The Isle

  Magistrate Harcourt examines the card. “Why are you here?” I close my eyes, arms crossed behind me. The others think what I’m about to ask is crazy, and maybe it is. But that alone—is even crazier. This is everyone’s planet and everyone’s water, and people should take care of one another.

  I swallow my doubts. I have to.

  “We’re here to ask . . . ,” I start. My voice breaks. I try again. “We’re here to ask if you could open the aqueduct to the UMI. Please.”

  “Excuse me?” The magistrate cocks his head, smiling.

  I say it again.

  He does a double take and points to the megaphone stand. “I’m sorry, did you not just witness the auction?” he asks politely. He thinks I’m confused—

  He’s the one who’s oblivious.

  That bitterness rises from my stomach up into my throat. Swallowing the anger, I walk to the north side of the dam and look out over the reservoir—inky water for miles.

  “You have so much fresh, more than you need. So much more, that you built the dam higher to make room for it all.” I stop to breathe, so nervous, my leg muscles are shaking. When I look up at the magistrate, he’s red-faced, guiltily avoiding my eyes. “Just thirty miles south, people are spending all their money buying black market, preparing for the drought. Why wouldn’t you want to help?”

  Magistrate Harcourt scoffs, then claps his hands in laughter. His stomach shivers, straining the buttons even further. He scratches his head. “Child,” he says, and already I know I’m not going to like what follows. “That is not how the world works; no one likes to be asked for handouts. It’s been decades since the disaster. Take some responsibility.”

  “But that’s not how the world works either!” I cry, wagging my finger at him. He’s blind. “Sometimes the hole’s too deep and you can’t dig yourself out. The longer it goes on, the harder it gets, until the only way is for someone to help you out.”

  Magistrate Harcourt stops laughing and shakes his head. “Have you heard the saying, ‘survival of the fittest’? None of this is my problem. A lion doesn’t send back the goat, because he’s the lucky one born with teeth. You have your rainwater—you’re standing here; the collection systems must be working. These are our natural resources.”

  Magistrate Harcourt’s fat brown eyes glare down at me, as hard and unyielding as this dam.

  “Put simply,” he continues, “this water is ours. If you want it, you will have to pay for it at auction, just like everyone else. The UMI is not my responsibility. I am sorry.”

  He doesn’t look sorry. “So that’s your answer?” My voice croaks, pitifully. I don’t know what else to say. I could tell him about Dunn’s army—throw it in his face that they’ll arrive on his doorstep in a few hours—but I’d never sell us out like that.

  “That’s all?”

  He sighs, exasperated. The conversation is over. “Since you are already here,” he says with a false smile as he spreads his arms wide, “you may as well enjoy the fair.”

  Swiftly, he drops his hands and his fake kindness. “But I expect you to be gone by morning.”

  With those last words he shuffles off, not one glance back.

  From some tent, a balloon bursts in the air. A girl squeals in laughter. The ding of some lively bell, the cheering chorus. Sounds blur together.

  The happy fair goes on.

  54

  REN

  11:15 P.M., FRIDAY

  I leave Kitaneh’s knife in.

  Once it’s out, I’ll bleed freely. Too soon for that.

  My penny necklace weighs tons—it wants to sink me—and my eyes burn. Not from the salty brack, but from tears. I’m crying, swallowing water, and I need air. I clutch the hilt in my belly and using only one arm I swim up, reaching, fumbling for the grate.

  I grab its edge—

  Derek?

  He’s grappling with Kitaneh—he must’ve followed her into the apartment. He tries to restrain her from behind, but she jerks sideways. Too fast, he winds his arms tight around her body. She can’t free herself. And now, she’s got no knife to fight with.

  Derek presses his mouth to her ear, struggling to keep her still. “Ren can do it. She can destroy the spring.” Kitaneh bucks, almost breaking free. Derek doesn’t allow it.

  “Impossible,” she spits back, but her voice is soft—like maybe she hopes she’s wrong.

  “Voss was my father. Emilce, my mother,” I say in a voice so weak it’s hardly my own.

  Derek’s face drops.

