The Water Wars

by Cameron Stracher

  Our family lived in a section of Arch called “the Rails” where trains had once rumbled. Long ago it had been one of the least expensive places to live, but after the transportation system broke down, it was one of the few places where food and water were still available. As the other suburbs collapsed, the Rails survived and even thrived. But the legacy of poverty was hard to shake, and anything that reminded us of plenty held us in an incantatory grip.

  It was an easy ride to the Wellington Pavilion. No one passed me on the road, and the wind at my back made pedaling easier. The guards stopped me by the front gate, and I removed my goggles to show them copies of my Certification of Health and Vaccination. Still, they wouldn’t let me inside. Instead they called Kai on an intercom, and in a few minutes he appeared.

  “Hi,” I said. “Are you hungry?”

  When he cocked his head, he looked like a sunflower, I thought, a rare prize that grew only in hothouses: tall, reedy, with silky blond hair that shone in the twilight. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “Inviting you to dinner.”

  “When?”

  “Now.” I held out copies of our certifications, and he took them tentatively in his hand.

  “What are you cooking?”

  “It’s a surprise.”

  He was only gone for five minutes. When he returned, he carried two plastene jugs and a small satchel on his hip. The jugs were stamped with a seal from the Water Authority, certifying that they contained real water from pure aquifers. He beckoned to me, and the guards stood by indifferently as I entered the compound. In a moment the black limousine appeared from an underground driveway, its powerful gasoline engine growling hungrily. It circled the interior courtyard and stopped in front of Kai. The bodyguard stepped from the driver’s side, machine pistol at the ready, mirrored glasses on the bridge of his nose.

  “Come on,” Kai said to me. “We’ll drive you.”

  “I have my cycle.”

  “Martin will bring it back after he drops us off.”

  I looked at the bodyguard, but his eyes were impassive behind the lenses. He stood there, alert, one hand holding open the door, the other on that machine pistol, head constantly scanning for threats.

  I climbed into the car and folded myself into the back seat. It smelled richly of leather and coconut—scents I knew only from chemo-washes. There was a glass divider between the front and back, and below the divider—incredibly—were a sink, a dozen small bottles of colored liquid, and six plastene liter bottles of water.

  “It’s a bar,” said Kai when he noticed me staring.

  “What’s it do?”

  “It doesn’t do anything.” He smiled at my ignorance. “You mix drinks for yourself.”

  Of course I knew what alcohol was, but no one I knew mixed it with anything. At parties sometimes shakers would pass around home-brewed stuff, and I had even seen my father take a glass every now and then, but no one had the money to mix real alcohol with other liquids. When I looked at Kai I had to remind myself to stop staring at his skin. It wasn’t calloused or dry like paper. A faint scent—real soap, I realized—emanated from his hair. It was all I could do to stop myself from touching him, and I felt my face grow hot from the thought.

  The ride was luxurious and smooth. I’d never been in a car like this. The limo’s big tires absorbed every jolt in the road, and its thick windows and doors (bulletproof, Kai said) blocked outside noise. We barely had time for a few words of conversation before we arrived at the front entrance of our building. Martin parked near the unmanned gate, then came around to unlock our doors. Kai gave him instructions for dropping off my cycle, and the man nodded wordlessly. He waited—gun at the ready—while we walked upstairs. My father opened the door. He was wiping his hands on his thighs, but when he saw the water, he stopped.

  “Thank you for having me to dinner,” said Kai.

  “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “Dad.” I scolded. “This is Kai.”

  “I’m sorry. Where are my manners?” He accepted the jugs. “Thank you, Kai,” he added. “It’s nice to meet you.” His voice sounded hoarse.

  Will appeared at his side, and his gaze went right to the water jugs. Without a word he took one bottle from our father’s hand and retreated to the back bedroom. Before Kai could ask any questions, I ushered him into the living room, where my father’s guacamole awaited. It was delicious, as always—the perfect blend of tangy salsa and creamy quasi-vocados. We had scooped up half the bowl when Will returned. His eyes were red-rimmed, but he was wearing a broad smile. “She drank a little,” he said.

