The next afternoon Kai wi-texted me to see if I wanted to go scavenging. In the short hills behind his apartment were the remains of an old mill. It had been abandoned in the Great Panic, before we were born. The factory was now a decaying agglomeration of empty buildings, busted silos, and broken-down trucks. Lizards and snakes coiled in the ruins. Our father had warned us never to go there-he claimed there were diseases and dangers-but Kai said it was safe.
It was Sunday, and Will was at water mission class. This summer he would have to spend a month bringing water to less fortunate towns. It didn't matter that we barely had enough water ourselves; the government ordered public service, and there was little choice but to obey. Will said it was just an excuse to get free labor, but even he didn't dare risk defiance. There were "education camps" where they took people who objected and taught them social responsibility. The "lessons" left them damaged and disfigured.
I rode my pedicycle to Kai's complex and locked it outside the front gate. Kai was waiting at the end of the drive. He smiled with one side of his mouth when he saw me and gave a small wave with his hand. Whenever I saw him standing like that, face poised in careful expectation, my heart went out to him. There was something cautious, something held back, in his smile. Drillers trusted no one, and their children learned to be wary and shrewd.
Kai led me through the scraggly cactus-like plants that survived for months without water. He didn't say much, so I kept all the questions to myself. The hills were gradual and gentle, but I soon tired of walking uphill. We stopped for a few minutes, and he gave me a sealed bottle of water that was sweet and still cold. We sat on the side of a concrete barrier overgrown with a grayish lichen that brushed off on our clothes. I drank, and then Kai drank. Our feet kicked up dust.
Before the Great Panic, the mill had produced cornmeal and flour that was shipped across the country. But once the Canadians had dammed the rivers and the lower states began fighting over the trickles that remained, there wasn't enough water for any industry, let alone something as water-intensive as milling. The snow masses and ice packs were gone, victims of warmer temperatures and higher sea levels. The aquifers and surface lakes had dried up or had been polluted. Forests were denuded, wetlands drained. Fresh, drinkable water was in the hands of a very few whose grip grew tighter as the world grew drier.
In truth there hadn't been enough water for years. Our father told us the story they wouldn't tell in school. Rain fell, but it couldn't replenish what was gone. Growing populations made shortages worse. Although the planet was mostly water, less than one-tenth of one percent was drinkable. Riots broke out in the cities. Countries divided into factionalized republics. Wars erupted along their borders. In the aftermath hundreds of millions had died-most from disease and malnutrition. The Great Panic punctuated what men already knew but still somehow refused to accept: the world had run out of water.
"Where do you think the workers went?" I asked. "After the mill shut down?"
Kai shook his head. "There was nowhere to go."
"The planes never bombed it."
"They didn't need to."
He held out his hand to help me up. We continued climbing until we reached the entrance to the old mill. We knew it was the entrance, because part of a broken sign still hung above the ground. Otherwise we would not have recognized it. Wooden and steel beams blocked our passage, and a tangled mass of circuitry dangled from the ceiling like webbing.
Kai said the factory had so much power that the workers never turned off the lights and used the venti-units all night long, even when the buildings were empty. I already knew this from school, but I let Kai lecture me. He said water ran through the pipes that didn't need to be filtered or treated; it could be drunk right out of the tap. This wasn't entirely true. There were giant treatment plants that purified water and added chemicals like chlorine to kill bacteria. I had seen the holos in the archive. Still, things were safer then, and no one got sick just from taking a shower.
Kai held my hand the entire time he talked. Neither of us said anything about it, but I could feel his heart beating in the pulse of his palm. I wondered if this made me his girlfriend. When the girls in school got boyfriends, they usually wore a locket or an old article of the boy's clothing. Maybe, I thought, that's what the water was. I held tight to the empty bottle.
We threaded our way through the beams and wires. At each step Kai cautioned me to avoid a hole, a nail, a plank. Finally we emerged into the center of the factory floor. The old milling machines hunkered like animals, all rusted gears and broken parts. They had run on diesel fuel, which was refined and processed from oil sucked up from deep within the ground. But oil was too precious now to burn in a machine. These days it was rationed and used only to power tanks, jets, and the cars of wealthy men like Kai's father. It was hard to believe oil had ever been so plentiful that people could burn it whenever they chose. But so many of the old ways were wasteful, like letting water spray onto the streets for no other reason than to run around beneath it on a hot day.