  Even with a knife in my gut, I find myself thinking crazy things . . . things that won’t matter a half hour from now: I hope he might come to love me someday, knowing whose blood runs through my veins.

  I’m barely able to hold on to the grate, but Kitaneh needs to hear the rest. “I didn’t know until today . . . there’s something with my blood—a protein—the right amount will kill the ecosystem.” I take deep breaths as my vision narrows and my toes go numb.

  Kitaneh stops fighting. She slumps over Derek’s arms, and I think if he weren’t holding on to her, she might collapse.

  “She’d be willing to die for this?” Her voice is hoarse as Derek lets her go.

  I nod, salty tears gathered at the corners of my mouth.

  Kitaneh’s eyes redden and her tanned face pales. When she meets Derek’s gaze, it’s like watching someone discover birth and death in the same moment.

  “So many centuries we’ve kept the spring hidden,” she whispers, staring into nothing. “Forever, it seems. Protecting humanity from their very own nature. Secretly . . .” She chokes on a feeble laugh. “Secretly, I’d hoped there was a different reason. That perhaps, we weren’t just hiding it—we were preserving it. For a better kind of human.”

  Derek is quiet. He nods his head gently, like he too might’ve harbored that secret hope. Outside, a dull thud shakes the building’s foundation—it must be Lucas and the remaining DI.

  When my wrist buzzes, I barely feel it over the pain in my gut. Static fills the airlock. “Respond, dammit!” Chief Dunn’s voice crackles through the comm’s weak audio. “I’ve sent another unit to the last known GPS coordinates. They’ll be there shortly. And Dane, if I find out you knowingly led my men into some kind of trap . . .”

  I don’t hear the rest. Dunn’s threats don’t matter no more.

  Kitaneh reaches for the wheel, about to open the basement-side airlock. “Lucas can’t hold them off alone. I’ll let him know what you’re doing. We’ll keep them away for as long as we can.” Her hand lingers there.

  She spins the wheel. “Do it.”

  Pressing another button, the grate under Derek’s feet retracts.

  He jumps into the water and the airlock continues to flood. Taking one long inhale, he wraps his arm across my chest and leads me to the cave. I trail behind, too weak to swim on my own.

  The sides narrow around us. I’m banged against slick rock. Without light, we’re unable to see how tight the space has become and I tuck in my limbs to avoid getting bumped again.

  The first air-hunger pang hits. This time, with a knife fixed in my gut, it’s harder to force back the ache. I malfunction, dizzied, swallowing back vomit. My throat contracts as my jaw clenches, but I defy the need to open my mouth. I kick, but almost immediately, my kneecaps ache. I just don’t have the energy.

  Derek’s pulling me along faster than I could swim on my own, and soon, the cave widens, curving upward. I barely stick my tongue out, and it comes back with a sweet taste. Then, like an ice cube dropped into hot water, my skin melts into a new heat. I’m wrapped up in it, warmed straight through to my core.

  For a split second, I’m too hot, anxiety-ridden—this might not work. My thoughts spirals toward every worst-case scenario.

  I’ve led Dunn straight here.

  It will never, ever end.

  Air . . .

  Derek and I gasp into the pitch-black cove smaller than Benny’s cloud—a watery pool spotted with neon-green-capped mushroom s
tars. Fresh spills into my mouth. Out of habit, I spit as he cradles me against his chest.

  “You’re sure about this?” Derek asks, trembling under his wet cotton T-shirt.

  “Too late not to be, ain’t it?”

  Water drips like rain onto my nose and between my lips. I blink, confused, because my face is above the surface.

  I’m swallowing his tears.

  “Go.”

  A jab under my ribs sends shock waves throughout my entire body. My teeth chatter. He’s twisting the blade. I can feel the blood as it’s wrung from me. I imagine red clouds like nuclear warfare covering every glowing organism in the cave. It surges over the algae and the spores, and every mushroom. My mind is a bonfire, searing against the underwater universe.

  I cough blood and fire and smoke.

  The basic drive to survive overrides my mission, as if my mind has pulled on the emergency brakes. My rib cage is a straitjacket. I buck against Derek’s arms, springwater splashing onto my stomach.