  “This is Kai.” It had been rude of Will to leave without even so much as a nod, but if he noticed my sarcasm, he pretended to ignore it. He said hello, then spooned himself some guacamole. Soon the boys were sitting on the couch chatting about the latest YouToo! and We! uploads. I followed their conversation like it was a Ping match: from screen to screen to screen. They could have been brothers of different mothers: one blond and smooth, the other ragged and lean, both tapered and fine.

  Our father returned from the kitchen. Kai looked at his empty plate longingly. “I’ve never had guacamole,” he said.

  “It’s my dad’s specialty,” I told him.

  “My dad can’t cook,” Kai said.

  “I haven’t met your parents,” said our father. “Are they registered?” Adults who had passed a rigorous security screening were allowed to travel freely between the lower republics and often had diplomatic or important business jobs.

  “My father’s a driller.”

  This wasn’t the answer anyone expected, but it made perfect sense. Drillers were wildcatters, risk-takers, and often rich—if they found water. That explained the limousine and the bodyguard.

  “Why aren’t you in school?” our father asked.

  “My dad needs me. He says I don’t have to go.”

  “What about your mother?”

  “She died when I was a baby.”

  We were silent for a moment, remembering. Before our mother had gotten sick, there was little she hadn’t done: school activities, recycling duties, and lots of volunteer projects. She had been the water-smart mom in my class all through elementary school. For Will’s prom, she taught the boys how to dance. When I remembered those times, I saw our mother in a favorite green hat, her red hair corkscrewing to her shoulders. People said I resembled her, but it was only the freckles. I wished I were as pretty as my mother. Every time I looked at my own arms, my hands, and my legs, the freckles seemed to mock my pale skin and uninteresting mouth—not at all like our mother’s vibrant lips and high cheekbones. Who would want to kiss such boring lips or such a flat pale brow? I knew it was petty to think those things, but thinking about anything else only made me sadder.

  “Why don’t we head to the kitchen?” said our father. “Dinner’s ready.”

  He had set the table with the “good” china—plates that required sanitizing before putting them away—as well as silverware, glasses, and even smaller plates for the chips and salsa. Four fat candles glowed, spilling light onto our mother’s favorite tablecloth: silver threads in a rich red fabric. Three bowls of various sizes bubbled and steamed. The food itself was like a decoration, the brightly colored peppers contrasting with the browns of the beans and the tans of the tortillas. Everything looked perfect.

  Before he sat down Kai withdrew something that looked like a thick laser pencil from his satchel. He lifted his shirt and jabbed at the fleshy side of his stomach. Then he took his place at the table and smoothed his napkin over his lap as if nothing had happened. We couldn’t help but stare.

  “It’s for the sugar before I eat,” he explained.

  “You have diabetes,” said our father.

  “Yes. Since I was thirteen.”

  Diabetes was an old-fashioned disease, one I had heard about but never seen. The bodies of people with diabetes didn’t produce insulin. Without it, diabetics could die within weeks. Kai had his insul
in tucked inside a pencil: real medication that must have cost a fortune—and that kept him alive.

  Despite his wealth, however, Kai ate as if he were famished. He piled his plate, then had second helpings—and thirds. Even Will couldn’t keep up. Our father poured from Kai’s jugs, and we each drank two glasses of water. I couldn’t believe how good it tasted: crisp and pure, almost like nothing at all. There was no bad aftertaste, no lingering hint of salt or algae. I held the glass aloft, and the water sparkled gold, green, and silver in the light.

  “It’s delicious,” I said.

  “We drilled it from an upper-republic aquifer,” said Kai.

  “I thought we had drained all our aquifers,” said Will.

  “Not all of them. There are still some left—if you know where to look. You have to get beneath the surface.”

