Promised

by Caragh M. O'Brien

  “I’ll take it for you,” Peter said.

  “No. You arrange things here as I requested.”

  “Ordered, you mean,” he said. “And sending Malachai to talk to Derek is a mistake. That should be your job.”

  “Are you going to defy me now, too?” she asked, stung.

  “You’re losing it,” Peter said bluntly. “The last Matrarc never raised her voice.”

  “I’m not her!” Gaia snapped.

  A silence fell around her, and Gaia glanced past Peter to see that a loose circle of people had paused to observe their exchange. The young brunette, Tammy, watched with particular interest, as if she couldn’t wait to stake out her status as Peter’s future girlfriend. Will sidestepped past her and came up beside Gaia. He’d found a chance to shave, too, as if looking sharp were now the top priority of every man from Sylum.

  “Everything all right?” Will asked

  Gaia said nothing. What did I expect? Of course the men would be thinking about themselves. They were vain and useless like everybody else. She frowned at the toes of her boots, unbelievably frustrated.

  “She’s upset,” Peter said.

  “I’m not upset! Quit saying that!”

  What peeved her was Peter questioning her leadership. What infuriated her more was Leon going inside the wall without her permission. And her own stupidity was beyond bearing. She should have known what Leon would do. She should have stopped him.

  Will cleared his throat.

  Gaia took a deep breath and straightened, looking hard at one brother and then the other. She didn’t care if she sounded like a tyrant. “I am not the brilliant Mlady Olivia. I’ll admit that. But I am trying my best to find some solutions here. If you could just, please, follow my orders, like normal people, I’d be grateful.” She spun and marched off toward the south gate.

  CHAPTER 12

  a mouse in the pipe

  AT THE SOUTH GATE, she borrowed a pen and paper and sent a message up to the Protectorat.

  Mabrother Protectorat,

  We missed you at the registry this morning.

  Where’s our water?

  Gaia Stone

  Matrarc of New Sylum

  An hour later, she received a reply:

  Masister Stone,

  These things take time.

  Yours,

  Miles Quarry

  Protectorat

  “He’s toying with us,” Gaia said, and passed the note to Will.

  Will, she noticed, did not seem to hold it against her that she’d acted like a high-handed diva. Peter accepted her apology with a brief nod. Neither made a joke about it, which would have been nice. Instead, she was left feeling secretly ashamed of her outburst, and more worried than ever about Leon.

  She spent the afternoon forcing herself to work calmly with Wharfton leaders to arrange the stockpiling of water. Before the deception at the DNA registry could be discovered, she asked Myrna, quietly, to find a way to suspend operations for the rest of the day, and Myrna arranged a logistical mix-up with some swab supplies. Slightly more than half of Gaia’s people had been registered, and all of them felt cheated when they learned the Protectorat had reneged on the water.

  By nightfall, Gaia was gathered around the campfire of clan nineteen with a dozen key people from Wharfton and New Sylum. There was no news about Leon, Angie, or Jack.

  “As of now, we have enough water for everyone in Wharfton and New Sylum for two days if the Protectorat cuts us off,” Gaia reported. “That means limited baths and washing, but enough for drinking and cooking. We also have teams drawing it off at the wall spigots through the night to bolster our supply.”

  “Two days is nothing,” Derek said, and Gaia agreed.

  “We still need the Protectorat to honor his agreement, long-term,” she said.

  “I don’t get where the water’s coming from,” the miner Bill said. “Do they have springs in there or something?”

  “No, they convert steam from the geothermal energy plant,” Myrna said. “They also recycle the water from the sewer system and purify that to irrigate the fields out here. The water isn’t cheap, but there’s enough to share if they want to.”

  “Just so you know,” Bill said, “me and my miners could get you a nice tunnel under that wall in two weeks’ time.”

  Derek laughed.

  “What? It’s true,” Bill said.

  “Maybe if you have explosives,” Derek said.

  “We’d go even faster, then,” Bill said. “My point is, we can get inside. We could even pop up inside one of the Enclave houses if we had an ally there. That would be best. Then the guards would never know and we could send in an attack force.”