  Like a storm passing, the searing disappears. My flank stops throbbing, my breathing steadies.

  The damn water. It’s healing me. How can I bleed out if it’s closing up my wound?

  It’s too strong.

  “Twist again,” I tell Derek. “Lift me from the water and hold on tighter.” If I can’t fight the instinct to survive, he has to fight it for me.

  Again, he rotates the hilt. It’s a metal helix drilling my stomach, while my own helixes escape.

  Did you know that the heart only gets one billion beats in a lifetime?

  I told that to Aven once. Now I’m proving myself wrong.

  Like flipping a switch, my eyesight turns off. Before, I was seeing by the light of a hundred million green plants. Now it’s just an empty night.

  From a distant planet, somewhere light years away, Aven calls my name. Ren! It’s as though the rocky cave wall is speaking to me. Derek hears nothing. I alone hear the whispering walls. They quiet, though.

  The blade drills deeper.

  My body burns up in the sky. All my thoughts are trapped under glass. I’m outside the glass. I see my sister, a bird, living on a branch out of my reach. She’s happy. She looks away.

  I open my eyes, or maybe they were open all along and only now they’re working again.

  The spring’s green twinkles.

  I cannot take this going and coming.

  “Higher,” I croak. Derek raises me up. I’m lifted like a living constellation and hung on to the sky, where even dead things go to be immortal. Blood makes highways over my body, dripping into the pool.

  Derek shakes. His whole body convulses over mine, sending ripples of blood-soaked spring water into green algae. It drinks the poison.

  “I’m here, Ren. . . .”

  He tells me I walked into his betting office like a bomb going off. That I made him cower and I made him laugh. He thought I was the toughest metal, but he was wrong. I was a mirror. He says words like unfair and why her, as my memory begins to melt.

  Why am I in his arms if I can’t hold them? Why does he have lips if I’m a ghost? Can a thought also be a kiss? I pretend it doesn’t taste like a blank wall.

  His name . . . what is his name?

  “You’re not alone,” someone sobs, but I don’t hear anything—just a passing cloud giving up the rain.

  I am dying.

  In my ears, the howl of death dogs. I bare my teeth in reply: Take me. From the back of my throat, a gurgling pours out. My heart is a breaking clock.

  I’m dissecting myself like the frog in Nale’s classroom—examining what’s inside.

  In me are all the things Voss and I have in common: Our blood, yes, but in that, a desperate clinging to the ones we love. Our relentlessness—the way we don’t understand the word no. And . . . the legacy we leave behind.

  I’m dying for Death.

  Even as I undo the damage Voss caused, I will betray humanity too. Except, I’ll do it uniquely, in my own way . . . as a daughter should—by denying them my faith. I don’t harbor Kitaneh’s secret hope.

  Was this the right thing?

  The question will live longer than I will.

  Along the cave wall, green stars flicker in the water. Red laps up against slick algae, bathing their stems.

  I’m being emptied into the universe.

  One by one, the stars go out.

  55

  AVEN

  11:30 P.M., FRIDAY

  We failed.

  Like ants, we climb down the black spiral staircase. The Cloud bobs in the distance, tethered to the rocks, waiting. We’re all so quiet there might’ve been a death. In a way, that’s not wrong. Only it wasn’t a person, it was an idea. Tiny and perfect, not yet met with the future. It was hope.

  We failed.

  I hate those words. Ren wouldn’t think them. She doesn’t allow it. Since the first time I saw her sneaking off to the races, she’s been that way. Maybe that’s why she always succeeds.

  I won’t fail, then. I won’t accept defeat.

  “We’re not leaving,” I say, halfway down the dam. “I want to know where the extra water comes from. Did you see the magistrate’s face when I mentioned it? I thought he felt guilty about not sharing, but that couldn’t be less true, clearly. So, if he’s not guilty about that, what is he guilty of?”

  “You think he’s hiding something?” Ter asks as both he and Callum skip stairs to catch up.

  “It’s the only answer that makes sense.”

  “The entrance to the distributary was heavily guarded,” Callum says, glancing back at the dam. “I’m not sure how easy it’ll be to investigate.”

