The only thing that saved us was Kai’s medicine kit on the side of the sink. As I stopped to examine it, the RGs entered the bedroom. They would surely have seen us if we had continued into the room. Instead Will bumped into me and we both froze behind the door. Then we quickly retraced our steps to the office, back through the living room to the front hallway—and out the open door.
Two men stood just inside the perimeter of the fence by the front gate. They were dressed in the same blue shirts as the men I had seen at the gaming center, and each carried an automatic weapon.
Will raised a finger to his lips. He signaled toward the hole in the fence. We scurried quickly in the twilight and slipped through the opening before anyone noticed. Then we leapt on our pedi-cycles and rode silently like madmen until we were within sight of our building.
“We can’t stay here,” gasped Will as we stopped to catch our breath about fifty meters from our front door.
“What do you mean? Where else can we go?”
He nodded at the security cameras mounted on nearly every building corner. Of course: the cameras at the Wellington Pavilion had filmed our arrival. It wouldn’t take long for the RGs to review the logs and identify us in the database.
“But we didn’t do anything!” I protested.
“It won’t look that way.”
I was still gripping Kai’s medicine kit. Now I looked inside. Four neat, contoured insulin reservoirs were secured in an insulated pouch next to two boxes of blood-testing strips and a spare adapter for the injector pencil.
“He left without his insulin,” I said.
“Why would he do that?”
“He didn’t do it,” I said. “They took him.”
“We don’t know that. He could have been running.”
“You saw the bodyguard! Do you think he shot himself?”
“Maybe he got shot protecting Kai and his father, and they got away.”
“Then where’s the blood and the other bodies?”
“Could be no one else was wounded.”
But Will knew I was right. No matter how desperate Kai’s situation, he wouldn’t leave voluntarily without his insulin. It was a death sentence.
“We have to help him, Will.”
“We can’t go to the Guard, or the army. They’ll be looking for us.”
“Then we have to go ourselves.”
“Don’t be crazy. They’ll have guns, and we don’t even know who they are.”
“If we stay here, the Guard will arrest us. You said so yourself.” My voice cracked; my throat was bone dry.
“And what do we do if we find him? Shoot our way inside?”
“If we have proof, the Guard will come. Especially if there’s money in it.”
Will frowned. But he knew the Republic Guard would help a wealthy driller if we had a holo or even an audiogram—anything they could link to bank records.
“We should tell Dad,” said Will. “Just in case.”
I couldn’t believe Will was suggesting this. Our father would never let us leave. I told Will he was scared and making excuses. He said he was being rational and weighing the risks. The more we argued, the more forceful I became. For once I was the leader and Will the reluctant follower. He may have had logic, but I had passion and desire.
“If we lose Kai, we lose the river,” I said. “We lose everything.”
The lights had come on outside our building, and soon the grid would shut down. Will’s face was smeared with dust and grime from the ride, and I assumed I looked the same. My lips stung, and my hair felt matted with sweat and sand. But I felt exhilarated and prepared for anything. Will’s uneven grin told me he felt the same way.
“We don’t know where to start,” he said.
“Yes, we do.”
I retrieved Kai’s father’s notebooks from my side basket. In them he had detailed the site of an old well that was about forty kilometers from Arch. I couldn’t understand all his notations, but it looked like he had found water there. If so, there were plenty of suspects who would kidnap him for the information.
We cleaned up as best we could outside. Luckily our father was making dinner for our mother. He didn’t notice as we tiptoed past him to the bath. By the time he returned from the bedroom, I had set the table, and we were sitting in front of our plates looking as innocent as we could. I have no idea what we talked about. Every bump and sound made me jerk with worry that the RGs had arrived. We could only pray that it would take them some time to review the tapes and run a data scan, because it was too dark now to cycle on the roads. I don’t think I slept a wink, and I know Will didn’t, because I could hear him thrashing and pacing in his room.
We left before dawn. We wrote a note explaining that we had gone to school early with a friend’s parent for water team. It was something our father could have checked, but he had plenty of other things to worry about. It was not the first time we had gone to school early, nor the first time someone had given us a ride.
Our plan was to return before dark. We had goggles, masks, and sunshields. The wind could be fierce on the open road, and the shields would also protect against flying sand. Will brought some food, two liters of water in a saddlebag, and his old instant holo-camera. I brought my credit chip. I had saved my weekly allowance for most of the year, and although it was only fifty credits, that was enough to buy four meals and another liter of water and still leave something for an emergency. I also had Kai’s medicine kit with his insulin and injector.
As Will calculated it, we could ride north on our pedicycles at about fifteen kilometers an hour. It should be no more than three hours to reach the well. If we were wrong, and Kai wasn’t there, we could return before our father knew we had gone. If there was any trouble, we had the camera and could send the holos by wireless. The RGs could come within an hour. At least that was the plan.
But we made two mistakes. The first was that we assumed our pedicycles could withstand the grueling ride over forty-two kilometers of broken road. The cycles were meant for short trips—the market, school, a friend’s apartment complex. They were not meant for dirt and gravel roads that had not been repaired in years and were littered with old car parts, scrap metal, rubber, and glass. We made it about fourteen kilometers before I got my first flat. Will fixed the tire with the repair kit and some compressed air, but the second flat could not be repaired. The metal rim had separated from the tire, and no amount of pounding and banging would straighten it out. We had to abandon the cycle on the side of the road, and I climbed behind Will on his cycle.
The extra weight, however, soon exhausted Will. He couldn’t pedal for both of us, and we stopped frequently so he could catch his breath. Then he got a flat too and ran out of compressed air while fixing it. Now his front tire was half-inflated, and that made pedaling even more difficult. I offered to trade places, but I didn’t have the strength to cycle more than a kilometer. It took us six hours instead of three to reach the site of the old well. Neither of us said anything about how long it would take to get back.
Our second mistake was to think that there might be water at a place so desiccated and lost. The well had been drained years ago, and the coating of dust everywhere quickly told us there had been few visitors. Cracked and parched earth was all that remained where there had once been soft loamy soil. No water had flowed since at least the Great Panic, if not before.
Kai was not here and probably never had been. Whatever the notations meant in his father’s notebook, the well wasn’t related to the kidnapping. Our lengthy trip had been foolish—and needlessly risky. As it was, darkness was coming, and we had no way to reach our father without a wireless signal. It was all my fault for suggesting we come here in the first place.
“They must have taken him farther north,” said Will. His voice was barely a whisper.