Ulysses chuckled. For the first time, I noticed that his clothes were ragged and torn. His unwashed hair and unshaved beard made him look like the older men in the gaming center. When he grinned, his crazed and cracked smile framed a handful of battered yellow teeth. But his brown eyes glittered like a promise. "Save the kid. Find the water. Get rich."
"Seriously. Don't you have a plan?" I asked.
Ulysses tried to look serious for a minute. "I thought you were the smart one," he said. "Don't you have a plan?"
"You can't just fly into the Great Coast, shoot your way into Bluewater, and take Kai and his father," I told him.
"Why not?"
"'Cause you can't. They'll kill you, for one thing."
Ulysses scratched his beard. "Hmm. Need a better plan."
The pilot interrupted with a question about their route, and he and Ulysses reviewed our position against a crinkled and torn map. We were flying low, and now there were the unmistakable signs of habitation: broken roads, scavenged vehicles, the ruins of concrete buildings, smashed and flat as if they had been crushed by a giant foot. But no people, and no other signs of life.
"The cities were the first to go," said Ulysses, noticing that I was staring out the window.
"Why?"
"Most of them have no water. They piped it in from the country. There were riots and war."
"The Great Panic."
"Before that, even. The Panic came later. When the Canadians dammed the rivers and the last great polar cap melted."
"They melted it for water," said Will, who pushed himself forward so that he was practically sitting on my seat.
"It was already melting. The ice caps were retreating, and the sea did the rest."
"Why didn't anyone stop it?"
"They couldn't. It happened too quickly, and it was too warm. Countries took what they could. But when the ice caps melted, all that water was wasted-it spilled into the sea and turned to salt. The aquifers had already dried up. The lakes had been drained or poisoned. All that was left were the rivers, and most of those were already dammed."
"What about the rain?" I asked. "The sky."
Ulysses nodded slowly. "There should be enough rain for everyone. But there isn't. We've dammed the clouds too."
Now I could see something gray off in the distance. At first I thought it was a landing strip, but as we got closer, it spread to the horizon, and flecks of white appeared on its surface. It was water, I realized, as far as the eye could see, to the edge of the earth and beyond. We had seen pictures of the ocean in school, of course, but the photos couldn't capture the vastness of the unbroken plain, or its emptiness. Earth was mostly water, yet nearly all of it was undrinkable. During the Great Panic, the coastal cities suffered most. Looking at the unbroken stretch of grayish-green, it seemed as if all of man's problems could be solved if only we could drink from the ocean. But we couldn't.
Then I saw something else: a blue octagon resting on the sea. It appeared first like an indistinguishable point on a darkened background, but as we got closer, it resolved into eight sides, like a giant blue spider, each with an oversized silver pipe that stretched into the ocean. I could see as well that it wasn't actually on the ocean. It sat above the water on steel stilts that the waves could not touch.
"What is that building?" I asked, though I suspected I knew the answer.
"Bluewater," confirmed Ulysses. "That's where they do their magic."
The global desalination company's magic came with a price. Desalination was more expensive than most countries could afford, and large-scale desalination poisoned the oceans with minerals, chemicals, and sludge. Yet just as humans might turn to cannibalism if they were hungry enough, governments turned to the sea for their water. Soon companies like Bluewater were more wealthy and powerful than any nation, and anyone who could afford the price lived with a steady source of water.
"It's more taking without giving," Ulysses concluded. "Someday they'll pay."
The helicopter dipped left, and my stomach dropped. But what I saw next made me sick with worry. A jet in the near distance, close enough that I could see the Bluewater emblem-a black spigot superimposed over a blue wave. It rocketed low in the sky, then banked toward us.
"Ulysses," I whispered.
But he had already seen the jet, and he barked quick instructions to the pilot. The helicopter swooped back to the right, but there was no way to outrun a jet. The next time, it passed so close that I could actually see the pilot in the cockpit. He wore a black and blue helmet with an oxygen mask over his mouth, and his eyes were covered by something see-through and metallic. He dipped his wings twice, signaling us to land, but the helicopter pilot ignored him.
