She pressed her whole hand against his mouth.
“Listen: You know when we talked about the voices?”
“The voices got me in trouble,” he muttered.
“I think those are, like, memories from when we’ve lived…before.”
Milo considered what had happened when he dove. The things he knew about the breathing, which were things he had never been taught.
“I think,” she said, “there’s a reason you feel familiar to me,” and Milo realized that she had his penis in her hand.
—
An hour later, there was a general stirring in the boat, and sounds of alarm.
“Shit,” said Jale, up in the prow.
Milo followed her eyes and saw that they were home. There sat the island, green and jagged, with its hills and grass and the village behind the long white beach.
And up on top of it all, over the tallest hill, hovered a cartel tanker ship.
It looked like a coffee kettle welded to a toilet, bigger than an ancient football stadium, steaming and hissing.
“What…” began Milo.
“Trouble,” said Jale, helping to pull the outrigger ashore, forgetting to ignore him.
She assigned High Voltage and Demon Rum to unload the fish from all three boats, then ran into the trees without another word.
They all followed. Everyone seemed to have an idea what was going on. Everyone but Milo and Suzie.
They weren’t in shape the way the islanders were, and the island kids left them behind without hesitation. Suzie kept her eye on what little trail there was to follow, and they hopped over fallen trees and around tangled vines, eventually stumbling out of the forest.
There was a factory on top of the hill. Looked like one, anyway. Looked as if giants had stood an old-fashioned submarine on its end and driven it into the ground. A towering, rusty, patched-up engine, clanking and steaming, full of hoses and oil stains. Over that, the tanker loomed.
“What in the name of…” Suzie began.
“It’s a well,” said Milo, who had been shadowing his dad around machinery for at least a decade. “A gigantic well, with a huge, piece-of-shit water pump.”
Not far away, Jale and Boone and a whole lot of islanders were arguing with two armored Monitors. One commander, with a red helmet, and a deputy with a burp gun.
Milo and Suzie jogged over to listen.
“This machinery is your responsibility,” crackled the deputy, through his speaker. “Either you keep it running your way or we will assist you.”
“Is that what you call it?” sneered Boone. “Sending a fifty-year-old grandmother down to fix a valve with a nine-pound wrench?”
“She is your chief mechanic,” said the commander.
“Was,” said Boone.
Jale slapped angry tears from her face and turned away.
“You may have five minutes to select another volunteer,” said the commander. “Or we will choose for you.”
“There is no one!” roared Boone. “Why won’t you understand? The mechanics can’t dive that far! Even if a diver could get down there, they wouldn’t know what to look for—”
The commander lifted Boone by the throat and held him in the air.
“Four minutes,” he crackled, letting Boone slump to the ground.
The islanders stood there without breathing or speaking.
“I’ll go,” said Milo.
Suzie smacked him—hard—across the back. “You don’t even know what it is!” she hissed.
“They need someone to dive down and fix something,” said Milo. “I can do both of those things.”
Jale shook her head.
“You’re on punishment,” she said.
Everyone stared at her in disbelief.
“Jale?” said Boone, picking himself up, rubbing at his throat. “You wanna bring me up to speed?”
—
Four minutes later, Boone and a team of mechanics led Milo into the rusty submarine—the water pump—and showed him what to do.
The pump was a cave of pipes and hoses and greasy turning things, stinking of scorched oil and exhaust.
“This is what we do,” the mechanics explained. “Everyone on the island—everyone on all the islands—runs these goddamn pumps for the water cartel. It’s a lot of digging and a lot of fixing and a lot of broken bones and skulls.”
At the submarine’s core, something like an anaconda snaked down into a pool of groundwater. The pool was the well itself.
“It goes down a thousand feet,” the mechanics told him. “You have to go down that far to get below the toxins in the water table.”
“Holy shit,” said Milo.
“He can’t dive that far,” said Suzie quietly. “No one can.”
The lead mechanic (new lead mechanic), Big Bird, shook her head.
“The stuck valve is four hundred feet down.”
“Christ on a stick,” said Milo, “they don’t have scuba gear for shit like that?”
“The well is too narrow for gear,” said Big Bird, “with the drill head in place.”
“Can’t you raise the drill head?” asked Milo.
“Not with the valve stuck. It’s a safety feature.”
Big Bird handed him a crescent wrench so heavy he had to hold it with both hands.
“The valve chuck is a bright-orange nut,” she said, “but you won’t be able to see it in the dark. It sticks out a ways; you’ll probably just hit it as you go down. It’s the only thing down there that fits this wrench.”
They stood silently looking at each other.
“Righty-tighty, lefty-loosey,” she said.
“I know,” said Milo.
“Let him get ready,” said Suzie.
The mechanics backed away. So did Suzie.
—
He stood there for a time.
From some distance away, he probably looked to Suzie and the mechanics as if he was meditating.
I have a big mouth, he was thinking.
In fact, the sight of the hole and the dark water and the greasy machinery scared the crap out of him. A lot of bad had happened lately. It seemed a matter of destiny that it would come to an end here, with his drowning or getting smashed, just when all he wanted was to go off someplace and have sex with Suzie.
“Milo?” said Suzie, tapping him on the shoulder.
Shit! She could read his—
“You don’t have to. You know that, right?”
“Just another minute,” he said. “I’m oxygenating.”
As Suzie re-joined the mechanics, he felt more focused.
After a minute or so, he jumped in.
Splash!
Sick! The water was what you might expect from swimming inside a machine. Oozy and thick. Too late, he thought to close his eyes, but they already stung.
Gripping the big wrench, he sank like a firebrick, scraping against the anaconda hose, then bouncing against the earthen wall of the well itself.
The water squeezed him. Pressure mounting.
He tried to feel the balance and harmony he’d felt in the open sea, but it just wasn’t there.
He tried to open the toolroom in his brain and get the light to shine out, but he couldn’t find it.
He tried to meditate, but his mind kept thinking about having sex with Suzie and—
He slammed into something hard and round. It jabbed into his leg and stopped him hard enough (almost) to make him yell out or take a breath. The wrench bobbled loose, but he caught it with his elbow.
Fuck! Idiot. The valve nut. He’d forgotten.