“Maybe there was a person both the pirates and PELA wanted to visit,” Will said.
“Dr. Tinker?”
Will nodded slowly. “Environmentalists don’t care much for water explorers.”
“But why would they blow the dam?”
Will wrinkled his nose, but before he could respond, the hover-carrier slowed, then came to a gentle rest on something firm. I could hear the crunch of earth and rock. I looked at Will, and he signaled for me to be quiet. He stood, and with my help he inched the desalinator closer to the door. His leg was bleeding again, but he didn’t notice. Instead he flipped a switch on the machine and took a hose in his hand. The machine started humming quietly and gave off a smell like two rocks cracked together. Will and I crouched in the darkness, silent except for the sound of our breathing. We stood for what seemed like an hour. I thought my legs would give out. My toes ached, and the scratches in my hands were inflamed. I couldn’t imagine what Will must be feeling. The pain was nearly unearthly.
Then outside we heard men talking.
“They don’t care about the doctor,” said a man’s voice.
“And the children?”
“It’s good money for the mines.”
“Shame.”
“Not our problem.”
Someone fiddled with the locks, and then the door creaked open. Sunlight streamed into the cargo hold like a bouquet of sharp needles. A man stepped into the doorway, blocking the sun. It took him a moment to adjust to the darkness, and in that space, quick as a sand fly, Will sprang.
The man screamed and fell backward into the dirt.
CHAPTER 11
“Run, Will, run!” I screamed.
Will stood in the open doorway of the cargo hold, shooting hot steam over the prone bodies of two guards. It was as if he were frozen, unable to move. Then he snapped out of it and let me help him out of the truck.
“Quick, they’ll be here in a second,” I said.
“I can’t run.”
“I’ll help you.”
Will shook his head. “The carrier. We can drive it.”
“I don’t know how to drive.”
“I do,” he insisted.
Even if Will could drive with his injured leg, there was a big difference between steering a rundown electric car and a hydrogen-fueled hovercraft capable of going several hundred kilometers an hour. On the other hand, I knew it was our only real chance. If we evaded the environmentalists, we still wouldn’t get far on the sand. The carrier gave us a fighting chance of escape. As for the border, we would just have to deal with it when we reached it. If we reached it.
I helped Will limp to the front of the carrier, averting my eyes from the burned bodies of the two guards by the rear door. There were three other carriers about two hundred meters distant, and men hustled about, unloading supplies and equipment. No one had noticed us yet, but our absence wouldn’t go undetected for long.
Will pulled himself into the driver’s seat, and I swung around to the other side of the front cab. The instrument panel was complicated, packed with levers and switches. There was no steering wheel; just two paddles thick with buttons. It didn’t look anything like our father’s car. Will flipped a switch on the front panel, but nothing happened; then he pushed another one, and the panel lit up.
“You sure you know what you’re doing?” I asked.
“I know,” said Will, sounding annoyed.
“They could shoot us.”
“Not if they want their desalinator.”
Will was right. If PELA destroyed the carrier, they would destroy the desalinator and all the weapons in the hold. They might be able to replace the weapons, but a portable desalinator was extremely rare and would literally keep them alive. Nasri and his men would think twice before risking its loss. They didn’t know, of course, that Will had already dismantled it.
The engine made a whirring noise that sounded promising. Then the carrier lurched forward a couple meters and stopped suddenly with a force that threw me to the floor.
“Sorry,” said Will. “Buckle up.”
I brushed myself off, and this time I buckled myself into the passenger seat. Will flipped a couple switches and gently squeezed both paddles. The hover-carrier lifted into the air, hovering about a meter above the ground.
“Now what?” I asked.
Will pulled back on one paddle while pushing the other forward, and the carrier rotated slowly in a circle. Then he reversed direction, and the carrier spun the other way. “Just like Death Racer,” he said. When he brought the paddles back to the middle, the carrier stopped spinning and hovered above the ground. “Cool,” he said.
Just then a man emerged from one of the other carriers. He was tall, with white hair that stood straight up, and he wore a scientist’s white lab coat. Nasri followed closely behind him. The two men walked about ten meters, and then Nasri withdrew something from his pocket and waved it at the man.
“He’s got a gun,” I said.
The first man stopped, and Nasri walked two steps closer to him, leveling the gun at his back. The man turned, faced Nasri, and bowed his head toward the ground.
“It’s Dr. Tinker,” I said.
“I see him.”
“They’re going to kill him!”
Nasri stood before Dr. Tinker, his gun arm extended. I couldn’t believe it, but it really did appear that Nasri was going to shoot the doctor in cold blood. “Will!” I shouted.
The hover-carrier bolted forward, pressing me back into my seat. Nasri looked up at the same time, momentarily perplexed by the carrier bearing down on him. He stumbled backward just as the carrier stopped. “Get him!” Will shouted to me.
Will had positioned us between Nasri and Dr. Tinker, with the rear cargo door facing the doctor. Through the front viewscreen I could see Nasri looking at us, his eyes turning into slits that promised violence. I knew I had only a handful of seconds before he acted.
I dashed to the back of the carrier and flung open the doors. Dr. Tinker was still looking down as if he expected to be shot. “Quick, into the truck!” I called. He looked up but didn’t move, and I extended an arm. “Get in! Get in!”
He moved as if in a daze and grasped my hand as if unsure what he was holding. When he took his first steps into the carrier, I heard a pistol shot, and then Nasri appeared around the corner. He charged at me, raising his arm to fire a second shot. I shut my eyes. But the shot never came. Instead I heard Nasri scream, and I opened my eyes to see Will spraying him with hot steam from the desalinator. “The doors, Vera!”
I slammed the cargo doors shut while Will scrambled back into the driver’s seat. We took off with a jolt that sent both Dr. Tinker and me to the floor. But I didn’t mind. We weren’t dead. In the bulletproof hover-carrier, moving at two hundred kilometers an hour, it would be difficult for Nasri to hurt us.
I helped Dr. Tinker into his seat. He let me fasten his buckle and adjust the headrest.
“Who are you?” he asked when I was seated.
“Who are you?” asked Will, turning slightly from the driver’s seat.
“Doctor Augustus Tinker. Hydrologist.”
“Pleased to meet you,” I said. “I’m Vera. And this is my brother, Will.”
Dr. Tinker looked at us as if I had just told him Will and I were Martians come down to perform experiments on his brain.
“We’re not going to hurt you,” I added.
The hover-carrier dipped suddenly in the air, and Dr. Tinker’s head jerked forward then banged backward against the headrest.
“Sorry,” said Will.
“My brother’s never driven a hover-carrier,” I explained.
“I’m doing a pretty good job.” said Will sullenly. “Considering.”
“But who are you?” Dr. Tinker repeated.
I told him our names again, and said we had been kidnapped by pirates, then by PELA, taken to Minnesota and then into Canada, and had escaped when Will rewired the portable desalinator. “We were trying to find Kai,” I explained.