Sula advanced cautiously, hand on her harpoon. I trailed two steps behind. We stepped gingerly around the strewn metal, over the fallen door, and into the yawning opening of the cramped torture chamber.
There, facing us, gun drawn, sat Nasri.
“Welcome,” he said. Then the lights went out.
CHAPTER 18
I was never certain which came first: the gunshot or the scream. My head hit the floor, and all was still. In the darkness there was only the blur of motion—faint outlines and shadowy imagination. In that split second between vision and nothingness, I couldn’t distinguish between the two. Was I injured? Was I dead? I was surprised by how peaceful I felt, how tranquil and serene. I lay on the floor, and all was preternaturally calm, as in the moments before a sandstorm. It was Sula’s voice that awakened me from my reverie. “Vera? Vera?”
So I was not dead. Or perhaps we both were.
Then the lights flickered on. Nasri’s chair had tipped over. The harpoon jutted from his chest. His lips were peeled back in a deathly grimace, and his eyes were fixed open. He looked like a man who did not expect to die and had left the earth as he had emerged: howling in agony.
Sula stood over me. “You’re bleeding,” she said.
I felt my face. My hands came away sticky. A great lump rose up in my throat, and my breath caught on something hard. “I’ve been shot?” It was a question more than a statement, because I didn’t feel wounded—although I had begun to feel cold and shaky.
“Sit tight,” Sula commanded. Her hands were in my hair, then on my head, pressing and probing. I tried hard not to panic, but the top of my head burned, and my forehead was wet with slickness.
Will stopped short when he saw me. “Vera?” he began, but could not finish. He looked to Sula for reassurance, but she was too busy examining me. There was nothing he could do but take my hand.
A bullet had grazed my scalp, Sula concluded. It had cleared a tiny path like a trail through the geno-soy fields and burned off the top layer of skin. A flesh wound, literally, but it bled like something worse. Sula tore off a sleeve from my shirt and bandaged it as best she could.
“It’s not pretty,” she said. “The scalp bleeds the worst. But it’s nothing to worry about. When it heals, you won’t even know it was there.”
I tried to smile but feared I would cry. “I always wondered what it was like to be shot.”
“Now you’ve lived to tell the tale.”
I touched my scalp where Sula had wrapped the cloth. It still burned, but it made me feel important. I’d been wounded in combat. Anyone could break a leg or dislocate a shoulder, but how many people got shot? I could tell by the way Will was looking at me that he was impressed too and not a little bit jealous. I would have quickly traded the head wound, however, for a glass of clean water.
“Who shut off the light?” I asked.
“I threw the switch,” Will said. He’d been leaning against a box that controlled power for the floor. He cut the voltage as soon as he’d heard Nasri’s voice.
“Quick thinking,” Sula remarked. She leaned over to pull the harpoon from Nasri’s chest. I covered my eyes in the crook of Will’s elbow.
“Where are they?” I asked, my voice muffled by Will’s arm.
“Not here.”
But Sula was wrong. A low moaning interrupted her efforts to retrieve the harpoon. In the dark corner of the small room—hard to believe we could miss it—a pile of blankets stirred. I ran over and tossed them aside.
“Ulysses!”
His face was battered and bruised; dried blood caked his beard; his trousers were sheared at the knees and crusted from his wound—but he was alive. His eyelids fluttered, but he couldn’t open them. He tried to speak, but no words emerged.
I put my lips next to his ear. “It’s okay,” I whispered. “I’m here. We’re going to take care of you.”
I wasn’t sure Ulysses understood me, but I kept repeating the words in the hope that he would.
Sula reached into a pouch on her belt and withdrew a syringe. I jumped to my feet and nearly grabbed it. “Adrenaline,” she explained. “His body needs energy.”
I tried to relax. I had to trust her, just as I’d trusted Ulysses. I helped Sula roll up Ulysses’s sleeve. Then Sula injected him. Nothing happened at first, but in a few moments he stirred, then moved his head and opened his eyes. They fixed on Sula.
“Who are you?” he asked gruffly.
“She’s Sula,” I said, stroking Ulysses’s bearded cheek.
“Where are we?”
I explained that we were still inside Bluewater. We had rescued him from the torture chamber, and Nasri was dead. “Sula knows how to escape.” I turned to her. “Don’t you?” I asked.
“Getting in is easy,” said Sula. “Getting out will be more difficult. If they see us boarding the skimmer, they’ll catch us. The boat is slower than anything they’ve got.”
“So we can’t let them see us,” I said.
“We’ll need to take out their eyes.” Her smile was lined and hard, but, like Ulysses’s, hid mischief.
I nodded.
“It won’t work,” Will said. “They’ll catch us on the beach. We need something faster.”
“Yes, and it’d be nice to have some commandos while we’re dreaming,” Sula muttered.
“You said you could drive anything,” Will continued. “They have jets.”
Sula’s eyes brightened.
“They’ll never expect it,” he went on.
“But we can’t leave Kai here,” I protested.
Sula frowned. “Who said anything about leaving without him? He’s worth too much to leave behind.”
“You’re not going to sell him!” I said, horrified.
“Sell him? Do I look like a merc?”
I hesitated. But her violet eyes made me trust her. Whatever suffering she’d endured had made her unblinking and resolute.
We helped Ulysses to his feet. He was weak, but the adrenaline helped. Sula quickly examined him and confirmed nothing was broken.
“I could have told you that,” Ulysses growled.
“Oh, Ulysses, she’s just worried about you.” For the first time since we had left home, I felt a surge of optimism. Our group of three had grown to four, and soon, I hoped, we would be six.
Sula led us out of the cell into the dim hallway. “So you’re the great pirate king?” she asked.
“Not a king,” he said. “I’ve explained that.”
“I always wondered what pirates did with all that water they stole.”
“We don’t steal water. We take it from people who don’t deserve it.”
“Ah, you mean from the pipelines that irrigate crops for innocent children?”
“And I suppose you deliver the water you’re skimming from this abomination to orphans and widows?”
They bickered like this for a while, but I could tell they admired each other. Two fighters; two survivors. Sula, the loner. Ulysses, the leader. Where she was impulsive, he was measured and deliberate. Where she would strike first, he would strike back. Their differences, however, were less important than their common enemy: Bluewater.
“The boy will be in the presentation room,” said Ulysses.
Sula put her hand on her harpoon. “We’ll need more weapons.”
“I don’t care how quick you are with that spear, you’ll not outfight the security forces of a half-dozen nations.”
“I’ve fought twenty men and killed them all.”
“Were they armed?”
“Of course they were armed!”
“Listen to me. You’ll not beat these people by killing them. For every one you kill, there will be two more coming at you. And what about the children? What do you plan to do with them? Give them weapons?”
“I can fire a gun,” said Will.
Sula turned to him as if she might consider it, then she swung back to Ulysses. “You have a better idea?”
“We’ll need a distraction.
“Such as?”
“Bluewater needs water. What if it were dammed?”