The Water Knife

by Paolo Bacigalupi

  “And that’s what you want?” Lucy started to laugh helplessly. “But I don’t have any passwords. I don’t even know Ratan.” She couldn’t stop laughing. “If that’s what you want, you’re completely fucked, because I can’t help you.” Her laughter turned to sobs. She hated herself for it, but she couldn’t stop. “I don’t know anything,” she sobbed. “I can’t help you. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I can’t help you.”

  “Damn.” The man frowned. “I kind of think you’re telling me the truth.” He sighed. “But still, I got to be sure.” He gripped her teary face in his hand. “Don’t worry. I’ll put you down quick once I’m done.” He straightened and went back to the counter. Picked up the knife.

  Oh God. No. No no. Please no.

  Lucy started screaming before he was halfway back to her.

  She didn’t stop for a long time.

  CHAPTER 25

  Maria hit water, hard as concrete. She sank, stunned, then thrashed for the surface.

  One second the scarred man had been asking her if she swam, and the next moment the asshole had heaved her over the rail, to drop four stories into the pool.

  She surfaced, paddling clumsily, enraged and relieved that she was still alive. She hadn’t swum for years. Not since going to visit a lake with her family during summers. They’d picnicked, and she’d paddled in the muddy waters, and then the lake had dried up, and all that had stopped.

  The scarred man slammed into the water beside her. Waves swamped her. He surfaced and grabbed her, hauling her toward where the water disappeared into a mossy tunnel.

  She fought him, angry and terrified. “What are you doing?”

  “Saving us both. Or else getting us killed.” They were moving with a current that pushed them into the cave. He swam ahead and began fiddling with a metal grate. “Are the Calies coming?” he asked.

  She knew who he meant. The guys with the suits. She peered out of the tunnel. They were running for the elevators and coming down. “Yeah.”

  He pulled a pistol from his belt and handed it to her, then went back to pushing buttons on a keypad.

  “Shoot anyone who sticks their head in.”

  “Are you serious?”

  She didn’t get an answer because now he had the grate open and pulled her through and took the gun back.

  The Calies jumped down into the water and started wading toward them. The man fired once, deliberately. They all dove for cover, and then the current was increasing, tugging them deeper into the heart of the arcology.

  Their stream was joined by other streams, pulling them on. Maria struggled to keep her head above water. Behind them, she glimpsed the Calies at the grate, unable to get through. She bumped into the scarred man. He grabbed her, and for a second she thought he was going to throw her over another edge, but instead he was lifting her out of the water and onto a walkway.

  “Grab on!”

  Her fingers scraped, and then she had hold of the lip and dragged herself out. The man followed and flopped beside her, dripping and panting.

  “Where are we?”

  “Water-treatment systems.” He stood and hauled her upright. “Come on. Taiyang Security is definitely coming for us. We need to be out of here before they lock everything down.” He rushed her down a catwalk alongside the rushing river.

  “How do you know where you’re going?”

  “Kind of faking it, actually.”

  “How’d you open that grate back there?”

  He laughed, looking pleased with himself. “Biotect company that does the water treatment. Same as one we got in Vegas. They got standard passwords. Guess nobody changed it. It happens a lot.”

  Maria wondered what he would’ve done if he hadn’t been able to unlock the grate, then decided the gun answered that question.

  He led her along the edge of the river, then over a walkway. Below them the water pooled out, spreading and spilling down into tanks. They were in a huge cavern, redolent with the smell of fish and growing things. Mosses and algaes choked the waters. Fish flashed in the shallows. A whole huge cavern, full of water and life.

  Maria stopped, stunned.

  It was the aquifer. Its details were different from what she’d dreamed of, but still, it was the place. Her father had been replaced by the scarred man, and Maria was being led on catwalks instead of rowing a boat, and the stalactites overhead were now electronic monitoring devices flashing status as they dangled over the pools, extending sensors down into the waters. And yet she was sure that this was the place she had dreamed of. It was alive and cool, and even if it was full of workers running skimmers across the surface of algae vats, it was her aquifer. She had dreamed this place, and now she was here. She hoped it was a good sign, but she didn’t have time to worry because the scarred man was already tugging her on.

  He led her through, walking quickly. A worker looked up from a flashing screen, startled at the sight of them.

  Maria half-expected him to shoot the worker, but instead he flashed a badge. “Phoenix PD,” he said. “There’s a security situation.” He brushed right past the guy.

  “You’re a cop?” Maria asked.

  “To him I am.”

  They hit double doors and ended up in a dimly lit service corridor. The scarred man scowled up at the ceiling. Cameras.

  “This way!” He dragged her on, down another corridor.

  They hit a new set of doors, and suddenly they were outside.

  Maria blinked and squinted in the glare, but the man dragged her on. Dust swirled around them, whipped by winds and traffic. Ahead, a bright yellow Tesla’s doors were popping open. “This is us.” He shoved her into the passenger seat and came around. The car locked down and came to life as he settled himself into the driver’s seat.

