“A watcher job?”
“No. He used to work for them. For GenTech.” She said it like it was the most normal thing in the world. But how do you go from being a Soljah to a GenTech agent, and then wind up as a Steel Cities watcher?
It didn’t make sense. No one hates GenTech more than the Soljahs.
“Crow worked for GenTech?” I stared at Zee. “You sure?”
She held up a stack of photographs and showed me the back of each one. The GenTech logo in purple ink.
“Don’t mean nothing,” I said.
“You’re right,” she said. “It doesn’t. Not now I’ve seen the Surge. They’re crazy. The pair of them.”
“Who?”
“Crow. And Frost. They’re as bad as each other. Build a boat big enough. Frost and his stupid coordinates.”
“Coordinates?” I said. My foot had eased off the accelerator and I pulled off the road as the wagon ground to a halt. I stared at her. “What coordinates?”
“That’s why they’re working together, hunting their prize. Crow’s been searching for years. That’s what he did for GenTech, I guess. Chasing rumors and clues.”
“Clues to what?”
“The trees,” Zee said, staring at me through the darkness. “The last trees on earth.”
What if it existed? The idea jammed inside me. What if it was real? A place where wild things grew. Not just a photograph. Not just a trick or a dream. Trees. Real trees. Real enough that people were looking for them. That GenTech was looking for them. And somehow my father had wound up in their midst?
I suddenly thought about Frost’s house, my understory of squeaky wheels. And if there were trees out there with roots getting deeper and limbs reaching high, then what good had it been building forests out of crappy bits of tin?
I climbed out of the car and a rotten salt wind blew off the Surge and stung the dust around me. I felt sick. Swallowed whole. And I wished to hell I could just sleep. Shut myself down, shut myself up. But all I could see behind my eyelids was my old man’s face.
I kicked the back wheel of the wagon. It just didn’t make any damn sense. None of it did. And though Pop was coiled up in chains in that picture, it made me almost bitter that the folk doing the taking hadn’t snatched me up, too. I’d been just left here in the dirt with the junk and the hungry. I kicked the wheel again. Then I slammed a fist at the wagon and damn near broke my hand.
“Stop,” Zee cried, staring at me across the roof of the car. “We got to figure out what to do.”
“Do? I’m gonna drop you off, that’s what I’m gonna do.”
“Then what?”
I stared back at the Surge. Then I looked west where the land crumbled like bits of cornbread. And I imagined soil bound with roots and wood for the burning and shade from the sun and a rest from the wind. And I pictured Pop, the metal chains wound around him, strapping him to the tree. Why? What was he doing there? It didn’t matter. If it were me in trouble, I knew my dad would come running.
“How long you had that camera?” I said.
“Crow tracked it down a few months back.”
“And who was it he got it from? I mean what was their name?”
“I don’t know. Want to ask him?”
“I will if I have to.”
Zee went to say something but the words got knocked out of her. She fell as the wagon slumped and the ground rumbled and the world split wide open.
“No,” I whispered, staring back at the ocean.
Zee’s holler rose up like a siren but I didn’t need another warning. I yanked open the door and jumped behind the wheel, cranking the engine as the ground let out a sigh and compressed again beneath us.
The road sank about fifteen feet.
“Get in,” I yelled, reaching across and tugging Zee into the car, slamming down the accelerator.
I stared into the mirror, watched dirt rise like smoke across the night. Another boom and the wagon slipped, but I floored it, willing it to keep going. Zee was kneeling up on her seat now, spun around to stare behind us, watching as the cliffs disappeared in the distance, gasping each time a new chunk of earth got gobbled by the furious Surge.
For years the cliffs had stayed where they were. But now they were hollow. Broken. And the world was collapsing.
Zee kept squealing till her lungs got choked. Then she was coughing. And when she weren’t coughing she was begging me to go faster. As if I weren’t thumping at the engine, fast as it would go.
Hard to see now. Dust filling the darkness. I could feel the road stodgy beneath the wheels. Dirt any deeper and we’d have been swimming in it.
Swimming.
I thought about that watery death, clawing its way closer. And I knew swimming wouldn’t help you, but not having the option still made it so much worse. I could almost feel the water in my lungs already, my chest tightening, just as it had all those years before. My limbs useless. Everything squeezing shut.
I stared straight ahead, tried to blink the fear out of me. But then Zee cried my name like I’d pinched her.
“What?”
“I think it’s stopping,” she called. I strained my ears to listen above the sound of the wagon. Was that it? Silence?
I stomped at the accelerator. Far from convinced.
But another few minutes and the dust began clearing, and what was left of the road had stayed where it was. I wound my window down, stuck my face out in the night.
The Surge felt far away. In the distance.
But then the ground began ripping apart right in front of us. A huge gash, breaking open the road and getting wider. As if the world had grown so weary it was tearing itself to pieces, slicing its brittle remains into shreds.
For a moment the wagon was airborne, the whole night grimy and blind as we arced through it. Then our front wheels hit dirt again and the car plowed to a halt.
Behind us the cliffs exploded into the water, and the spray shot upward until all we could see was dust and ocean and every little thing dissolving into sky. But we were still there. Hanging on. Our front end was buried in sand but the bulk of the wagon hung out over the ocean. Just dangling there. A thousand feet high.
Zee was huddled on the dashboard, her eyes shiny, blinking at me. And I realized she was waiting on me to do something. Anything.
Could have just crawled out the windows. Run west right then. But there’s nowhere in the world you can get on foot, so I clicked at the ignition.
The engine stayed dead.
I glanced down at the Surge and thought it had calmed a little, as if the earth had soothed the water, diluted the waves. But back out past the breakers, I’d never seen it so big, the arc of the whirlpools stretched so wide. And beyond them, at the wobbling far corner of the world, I could see red streaks as the sun refused to quit. Here it came again, that scorching ball of heat.
I coaxed the engine back on the sixteenth try, like getting a fire going on wet plastic. The wagon eased forward, digging into the sand, but the back end was too heavy and we sank again. Stalled.
I stared back at all my shit. The tools and supplies.
“Hold on,” I whispered, shoving Zee tighter on the dashboard. And then the wagon bent and rocked as I wriggled toward the hatch at the far end.
It was so dark. Dusty. And I was sweating, slippery and afraid. Everything quiet now but for the sound of the water twisting and foaming below us, the wagon creaking, the rear end dipping lower with every inch I slid.
The hatch was sticky, weighted with sand and rocks, and I had to pry at it, jamming it free. But then the wagon squeaked and shifted. And it started to pitch real low.