Parched (13 page)

I pull my new ID from my back pocket. In this new loop, my expression is cool and unyielding. Taking it in both hands, I snap the glossy card in two. I hold the pieces out to her. “You can trust me.”

Ling and I ride north through the gentle slope of Lakeside. Unlike the shady, oak tree–lined streets of Liberty Gardens, the relaxed and easygoing Lakeside boasts breezy palm trees and squat bungalows with water views. It's kept a few degrees warmer than the rest of Eden, making it balmy all year round. We pass girls with long golden braids walking barefoot in short shorts and old men playing checkers in shirts splashed with bright flowers. I catch snatches of Moon Lake between the houses, winking in the sun.

We keep heading north until we clear Lakeside altogether and are on a single road surrounded by trees and scrub, heading toward the uppermost tip of Eden. The farther north we go, the higher the white city walls get, until it feels as if they're about to topple down on us. It's so strange—I never used to notice the city walls. Now I feel as if they're watching me.

We veer off onto a side road, then a side road off that, then what barely amounts to a dirt track. Finally, we slow to a stop, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. It's peaceful and quiet except for the hopping song of a few birds.

Ling guides the floater to a small thicket. She grabs a piece of green canvas that's covered in leaves and twigs and flips it back. About ten floaters are nestled underneath.

“Why don't you use buzzcars?” I ask, watching her park her floater next to the others. “Be a lot faster.”

For a second I think she isn't going to answer me, but after a beat she does. “Buzzcars are all on-cycle these days. Too risky. Floaters are the safest way to move around Eden.”

After pulling the canvas back, she heads off into the scrub. Her sturdy leather boots find footing in a steep pathway that snakes endlessly up through the tangled vegetation. She moves with the certainty of someone intimately familiar with this all-but-invisible mountain trail, anticipating which rocks are stable and which ones aren't. “Just follow my lead,” she calls over her shoulder.

“I spent a year in the Badlands on my own, sister,” I reply, using Mack to slice away at some of the thicker vines. “I think I can work out how to—
oof!
”

A second later, I'm on my hands and knees, banging both kneecaps on sharp stones. Ling is grinning as she leaps back down the path to offer me a hand. I don't take it, which makes her laugh. “I've never met anyone as stubborn as me,” she says, watching me get awkwardly to my feet. “You're going to fit in just fine.”

This land technically belongs to the Trust, but it's overgrown and uninhabitable, and thus, unmonitored. As we hike, I ask Ling what exactly she expects me to do today. “You'll speak at an afternoon briefing,” she says. “About artilects.”

“What about them?”

“Explain what they are,” she replies. “Why they're dangerous. And how we can destroy them.”

We climb steeply for over an hour. Despite Eden's climate control, it's uncomfortably muggy. Unlike the Badlands, this heat is thick and wet. Sweat crawls down my temples and back.

“Up here!” Ling calls, waving from the top of the path, then disappearing over the ridge.

“Yeah, yeah. So where's this—oh.”

I stop in my tracks, stunned.

Moon Lake.

The morning sun plays on the gently rippling surface—a vast reservoir of clean blue water. Vegetation grows right up to the edge, verdant and brilliantly green. Swallows swoop above it, catching invisible insects in the air. It is living, this lake.
It is life
. “It's so
beautiful
.” The words come in a whisper.

“Yeah, never gets old.” I hadn't noticed Ling squatting on the
ground near me, taking a sip from her water bottle. “Hard to believe it used to ice over in winter.”

“Really?”

She nods. “Back in the Age of Excess. As in, really ice over, not climate-control ice like the Smoking Mountains.”

Wow. The planet has changed so fast. Sometimes I try to imagine what it would've been like to live back in Excess. They didn't have allowances then. They had money, like in the Badlands, and if you had enough of that you could do whatever you wanted. And even though they knew the earth was dying, no one really cared.

Ling arches her back in a stretch, chin tipped up toward the sun. “C'mon. We're nearly there.”

We troop down toward the water. Ling explains that like the filtration plant, a filtration office was also shut down after the Trust switched systems.

“We found it last year,” she says. “Perfect, really. All unmonitored, lots of supplies, and we worked out how to switch the solar back on.” She stops abruptly, gesturing proudly. “This is it. Home, sweet home!”

