His gray eyes fastened on mine. He sat silent for a while before responding. “I’m not used to working with a team.”
I waited for more, but none came. “So? And I care about that why?”
He ran both his hands through his hair, straightening up. “What’s it going to take for you to trust me? Not blind trust, but the beginning of something we can work with?” Case had already admitted that he wasn’t going back to where he’d come from. That meant he was going to be around awhile—if not indefinitely. He was a thorn that was going to continue to prick me whether I liked it or not.
Instead of answering, I glanced around the large space we occupied. The barracks was a pretty sweet setup, and he hadn’t complained once about letting us use it. The supplies in here would feed all of us for a few years, no problem. Having one of my residences blown to bits was a reminder that I was going to have to salvage hard for more resources, including ways to gather power.
I was momentarily distracted.
Uncrossing my legs, I stood, turning in a full circle, realizing I hadn’t seen a main power supply to this place since I’d been here. “Where are the batteries located?” My voice came out sounding confused, which was fairly accurate. I had my residences rigged with wires running from solar panels to battery packs. It was all very conspicuous. “Where does the energy come from to work the lights and stuff?”
Case stood, saying nothing, and began to head toward the back of the room.
I followed.
We passed the medi-pod, which whirred quietly, doing whatever it did to make someone well again. At the end, there were two doors—one led to a waste room, and the other I hadn’t investigated before. Case opened the second door and reached in to turn on a light. I leaned in behind him, glancing over his shoulder, and my breath caught in my throat.
The entire room was filled with batteries.
Not small batteries, like the kinds I’d clustered in packs and mounted on my wall. These were big half-a-meter-square helium batteries. The kind only the government had access to, even before the dark days. A single one was rumored to last five years from one full charge. These kinds of batteries had been completely salvaged in the first few years after the meteor hit. I’d never found even a single one in all my years searching, which was saying something.
This room held hundreds.
“What?” My face probably mirrored the incredulousness I felt.
He entered, and I trailed after. As far as I was concerned, these were hunks of solid gold. Stacks upon stacks of living, breathing vitality. If anyone—let alone the government—ever found out they were here, we’d be dunked in a vat of acid and questioned later.
“Showing you this has to count for something, right?” His voice held humor. His stubble was beginning to grow back. From this close, I could see it was a shade or two darker than the hair on his head.
“Possibly. Better would be letting me take some.”
“Be my guest.”
I gave him a look, a cross between an eye roll and an eyebrow waggle. “You’d just give me these? Like it didn’t matter? You know as well as I do what these batteries mean—they mean life. They mean wealth. They mean resources. And death, if the wrong people find out—hell, if anyone found out. These have murder written all over them.” I made a sweeping arm gesture. “Almost every human left in the world would kill for these.”
He seemed unfazed. “I only need enough to run this place.”
“How do they stay charged?” I wandered over to one, my fingers tracing the hard contours. It was warm. “It’s been over sixty years since disaster struck, and you said the sand had eroded only enough for the barracks to be spotted ten years ago. That means they went without charge for fifty years. No battery lasts that long, not even helium technology.”
He moved a stack, uncovering a small shuttered opening situated halfway up the wall. Grabbing on to a knob, he yanked the façade down. Inside was filled with wires.
Solar.
I’d never seen the roof of the barracks. We’d always arrived and departed over the sea. “Are the panels visible from the air?” I asked.
“Semi,” he answered, closing the space up. “You’d have to know what you were looking for. They’re military-grade glass, like a megascraper window, but stronger, with more output. When I first found this place, some were too scratched to salvage, but luckily there were enough to power this entire room. Back when this place was fully operational, there were likely other spaces just like this, but they’ve been destroyed, likely caved in.”
“How long did it take for the batteries to become optimal?”
“Six days.”
I whistled. That was impressive. We made our way out, Case shutting the door behind us. We had to face facts—neither was going to leave the other alone with that pico.
Case veered toward the cooling unit, and I continued to the tech table. “Do you want something to eat?” he asked. “It seems Daze took your words to comb this place to heart.” I glanced over to see the piles of dried-food packets stacked around the cooling unit. Case picked up a package. “This one says it’s meatloaf flavored.” He squinted at the lettering. “Do you know what that is?”
I shook my head. “Nope. But whatever is fine.”
He heated some water and made two bags, walked over, and handed one to me. “If you don’t like it, there’s more to choose from.” He gestured idly toward the countertop.
I took a bite. “Wasting food is not my thing,” I said between scoops. “So unless it tastes like excrement, which it doesn’t, I’m fine.” We ate in silence for a few minutes. Once I was done, I set the bag on the table. I tried to run my hands through my hair, but my fingers couldn’t get through it. I badly needed a shower, but it was going to have to wait. I took a deep breath. “Okay, Case. We have an hour and a half before we head out. I want to hear your story. Leave nothing out, and don’t lie to me. After you’re done, I’ll tell you if it’s enough.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Enough what?”