"Fly inland," Ulysses instructed.
The helicopter turned from the ocean and raced over the land. The jet kept pace, crisscrossing the sky above us and repeatedly dipping its wings. Once we even saw the pilot make a landing motion with one of his hands, but Ulysses and his pilot ignored him.
"They're going to shoot us down," said Will matter-of-factly.
"Not yet," said Ulysses.
Now the helicopter was over a thick field of geno-soy, a crop that was irrigated with water from the desalinating factory. The plants looked withered and brown, but I knew they had been genetically altered to require as little water as possible, which allowed them to survive in harsh conditions. The fields stretched as far as I could see without a retractable roof or any sign of evaporation management. They rippled in the wind from the rotors, bending like waves in a storm. Their beauty was transfixing and held my eye as the horizon disappeared.
The shadow of the jet moved swiftly across the ground. It bore down on us before I saw it in the air. There was a puff of smoke from beneath one of its wings and a missile flew at us with deadly accuracy.
"Ulysses!" I screamed this time.
There was no time even to blink. The missile exploded in a ball of fire just one hundred meters from the nose of the helicopter. It knocked us sideways and threw Will and me to the floor, but the copter remained in the air.
"A warning shot," said Ulysses. Then to the pilot: "Take us down before they straighten their aim."
We scrambled back into our seats, and this time we buckled ourselves in securely. If there was a place to land, I didn't see it. But the pilot hurried to the ground as if he did. Too fast! We were coming in too fast! We couldn't land at this speed!
There was a terrific ripping noise and a spine-shattering crash. The windows blew out, and everything inside flew outside. The safety harnesses cut deeply into our shoulders, and the backs of the seats were like hard rubber mallets against our heads.
The hush that followed was the stillness of death. Ulysses was the first to speak. "Vera? Will? Roland?"
Will's voice was soft but clear. My head hurt, but as far as I could tell, nothing was broken or bleeding. The pilot, however, was silent.
"Roland?" Ulysses repeated.
The pilot's body was not in the helicopter-or what was left of the metal wreckage. I craned my head to see that Will was still strapped into his seat, although the steel trusses on which the seat had been fastened were ripped from the bottom of the helicopter's frame. Ulysses was pinned between the door and the roof and struggling to free himself. But there was no sign of Roland.
Then I saw him, lying in the geno-soy about twenty meters from the left door. His head was snapped back at an unnatural angle, and one arm was twisted beneath him. I knew he was dead before I even noticed the bright red pool that stained the brown plants. Bile rose in my throat, and I forced down a strangled cry.
"What is it?" asked Ulysses.
"He's dead," I sputtered.
"No time for mourning," he said. "Help me out of here."
Will slipped from his safety harness and climbed through the twisted debris to help Ulysses. "He needs a proper burial!" Will exclaimed.
"Can't wait for that."
As if to punctuate his words, the jet roared overhead. White contrails in the sky; a light mist like rain.
"Have to get moving," said Ulysses. "They won't leave us alone for long."
I released my seat beat and felt a stabbing, electric pain through my shoulder. Before I could stand, I fell to the ground.
Will was next to me, and then Ulysses. His brisk and indifferent demeanor suddenly melted. "What is it, little sister?" he asked.
"My shoulder," I managed.
Ulysses gently manipulated my arm. The pain was like a thousand knives in an open wound. "Dislocated," he concluded. "I can fix it, but it will hurt worse first."
"How much worse?"
"Like stretching the muscle until it tears."
"And then it will feel better?"
"Yes."
"Do it."
Ulysses looked at me long and hard, as if he were weighing the pain against his ability to inflict it.
"Give me your hand," he said.
He took my good arm and gripped it tightly. The hard calluses on his palm scratched my skin. His other hand was on my shoulder. His chest was pressed close up against me. I could see every line in his face, the fine hairs on his cheeks above his beard where no beard grew. I could feel the thumping of his heart, the hard steady rhythm that matched mine. He steadied himself with a deep breath and turned away. Then he pulled.
