Parched (3 page)

The name, however, is not mine.

“Carin St. Clare?” I ask.

“Completely fictional,” Ling assures me. “I'll prep you on her background so you can pass border control. That ID will pass a DNA scan.”

“How did you get my DNA?” I ask, alarmed.

“I didn't say we had your DNA. I just said it'll pass a scan.” Ling leans toward me intently. “I can get you back over the border. But we have to leave now.”

I could go with her. Part of me knows I should. “Why do you think you can trust me?” I ask. “What makes you think I'd want to help?”

Ling holds my gaze unflinchingly. “Because I read about what happened to your mom. I know Magnus killed her.”

And just like that, the itching, driving urge to flee takes over. I pluck Mack out of the bar and drop him into the leather sheath on my belt, then slip both arms into my sun robe. My backpack pulls down on my shoulders. “Thank you for a fascinating conversation. Let's never do it again.”

As I head for the door, I feel undone. Angry at Ling for tracking me down. Angry at Zhukov, at the Trust, at everyone. The barefoot kids part for me as I stride through them. I don't need to join Kudzu to help them. I spin back to the small crowd and call,
“Acqua azul, à porte! Dalé!”

They just stand there, staring at me in dumb disbelief. I gesture at the open doorway.
“Dalé! Dalé!”

One darts inside. The rest keep staring at me, and I nod encouragingly.
“Acqua azul,”
I repeat, pointing at the bar. “Lake water.” Another kid follows the first. Then another. Then en masse, the kids rocket inside
the bar—a dam bursting. I watch them scamper past Ling to jump over the wooden counter, shouting with delight. My anger disappears, flipping into amusement. My mom always said my impulsiveness was my best and worst quality. Right now, it feels like the best. Satisfied, I spin around and head up the street.

The sun turns everything into hot metal, even the shadows. After half a minute, I hear Ling call after me, mocking, “What are you going to do, Tess? Keep running?” She's chugging behind me on one of the bulky solar floaters most Badlanders ride. The castoffs from Eden hover a few inches off the ground. This one has faded red-and-yellow flames painted on a silver body that has definitely seen better days. “How's that working out?”

“Perfectly,” I snap. But the truth is, I'm not even sure how I'll get a ride out of town. I'm about to celebrate a year of aimless backpacking. I've spent everything I had on pickup rides, tasteless food, and thin bedrolls in airless rooms. I don't even have a floater. No possessions, no plan.

Maybe this whole Kudzu thing is an option. Head back to Eden, where life is lush and sheltered and easy. Take a shower for the first time in a year.

Meiyou
—no. I squash the idea before it can bloom.

Ling's voice is urgent. “Tess! You
know
this is important. Come with me!”

I spin around to address her directly. “Ping.”

She scowls. “It's
Ling
.”

“You're looking out for the Badlands. That's great. But you know what I'm looking out for?”

She squints at me. “What?”

“Myself.”

“Scucha!”
A huge, angry voice cracks up the street. A swarthy, shirtless man with a long ponytail made of real horsehair fights off the riot of kids looting his bar.

Zhukov. The kids are scattering, but it's too late. Dozens already have armfuls of expensive
acqua azul
, because I let them steal it.

He points at me, yelling at someone to bring him the
fuega
. Not someone—some
thing
. Substitutes. The two old Divers Zhukov had repurposed as his own personal security emerge from the shadows, motors sputtering into action.

I swear loudly.

Divers could haul me back to Zhukov in a heartbeat.

“Get on,” Ling urges.

“No.” The Divers begin gunning up the empty street toward me, their three large wheels zooming easily over the unpaved roads. I can see their weird, open mouths from here, set in a permanent O to suck out floodwater that no longer exists. I start to run but the Divers are gaining ground.

“Tess, get on!”

I hesitate for a nanosecond before swinging my leg over the floater, leaping in front of Ling and shoving her down the seat. “I'm driving.”

“Hey!” She barely has time to grab on to my backpack before I shoot us forward.

“I know the streets better!” I yell over the roar of the engine.

