A great roar erupted as Ulysses pushed Thomas toward the caves. The boy ran, not like something sickly, but something spectacular, his hair flaming and triumphant, his sister, Danielle, behind him, followed by scores of children of all sizes, the smallest carried by the tallest, the crippled guided by the able-bodied. They spilled into the caves like an ancient river, a stream of humanity drawn by the promise of food, nourishment, life itself.
In a moment Will and I were alone with Ulysses and the pilot. Dust from hundreds of footsteps still hovered in the air. A weak sunlight pushed through. The atmosphere was rank, but a breeze had begun to blow. We had given the children what we could to protect and feed them. The rest was up to them.
Ulysses stepped toward the helicopter. “Ready?” he asked.
“For what?” asked Will.
“To find Kai, of course.”
CHAPTER 14
We flew south.
From the sky, the earth looked like a flattened soy cake. The blues, greens, and whites familiar from the school screens were missing, as if they had always been a lie. At fifteen hundred meters I could see dried rivers like the spidery, cracked fingers of a dead man. The only thing of color was a brilliant red sun, burning low in the west.
On the ground I had never thought much about the earth, but from the sky it was all I could see. We could have been on Mercury or the moon, some barren place that creatures had once inhabited but now were long gone. Not a single living thing stirred, and the ever-present grayish dust spiraled in thousands of eddies. I saw something that could have been a road, but it was decomposed and swallowed up on either side. The remains of a truck or a tank were scattered like bones nearby. In the copter it was drier even than on land, and I couldn’t lick my lips quick enough to keep them moist.
I knew if we could climb higher, I would see the silver pearls that dotted the planet’s surface and were all that remained of the great lakes and rivers. Enormous reservoirs, they held all the fresh water left on the planet. Canals, aqueducts, pipes, and pumping stations funneled every drop into their well-guarded steel and concrete basins. Humans had finally made the world to suit their purposes. Even the weather was under their control, and the sun, moon, and stars were sure to follow.
A chill made my bones ache and muscles shudder.
“There’s another blanket in the rear,” said Ulysses.
Will reached for it and handed it to me. I let it fall to my lap. “How do you know he’s there?” I asked.
“Don’t know for certain,” said Ulysses. The PELA mercenary who had told the pirates Kai was a prisoner of Bluewater had traded the information for his life. To him, Kai was just a boy and well worth the trade. PELA did the dirty work and asked no questions.
“So what’s your plan?” asked Will.
“The plan?” Ulysses chuckled. For the first time, I noticed that his clothes were ragged and torn. His unwashed hair and unshaved beard made him look like the older men in the gaming center. When he grinned, his crazed and cracked smile framed a handful of battered yellow teeth. But his brown eyes glittered like a promise. “Save the kid. Find the water. Get rich.”
“Seriously. Don’t you have a plan?” I asked.
Ulysses tried to look serious for a minute. “I thought you were the smart one,” he said. “Don’t you have a plan?”
“You can’t just fly into the Great Coast, shoot your way into Bluewater, and take Kai and his father,” I told him.
“Why not?”
“’Cause you can’t. They’ll kill you, for one thing.”
Ulysses scratched his beard. “Hmm. Need a better plan.”
The pilot interrupted with a question about their route, and he and Ulysses reviewed our position against a crinkled and torn map. We were flying low, and now there were the unmistakable signs of habitation: broken roads, scavenged vehicles, the ruins of concrete buildings, smashed and flat as if they had been crushed by a giant foot. But no people, and no other signs of life.
“The cities were the first to go,” said Ulysses, noticing that I was staring out the window.
“Why?”
“Most of them have no water. They piped it in from the country. There were riots and war.”
“The Great Panic.”
“Before that, even. The Panic came later. When the Canadians dammed the rivers and the last great polar cap melted.”
“They melted it for water,” said Will, who pushed himself forward so that he was practically sitting on my seat.
“It was already melting. The ice caps were retreating, and the sea did the rest.”
“Why didn’t anyone stop it?”
“They couldn’t. It happened too quickly, and it was too warm. Countries took what they could. But when the ice caps melted, all that water was wasted—it spilled into the sea and turned to salt. The aquifers had already dried up. The lakes had been drained or poisoned. All that was left were the rivers, and most of those were already dammed.”
“What about the rain?” I asked. “The sky.”