I thought about the other costs involved in milling grain. Not only were there oil and electricity for the machines, trucks, venti-units, lights, and refrigerators, but there was all the water to grow the grain in the first place. Millions of hectares of farmland were devoted to corn, soybeans, wheat, and rye. The government built thousands of kilometers of aqueducts that took water from rivers halfway across the country and brought it to the farms. There were places in the desert that suddenly bloomed with vineyards and orange groves. Towns without water were transformed into green paradises where people played games on tracts of perfect grass. Entire cities sprang from dust and clay, their spires reaching into the sky and their roots deep into the earth. They sucked up water as if it were their birthright and spat out sewage back onto the land. There was no limit to Earth's resources-until there wasn't anything left anymore.
We hiked over and around machines as big as trucks. In every building the windows were shattered, and the walls were scoured of anything valuable. Floors and ceilings had collapsed, and splintered trusses lay everywhere. Some of the interior offices were intact, but they were completely empty of furniture, paneling, and anything else that would burn. The copper wiring had been stripped away, and the machines had ben robbed clean of fuel for use during the cold winters that followed.
The rear of the factory was open to the hills behind it. It was here that the trucks stopped to fill up with their loads of milled grain. There was a road that looped around the buildings, then made its way beneath a stack of elevators. The road was badly eroded-more sand and rock than concrete-but it was flat and clear of debris. We walked through the factory and out onto the road, then followed it until we came to a gully that cut the road in two. A short steel bridge had provided passage across, but it lay collapsed in the ditch, the victim of too many crossings and too much time.
"This way," said Kai, stepping down into the ditch. He did not turn around and walked as if he knew where he was leading. It occurred to me then that this trip to explore the mill was not what it appeared: not a random wandering among the ruins, but a planned tour with a knowledgeable guide. Kai walked with purpose, navigating the rutted path like someone who had trudged there before. He released my hand and expected me to follow.
"Where are we going?"
"I want to show you a secret."
We walked about five hundred meters down the gully, and then Kai climbed up the steep side away from the mill. There was no sound except our footsteps. No wind. No shade. Not a cloud in the sky. Everything was brown, burned, dried, or cracked.
"There," he said. He was pointing to a nondescript patch of ground on which there was nothing but some gravel and broken glass.
"There, where?"
"Dig there," he instructed.
I bent down and scratched at the dirt, which came away surprisingly easily in my fingers. It felt soft and slightly wet, as if it had just rained, which was impossible. I dug a little more quickly, and the dirt got wetter, which was definitely impossible.
"Kai?" I looked up at him. For the first time I felt something like fear. We were nearly a kilometer away from the nearest building, and twice that far from any living being. I realized there were so many things I didn't know about this boy. How come we had never seen his father? How did his mother die? Why didn't he go to school? All of his explanations suddenly seemed unbelievable. A boy didn't just stop going to school with his father's blessing or wander abandoned grounds as if he owned them. Eventually the government came to get him, or he went away. But Kai was still here, pointing at the earth.
"It's okay," he said. "Dig."
I scooped deeper into the dirt, which began to come away in soggy lumps. "What is it?" I asked, although I already knew.
"Water," he said.
"How did it get here?"
"There's a spring underground. A small one. It runs right under the mill."
I shook my head. I couldn't believe there was fresh water so close to our home. Yet there it was, trickling through the sand in my fingers. As mysterious as Kai himself.
"Does anyone know?"
Kai shook his head slowly.
"Where…how did you find it?"
He shrugged. "I knew it was there."
Kai's face shone, and the gold in his hair refracted the sunlight. Finding a source of free water was like finding oil-better, even. It could make a person wealthy beyond imagination. But Kai didn't seem to care. He regarded me with drowsy eyes below his bangs.
"You could be rich," I said.
"There's not even enough water to fill a cistern."
"There might be."
"There isn't."
I placed my fingers to my lips and tasted the water that came from the ground. It was sandy and gritty, but there was no chemical aftertaste and no brackish residue. I wasn't worried about poisons or toxins, because I could tell it was real water, filtered deep in the earth. I scooped up another handful and let it wash over my face, closing my eyes as the drops cut cool rivulets down my cheeks.
At first I thought I was dreaming. And then I realized the lips on my own were Kai's. He pressed against me, his warm breath washing my face like night. The air chopped and eddied, and I felt like I was falling into something deep and bottomless from which there could be no rescue. When I opened my eyes, his eyes were bright and large before me. "You shouldn't," I said.
"Sorry," he said.
"Stop, I mean."
