His lungs had begun to burn, but he had time to do what he’d promised, he thought.
He worked the wrench into place. It fit neatly.
Lefty-loosey…he gave it a yank.
It didn’t budge.
Of course not, he thought.
The pain in his lungs cranked up a notch (I don’t have enough air to get back up, he realized, and tried to ignore the thought).
He gave the wrench another pull. Nothing.
At this point, someone put a hand over his face.
He almost screamed. He did urinate, which warmed the water and felt nice. And he realized almost instantly what was going on. It was the dead chief mechanic, bobbing around.
It was all Milo could do to convince his body not to panic, but he calmed himself. Even felt the beginnings—way too late—of peace and balance.
He was also left with at least a gallon of adrenaline pounding through his veins. He was aware of this in the same way he was aware of his respiration.
Milo put his whole body into one massive tug, and the nut came loose and turned.
And turned. And Milo heard something clank into place.
Up! Now! He launched himself toward the surface even as he felt his consciousness beginning to slip. Any second, his body would gulp for air, whether he wanted it to or not— A dead hand touched him again. This time it grabbed his wrist.
Wild horror! He shit himself a little—
But it wasn’t the dead mechanic. The hand was a living hand, and it pulled him and kicked along with him and took him up…
(What? Who?)
Light, at the end of a verrrrr-rrrrr-rrrrr-rrry long tunnel…
Splashing through!
Oily, gassy air!
He sucked it up—delicious!—grasping the edge of the well.
He was so damn weak. He was going to pass out and sink.
An arm around his neck. Legs twining around his legs, holding him up.
“Suzie?”
“Just shut up and pass out,” she said, and he did.
—
The well sucked water up out of the bedrock and pumped it into the cartel tanker. The Monitors climbed back aboard the tanker, and the tanker rode its skyhook up into space.
Milo and Suzie lay in the hospital hut, sleeping.
Sometimes people brought them something to drink or a bit of fish to eat.
One time, Milo woke up and his mom was sitting there, naked, trying to feed him some soup (awkwaaaaa-aaaaa-rd…).
The twins were there, briefly. They gave him a bored look, said, “Fong!” and scrambled away somewhere.
“They’re letting me teach in the school,” Mom told him. That was all he remembered from Mom’s visit.
The next time he woke up, it was Suzie who fed him soup.
“That other mechanic finally came to the surface,” she told him. “There’s a funeral for her tonight. They have these toxic trees that burn like crazy, so whenever they have a funeral, it usually means a bonfire. Except you’re not supposed to get too close or breathe the smoke, or get the ashes on you, or go near the fire pit after until there’s a good rain. Other than that, though, they say it’s really cool and burns different colors.”
“What the flying hell were you doing down in the well?” he asked.
“What did you expect me to do? You think you’re the only one who can do that voice-in-the-head thing? You don’t listen. It’s the past-lives thing I told you about. We knew each other, and I think I used to be a queen or something.”
“Of that,” said Milo, setting the soup bowl aside, “I have no doubt.”
“Ooh,” she said. She liked that. She let him kiss her.
She let him do all kinds of things.
—
They left the hospital tent in time for the funeral, which was a simple affair.
Boone and five other islanders lowered the body into a sandy grave.
“Midnight Rider,” said Boone, piling sand over her with a hand-carved shovel.
That was the name the woman had chosen for herself, because it told people something about who she was.
“Midnight Rider,” everyone repeated, and they lit the bonfire, and stepped back and stayed out of the smoke, and applauded the wonderful colors.
Then they went about their business and, as far as Milo could tell, never mentioned the woman again.
Afterward, Mom took Milo by the elbow and called the twins with a whistle, and the four of them went to the shore together and stood—cautiously—knee-deep in the sea.
And they talked about Dad. Just talked about him. And cried.
And Mom didn’t say they shouldn’t talk about him anymore after that. Dad hadn’t been an islander. But, as far as Milo ever knew, they didn’t. He was part of another world, or a face from a fading dream.
—
There was another funeral, the next night.
Sometime during the high tide, with hundreds of people around, three sisters had walked right into the ocean, holding hands, and let the monstrous undertow take them.
“No one tried to stop them?” Milo asked Chili Pepper.
Chili Pepper shook his head. “Some people choose not to live like this,” he said. “It’s like defiance, you know?”
A light rain came down on the funeral that night, so the colors were dimmed somewhat.
There were no bodies to bury, so Boone sprinkled some sand on the wind.
“Betty,” he intoned. “Lunch Lady. The Priestess of Mu.”
“What does it mean when you sprinkle the sand?” Milo asked Boone later.
Boone didn’t know. “Just seems right,” he said.
—
They became islanders.
One of the first things they learned was that the islanders called themselves the “Rock ’N’ Roll Hall of Fame.” (Booty Dog had a twentieth-century pop-culture book called I Want My MTV. They got a lot of their names from this book.) Other islands named themselves after their own mood and style. Big, glad names were popular, like the Sexy Geniuses and the Hookah Panthers to the north. There were serious names, like Hope Island, the Isle of Life, and Gateway Atoll.
“Things change,” Boone told Milo, “so names change. Last year we were the Twilight Zone.”
They traded with other islands sometimes. Here on the Hall of Fame, they grew a kind of grass that was great for twisting into rope. On the Isle of Life, they grew apples that could feed four people for a week. So they traded grass for apples.
“Last year,” Boone told Milo, “we traded a girl named Red Rita to a boat builder named Spock.”
“Traded?” Milo’s eyes darkened.
“Married,” Boone clarified. “Relax.”
Hall of Famers helped them build houses—one for Mom and the twins, one for Milo and Suzie. Milo and Suzie’s hut was made from giant leaves, mostly, and some metal plates salvaged from a cartel trash drop.
One whole wall of Mom’s hut was an aluminum strip with part of a faded advertisement on it, advising everyone to watch a TV farce called Time Lobster.
Mom made a better islander than Milo would have guessed. She taught in a little bamboo schoolhouse they had and took a seat on the New-Things Committee, a think tank for brainstorming up better ways to live. If you’d had an engineering job or a real education, you got pressed into this group. A man named Raymond Carver, a former cartel lab chief, had been in charge of this board for as long as anyone could remember.