“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.