I leaned back into him, and we kissed again. My lungs inhaled him, and his breath was my breath. We kissed until I was dizzy from it, and swirls of color patterned beneath my eyelids. When we stopped, the softness of his mouth lingered like buzzing. I touched my lips, and they felt warm and liquid-not at all like the dry chapped feeling of wind and sun. Kai's gaze mirrored mine, and I looked back into his eyes as if I could see my own emotions reflected in them. They were a clear limpid blue, without a hint of gray.
We stood that way for a moment, eyes locked, hands clasped, and then he moved toward me. This time I stepped back, and his lips brushed my cheek.
"I'm sorry. I'm all confused," I said. "I mean, it's not like I don't want to keep on, but I don't-I don't know what it means."
Kai nodded as if he understood. Another boy might have pushed himself on me or tried to change my mind. Kai simply covered the small hole I had dug, patting the sand back into place. "Want to see the rest of the site?" he asked.
He took my hand, and we continued our tour of the dry hills and dusty grounds. He showed me the tiny lizards that lived deep in the sand and were able to withstand the winter. He pushed aside broken pilings and showed me colonies of ants that feasted off water in the decayed wood. But nothing else made any impression on me during the rest of our afternoon together at the old mill. Later I would regret not asking him more. Part of me wished we could go back to the moment before the kiss. He had become my closest friend-my only real friend besides Will, if I was honest-and I worried what would happen to that friendship if we kept on. But the other part of me felt old enough to continue. He was the first boy for whom I'd felt anything but curiosity, and I didn't know then how to speak my mind about the things I wanted.
It was getting dark by the time we made our way to Kai's building, and I knew my father would not want me cycling home. I called him from the lobby to pick me up. Kai apologized for not inviting me inside, but I understood. Germs spread more easily indoors, and it wasn't worth alarming his neighbors.
We waited together downstairs. Kai's father remained upstairs. The security guards kept their distance. There was a single hard-backed chair, and Kai offered it to me, but I was content to keep standing. An old digital clock on the wall kept time. Minutes blinked slowly past. The intimacy we had shared in the abandoned ruins felt as far away as the buildings themselves. It was as if Kai weren't there, even though he was standing right next to me. I listened intently and could just hear him breathing. I wondered whether he was embarrassed that he had kissed me and wished he hadn't. Then I wondered if the kiss had been any good and if he had kissed many other girls. But he was staring off into the distance, and all I could see in front of him were the walls of the building and a bank of security lights. The lights blinked and flickered, sending their coded messages into the night.
"Kai," I finally said.
"Yes?"
We heard a car honk outside.
"It's my father," I told him.
"Will I see you tomorrow?"
"Sure."
"Tomorrow, then."
My concerns were silly, I told myself as I ran out the door. Kai wasn't upset or disappointed. He was just naturally distracted, like a boy who listened to a different voice. And I knew he trusted me; he had shown me the underground spring. Maybe I wasn't ready to be his girlfriend, but that didn't mean I had to stop seeing him. It didn't mean either that we knew what the weeks or months ahead would bring. I wouldn't be fifteen forever.
That night I told Will nearly everything-except the part about the kiss. I was certain Kai didn't want me to keep a secret from Will. He was my brother, after all. But Will didn't believe me. Everyone knew there was no water for miles, he insisted. We must have come upon a leaking cistern or a buried tank. Will raised his voice, and I raised mine back, and the fight ended with our father coming upstairs to separate us. I decided Will wasn't worth telling anyway. I didn't care about his opinion. It was just as well he didn't believe me.
But the next morning, Will asked about the spring again. I repeated what I had told him, and this time he seemed interested.
"Let's go see it," he said.
"We've got school."
"After school."
"It's behind the old mill."
"We don't have to say where we're going."
I nodded. Of course I wouldn't say anything to our father. Will knew that. He pursed his lips and solemnly shook my hand. I understood then-he was jealous that Kai had shown me the spring. But if he suspected anything else, he didn't let on.
The school day seemed to take forever. Every word the teachers said hung in the air as if coated with thick paste. I tried to get my mind around the words, but they landed back on my desk with a splat. They were unrecognizable, and my brain was dulled with the effort of trying to discern their meaning. I forced myself to sit upright, but all I could think about was showing Will that patch of wet earth.
Finally the bell rang, and with a whoop, the kids raced down the hallway. Normally I took my time gathering my belongings, but today I joined the others in the mad dash for the buses.
