The Water Knife (22 page)

So she told her story and didn’t milk it. Just told him how the guardies had come to their town outside San Antonio and said everyone had to leave because they weren’t going to be trucking water to the town anymore. Told him how they’d crossed out of Texas, going west because everyone knew Oklahoma was stringing people up, and Louisiana was full of hurricane refugees. Told him how bad New Mexico had been. Bodies thrown over barbed-wire fences, Merry Perry convoys, and Red Cross relief stations, and her mother dying of chikungunya.

She told him, too, about her schemes. About how she’d been selling water with Toomie. Described how she’d tried to use his water tip.

He laughed at that, impressed, and his reaction gave her hope that she was getting through to him. If she could just tie herself and Sarah to this man, he could take them anywhere.

“You know Catherine Case got her start in water trading?” Mike said.

“That’s the lady who owns the water in Las Vegas, right?”

“More or less. She started out selling farm water to cities, getting the best price when farm-to-city water transfers really got rolling. After she squeezed Las Vegas, they hired her to do the same to everyone else. She was always looking for the angle. She’s famous for the deals she made.”

“I’m not like her.”

He shrugged. “Not so different. It’s all about moving water to where people value it. Case works with hundreds of thousands of acre-feet; you work with gallons. But the game—it’s not so different.”

To Maria’s surprise, he turned off the eggs. He went to his shelves and pulled down an old paper book. He glanced at her speculatively,
flipped through, pulling out papers that were stuffed between the pages.

“You ever read this?” he asked, offering her the book.

Maria took it and read the title slowly. “
Cadillac Desert?
It’s about cars or something?”

“Water, actually. It’s kind of how we got where we are now. There are other books. Lots came later. You can read Fleck or Fishman or Jenkins or others online.” He nodded at the book in her hands. “But I always think people should start with this. It’s the bible when it comes to water.”

“The bible, huh?”

“Old Testament. The beginning of everything. When we thought we could make deserts bloom, and the water would always be there for us. When we thought we could move rivers and control water instead of it controlling us.”

“That’s interesting.” She offered it back to him, but he waved it off.

“You can have it.”

The way he said it…“You’re leaving, aren’t you?” Maria said. “That’s why you were okay paying so much for me and Sarah.”

He seemed uncomfortable. “It’s possible.”

“When?”

He looked down. “It depends.” Didn’t meet her eyes. “Soon, I think.”

Maria shoved the book back to him. “You can keep your book.”

“I don’t think you understand.”

“Oh, I understand. It’s a book. And I don’t need a book to tell me how dumb people are. I already know that. If you’ve got a book about how to get across the border without getting caught by drones, that’s what I need. Maybe a book about how not to get knifed by my coyote, like all those people they’re digging up on the TV.”

She glared at him. “I don’t need books about how things used to be. Everybody talks about how things used to be. I need a book about how I’m supposed to live now. Unless you got a book like that, I don’t need the weight.” She flicked her hand at the thing, lying on the countertop. “I mean, seriously. It’s
paper
.”

The guy looked hurt. “It’s a first edition,” he said defensively. “People value these. You could even sell it if you wanted.”

But Maria didn’t care. She was suddenly sick of him. Sick of having to be polite to some guy who wanted to give her a book to read so he could feel good about the fact that he’d fucked her and was leaving Phoenix the first chance he got.

“Just keep it.”

“Sorry,” he muttered. “I thought you’d think it was interesting.” He stuffed his papers back into the book and set it aside.

“Whatever. It’s okay.” She hesitated. “Can I do my laundry?”

“Sure.” He nodded, looking almost as tired and defeated as she felt. “There’s a robe in my room. You can wear it while your clothes run. You can do Sarah’s, too.”

“Thanks.”

She made herself smile at him, wider than she felt, trying to fix the broken moment, and he seemed to brighten a little. He might not be taking them with him when he left, but maybe she could get a tip out of him. Or one more night for herself and Sarah.

Maria returned to the bedroom and dropped her towels. Hunted for the robe. Sarah turned over, flinging an arm and leg out, taking up the whole bed, but didn’t wake.

Maria paused, staring at her friend, affectionate for her sleep. Glad she was getting to sleep in, and sleep well, for once.

Am I in love with her?
Maria wondered.

She knew she wanted Sarah. And she knew she didn’t want Mike at all. Not as Sarah seemed to want him. Mike was nice. All the boys in Maria’s life had been nice, but looking at Sarah felt as forbidden and overwhelming as when her mother had caught her touching herself while looking at tablet searches for the actress Amalie Xu. Being with Sarah felt as vibrant as grabbing a live wire. All Maria knew was that she didn’t want to lose Sarah.