  “It won’t take care of the problem,” Gaia said. She felt like she’d said it a hundred times. “We need the Enclave cooperating with us. They have to trust us and provide us with the water, long-term. Undermining the wall is not the solution. It could even backfire.”

  “I’m just saying. Don’t be so quick to throw out my idea,” Bill said. “If we need to move a number of people inside at the same time, we could do it.”

  “We’d need more than one tunnel for that,” Gaia pointed out.

  “So we cut more tunnels,” Bill said.

  “We’re not staging some massive attack,” she said.

  “We need to do something,” Bill argued. “We ought to prepare. We can’t just sit around out here waiting for the Protectorat to make a move. Vlatir would get this.”

  “We have a town to build,” she pointed out. “You’re not exactly idle.”

  “A town won’t do us no good if we don’t have water,” Bill said.

  Everything came back to that. Grumbles moved through the group.

  “Possibly Vlatir is working out a solution with his father right now,” Will said. The others fell silent again, and Will turned to Gaia. “There’s potential there, isn’t there?”

  “No. I don’t think so. He and his father are not on the best terms.” Gaia shifted uneasily. “Leon told Malachai he’d be back outside by tonight. He’s not.”

  “Then what’s he doing in there?” Bill asked.

  She didn’t want to say, but as she looked around at her friends, she realized she had to. Their futures were at stake, too. “I believe he’s gone in to set up the sabotage of the power and the water system.

  The responding murmur sounded like approval to her.

  “Don’t you know for sure what he’s doing?” Bill asked.

  Gaia felt color rising in her cheeks. “No.”

  Bill let out a guffaw. “There’s leadership for you.”

  Gaia stood. She’d had enough. “Anyone else who wants to lead New Sylum can take over with my blessing,” she said.

  The others quickly objected, and Bill offered a churlish apology. But Gaia really had had it. Her mind was exhausted from trying to reason with people, to come up with plans and backup plans that would satisfy everybody. Even worse, she felt the raw truth of Bill’s comment: as one of her citizens, Leon was her responsibility whether he was operating a pivotal stealth mission, or endangering himself and the rest of New Sylum. A better leader would have been able to control him.

  A better leader would strive to control him, even now.

  She gazed up the dark hillside, beyond the wall to the distant streetlights that shone through the trees. If only the Protectorat would treat them fairly. If only she could find a way to compel him.

  If only she knew that Leon was safe.

  “I don’t see a problem with doing all of it,” Peter said. “We’ll keep drawing off water around the clock to increase our supply. Bill can start his tunneling. It’ll give us more options later. And Mlass Gaia can continue peaceful negotiations with the Protectorat.”

  “I’ll go,” Will said. “Mlass Gaia can stay out here to run things.”

  Gaia shook her head. She knew it would have to be her, one way or another. She fingered the Protectorat’s note that she’d saved in her pocket. “I have
to go deal with him. It’s me the Protectorat wants.”

  “He doesn’t have to get you, though,” Will said. “It’s your responsibility to stay outside the wall. You’re needed here.”

  Gaia looked around the circle and saw the stubborn determination of her friends. She appreciated their concern, but if they wouldn’t let her go inside the wall openly, she’d find another way. She was bad at lying. It was going to be best to keep it short, and not look Will or Peter in the eye.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll stay out here. Will can be our ambassador.”

  * * *

  When Gaia checked on Maya, the girl looked so cozy sleeping beside Josephine and Junie that Gaia couldn’t resist slipping under the tarp beside them for a minute. She drew a blanket around herself and as soon as her head was down, heaviness felled her into instant sleep. It was hours before she stirred, and with a jolt of panic, she came awake. The night was still dark. The campfire had burned down so low she couldn’t read her locket watch. Quietly, she eased out from under the tarp and started uphill.

  Gaia picked her way along the dark path up to her parents’ cottage on Sally Row. Malachai, the most conspicuous of her bodyguards, followed discreetly behind her, and Gaia was impressed with his vigilance.

