“I’ll need five minutes.”
Ulysses nodded. I knew that pirates worked together, their groups small but well-coordinated. I surveyed our group. Two of us had never handled a weapon, three of us were injured, and the four of us were badly outnumbered. Yet our survival—and Kai’s—depended on our collective effort. Ulysses divvied up the tasks. Sula and I would cause the diversion. Ulysses and Will would make their way to the presentation room. If everything went as planned, we would meet on the roof, where the jets were parked.
“Be careful,” Ulysses instructed. “Stay low, and keep to the corners. Avoid the open halls. If there’s shooting, don’t engage; keep moving.”
“You be careful too,” I said to him. The drug Sula had given him was wearing off, and he flinched when I took his hand. His skin was sallow. Beads of perspiration lined his forehead. But his grip was strong, and his eyes were focused and intense. He pulled me closer, and his warm body and pirate smell enveloped me: wood smoke and sand.
“After this, no matter what happens, no more rescues,” he said softly to my ear. “Promise me that.”
I nodded solemnly. If we didn’t rescue Kai, there wasn’t going to be a second chance. We would never see our parents again.
As if he sensed my fear, Ulysses said, “I’ll get you home. Word of honor.”
“No one’s going home if we don’t hurry,” said Sula. I gave Will a hug, but there was no time to linger. Sula moved swiftly for the stairwell, and I hurried to catch up.
The steel steps glistened, but rust had already begun to wear through on the risers. Like everything else about Bluewater, the shiny surfaces hid corrosion and corruption. The entire edifice was a monument to ignorance. The truth was that butterflies could not disrupt an entire ecosystem simply by beating their wings. It took willful neglect and deliberate blindness, the refusal to see the obvious even as the land grew toxic before our eyes. But I still held out hope that we could change our ways.
“How far?” I gasped.
“Sea room,” she said. “Lowest level.”
Ulysses had taken Nasri’s gun; Sula had scavenged his knife and laser-taser. As we walked she showed me how to use the laser, aiming its precise beam at any large muscle group but avoiding the head, where it could incapacitate an enemy. “Legs, stomach, or groin,” she said. “Shoot first, then ask your questions.”
I couldn’t imagine shooting a man, but I knew it might be possible. At least the laser-taser wouldn’t kill anyone. I hoped Sula wouldn’t either.
We went down the stairwell, back in the direction from which we had climbed. The drone of the desalinating machinery was like the advancing rumble of a convoy. Sula was explaining how much power desalination required, but by the time we reached the double safety doors, I could barely hear a word she was saying.
The doors were bolted, but Sula blew them easily with an explosive cap. Bluewater’s defenses were directed outward: toward the coast and the ragtag boats that troubled its boundaries. Frontal attack, not sabotage, was its main concern.
Inside, the sea room was louder than jet engines. Five enormous pipes sucked in water and transported it to steel cisterns. But much worse than the noise was the smell. Foul, rank, and fetid—tons of seaweed and other waste rotted in giant holding tanks from which they would eventually be dumped back into the ocean. Sula knew that the waste had to be cleared from screens inside the pipes twice daily, or else they would clog, and the desalination process would grind to a halt.
We had no gloves or masks. Sula fashioned them as best she could from the remaining cloth of my shirt’s sleeves and her own wet suit. But they were clumsy, and soon both of us were scooping rotting seaweed from the containers with our bare hands. At first I nearly passed out from the stink. Then when I grew used to the odor, my hands burned from the chemicals. My eyes filled with tears, and the back of my throat felt as if someone had scratched it raw.
We removed the filtering screens from the intake pipes easily enough. But stuffing them with rotten seaweed required pressing the debris into the tiny mesh so that it would not fall out. A foul brown liquid seeped between our fingers, and my hands were red and blistered before we had even completed one screen.