Maria searched through the tangled sheets for the rest of their clothes. She poked Sarah. “Where’d your skirt go?”

Sarah mumbled and pushed her away.

“Fine. Do your own laundry, then.”

From the living room, the doorbell rang. Maria froze, suddenly aware of her nudity. Where was Mike’s robe?

She peeked through the bedroom door. A voice said, “Hey there, Mikey, you old motherfucker, how you doing?”

“What the fuck are you doing here?” Mike said. “I told you we were going to meet later.”

“Decided not to wait.”

“Wha—?” There was a wet thump. Shouts followed. More thumps and gasps.

“God damn, Mikey, you got a hard fucking face! Now how about we talk about our
—oh no you don’t!
”

There was a muffled cough. Maria glimpsed Mike stumbling back, clutching his shoulder. A man followed, pistol pointed.

“Wait!” Mike gasped. “We had a deal!”

“Definitely. The deal is, you give me what I want, and you get the fuck out of Phoenix.”

Mike lunged for the man with the gun. The pistol coughed again. Blood exploded from the back of Mike’s head. He toppled backward.

Maria lunged for Sarah. “Get up!” she hissed. “Hide!” She tried to haul Sarah out of the bed.

“Lemme go,” Sarah moaned. “Lemme alone.”

Voices from the other room:

“Why the fuck did you whack him?”

“Would’ve done it sooner or later, right?”

“I still needed to ask him where the rights were!”

“Sorry, bro. Shit happens.”

“Fucking hell. Check the rest of the place.”

Maria grabbed Sarah’s wrist and pulled. She could hear someone coming, footsteps on hardwood. Closer and closer.

Maria threw herself down beside the bed as the door opened.

“Wha—” Sarah started.

The gun coughed.

Maria wriggled under the bed as the gun went off again. She froze, trying not to whimper, jammed into the tight space.

“God damn, what a mess,” a man’s voice said.

“What you got?” the other called from the living room.

“Some Texas bangbang.” The footsteps receded.

“You didn’t have to shoot his ass.”

“Motherfucker threw down on me.”

Maria’s heart was so loud in her ears, she could barely make out their voices. Their conversation grew muffled as they roamed the
apartment, words blurring into a rise and fall of chitchat, distinctive for its calm.

They’d just killed two people, but their voices sounded as if they were having a conversation over coffee. Business banter. She heard one of them laugh. Cabinets being pulled open. More conversation.

The footsteps returned.

Please no, please please please
.

“These Ibis fuckers sure know how to live,” the man commented.

“Expense accounts.”

Maria could see his shoes. Black cowboy boots so close she could reach out and touch them. Polished and expensive. The boots came to a halt. The gun spat again, and Maria flinched.

Was he making sure Sarah was dead? Or did he do it just for fun?

Maria realized she was crying. She could feel tears running down her cheeks. Her vision was blurry. Beneath the bed, immobile with fear, she sobbed, but not a single sound escaped her mouth.

She cried silently, as still as a mouse, praying that the man with the boots wouldn’t notice that too many girls’ clothes lay strewn about the room or that too many high-heeled shoes lay jumbled on the carpet.

Maria cried with terror and loss, still feeling Sarah’s warm hand in her own, her fingers slipping from Maria’s grasp as she dove for safety.

She cried, silently and without hope, knowing that her dreams were real. Whatever angel or devil or saint or ghost whispered in her ear, she had been a fool not to listen to the warning nightmare, and now it was too late to do anything except to pray for forgiveness and salvation.

In the other room the thumping and scraping continued.

“Nothing here,” one of the men said. “Check the bedroom.”

Please no please please please
.

T
he guard kept pace with Lucy, making sure she actually left.

She’d seen ejections happen before, but hadn’t thought about it from the squatter’s perspective.

She’d been sitting at Saguaro Coffee, just on the far side of the plaza, meeting with a Chinese engineer who specialized in biodesign. He’d talked about how the pond they were sitting beside was actually part of the entire water-treatment structure, how each reed and fish had been carefully engineered and selected to accomplish specific cleaning tasks.

In the midst of the conversation, she’d seen the guards ushering someone out. She’d sipped her coffee, watching as it happened. Pitying the person but not really feeling their desperation.

And now she was the one being guided out, while others at the coffee shop pretended not to see it happening.