  Entering the cottage, she found it crowded with half a dozen people focused toward the bunk beds, where a child lay on the lower level and a teenage boy lay on the one above. They were connected by a translucent tube, and just as Gaia realized it was a blood transfusion, Myrna crimped off the tube and bent over the lower bunk.

  Gaia stayed only long enough to collect her satchel. She took a handful of candles from beneath the sink and a box of matches. Then she slipped out the back door and moved silently through the backyard herb garden, past the laundry line, to the chicken coop, which was black and hulking in the night. Soft clucking noises came from within, and she touched a hand to the wooden wall. She crouched over, seeking in the dark behind the coop for the old, rotted wood that had been piled there when her father had dismantled the last outhouse.

  There, deep in the angled, rough, decaying boards, a pale light gleamed. She bent even lower, peering inside, and found a dozen glowing stems of honey mushrooms. She’d never liked the taste, but she’d always loved the mysterious way the stems glowed in the dark. The patch was smaller than she remembered, and she was unwilling to clear it out completely, so she took half of the mushrooms, tugging them gently from the boards and slipping them into her satchel.

  She turned to look back at the house’s windows gleaming with candlelight, and watched for Malachai and the excrims. Though they didn’t have the authority to interfere with her, she still wanted to evade them if she could. Moving as silently as possible, she slipped into the neighboring yard. She passed through several more backyards until she reached a narrow track that skirted above Western Sector Three and intersected the path to the water spigot. People were slowly, steadily filling barrels there by the glow of several torches. She dipped lower again, and wound her way through the narrow, dusty roads of Wharfton.

  It had been ages since she’d last been out alone in Wharfton at night, but she knew every path and corner. So many times in the past, she’d delivered babies to the south gate at all times of the day or night, and as she passed between the dark, wood and stone buildings, she was home again in yet another way. It was like playing hide and seek in the dark, but alone and with a destination.

  If Leon, Angie, and Jack could get into the Enclave, so could she.

  She passed below the quad to avoid the activity there, and heard the distant piano from Peg’s Tavern. She passed down the street where Emily had lived with Kyle in Eastern Sector Two, back when they’d sheltered her before her escape to the wasteland, and then she headed farther east toward the fields. The moon came out from a high, thin cloud and dropped enough pale light over the crops to give them a colorless, alien quality.

  She looked back to see if anyone was following her and saw figures down the road. Picking up her pace, she hurried along the contour of the hill in parallel with the wall. Faint reflections of moonlight along the upper edges of the irrigation troughs made a great web in the fields. The troughs rose gradually to converge at a series of junctures, and finally met up with a big pipe in the slope below the wall.

  Now she had to hope for a clue to how the others had gone in. Angie had been seen near here.

  The ground pitched more steeply beneath her feet as she hurried toward where the main pipe met the hillside. She wasn’t exactly sure what she’d been hoping for, but even with a lit candle, she found no gap, no narrow channel she might crawl up.

  She set a hand on the cool metal of the pipe, blew out her candle, and headed down the slope several meters to where the pipe opened into the main trough. She crouched down, peering around the edge into the pipe’s interior. The darkness was impenetrable. She lit her candle again and held it forward. The inner surface shone with moisture from where water had run earlier, but what struck her most was how narrow the pipe was, not even a meter across.

  They couldn’t have gone inside, she thought. There would hardly be room to crawl.

  But what if they did?

  Water could come pouring down at any time. Her heart began to pound. She could get trapped in there. She had no way to know exactly where the other end led. She didn’t even know for certain if Leon, Angie, and Jack had gone up the pipe. It seemed impossible.

  Her eye caught on something near her foot, just beside the edge of the trough. She leaned to pick it up, and the instant her fingers touched it, she knew what she’d found: Angie’s goggles.

  You know you’re going to do it, she thought, and let out a squeak. Just because she was going to go in didn’t mean she wasn’t terrified.