  We need another way in. . . .

  A gust of wind takes my hair, and I stifle a sigh. I imagine what it will look like at midnight—someone pushing the button: The aqueduct opens. Hundreds of gallons of reservoir fresh surge into the winner’s city.

  I look around, but all I see are stone and stairs, and the river forking ahead of us. The cusp of a brack waterfall flows white.

  A waterfall . . .

  At Nale’s, we used to get holo time, when she’d replay old cartoons and movies. Characters were always hiding doors behind waterfalls. Even Robin Hood did it, and he was a fox.

  Scrambling to the bottom of the stairs, I leap over rocks to cross the river. Once on the opposite bank, I race downhill, looking for a side view.

  A crunch-crunch, crunch-crunch stops me in my tracks. I duck behind a boulder and freeze as a beam of light carves up and down the woods.

  Patrolling the nearby grounds is a ranger—he’s making his way uphill, boots trampling the underbrush. Scanning downhill for more of them, another light catches my eye. About a hundred feet off, a woman sits inside an outpost flush with the treeline. Behind it, deeper in the woods, I spot a fenced area—it’s dimly lit, but I can’t tell if it’s being patrolled.

  Then I realize this side of the river is dotted with outposts . . . all hidden just deep enough in the woods that they’re invisible from the river.

  Only one directly faces the waterfall, though.

  I’m onto something . . . and I’m trapped.

  “Aven! Where’d you go?” Ter calls from a rock in the middle of the river.

  The patrolling ranger shines his light on him. “State your business!” Inside the outpost, another ranger stands and peers through the glass to get a better look.

  My chance.

  Staying low, I scuffle downhill, dragging dirt and twigs under my feet. I don’t slow until I’m directly in line with the outpost. To my left, a ravine drops at least fifty feet into the river below. To my right, the ranger. She casts unsure glances in Ter’s direction.

  As I inspect the waterfall, gusts of brack spray my face—I’m looking for an arc wide enough to fit a pathway.

  All I see is the ravine. No path.

  A yellow beam cuts across the grass just inches from my feet. I turn—I’m too close to the waterfall—but the ravine’s right behind me; there’s
no place to go. The light swings closer. Without thinking, I avoid it. . . .

  I step backward into the ravine.

  My heart races, drugging me with adrenaline. I cry out, but it’s swallowed by the rushing water. I wait for gravity to catch me and throw me down, but—

  I’m not falling.

  I’ve landed on . . . glass? A thick, clear ledge extends wide enough to walk along. My burning muscles shake with relief, calmed by the waterfall’s cool drizzle. Choking on laughter, I crawl along the path, too shaky to stand. When it narrows, I have no choice; I pretend I’m walking a roof gutter or doing a balancing act for the circus. Soon it’s barely wide enough for one foot, but I find a handle drilled into the gray rock face. Brack spray clings to my eyelashes and wets my lips, salty. Spotting a gray camouflaged door, I begin to feel heady, like I can do anything. I was right.

  I touch the handle.

  Then I read the sign.

  Emergency Exit. Alarm Will Sound.

  There’s a keypad to the door’s right—it locks electronically. I can’t get in without the code. My stomach curdles. Of course it’s locked. Turning back, I follow the ledge, but I don’t cross onto the bank—I’ve already made it this far.

  Instead, I type a message:

  Found the emergency exit, but it’s got an electrical key-code lock. Any ideas?

  As I wait for Ter’s answer, the ranger stationed by the tree draws semicircles with her flashlight. The beam passes over the river and the waterfall, through the woods, then swings back over the waterfall again. I flatten myself, cheek to the glass, letting it pass me by, and wait for what seems like hours. They have to come up with a plan, I know . . . but the glass is cold, and the water is cold. I begin to shiver, so I curl into a ball. Finally, my wrist buzzes.

  Callum’s going to distract the rangers while Benny figures out a way to cut the power. He thinks he knows where they keep the circuit breaker. And I’m finding you.

  As I type my reply, a second comm follows:

  Where exactly are you?

  I explain as best I can and press send, wondering about Callum’s distraction. Creeping closer to the bank, my teeth chattering, I get a better look.