Behind her a man gasped. The sound was loud enough that Lucy turned.

She half-expected to find someone knifed, from the way he sounded. But instead the man was standing stock-still, staring upward. Others were gasping as well, bolting to their feet, gawp-jawed. A ripple of astonishment running through the entire Taiyang plaza. Surprise and alarm, and everyone looking up at the sky. No, not the sky—

The monitors. The huge TV screens that hung throughout the atrium.

Lucy followed their gaze. “What the—?”

The cop shoved her to keep going, but she shook him off.

“Wait.”

He made to grab her again, but then he, too, paused, and just like that, they were no longer security guard and trespasser, but two people
watching TV. Two people, together, suddenly made into brother and sister by changing circumstances.

Up on the televisions, images of a huge placid lake flashed. A dam. The text beneath the images had it labeled.

Blue Mesa Reservoir. Gunnison, Colorado
.

An azure jewel pooled among yellow clay hills, cliff scarps, and sagebrush.

At one narrow end of the lake, a wall of boulders corked a deep craggy canyon, stoppering the blue waters behind it.

Except the bouldered face of the dam was weeping water. Three separate cascades. The spouting froths seemed to be growing.

Lucy could make out people clambering off the dam, running, tiny little ants in comparison to the leaks that had sprung. A car was racing across the highway that ran atop the dam.

There were crews on rappelling lines, down on the dam face, trying to figure out what they were supposed to—

The dam started to give way.

The guard’s hand fell from Lucy’s arm. Behind her someone cried out, horrified. The dam spat more and more water. Monolithic hunks of it peeled away. More water shouldered through the gap, spouting. More and more, faster and faster. The people were specks on the edges of the dam, all fleeing. The scale was almost too big to understand, the people tiny beside the jetting waters that blasted through the dam under pressure.

A top piece of the dam collapsed. A cement mixer went with it, bobbing and piling down into the tight canyon confines. A toy tossed by the waters, floating and swirling in the increasing torrent.

Someone keyed the sound for the monitors. A breathless announcer’s voice filled the atrium, running down long lists of towns that were vulnerable to the surge of water:

“We just don’t know how far it will go! The Bureau of Reclamation expects that the Morrow Point and Crystal Reservoirs will also fail. The Army Corps of Engineers is recommending evacuation alerts for the cities of Hotchkiss, Delta, Grand Junction, Moab…this could go all the way down to Glen Canyon.”

The announcer rattled off more town names as the cameras panned
from the collapsing dam down into the tight confines of the canyon, a raging muddy froth. Boulders as big as houses bobbed in the tumult. The announcers were calling it an act of terrorism, then correcting themselves and saying that it could have been a failure in construction. The dam had stood for almost a hundred years, and now it was dying. More and more muddy water gushed through.

A part of the canyon wall collapsed, undermined by the blasting water, an entire stack of cracked granite peeling off, spinning, taking a handful of observers with it. Ant people scrambled away from the rim. The announcer was shouting, “
There were people there!
” as if it hadn’t been obvious, but he kept saying it, breathless and terrorized. “
There were people there!
”

“We’re getting word from the Bureau of Reclamation that the dam was recently evaluated and considered stable. The construction and geological location were ideal. No dam on record has collapsed spontaneously, after existing in a stable condition for so long—”

“So it’s terrorists, then,”
someone else said.

But still the announcer was backing away from the word.

Lucy wondered if the announcer had a connection to California. If he’d been pressured to go easy on the state the way that Lucy had been pressured. If he’d had his own
plata o plomo
moment.

The dam collapsed into a torrent of raging water.

It would rush down through canyons, cross state lines, inundate towns, sweep away all traces of human activity along its margins, and still the announcer struggled to avoid saying what everyone knew must be true: California had gotten tired of negotiating for its share of the river and had done something about it. It wanted its water, and it wanted it now.

Everyone stood in the open atrium of the arcology, staring up at the news, and suddenly Lucy realized that her opportunity had arrived.

All she had to do was move, while everyone else was paralyzed.

She eased away from her security guard. She slipped through the gathering, easy and relaxed, walking while everyone else stood and stared, mesmerized.

It was almost as if she didn’t exist. She was a ghost.

She hopped the turnstiles and made it to the elevators. She tailgated a shell-shocked-looking man into the elevator and let him sweep his key. She pushed her own button.

As the doors closed, she caught a last glimpse of all the wealthy fivers, the privileged of Taiyang, all of them watching the news, all of them made small in the face of California’s power.