“For me to trust you.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
For a moment, it didn’t seem like Case was going to answer my request for his backstory. He got up and paced, ending up against a pillar near the cooling unit. He braced his shoulder against the painted metal column and started, “My parents were part of a small tribe in the South, in what used to be called South Carolina. We call them tribes because that’s what they are. Not cities, not towns—but small human collectives trying their damnedest to stay alive. Every waking hour is a fight to stay fed and keep breathing. My parents would’ve come to the city to try to better their lives, but they had no resources or means—no craft, no transportation of any kind—so they stayed.” This wasn’t going to be an uplifting tale, but then, most of ours weren’t. “The eastern shoreline of the United States, as you know, was one of the only places to survive the meteor hits. It was far enough away from all three impacts, even though it’d been battered by the aftermath of hurricanes and tsunamis. My ancestors did us a disservice by believing they could make these small communities work, that they had any lasting sustainability. They didn’t. In reality, they dug themselves into a deep hole they couldn’t get out of. It was only a matter of time before all the resources were depleted and nothing was left. By the time my parents had me, the tribe was less than one hundred strong, and the conditions were abysmal.” He pushed off the pillar, walked over to the cooling unit, and took out a jug of water. After he poured himself a cup, he took a drink. His eyes were full of fatigue, his face slack.
Filling in the gap of his long pause, I said, “I’ve heard tales over the years about these kinds of communities, none of it good.” The stories are full of hardship, sorrow, and death. “I’ve never understood how people could live with less than we have here, because life here sucks.”
He nodded, setting the cup down and coming to sit across from me. “There had been immediate salvaging along the coast directly after the meteor. The community
where I grew up had amassed what they thought was enough to keep them going for many years—and it had—but as the years turned into decades, the stocks ran low. Then The Water Initiative began. Recruiters from the city came to the Southern communities in droves, under the guise of bringing aid, only to recruit those with the most resources among us. Overnight, the last of the vital necessities were gone, carried away by the assholes who decided to join the quest for a better life at the cost of all of ours.”
There was no way to know if the planned Flotilla—a massive city on water—had thrived, or if the hundreds of boats laden with supplies had been taken to their watery graves at the mercy of the fierce, roiling sea.
I clasped my hands in front of me, leaning forward so my elbows rested on my thighs. “The Water Initiative harmed us all in irreparable ways,” I said. “In fact, at the rate we’re going, I’d give it another ten years before we’re all extinct. I don’t know what they were thinking, but obviously only about themselves.”
Case’s eyes took on a faraway look as they focused somewhere behind my shoulder. “I was born the year the Flotilla set sail. Both my parents died four years later, within six months of each other. The medic in charge of the tribe had taken all the inoculations with him.” Case met my gaze, his gray eyes flashing in anger. “After that, my life was a living hell. An older couple who lived nearby sustained me for three years, and even though they meant well, I was nothing more than their prisoner. They never allowed me to go outside because they were so fearful of what might happen, so they kept me locked in a small room.” His voice took on a wistful note. “But they fed me, often giving me more than they had themselves, and the room had a sleeping pod, which provided me with some entertainment and a daily dose of UV. After the old man died, I broke out. I was seven years old. I wandered the streets for close to a year.” He shook his head. “It’s a mystery I survived at all. There were weeks I went without food. A new family who were passing through, one outside the tribe, offered to take me in if I was willing to work. I was one of their many sustainees. I was happy to do hard labor. Anything for a home.”
“The same family who took in your sister?”
“Yes. I met Carmen a few months before that on the street. She was two years older than me. The work was hard, but it paid off in the end, because it made me strong and capable. The family was convinced we could all save ourselves if we just tried hard enough.” Sorrow seeped into his voice. “They were part of a tribe who considered themselves Sun Optimists. If they did the higher power’s bidding, the sun would grace us once again. The work they deemed holy was digging underground shelters. Day and night, that’s all we did. It was backbreaking, but we always had a place to lay our heads out of the rain. The saving grace was that they had a large 3-D bio-printing machine with enough slurry to keep it running, so we always had enough food.”
Slurry was a basic atomic mixture that was added to the bio-printers to make food. In order to create it, you needed access to a macro-centrifuge, which separated organic material by density, filtering out the unneeded waste. The end result looked exactly like it sounded—like a pile of sludgy stuff you poured into your bio-printer.
The results were dry, crumbly protein cakes, with little variation.
“I left a day before my sixteenth birthday.”
“Then what?” I asked. There were a lot of years from sixteen until now.
He was quiet. I let him take his time. His gaze finally met mine. “Militia members recruited me. I was tall for my age, and because of the years of hard work, I was what they referred to as able-bodied.” The corners of his eyes compressed. “They fed me lines about being able to save the world. That I would be one of the few who could keep our community safe. I would be its protectorate. I bought it, so I agreed to go with them.” He shrugged. Then he bowed his head. “They were all lies.”
“Were they part of a child-slavery ring? Sixteen is a young recruit.”
