Will grinned at me. I pulled my shirt back on and zipped my trousers. They were wet and uncomfortable, but I barely noticed. We had our boat and hadn’t been killed. At least not yet.
But first we had to fit in the skimmer. The boat was barely meant to hold one person. It was rigged to carry as much water as possible and, despite its ungainly shape, designed to be light and quick when empty.
Sula slid into the pilot’s seat by ducking under the steering paddles. Once secured, her head could turn only twenty degrees in either direction. A viewscreen clamped to her face gave her a three-dimensional, three-hundred-and-sixty-degree panorama of the outside. Will had to crawl under her legs and wedge himself into the space between the edge of the seat and the back of her knees. In that position Sula could barely reach the control pedals, which limited her ability to stop. Meanwhile I stretched out on Sula’s lap with my feet resting against the steering paddles. One accidental push and I could send the boat spiraling in the wrong direction.
What seemed merely uncomfortable and dangerous, however, became nauseating once the skimmer got moving. Each bounce on the waves knocked Will’s head against the hard seat. Each dip and crest made my arches ache as I tried desperately not to push the steering paddles. It was so loud in the skimmer that even if we wanted to complain, Sula could not hear us. The venti-unit pumped only enough fresh air for one, and it soon grew stale and rank as odor of our filthy clothes mixed with the smell of fear and sweat.
“Hold tight,” said Sula, as if there were something to hold to. The skimmer lurched on the crest of a wave, then tumbled sidelong into a pylon. The collision knocked my head into Sula’s chin. I didn’t know who had it worse, but my skull felt like someone had driven a stake into it.
“You’ve got a hard head,” she said.
“Not as hard as your chin.”
Sula rubbed her injured jaw with one hand as she navigated the skimmer away from the pylon. Then she cut the engines, and the boat bobbed on the waves. When we were directly below a large water-release hatch, she fired a grappling hook that snagged the hatch’s metal wheel. The boat steadied in the water, held tautly by the rope. Satisfied that we weren’t floating off anywhere, Sula unlatched the outer door of the skimmer, and the three of us climbed onto the deck.
“How do you drive this thing?” asked Will as he examined the bulbous stern and flattened bow.
“I can drive anything,” said Sula. “I was raised on a military base. My father flew jets. He taught me to fly when I was still a teenager. After that everything else was easy.”
“You can fly a jet?” asked Will with a low whistle of appreciation.
“Anything with an engine,” said Sula.
“Is he still in the army, your father?”
“He’s dead. Help me with this.”
Before Will could ask another question, she flipped him a second coil of rope that he caught with both hands. She knotted the other end and tossed it through an open arm of the hook. Then she grabbed the dangling end and pulled it down, securing another line to the hatch. “Can you climb?” she asked me, holding out the second rope.
I shook my head. I remembered trying to escape the prison cell and Will rescuing me.
“I’ll have to carry you, then.” She handed the loose rope to Will. “Hold this, and I’ll pull you up. When you get to the top, you’ll have to open the hatch. Do you think you can do that?”
Will nodded.
“There’s no water in it now, so you don’t have to worry about that. Turn the hatch hard to the left, and it will pop open. You’ll see climbing rungs as soon as you get inside.”
Will took the loose rope in one hand and grasped the taut one in his other hand. “Ready,” he said.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked.
Sula’s eyes were so deep blue that they could have been black. It was impossible to discern where the pupil ended and the iris began. But her eyelashes were a pale and fine gold, lighter than her hair, nearly invisible. When she lifted me into her arms, her eyelids fluttered slightly but never closed. The faintest lines spidered from the corners into the broad plane of her face. I held her, and felt the breath as it went through her lungs.
“It isn’t natural, what they’re doing here,” she finally said.
“Are you a natural-earther?” I asked.
“Never heard of them,” she said. “I don’t believe in slogans.”
Bluewater had factories on the entire coast, she went on. Across the world there were other companies like Bluewater, poisoning the sea so people could turn on the tap without worrying about the consequences. To gain access to water, the lower republics were fighting a war against Canada and the Arctic Archipelago. Across the globe there were other wars between Japan and China, between Australia and New Zealand, between Argentina and the Kingdom of Brazil. Earth existed in perfect balance, but humanity did not.