The pain was like nothing I had ever experienced. It was as if every fiber in my arm cried out at once, then was ripped from its anchor. A swirl of violent colors washed over my eyes, and my face burned as if on fire. Then something slipped and fell back into place, and just like that the pain subsided. I was left dizzy and nauseated, covered in a cool, clammy perspiration.
"It's done," said Ulysses.
Then I did vomit, in a wrenching spasm that doubled me over. Nothing but a thin stream of spittle emerged, however, and once it was gone the nausea passed. I wiped my mouth and sat up straight. "I'm okay," I said.
Ulysses tore a strip of cloth from his shirt and tied a makeshift sling from my neck to my wrist. "It's not what the doctor ordered, but it will hold your arm."
Will was staring at me with something like awe. "Did it hurt?"
"Not that much," I lied.
The jet thundered again overhead and dropped two flares into the geno-soy. Plumes of red smoke rose toward the sky.
"They're flagging us," said Ulysses. "Let's get moving." He put an arm around me and helped me stand, then beat a path through the soy with his free hand. The plants were thick and hard to bend, but Ulysses held them down until we could pass. The stalks reached higher than my head. I kept looking up to make sure the sky was above me, but it only made me lose my step, and I still felt trapped and claustrophobic.
After a few minutes, I noticed Ulysses had slowed and was limping.
"You're hurt," I said.
"It's nothing," he said.
But his leg was dark red with blood. It had soaked through his pants and the wound appeared to still be bleeding. I insisted we rest, but Ulysses refused. "In about five minutes, they'll be here with robo-sniffers and guns," he said. "They won't stop until they've caught us. They'll leave the bodies in the fields."
His tone was calm, but there was something in his voice that betrayed him. It took me a moment, but I realized he was frightened, and his fear made me more nervous than anything he could have said.
"These are not ordinary people," he continued. "Pirates steal, and we'll cheat if we need to, but we do it to survive and because our enemies do the same. Even PELA has a code, though they don't always live by it. But Bluewater cares only about money. They don't even care about the water, really. They have no loyalty and don't look out for their own. It's greed, pure and simple. Nothing will stand in their way. Not laws, not governments, and not any pirate with a gun."
"How do we know they haven't killed Kai?" asked Will.
"No. They'll keep him as long as it suits their purposes. The boy is a diviner. That's worth a lot of money. He can tell them where water is, and they can keep him from telling others. They won't kill him as long as there's use for that."
"He needs medicine," I said.
"They'll give him that too."
The jet had disappeared now, but there came another sound in the distance, harsh and braying.
"Sniffers," said Ulysses. "Move!"
The three of us were battered, two of us bleeding, but we ran as quickly as we could. Will winced with every step, his leg healing but not healed. Ulysses showed no pain, but his pale face betrayed his injury. My shoulder had begun to throb, and every plant that brushed me was like a whipping.
We were deep in the soy fields. I had never seen so much vegetation. I could practically feel the plants pulsating, exhaling moisture like breathing. Without any protection from the sun or the sky, they flaunted the great wealth of their growers. Even with their genetic alterations, they still wasted enough water to quench the thirst of a large town. But their growers didn't seem to care. They had resources to burn, and the food not only tasted better, it was a potent reminder of their enormous power.
"Run, Vera!" Will urged me forward.
The braying grew louder. We followed Ulysses, who beat at the plants with his powerful arms. The pain in my shoulder was nothing compared to the burning in my lungs, the aching in my sides, and a terrible, drill-like pulsing in my skull.
And then suddenly, without warning, Ulysses collapsed.
For a moment time stood still. It was not possible that the great pirate king could fall. Even when I thought Ulysses had drowned, I never saw his body, and I had refused to accept he might actually be gone. But now there he was, splayed out before us, his pants leg soaked and his face white.
I grabbed his hand. "Ulysses," I begged. "Ulysses."
He looked up at me, and his eyes fluttered slightly.
"You remind me of her," he said.
"Who?" I asked, although I knew.
"She was skinny, like you. She used to call me Poppy."
"Hold on," I said. "Please. We'll get you help. I promise."
And then the sniffers were upon us.