  “How do you know where to look?”

  “My father knows.”

  Of course no driller would share his secrets. There were plenty of tales about how drillers found water—divining rods and specially trained animals, sunspots and moonbeams. But if any of these methods worked, there were no screens verifying it and no witnesses except the driller himself and his closest confidantes. Water was money, and money was power, and no one would give up one without the promise of the other.

  “Once there was water flowing down in rivers from the mountains into the sea,” said our father.

  “They were thousands of kilometers long,” added Kai. “During the rains they would flood and wash everything away.”

  “Yes. You could drink it and bathe in it. People even used the rivers to clean their clothes.”

  When the teachers taught about that time, they made it seem as if the rivers were viewed as inconvenient and expensive highways, wasted resources pouring out into the ocean. Now dams caught all the water, powered turbines, and irrigated the land. Water was too valuable to let it flood the prairies and spill into the sea.

  “Your mother and I sailed on a river once,” said our father. “It was thick, fast, and, in some places, hundreds of meters deep.”

  “When was that?” I asked.

  “Before you were born. In Sahara, when it was known as Africa.”

  I had never heard this story before, but I knew my father didn’t like to talk about the earlier times: the world before the wars and water shortages. When he was a boy, there were still green fields and blue lakes. Kids played sports outside, like baseball and football, that existed now only on the screens. You could lie in a tub filled with warm water for no reason except to relax. It seemed foolish and wasteful and wonderful—to live as if the sky were endless and time itself had no measure.

  “Do you think we’ll ever be able to travel down a river again?” I asked.

  “No.” Our father shook his head sadly. “But long after people are gone, the rivers will return.”

  I had never heard our father talking like this, and I wondered if Kai’s presence had loosened his tongue.

  Then Kai spoke. “I know a river.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  “I can’t say.”

  “Can you sail down it?”

  Kai ignored my question. “My father told me.”

  “Tell us,” said Will. “We can keep a secret.”

  “I promised my father.”

  “If your father knows a river,” said our father, “he should tell the government.”

  Kai laughed. He didn’t sound like a kid at all. His laugh was scratchy and untidy, like an adult cackling at a dirty joke. To tell the truth, it scared me a little. “The government is stupid,” he said.

  This was scandalous. Even Will seemed shocked. No one said that about the government. It could get a person—even a teenager—arrested.

  “Kai,” our father said gently. “We don’t say those kinds of things.”

  “Why not, if they’re true?”

  Our father sighed and looked down at his hands. Then he looked up and said, “These are difficult times, Kai. It’s not like when I was growing up. We have to watch what we eat and drink and be careful of what we say. The world is a dangerous place, and the government is just trying to protect us. There are bad people out there who want to do bad things. Sometimes, to protect all of us, some of us can’t say everything we want to say.”

  “It’s about the water, isn’t it, Dad?” asked Will.

  “It started with the water,” said our father. “But now it’s about so many different things.”

  Will squinted, his left eye nearly closed, the green in his iris like a sliver of emerald. I knew he was thinking about the war, and the army, and what awaited him next year. I was too. Everyone spent a year in the military, then five years afterward on active reserve. We had to protect Illinowa—guard the earth and sky. But the Rails seemed a long way from Basin, and I wondered who was really protecting whom.

  A klaxon rang outside signaling the last hour before the grid shut down. I could hear the car outside waiting, the low humming of its motor like the grid itself. Kai regarded our father coolly. He suddenly didn’t look anything like a boy. His face was planed by shadows, and his fine hair hung over his eyes. “The government is keeping secrets from you,” he said.

  “What kind of secrets?” our father asked.

  “The kind they don’t want you to know.”

  “Well, then, it’s probably better we don’t.”

  Our father’s smile was a tight line, but Kai didn’t smile at all. “The river is the beginning,” he said. “If they can’t control it, we can start again.”