Partly overgrown with foliage and tattooed with moss is an unassuming coffee-colored building. The single-story construction has a flat roof and is set with small, square windows. It is devoid of personality or any signs of life. This is the headquarters of the underground rebel force, Kudzu? It's like popping a bottle of champagne to find it full of Badlands water. Ling takes one look at my raised eyebrows and laughs. “Not so impressive from the outside, I know. We don't want to draw attention to ourselves, in case some lost hiker comes by. But it's pretty great inside. C'mon!”

She heads up a path through the foliage toward the front door and goes to push it open.

“Wait a minute,” I say. “Who else knows? About the ID thing, and standing you up yesterday?” If I have to deal with a thousand people all as suspicious as Ling had been, I want to be ready.

Ling sighs. “Just me and Achilles. Everyone else thinks you're a superstar robot girl, here to save the day.”

I cringe. “Why would they think that?”

“Because that's what I sold you as,” Ling says matter-of-factly. “Look, grudges are for whiny bitches, and I'm not a whiny bitch. I'm willing to forget about the past twenty-four hours if you are.”

“Definitely.” I nod, sticking out my hand. “Friends?”

She gives my outstretched hand an amused look. “We're more than that now. My life's in your hands, and vice versa.”

I roll my eyes. “Just shake my damn hand, Ling.”

She laughs and grabs it, eyes dancing. “Welcome to Kudzu, Tess.”

The
heavy front door swings open into a dimly lit room. Filling the three hefty tables that line the walls are mountains of mismatched equipment—different generations of scratch, snakepits of black cable, devices I don't even recognize. Little lights blink unevenly, while nonsensical data stream from different pieces of scratch. Amid the computer gear are superhero figures, dirty coffee cups, a dead plant. It smells like somewhere unwashed people spend a lot of time, mixed with the woody scent of incense. Old posters are tacked to the walls, crowded next to silly happy-snap photograms, ripped stickers, and graffiti.

Someone had carved
KUDZU LOVES YOU!
onto the wall next to me, and underneath it, in a different script,
THEN WHY WON'T HE COMM?

The wall to my immediate left, next to the doorway, is filled with a huge piece of glowing scratch. It looks like a patchwork quilt. Impressively, some brainiac has worked out how to meld different generations of scratch together. Usually you can only cut and meld the same generation. But the very first kind of scratch—an inflexible dark brown type about half an inch thick—is fused with the paper-thin kind Ling gave me. The patchwork scratch is on the 2D setting, showing flat, ever-changing images of quiet stretches of water. The workers here must have had access to the Trust security streams set up around Moon Lake. I guess Kudzu had worked out how to access them after they left. Handy.

In the center of the room is a large conference table, lit by a single overhead light. Empty chairs are scattered around it. I glimpse a few pieces of scratch beaming tiny holos of familiar names: Aevum, Simutech.

“Tech-room-slash-meeting-space. This is Achilles' territory,” Ling
announces, gesturing at an authoritative-looking red swivel chair, currently empty, presumably Achilles'. “You'll meet him in a sec.”

“So, he's the one in charge?”

Ling blows her bangs out of her eyes. “Of this stuff, yeah. Cracking an uncrackable security system is all he ever wants for his birthday.”

“No,” I clarify. “Of you guys—of all of Kudzu.”

“Oh no!” Ling says with a laugh. “No one's really ‘in charge.' We're a leaderless collective. Everyone has an equal say.”

This surprises me—Ling acts so much like an alpha. “So why did
you
come and get me?”

“If you have an idea for a mission and the entire collective votes that it's a good idea, you can call for volunteers and run the mission yourself,” she explains. “This is my mission, so I was the one who went to get you.” She waves her hand back at the room. “We'll do the Aevum briefing here after lunch.”

I follow her down a narrow corridor that hugs the left side of the building. The maroon concrete floor is littered lightly with dog or cat hair and the walls are covered with bold graffiti art showing blue-haired girls pouting dreamily next to strange, spacey animals that drink from martini glasses. In spiky purple paint, I read the words:
OUR MINDS ARE BETTER. OUR HANDS ARE FASTER. OUR HEARTS ARE STRONGER. WE ARE KUDZU
.

