“We are busy doing our work,” Mr. Jones would say, continuing to work.
“Your work,” the Monitors would continue, “is to operate the wells and be prepared to provide water for our tankers.”
Mr. Jones would ignore this nonsense, because it was no longer true.
The Monitors would probably get mad and—yep, there they went, beating the living shit out of Mr. Jones. Mr. Jones, as rehearsed, wrapped his arms around his head and tried to endure. He even tried to return to his work, but they clubbed him back to the ground and left him there, bloody and motionless.
“Dammit,” Milo whispered.
Briefly, the Monitors split up and tried to drag a few people down to the shore. But the people they grabbed went limp and became a real pain to move.
“How come you’re all wearing this skeleton shit?” Milo heard a Monitor ask Christopher Noonguesser, trying to pull him away from his work.
“We’re dead,” answered Noonguesser. “There’s nothing you can do to us.”
The Monitor gave Noonguesser a smart kick in the teeth and left him there.
“Dammit,” said Milo. He kept letting his thread get loose, which meant starting over. What he needed was a drop spindle. Rootabeth, the resident expert, had told him that at least three times, but he’d been too lazy to carve himself one. He would do it tonight, he decided, if they didn’t all get shot today.
The Monitors were having a conference by their spacecraft now.
Crackle, crackle, crackle.
They would get on the loudspeaker and make some kind of threat, Milo knew.
But they didn’t.
They got back in the heavies and swooped away over the outgoing tide, up and gone.
The Hospital Committee rushed to help Jones and Noonguesser.
“What now?” asked Suzie.
“Now I’m going to go find some wood for a spindle,” he said. “You?”
“I’m going to go scrape off this fucking blue paint,” she said.
At least eighty other islanders went with her into the woods, scratching and cursing, all silently proud and feeling brave to the point of tears.
—
The silent treatment could work both ways, Milo discovered.
The next day, the goons were back. Several sleds and heavies landed. One large ship hovered over the beach, not quite landing.
The cartel stooges who got out and walked around were engineer types, with a few Monitors. They crackled to one another by speaker and radio and said nothing at all to the Family Stone.
The big ship opened its bay doors, and something like a giant coconut fell out.
It did not strike the ground. It bobbed in the air as if it had reached the end of an invisible tether, and there it stayed. It had an odd look to it, as if it might or might not be glowing softly. It blurred around its edges, as if it might not quite be there.
The ship nosed up and rode its skyhook back into space.
The smaller craft followed, except one. A single heavy, steaming at the edge of the cliff.
A loudspeaker spoke to the islanders as they built and cooked and fixed things.
“We will return in one week,” said the loudspeaker. “At that time, we will expect the pump and well to be functioning and at least forty thousand kiloliters of detoxified water available for loading.”
Then the heavy rumbled off the sand and shot into orbit.
Christopher Noonguesser came walking up. Noonguesser wore a bandage around his jaw and had lost about half of his teeth.
He pointed up at the coconut thing, hovering and blurring overhead.
“That’s one of those things they’ve been testing,” he said. “It’s an inside-out bomb.”
—
“It’s an inside-out bomb,” Milo announced to the whole Family Stone, at around noon. It seemed only right to share what he knew.
“Great,” said Christmas Break, still mostly blind from the first test they’d witnessed.
A lot of islanders—maybe a hundred—got up and headed into the woods. Headed, specifically, in the direction of the pumps.
“Aw, fuck,” said Milo. And he opened his mouth to shout, to get them to hang on and hang together, but Suzie put her arms around him and said, “Shhhhh, baby. Don’t police them. It works or it doesn’t. The dead don’t force things; they just go about their business.”
She was right.
Still, it made him so mad. How could people give up like that? He sat down to try meditating again (couldn’t stop thinking about whether his butt was getting bigger as he got older. Did that happen to everyone? Why?) and almost managed to get some kind of peace back.
Suzie sat beside him, doing the same thing.
He got up around twilight, at the very beginning of the eclipse, and was getting ready to go find wood for his damn drop spindle when Suzie pointed at the trees and said, “Milo, look.”
He looked.
A hundred islanders emerged from the forest in a line like a triumphant hunting party, all carrying some kind of machinery, or sheet metal, or small motors or transformers or pipework.
Parts from the cartel’s precious pump.
They piled them in the middle of the village, and the Rebuilding Committee got busy sorting through the parts, discussing what could be useful and how.
Many of the islanders, Milo noticed, now wore traces of red bones on their skin.
“How’d they manage to get red paint?” he wondered aloud.
“Easy,” Suzie answered. “It’s blood.”
—
The day before the cartel had promised to return, Milo quietly put out the word for the Family Stone to gather on the beach.
Skeleton by skeleton, committee by committee, they all came.
Milo arrived with a package of some kind tucked under his arm—a roll of sailcloth, it looked like.
“I brought something to show you,” he announced. And he unrolled the sailcloth to reveal ten communications fish. Black, sleek, and military-looking.
A gasp went up. Islanders could get their faces shot off just for mentioning fish, let alone having ten of them actually in their possession.
Milo picked up one of the fish and held it high.
“A couple of months ago,” he told them, “Suzie and I found the missing cartel ship, and we dove down to the wreck. Suzie salvaged these from inside the cockpit, and we haven’t told you about it. I’m sorry about that. We should have told you. At the time, it seemed like we might have to keep secrets from one another.”
The Family Stone made forgiving noises.
“You have a plan,” shouted Carver, way in the back, “don’t you, Milo?”
Milo put the fish down and clapped his hands two times.
“Let me tell you about my plan,” he said.
—
Milo’s plan called for the cartel ships to come down and look around to see if their slaves had wised up.
Which they did.
Fa-zooooo-ooooo-oom! At midmorning, about fifty ships came slamming down out of space and circled all over the place. A lot of them circled more than forty miles out. Big ships, like the first time they’d tested their bomb. A few heavies landed on the beach.
The Monitors on the beach looked around, and Milo could see them getting madder and madder as they saw tons of pump machinery helping to support huts, forming launch docks for the catamarans, forming…was that a playground?