He ran a hand over his face, lingering on the stubble coating his chin. “Yep. They took glee in exploiting children.” He stood, making his way around the couch. “If my life had been wretched before, it was infinitely worse. The abuse was…unbearable.”
My heart gave a single clinch. I’d been there before. I’d lived that life.
His voice was hollow as he continued, his back to me. “The only redeeming thing was they taught me to fight. Both physically and mentally.”
I closed my eyes as his pain echoed inside my soul. “How many years?” I could barely get the question out.
“Eight.”
Eight horrifying years at the hands of abusers. “How did you escape?”
He turned around, his hands behind his back. “A man happened into our community. The abusers—posing as militia—protected five different tribes. It was clear this man had been trained—and trained well. He’d been militia someplace else. He was big, tough, with silver hair and a scar running along his jawline. He asked for entry into the group, and it was granted. He assimilated seamlessly and quickly moved up the ranks. Our leaders fell all over themselves trying to impress him, coaxing him into giving them his secrets.” Case’s eyes flicked over mine. Life had been hard for him. “I refused to give him the time of day, nor my loyalty. And for some reason—likely because of my ambivalence—he singled me out. He goaded me day and night, trying to get me to react like the others. It never worked.” Case dropped his arms and came back to the couch, sitting, his face resigned. “Two days after my twenty-fourth birthday, he shook me awake in the dead of night.” He bowed his head. “He’d killed them all. All my tormentors were gone, the entire militia wiped out. He’d wasted forty-six men without a sound. He told me to get dressed, so I did. We gathered up supplies, got into his craft—mine now—and went to a place similar to this one.” He shrugged, sitting back, glancing around the barracks. “He made it his mission to train me. I never asked why.” Case met my questioning glance. “You don’t ask an angel why they choose to intervene, you just accept it. We moved from place to place. He always knew where to go, where to get more supplies. I suspected he was part of a larger network, but I never found out what it was. He was someone who would never betray a trust. He brought me here for the first time two years ago. We worked hard to uncover and reclaim it from the sand. He died six months ago. I buried him up on the dunes.” Case stood abruptly and walked over to the cooling unit. “During my time with him, I’d reacquainted myself with my old Sun Optimist sustainer family and kept in touch. The parents had died, but the children remained close. After Dixon, the man who trained me, passed away, I headed back South. My arrival happened to coincide with Tandor’s. His crew had gone from tribe to tribe recruiting members, a familiar tactic, just like The Water Initiative.” He opened up the cooler and took out the jug. “Two weeks later, Carmen killed her child, and everything Dixon had instilled in me came to the forefront. I followed Tandor and his men up here, and you know the rest.” He poured himself another glass of water, his gaze falling to the counter in front of him.
He was done.
There was still immense mystery shrouding this man, but it was a start. He’d laid the groundwork, like I’d asked, providing a seed of trust to be planted.
Assuming the story wasn’t complete bullshit.
I nodded as I stood. “Thanks for sharing that with me. I appreciate it. I know the past is hard for most of us to dig up, let alone explain to a stranger.”
He set the cup down and turned to settle his waist against the counter, bracing both his hands against the rim. Outwardly, he conveyed his ease, but I noted the tenseness of his shoulders and the stiff angle of his neck. “Did I pass your test?”
I made my way around the couch. “It wasn’t a test.” The medi-pod timer went off. I was thankful for the distraction. “And, yes,” I called over my shoulder, heading toward Daze, “if the story is truthful, it’ll go a long way toward establishing the start of something.”
What, I wasn’t exactly sure. But I was glad he’d
told me.
“It’s real.” His voice was coated in emotion, surprising me. “Even though I’d give every coin I’ve ever earned to change it.”
* * *
“It’s working,” Daze said excitedly. “Look, the screen is blinking!” It’d taken less than an hour to charge, but it seemed the pico had miraculously been brought back to life.
“I see,” I said. “Do you remember how to get into the files?”
“I think so.” He tapped a few buttons. “This computer helped me learn to read.” His chest puffed. “My dad was real smart. He even worked for the government when he was younger.”
“Is that so?” I asked. “What did he do?”
Daze’s brows furrowed. “I don’t know. My mom never answered me when I asked. But I think he worked with numbers. There were a lot of numbers on this computer. And lots of files about AI and LiveBots. It’s really cool. I can show you later if you want.”
“That’s great, but first we need it to read this.” I picked up the quantum drive, carefully holding it by an edge. “Where do you insert it?” There were a number of slots on the side of the pico, but they all looked the same to me, and none of them looked like the drive would fit inside.
“That doesn’t go anywhere regular,” Daze said in a tone like I should know. “The quantum drive is special. It goes in its own place.” He plucked the chip out of my hand while tapping something onto the screen with the other. Very slowly, a section of the computer broke away, rising like a mini hydro-lift. “It works!” Daze chirped as he carefully placed the quantum drive into the slot and pushed the drive down.
It slid easily, clicking into place, like it’d been waiting for the chance to merge with the supercomputer.
I held my breath.
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