Will was waiting for me. We boarded the bus and sat next to each other without speaking. Other kids jostled for Will's attention, but he ignored them. He gripped the seat in front of him and stared straight ahead. I knew what he was thinking. It was the same thing I had thought when I first saw the spring. A free-flowing source of water could mean more water nearby. More water could mean the aquifers were replenished. Replenished aquifers meant clean water-water that wouldn't have to be purified, treated with harmful chemicals, poisoned. It was water our mother could drink.
Maybe Kai was wrong about there being very little water. He couldn't know for certain. Geologists would have to drill and test. Sometimes the water could be a kilometer or more below the surface. A trickle could mean huge reservoirs underneath. These were complicated matters to be divined by scientists and hydrologists.
But when we got off the bus, Kai wasn't there. At first I assumed he was just late. I realized how much I had counted on him being there every day; not seeing him was jarring, like walking past the same building and suddenly noticing it was gone and there was a huge hole where it once stood. In the last two months, I had almost forgotten the time before he existed, and now his absence felt like a sharp ache. The longer we waited, however, the more we realized Kai wasn't coming. I wasn't worried; not yet.
"We could go without him," I suggested.
"What's the fun in that?"
"He would be upset," I agreed.
"Let's go find him."
It wasn't far to the Wellington Pavilion. We got our pedicyles from the locked storage room and cycled down the familiar road. Several cars passed, the drivers steering wide to avoid us. The sun hung low in the sky, a dull orange-brown ball filtered through haze and dust. Finally we saw the triple spires of the Wellington Pavilion over the next hill and picked up our pace. Will raced me to the driveway, then let me win.
The guards stopped us at the gate.
"We're going to see Kai," said Will.
"Kai?" asked one of the guards.
"Tall, about my height," said Will. "Blond. Hangs around outside all day."
"You know me," I said to the guard. "I've been here before."
The guard shook his head. "You got a certification?"
Of course we didn't have our certificates with us. I looked at Will to see what he would do next. I was certain he would find a way to talk himself inside. Instead he shrugged and said, "Oh, well, I guess we'll see him back at school." He walked off, pushing his cycle, and I followed.
"Will!" I hissed. "Why didn't you say something?"
"Can't talk sense to a guard," said Will. "Follow me."
Although the Wellington Pavilion was one of the fanciest housing complexes, it too suffered from a lack of regular maintenance. Without water it was difficult to fix nearly anything. Road crews used dry-crete, a waterless cement, but it crumbled easily in the heat. Asphalt was practically nonexistent, because even petroleum substitutes were impossible to find. As I followed my brother, circling the compound, we soon came to a part of the fence that had rusted out, and the concrete had disintegrated below. We leaned our cycles against a pole, and Will pushed at the fence. It quickly broke away in his hands. "In here," he said.
The space was just big enough to slip through. Will went first, and I followed. So much for security.
"Three-B," I said, remembering Kai's apartment number.
We snuck across the sandy lot, colored green to resemble grass, although it didn't look anything like it. We didn't see a soul. This was what it was like to be rich: You didn't have to leave your apartment, risking the outside air and the lack of water. You lived in a secure compound with guards who stopped visitors at the gate. When people came to visit, they had to be certified and cleared, or else they snuck in beneath the torn and tangled barbed wire.
At the stairwell Will pulled at the door, and it opened easily-either the lock had been removed or it was broken. We climbed three flights, our footsteps echoing eerily in the dim passage. A thin coat of sand made the banister gritty, and several times I had to wipe my hands on my trousers to clean them.
Something was wrong. We could tell as soon as we reached the third floor. A breeze blew down the hallway-not the familiar and comforting air of a venti-unit, but the hot, dry breath from outside. Sure enough, when we reached the end of the hallway, we could see an apartment door swinging open on a single hinge. Will slowed and signaled for quiet, although I wouldn't have made a sound even if I could. We tiptoed the last several feet to the apartment door, and then Will peered around inside.
The intake of his breath was like a sharp cry.
I eased behind him and looked over his shoulder. The apartment appeared trashed, as if someone had set about to wreck it. Broken lamps on the floor. Shattered windows. An overturned table in the kitchen. Dishes scattered beside it. A rank odor, like spoiled food, filled the air. It was too much to take in at once, and for several seconds I didn't see what had made Will cry out.
A bloodied body lay face down near the doorway to the bedrooms. I recognized him instantly, and my stomach turned: Martin the bodyguard, the machine pistol still in his hand, his broken sunglasses lying about two meters away. I noticed bullet holes in the walls now, and empty shell casings on the floor.
"Kai?" I called. "Kai?"
But my voice echoed hollowly in the empty apartment. Kai was gone.