We race jerkily up the narrow, twisting street, weaving around men lugging canvas bags of spare sub parts and barefoot kids playing chase. Zhukov once gave a local boy a black eye for refusing to pay for a bottle of lake water. I shudder to think what he'd do to me now.

I take a turn so tight we tip to one side, so close to the ground my ponytail skims the earth. My stomach rockets into my mouth. Ling lets out a little shriek, but I manage to pull us upright, heart drumming furiously in my chest.

We pause at a cramped cross street. Left or right? In a roar of twin engines, the Divers appear at the far end of the street to my right. They whip themselves in our direction.
Left
.

“We have to lose them!” calls Ling.

“You don't say!” I call back.

Red dust sprays out on both sides as if we were cutting through water. We curve left, then right, shooting up streets as squiggly as noodles. Through an upcoming archway, I spot a flight of stairs. My teeth chatter as we hurtle up them and I almost run straight into a woman with a huge basket of pots and pans. The basket goes flying. She curses at me furiously over the oddly musical sound of metal clattering down the stairs.

“Sorry!” I yell over my shoulder.

At the top of the stairs, I pause. We're on the second floor, which overlooks a square interior courtyard. A handful of young girls are playing in it, amid trash and debris. “This used to be a school,” I tell Ling quietly. “But people live here now.”

Slowly, I begin chugging us down the corridor. Dirty clothes are
strung up between gray concrete pillars. Most people can't afford water to wash them, but sunlight gets rid of some of the smell. Through the open doorways, we pass classrooms repurposed as one-room apartments. Some are jam-packed with dozens of makeshift beds, some contain no more than a bedroll and a bucket. Looks of surprise morph quickly to anger, and within a minute, we've attracted a trail of men and women yelling at us to get the hell out of their building.

“Tess?” I hear Ling say uncertainly. “I don't think we're exactly welcome.”

“We'll just be a minute,” I mutter. I need to stretch out our hideout as long as possible.

In a familiar roar of engines, the Divers appear at the top of the stairs behind us.

I power us forward at full throttle.
“Yídòng, yídòng!”
I shout at the Badlanders coming out of doorways in front of us to see what the fuss is. I hear Ling gasp as we take the first turn. The dull buzz of the Divers behind us echos around the corridors. Another turn. Another. Then we're in the final stretch. “Hold on!” I yell to Ling as we careen back down the stairs. The woman with the pots and pans is standing in the stairwell entrance chatting to someone.
“Yídòng!”
I yell, and she does, just in time.

Back in the streets, my foot jams on the accelerator. “Are they behind us?” I yell to Ling. I feel her body twist as she turns to look.

“Yes!” she calls. “Gaining!”

“C'mon,” I mutter anxiously, scanning the storefronts for a way out. An alley. I wrench the floater into it, barely keeping us horizontal. We fly toward the bright light at the end and burst out onto a market square.

Hundreds of men, women, and different kinds of junky substitutes—Divers, Sweepers, Strongs, Mulchies—crowd around us. Beat-up old floaters laden with cages of cackling prairie chickens are crammed next to guys haggling viciously over livestock and solar bars and barrels of aqua ferro. I almost laugh in relief. We're saved.

Amid a chorus of honks and beeps and yells, we start blending into the ragtag crowd. After a few minutes, I'm sure we've lost the Divers. Eventually, we pass all the way through and emerge on the other side. With no particular destination in mind, I join a throng of floaters heading for a main road.

“There's another reason you might want to come back,” Ling calls from behind me.

“Oh yeah?”

“The new head of Innovation at Simutech is Dr. Abel Rockwood!”

I'm stunned. “My uncle? That's not possible.”

“What?” she calls over the roar of hundreds of old floaters.

“He split—quit!” I call back. “He told me himself he'd quit Simutech. He promised he'd destroy Mom's research!”

“Guess they made him an offer he couldn't refuse!”

My
uncle
is the head of Innovation? The position that got his own sister killed? I wouldn't have picked Abel as a career-hungry grave digger. The idea tastes as bad as
pourriture
. All my fear and panic and guilt begins to solidify into another emotion, as clean and pure as a flame. Anger.