  Clean dashboard instruments, electronic glows—and her sitting inside, feeling like a drowned cat as she dripped on the leather. A/C came up, icy on her wet skin and dress. They pulled away from the curb, and Maria was shoved deep into her seat as the car accelerated. She looked back, expecting pursuit, but no one seemed to have noticed.

  “Did we lose them?” she asked.

  “For now.”

  Now that she was no longer running, the adrenaline was draining out of her, leaving her feeling exhausted and chilled in the A/C. She found that she was shivering. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been so cold.

  “Can you turn off the A/C?”

  The icy gusts died, leaving them driving in silence.

  “You said you have someplace you can go?” he asked.

  “Yeah. There’s a guy. He’s pretty close to here. Over on the construction side. He makes pupusas.”

  “You sure you don’t want to be farther away?”

  The man sounded like he was trying to take care of her. Like he gave a damn, and it made her angry.

  “Why do you care? You just threw me off a railing.”

  Her head hurt, and the motion of the car made her nauseous, and now she was mad at him. This guy thought he could just drag her around however he liked. She started digging into her purse, the purse that he’d made her bring, to carry his damn ballistic jacket. She yanked the jacket out. It was practically dry, of course. Cadillac Desert was soaked.

  “Fuck!”

  “It’ll dry,” the scarred man said, glancing over.

  “I was going to try to sell it. Mike said people buy this shit.”

  He hesitated. “It might dry.”

  All that pain, and she was left with nothing. Staring at the sopping book, she fought to hold back tears. Everything I try turns to shit.

  “This is close enough,” she said. “Drop me here.”

  He pulled over to the curb and dug into his wallet. He pulled out some yuan and handed them over. “Sorry about…” He nodded at the book.

  “Whatever. It’s fine.” Maria found it hard to leave the cocooning wealth of the Tesla. “Sorry about your woman.”

  “She wasn’t mine.”

  “Thought she must be. Si
nce you kept asking about her.”

  He looked away, and for a moment he seemed deeply, shockingly sad. “You can’t save someone who’s trying that hard to get themselves killed.”

  “Is that what she was doing?”

  “She cared a lot about what she thought was right and wrong. It made her blind. She was looking for trouble.”

  “A lot of people are like that,” she said. “Blind, I mean.”

  “Some people are, yeah.”

  “You’re not.”

  “Not normally.”

  He said it bitterly. Even if he didn’t admit it out loud, Maria could tell he’d cared about the dead lady.

  “Why did you save me?” she asked. “You could have ditched me—way easier.”

  The scarred man glanced over, frowning.

  For a long moment she thought he wasn’t going to answer, but then he said, “Long time ago I was in your shoes. Down in Mexico, you know? Saw something I shouldn’t. Stood this close to a killer.” He indicated the distance between her and him in the car. “I was just a little kid then. Think I might have been eight or ten. I was outside this little bodega down in Guadalajara, and I had an ice cream—”

  He paused, staring out through the windshield at the sun-blasted Phoenix boulevard, lost in memory. “This sicario—you know sicario?—assassin? This sicario drops a guy right in front of me. He pulls up in his truck, gets out, walks over, and bang—bullet in the face. Five more in the body. Another in the head to make damn sure. And me, I’m just standing there.”

  The scarred man was frowning. “And then this motherfucker, he points his gun at me.” He glanced over at her, significantly. “It’s funny, ’cause I can’t remember anything about the sicario’s face, but I remember his hands. He had ‘Jesus’ written on his knuckles. I can’t remember anything else about that guy. But I can see his hand, and that gun pointing at me, like it was yesterday.”

  The man seemed to shrug off the memory. “Anyway, you were just in the wrong place at the right time. I been there. I wouldn’t leave you there.”

  He reached across and opened Maria’s door. “Lie low. Don’t do anything to show up on people’s radar. Don’t go back to where you used to live. Don’t do your old patterns. If you lie low, people will forget about you.”

  Maria stared at the man, trying to figure out what he was about. Something in his story mattered to her, though.

  The killer’s knuckles…

  “The men,” she said. “One of them had a tattoo.”

  CHAPTER 26

  “The guys who took your lady…and killed…” The girl swallowed. Pushed her black hair back behind her ear.

  “One of them was going through the clothes in the bedroom, while I was lying under the bed, and I could see his hand. He had a tattoo, like you were saying about that other guy. That sicario you saw.”

  Angel felt his childhood rising up to seize him. He could still remember the sicario’s hand, and himself, incongruously, trying to spell out the letters on his knuckles, even as the man’s pistol centered on his forehead.

  “Letters?”

  He remembered the sicario smiling at him, pretending to shoot, letting the pistol kick in his hand. Making the sound of its report the way Angel and his friends Raul and Miguel had played at guns.

  “Pshew.”

  Angel had gripped his ice cream cone so hard, it snapped between his fingers. He’d been so scared he pissed himself, his bladder letting go like a popped balloon, hot liquid coursing down his leg—

  The girl was talking. “No. Not letters. It was like a snake tail. It went around his hand and up under his jacket sleeve. I saw it. It was a snake tail.”

  Angel was so caught up in his own memories that at first he didn’t hear her words, and then abruptly it was all jigsaw puzzle pieces falling into place, his world clicking together, piece by piece, making a picture.