  A noise behind her made her turn. Malachai was advancing rapidly along the hillside with three other men. He had the sense not to call out anything that might alert the guards on the wall, but she knew he would never let her disappear into the pipe if he caught her. She had no time to waffle.

  She scrambled into the pipe, thrusting the lit candle before her. Pausing only to settle her satchel high on her back by its strap, she crawled deeper into the sloping concrete cylinder.

  “Mlass Gaia, come back!” came Malachai’s voice from behind her. Then a grunt.

  “I won’t be long,” she called back. “I have to get Leon. Chardo Will is in charge.”

  “You’ll never find Leon! Don’t be a fool! You could die in there!”

  “I have to try.”

  There was another grunting noise behind her.

  She kept going faster, finding her rhythm, crawling on her two knees and one free hand. The inner surface of the pipe was a slick beige interrupted only by occasional seams in the concrete where threadlike veins of water gleamed in her candlelight. The air was thin and motionless, so that the wavering heat and smoke of the candle clung around her.

  She heard one more bumping noise behind her, distant now, and hurried onward, meter by meter. The narrow space must have been even tighter for Leon and Jack, she realized. She had to go fast. The longer she was in the pipe, the greater were the chances that water would start down the chute toward her, and there’d be no escape.

  A faint clicking sounded ahead and she stopped, listening intently. The candle flame burned upright in an unwavering, vibrant yellow. She could hear her breathing, quick and anxious, but nothing more in the close silence. Then another click. Something was happening up ahead. She began scrambling faster, and then she heard the gurgling sound of water. A pocket of cool air moved against her face.

  “Wait!” she called. She dropped her candle to use both her hands, crawling in a race, in a blind nightmare of nothingness, terror in her throat. Her satchel slid down, ensnaring her arm, and she stripped it off in alarm. The air grew cooler, and suddenly the pipe began rising more steeply.

  She plunged and crawled madly up the pipe, terrified, and a circle of gray appeared far, far ahead.
r />   “Wait!” she called again, screaming.

  The trickling noise grew closer. She kept her eyes glued to the gray circle and then she saw something small and black scurrying toward her down the pipe. She raced toward it, hearing a faint rumble of laughter. The mouse ran silently beneath her, a stream of water in its wake, and then Gaia was crawling in cold water.

  CHAPTER 13

  old friends

  “WAIT!” SHE SCREAMED AGAIN. “Stop the water!”

  She scrambled onward through the increasing water flow, panicking. Did nobody hear her? She screamed again. The gray circle before her expanded, grew brighter, and then, as an onslaught of water deluged down the pipe, an opening suddenly burst wide above her and she stood up into a shower of pouring cold water.

  She lunged over and clung precariously to the slippery side of the big funnel that contained her. Blinking back water and opening her mouth wide to gulp in a lungful of air, she looked up desperately. Water was rushing loudly out of another pipe above her, into the funnel, and spiraling down into a whirlpool that emptied into the pipe where she’d just been.

  She leapt upward to get a finger hold on the top of the funnel and scrabbled her feet against the side. She slung an elbow over the upper edge and hauled herself out. She toppled in a heap to the floor of a waterworks facility, shivering from residual horror. If Malachai had followed her into the pipeline, he would be engulfed in rushing water by now, as doomed as the mouse. If she had been sixty seconds farther back, she would be dead.

  She sat upward. The loud room was hung with pipes that could be swiveled into big vats and funnels like the one she’d crawled out of. The area was deserted, but an open doorway shone with light, and she knew whoever had started the water could return at any moment. Above her, a hatchway was open to the night sky. On instinct, she grabbed the rungs bolted into the wall and quickly climbed up through the hatchway to the roof, leaving the crashing noise of the water behind her.

  She hugged her arms around herself, struggling to catch her breath and get her bearings. Dark water gurgled in a series of huge, deep holding tanks to her left, and a pump was chugging a spout of splashing water. She could see downhill to the dark fields she had left below the wall. To the right, below the south gate, spread the dark buildings of Wharfton, and even farther, pinpoints of light shone from campfires in New Sylum.