“That's why we need you, Tess!” Ling continues. “Dr. Rockwood is our best way in, and you're the only person who knows what to look for!”

Going back to Eden means getting close to secrets—horrific, ugly secrets that I've worked hard to bury. But if I don't
really
get involved with Kudzu and Simutech and Aevum, those secrets will stay where they belong—unknown, and then lost forever. I can pretend I'm interested, take the free passage, then disappear as simply as smoke clearing.

“Okay!” I yell. “I'm in!”

“Then I guess we're heading the right way!” Ling points to the hand-painted sign we're passing under. It has one word on it:
Vuelvol
. Airport.

I'm going home.

It's
a three-hour flight to one of four crossings into Eden. A decrepit cargo ship flies us the thousand-odd miles to the Western Bridge. Like the floaters, Badlands cargo ships are also Eden hand-me-downs. The soft passenger seats have been stripped to make room for as many people and things as the fast-talking captain can cram in. This means we can bring Ling's floater with us, but it also means I have to be sure the hungry goats in the cage next to me don't make a meal of my backpack.

After taking off, we circle back over the Manufacturing Zone, which most people just call the Zone: miles of stifling hot factories, where people aged seven to seventy used to do everything from recycling glass bottles to building talking tennis rackets. But there are no human workers there anymore. In the last six months, the Trust switched over the entire workforce to shiny new substitutes. There's a tired joke about it—the Zone was the only place in the Badlands where you got good service. Everywhere else, the substitutes were a notch above junkyard.

It's obvious why the Trust made the change. Substitutes are more efficient. Plus, subs don't need bathroom breaks or fresh water or shelter. Even though many are human-shaped, they're not sentient. They're just robots. Ex-Zone workers were left to starve like everyone else.

When we clear the outskirts and begin to head east, the earth becomes more uniform. Glimpsed through the small, dirty windows is endless dry, red clay. Occasionally we pass over forsaken villages, or larger cities stripped of everything useful. The land, once a compact grid of people and parking lots and ninety-nine-cent hot dogs, is now empty.

Ling and I sit with our backs pressed against the side of the plane. I
toe my backpack farther from the cage of goats and say, “I assume you have some proof to show me.”

Ling checks that her floater, which is parked directly in front of us, obscures us from everyone else's view. Then she unzips her backpack and pulls out a folded piece of scratch. The gold computer is paper-thin, but made from a durable, flexible material that you need a knife to cut. That's one of the good things about scratch: you can cut it if you want to share it. You can even meld together the same generation if you want a bigger piece for bigger holos. At the cinematheques in Eden, they use scratch the size of houses for holos just as big. It makes you feel like you're in a completely different world. Ling's scratch is the same kind I traded for Mack. When she presses her thumb and forefinger into one corner, it begins glowing a familiar deep amber.

“Show me the Simutech file.” A silent holo materializes between us—a colorful, shifting cloud. There's no mistaking who's in it. Uncle Abel is speaking passionately with a man wearing a flowing yellow robe. I recognize him instantly: Gyan, leader of the Trust. Abel waves his hands emphatically as he talks, while Gyan's fingers are clasped behind his back, gaze directed straight ahead. They're heading into Simutech itself; I catch sight of the company slogan glowing above the imposing main entrance:
How the Future Feels
.

With a small wave of her hand, Ling flicks the holo to pause and the two men freeze. “It was recorded a few weeks ago.” Specks of red dust drift through the crystal clear holo of Gyan. In his yellow robe, our charismatic father figure is unmistakable. I can see every smile line around his piercing blue eyes, every hair in his full, thick beard. He looks, as usual, powerful without even trying. On the other hand, Abel's shirt is untucked and his hair is mussed. They're both surrounded by a clutch of attentive Guiders—blue-robed community officials who uphold the will of the Trust. The Guiders are all looking at Gyan, even though my uncle is the one speaking.

Ling pulls open another holo. “And then there's this.”

I skim the tight black print scrolling before me:
Work Choice Reassignment for Dr Abel F. Rockwood
. Abel's signature is scrawled at the bottom of the page, floating just above my knee. “How did you get a copy of this?” I ask incredulously.