Will saw them too. “They’re coming for us,” he said without emotion and stood up next to me.
“Shouldn’t we run?”
“I’m tired of running.”
I took my brother’s hand.
The two of us faced the ocean, oddly still as the guards on their moto-skis buzzed toward us. After all the cycling, running, driving, flying, and swimming, it felt good to stand still. Not surrender, because that meant giving up. But defiance and resolve.
The moto-skis drew closer. The noise was as loud as the jet that had pursued us over the soy fields. Each man wore a pair of yellow-tinted goggles and a black breathing mask. The skin around their masks was grayish-green. The ocean was black and brown. The sky was a pale sickly orange.
The machines were fifty meters from the edge of the beach when each man suddenly reared up as if performing a flip, then somersaulted off the back of his ski. The machines continued toward the beach without drivers, fast and furious, roaring up on the sand, grinding and careening and finally crashing into each other. It was all we could do to avoid being struck by rocks and debris before one of the moto-skis burst into flames and the other followed.
The entire incident took less than a few seconds, and neither of us noticed that the top of the skimmer was now open, and a woman stood in the hatchway, a harpoon in her hand.
CHAPTER 17
The said her name was Sula. She stood over us with a tempered steel harpoon, no larger than a sword, but finely honed and deadly sharp. It glinted blue in the afternoon sun. Her arms were exposed in her wet suit, and the muscles twined up her forearms like ropes. Beneath her black cap, her hair was salt-bleached blond, and her eyes were a deep violet-blue. The water still dripped from her suit, and there was blood on her hands.
“You’re a long way from the city.” Her voice cracked like someone who was not used to speaking.
“We’re not from the city,” I said.
“No. I can see that.” Her gaze was flat and direct and did not linger.
“Did you kill those men?” asked Will.
Sula nodded.
“What will happen to you?”
She shrugged and wiped one hand on her wet suit. “They’ll come after me, I expect. They won’t find me, and then they’ll forget. They usually do.”
“Have you killed a lot of men?”
“When I’ve had to. Women too.” She began walking toward the burning moto-skis, and we followed. She picked up some of the scattered debris, examined it, then tossed most of it into the fire. “Bluewater rubbish,” she said. “Plasteel and tin.”
“Shouldn’t we be running?” I asked.
Sula gave me the flat gaze again, efficient and expressionless. “You’ve got a broken collarbone, and he’s got a leg wound. You’ll not be running far, I expect.”
“Can you take us? In the skimmer?”
“What’s in it for me?”
“Water. We know where to find it.”
“Not hard to find,” she jerked her head toward Bluewater. “They’re sucking it out of the sea.”
“No. We know someone who knows how to find fresh water. A diviner, they call him.”
Sula exhaled sharply through her nose. “I’ve heard of such a thing. But I don’t believe it.”
“I’ve seen him do it,” I insisted. “He knows where it flows. They’ve got him locked up in Bluewater with his father and a pirate king.”
“A pirate king!” Sula’s lips curled into a slight smile.
“It’s true!”
“Stomping your feet won’t change my mind.”
I was tired, beyond exhausted. The pain in my shoulder was vibrant and aflame. My skin was chafed, chapped, and raw. But I wasn’t going to let this harpoon woman scare me, or worse, ignore me. Who did she think she was?
“We’ll go back by ourselves, then,” I said. I stripped to my underwear and threw my shirt to the sand. Will stared at me, wide-eyed. “Come on, Will,” I said. “We’re swimming. And my collarbone’s not broken,” I added.
Sula’s fingers on my forearm were like the keys of an old- fashioned piano, solid and delicate at once. “You shouldn’t be swimming in these waters. Not without a wet suit, goggles, and a breathing apparatus.”
“I don’t care! We have to rescue Kai. And Ulysses.” I stood before Sula, hands clenched, breathing hard. Will came up beside me. I really was prepared to swim back to Bluewater, and no one could stop me. I had abandoned reason for pure emotion. It coursed through my blood like holo-sugar, a chemically induced energy infusion. I felt like I could have jumped back into the ocean, chemicals be damned.
“I’ll take you in the skimmer,” said Sula.
“You will?” Despite my outburst, I was surprised to have convinced this woman of anything.
Sula scooped up my clothes and handed them to me. “I don’t like Bluewater, in case it isn’t obvious. When I saw those men on their skis—what kind of men kill children? And who knows? If there’s fresh water to be had…” She let her voice trail off.
Will grinned at me. I pulled my shirt back on and zipped my trousers. They were wet and uncomfortable, but I barely noticed. We had our boat and hadn’t been killed. At least not yet.
But first we had to fit in the skimmer. The boat was barely meant to hold one person. It was rigged to carry as much water as possible and, despite its ungainly shape, designed to be light and quick when empty.
Sula slid into the pilot’s seat by ducking under the steering paddles. Once secured, her head could turn only twenty degrees in either direction. A viewscreen clamped to her face gave her a three-dimensional, three-hundred-and-sixty-degree panorama of the outside. Will had to crawl under her legs and wedge himself into the space between the edge of the seat and the back of her knees. In that position Sula could barely reach the control pedals, which limited her ability to stop. Meanwhile I stretched out on Sula’s lap with my feet resting against the steering paddles. One accidental push and I could send the boat spiraling in the wrong direction.
What seemed merely uncomfortable and dangerous, however, became nauseating once the skimmer got moving. Each bounce on the waves knocked Will’s head against the hard seat. Each dip and crest made my arches ache as I tried desperately not to push the steering paddles. It was so loud in the skimmer that even if we wanted to complain, Sula could not hear us. The venti-unit pumped only enough fresh air for one, and it soon grew stale and rank as odor of our filthy clothes mixed with the smell of fear and sweat.
“Hold tight,” said Sula, as if there were something to hold to. The skimmer lurched on the crest of a wave, then tumbled sidelong into a pylon. The collision knocked my head into Sula’s chin. I didn’t know who had it worse, but my skull felt like someone had driven a stake into it.
“You’ve got a hard head,” she said.
“Not as hard as your chin.”
Sula rubbed her injured jaw with one hand as she navigated the skimmer away from the pylon. Then she cut the engines, and the boat bobbed on the waves. When we were directly below a large water-release hatch, she fired a grappling hook that snagged the hatch’s metal wheel. The boat steadied in the water, held tautly by the rope. Satisfied that we weren’t floating off anywhere, Sula unlatched the outer door of the skimmer, and the three of us climbed onto the deck.
“How do you drive this thing?” asked Will as he examined the bulbous stern and flattened bow.
“I can drive anything,” said Sula. “I was raised on a military base. My father flew jets. He taught me to fly when I was still a teenager. After that everything else was easy.”
“You can fly a jet?” asked Will with a low whistle of appreciation.
“Anything with an engine,” said Sula.
“Is he still in the army, your father?”