“That's kind of our motto,” Ling explains, somewhere between proud and embarrassed. “Still waiting for a chance to really use it. Apart from the leaflets, I guess.”

Piles of multicolored paper are stacked against the wall. I recognize one pile immediately:
KUDZU RATS OUT THE TRUST
. The rats at the ice-skating rink. What did she call this? A leaflet? “Why paper?” I ask Ling. “Seems a little last century.”

“Untraceable,” she replies simply. “For us, and Edenites. But this mission, we're stepping things up.” Her eyes flash intently. “After we destroy Aevum, we're releasing a whole stream about artilects and what's happening in the Badlands.”

“But the Trust controls the streams,” I point out. “They'll just shut it down.”

Ling shakes her head, looking smug. “Not if you're sneaky like us. The Kudzu stream will be totally anonymous, totally untraceable. Just like paper.”

An unauthorized stream. Something that tells the truth about the
Badlands, the truth about the Trust. “That could really wake people up,” I admit.

“It
will
wake people up,” Ling says. “That's why this mission is so important. Stunt plus stream equals real change.”

The smell of something warm and rich and tomatoey drifts up the hallway. A booming woman's voice calls out, “Chicken? Is that you?”

“Henny!” Ling calls back.

I follow Ling as she bounds into a cluttered kitchen. Wooden shelves nailed to the walls hold stacks of mismatched plates, mugs, bowls, and saucepans. Wire baskets full of fruit hang from the ceiling. Potatoes still covered in dirt are heaped in the sink, next to big bunches of fresh basil and parsley. Something bubbles on a stove, wafting the warm, salty smell of roasted tomatoes mixed with fragrant herbs. Every bit of space is used, and there's enough food in here to feed an army. Or at least, a bunch of hungry revolutionaries.

From the open doorway, I watch Ling hug a big woman with a pile of yellow-and-black leopard-print hair. Then Ling swings her backpack onto the floor, unzips it, and hands the woman a bottle of dark yellow cooking oil, a packet of flour, and three large blocks of chocolate wrapped in gold paper. The woman squawks with excitement. “You did well, chicken. You did well.” She glances in my direction. “Seems we have a visitor.”

Ling gestures at me proudly. “Tess, this is Henny. Henny, Tess.”

“Hey.” I give a small wave.

“No, that won't do,” says Henny, barreling toward me. “Everyone gets a hug hello from Henny.”

Before I know it, she has wrapped me up in a huge hug, squeezing me hard. I just stand there stiffly. She smells like onions, but in a good way.

“Not much of a hugger, huh?” Henny says, letting my stiff-as-a-board body go with a bemused smile. “We'll soon change that. All right, let's get a look at you.” She gives me a slow once-over. “Looks pretty tough,” she says to Ling approvingly. “Nice tronic.”

Ling takes a wooden spoon from the large pot of stew on the stove and licks it. “Yum. Did you make the strawberry thing for dessert?”

“I wanted to, but those darn rabbits got into them again.”

“Rabbits?” I'm surprised. According to the Trust, there's no pest or invasive species in all of Eden.

Ling nods, her nose wrinkled in annoyance. “They live in the woods. Fair game if you can catch them.” Then, to Henny, “When's lunch?”

“Ten minutes,” she replies.

We head farther down the corridor. Ling gestures to some more workrooms, storage spaces, and a small bathroom, before the corridor opens into a space about twice the size of the tech room and three times the size of the kitchen. It's a riot of blankets, backpacks, and boots. All four walls support handmade wooden bunk beds. Several of the bottom beds hold double mattresses, presumably for couples. Every bed has a box or some shelves built onto the end of it; they are piled with clothes, toiletries, and knickknacks.

“Ah,” I say, turning in a slow circle. “The famous Kudzu Procreation Palace.”

Ling jolts with alarm. “Is that what people say about us? Procreation . . . Palace?”

I grin and give her shoulder a light sock. “Relax, Ping. I'm kidding.”

A golden Labrador retriever lies on one of the bottom beds. On seeing Ling, the dog's tail thumps happily. “This is Carlos.” She gives him a scratch between the ears, and he whines. “He's kind of all of ours.” She points to one of the double beds. “That's mine.”