  “A snake you say?”

  He ran his hand up his wrist. “You think maybe it could have been a dragon tail? Did it have scales? Colored, maybe?” Not wanting to prompt her into remembering something that didn’t exist, but knowing the answer, and knowing before she answered what she was going to say. “Not green, but maybe some other colors?”

  “Red and gold.”

  I’ll be goddamned.

  Absolute pattern emerging from chaos.

  “Does it help you?”

  Angel could have kissed her. This innocent girl being ground up in the gears of the world was offering him the gift of understanding. A virgin mother showing him the shape of the world. She should have been wearing blue, the Virgin of Guadalupe blessing him with all the pieces.

  “Oh, yeah. It helps.” Angel reached into his pocket. “It helps a lot.” He had a sudden overwhelming need to balance all the things in the world that couldn’t be balanced. “Here.” He emptied his wallet of cash, not bothering to count it. “Take it. Take it all. You helped me.”

  She took the cash with wide eyes, but he didn’t wait to see its impact. Time was running out. He grabbed his phone, waving off her thanks, and then she was closing the door, and he was all alone, dialing a number from memory.

  Catherine Case saw the world in terms of a mosaic. She spent her time trying to gather data, then shape that data into a picture that pleased her. But that wasn’t Angel. He didn’t need to shape a picture—he needed to see what was already there. Mosaics made you hope that you could push pieces around to create a picture that didn’t exist, instead of letting all those little pieces click click click right into place. Instead of letting them tell you what was right in front of your face.

  Red and gold. Tail like a snake.

  Or a dragon.

  Julio’s phone went straight to voicemail.

  Angel swore and pulled away from the curb. Goddamn Julio. Ducking and dodging. Complaining about being stuck in Phoenix. Bitching about big risks and small payoffs.

  Red and gold. A tail curling around his wrist and up his arm.

  The girl had seen it and thought it was a snake, but Angel knew what she’d seen. If that girl had been able to see the rest of Julio’s arm and shoulder, the way Angel had so many times when they were out on some river, squeezing some dumb farmer for his water rights, both of them wearing tank tops and sweating, she wouldn’t have said she was looking at a red-and-gold snake; she’d have said she saw a dragon.

  The number of people who handled water was small. Clean-cut Cali agents, federal bureaucrats in BuRec and the Department of the Interior. The municipal water managers of the many cities that depended on the interlocking water rights of the western United States…

  Julio.

  He’d been one step ahead of Angel all along. Playing him right from the start. Killing the people Angel wanted to talk to. Cleaning up ahead of Angel. Beating Angel to…what?

  What are you after, you hijo de puta?

  Angel remembered Julio standing in his hotel room, staring down at his phone, bitching about the lotería, pretending to be frightened. He remembered how Julio had scoffed about James Sanderson, not interested in him at all.

  Midlevel nobody…Doesn’t fit the profile…I doubt Vos was running him, he would’ve told me.

  Julio’s phone went to voicemail again.

  Where the fuck are you, you snake?

  Assuming that Julio needed information from the journo, he’d want a quiet place to question her. A place without neighbors. Someplace he’d think of as secure.

  Angel wondered if Julio had big enough güevos to use one of his own safe houses. If he didn’t think anyone was on him, he might. And for sure, he wouldn’t think Angel was on his trail. He thought Angel was still chasing mirages around Phoenix, pleasingly clueless while Julio skipped ahead of him.

  Julio would still feel safe, Angel decided. So he’d wander out to the blasted edges of Phoenix, somewhere in the dark zone, where electricity and water were shut off and people were scarce, and he’d set himself up in one of his nice Vegas safe houses that he normally used for m
eetings with his agents and informants, and that water knives like Angel could use when they needed to go to ground.

  And there he’d finish his business with Lucy Monroe.

  Angel had a half-dozen Vegas safe houses memorized for this operation. Only a few were very close. They wouldn’t be the only ones that Julio had set up on Vegas’s behalf, but they were worth a try.

  Angel stomped on the accelerator, ignoring the Tesla’s protests as he bottomed out on dust washboard and street dips.

  Time was ticking. Pretty soon the journo would be another piece of ruined flesh, same as Vosovich and Sanderson.

  CHAPTER 27

  The first safe houses Angel tried showed no signs of life. But the third one had Julio’s truck parked right out front.

  “Well, fuck you, too, Julio.”

  The man’s arrogance was irritating. If Angel needed any more confirmation that Julio thought Angel was a complete pendejo, finding the man’s truck parked in plain sight in front of one of Las Vegas’s very own safe houses did the job.

  Angel parked well down the street and studied the scene. Nothing but dust and tumbleweeds. Cracked stucco houses sat silent. Most of them had been gutted for their metals and solar panels a while back.

  Nothing to see, nothing to care about. Move along, folks.

  The houses were big. Angel wondered if the people who’d owned them had felt rich living in their 5 Bed/3 Bath houses. They’d probably been pretty pissed when Phoenix shut off their water. All that money invested in things like granite countertops for resale value that were now just polished rock no one gave a shit about.