  A new beginning, I thought. Without hunger, thirst, or war. A river could be like a time machine: Step into the same place and it was already changed. But I wondered if there could ever be enough water to start again.

  Kai watched me from across the table, his eyes lidded low, pupils barely visible. His skin glowed, and his lips gleamed moistly. When he spoke, his voice was soft and low. “Someday,” he said softly to me, “I’ll take you there.”

  CHAPTER 4

  After that Will and I became obsessed with Kai’s river. But no matter how many times we asked, cajoled, or flattered him, Kai wouldn’t say anything else. His father had sworn him to silence, and as much as he wanted to impress us, he feared his father more.

  But that didn’t stop us from trying.

  One morning when Kai met us at the bus stop, Will said, “Kai, let’s go to the river today!”

  Kai said, “You can’t just pick up and walk there.”

  So we knew it was beyond the boundaries of Arch.

  Another day I said, “I wish we could take a boat down that river.”

  And Kai said, “It’s not a river for boating.”

  So we knew the river would be shallow and fast.

  In this way we learned things without Kai even knowing. We learned, for example, that the river traversed the border with the Republic of Minnesota—territory thick with pirates. We learned that men had tried to find the river for years but had given up, because they thought it was a myth. We learned that water from the river began in secret places where no man could reach, in high mountain crags and deep valleys protected by violent winds.

  But we could not convince Kai to tell us the location.

  A month passed. Our mother got no better. Our father seemed more tired and haggard than before. The days got shorter but no cooler. Merchants draped yellow, gold, and red banners across their windows to remind us of autumn, but they couldn’t disguise the monochromatic sameness of the earth and sky. The wind blew harder, and no dry shower could remove the grit permanently embedded beneath our nails and stuck in our skin itself.

  Each morning I saw Kai at the bus stop when I went to school, and he was waiting there when Will and I returned. He seemed bored and restless but refused to go to school, because he didn’t have to. “They don’t teach you anything there,” he said. “Nothing worth knowing.”

  I disagreed. I had learned a lot in school—about butterflies and sand worms; about drainage and
absorption; about how water is made of gases that float in the air.

  “If you don’t go to school, they’ll send you straight to the army,” I said.

  “Will’s going to the army,” Kai countered.

  At least Will’s service was only for twelve months. The kids who dropped out of school ended up in the army for years—or worse. Without a job on the outside, or a sponsor, they had nothing to leave for and few reasons for the army to release them.

  “Anyway, I have a job. I work for my father,” Kai reminded me.

  It had been two months since I met him, and I still hadn’t seen Kai do any work for his father. But he insisted he was there when his father needed him, and I didn’t know enough about the drilling business to recognize if that was just an excuse.

  We were walking in the direction of my building, the only ones on the road for miles. In the distance we could see the collapsed facade of a shopping mall: gaping bricks and metal rebar. There weren’t enough people to keep buying things, and most businesses had been shuttered or moved back to the central core. Scavengers had picked over the most valuable materials, and the rest of the building was slowly falling into a heap. That was what it looked like all across Arch—and across the entire republic, as far as I could tell. People gathered in close proximity to one another, and anything unprotected was left to criminals and the elements.

  Everything fell apart. That was the only constant.

  In nine months I would lose my brother to the army. I couldn’t bear thinking about what would happen once he left home. He promised he would be fine, but I knew boys left all the time and were scarred forever. If anything happened to Will, I didn’t know if I could go on.

  And what of Kai?

  When I thought of him, I felt a sudden flush creep up my neck. I cast a sidelong glance at him, but he didn’t seem to notice. He didn’t look anything like the dark and muscular heroes in the romance screens I sometimes read. Besides, I was too young for a boyfriend—that’s what my parents had said—even though plenty of girls my age were pairing up. There was one boy last year who had followed me around, but he was creepy and left me alone when Will threatened to beat him up. With Kai, however, I grew more flustered as we walked farther and didn’t hear when he asked if he could come over.