In his absence the room seemed to grow smaller. Torq moved closer.
“Why are you here?” Torq directed his question to Will.
“You brought us here,” said Will.
“Where did you get the rotorcraft?”
“Where did you get the jet?”
Torq slammed the wall behind Will’s head with such force that I was certain he would break something. He picked Will up by the hair and held him ten centimeters off the ground.
“I. Ask. The. Questions.” He spat out each word, then dropped Will back to the ground. “You answer!”
Will stammered out a partial version of the truth: We had been rescued by Ulysses from a drill site and were flying back to a pirate camp.
“Pirates don’t rescue children,” said Torq, raising one hand as if he might yank Will’s hair again.
“We’re his children!” I blurted.
Torq looked at me for the first time. I held his gaze. His eyes were like pools of dirty gray water—flat and dangerous.
“That may be useful,” said Torq.
Nasri arrived with the medic. He was a small man, skittery and nervous. There was dirt or dried blood on the front of his white tunic. He examined Ulysses quickly and gave him two injections. Ulysses did not stir. The medic cut away his bloody trouser leg with a scalpel. I averted my eyes. The sight of all that blood made me feel faint again. I heard the medic murmuring about sepsis and shock, but I put my head in my hands and blocked the sound.
There was some more cutting, and then some stitching. Another shot. Bloodied medi-pads discarded on the floor. A second medic wheeled a gurney into the room. Both men heaved Ulysses onto the bed.
“Where are you taking him?” I asked.
“Don’t you worry,” said Torq. “He’ll be better in no time. Then we’ll stick pins in him until he bleeds again.” Torq and Nasri laughed, and the medics wheeled Ulysses out of the cell. Nasri gave us a last violent look, then the steel door clanged shut behind both men, and Will and I were alone in the tiny cell.
“They’re going to torture him!” I cried.
“No, they won’t,” said Will. “Not right away. Didn’t you hear them? They need him awake.”
“So they can torture him!”
“That gives us time,” said Will. “Wherever they’ve taken him, I’ll bet that’s where they’ve got Kai. If we can find one, we can save the other.”
“But we’re trapped. It’s hopeless.”
“You told me not to say that!” Will snapped.
“But it is, Will. It is.”
He shook his head. The color had returned to his face, and he looked like the Will who once outraced a boy, three years older, on a dare. The medicine Nasri had given him back at the drilling site must have been powerful stuff, because he stood without much effort or visible pain. “You said Kai was our friend and we had to help him. Well, Ulysses is our friend too, and that means we’ve got twice the people to help, and we’ve got to work twice as hard.”
“But what can we do?”
Will looked around the cell. Except for a small air vent in the ceiling, and window grates in the steel door, the walls appeared solid and impenetrable. There was no handle on the door and no way to open it from the inside. His eyes darted back to the air vent.
“I know what you’re thinking,” I said. “But even if we knew where that went, we can’t possibly reach it.”
“Easy,” said Will. “Just like condenser duty.” He approached the wall, and felt its surface for imperfections. Although it appeared smooth, the wall had hundreds of cracks and fissures—the result of trying to build anything without water. The imperfections were small, but not so tiny that Will’s fingers could not grasp them, or his toes without shoes could not find footing.
“Give me a hand,” he said.
I made a step by interlocking my fingers and gave Will a tentative boost up the wall. A sharp pain cut into my shoulder, and I staggered backward, but Will had already dug his toes into an open space. He reached out with one hand and felt for the next toehold, then pulled himself up another ten centimeters. In this way he made steady progress. When he approached the corner where the wall met the ceiling, he extended his arm and just barely grasped the vent.
I scurried beneath him. I didn’t know if I could hold Will, but I would be there if he fell. I waited while he rested and pursed my lips in silent prayer. I didn’t pray about any of the things they taught in school; instead I promised our father that we would return home, no matter what. Will gave one hard yank, and the vent clattered to the floor. Then he pulled himself up and inside. In a moment his face reappeared in the open hole in the ceiling. “There’s a passage,” he said. “Climb to me.” He extended his arm through the hole.
There was no way I could shimmy up the wall as Will had. For one thing, I lacked his strength and agility. For another, my shoulder throbbed badly now, and I knew the effort would rip my arm from its socket. Nevertheless I tried to slip my fingers in the cracks and crawl up the vertical surface. But I had no strength, and the pain was brutal and unrelenting.
“I can’t, Will,” I cried.
Will undid his shirt and knotted it, then extended it through the hole like a rope. His head was stretched through the vent while his arm dangled the shirt. I leaped and grabbed the end of it with my good arm. But when I tried to pull myself up the wall, I couldn’t hold to the crevices. I fell backward and let go, and Will nearly toppled from the ceiling trying to hold on.
I lay on my back on the floor. I did not cry. I was exhausted; we both were. We had traveled nearly two thousand kilometers, crossed several republics and the Empire of Canada, reached the Great Coast, seen hundreds dead, killed several ourselves, starved, thirsted, fought, and were dirtied and bloodied. But we were not dead yet. And neither was Ulysses or Kai.
“You go,” I said. “Find the way out, and come back and get me.”
It was the only option, and Will knew it. He nodded. “I’ll come back. I promise.”
Then he was gone.
I sat for a long time on the floor. I listened to the fading echoes of Will’s feet overhead and the indistinct rattling of activity occurring somewhere outside the prison walls. If I was very still, I could feel the floor swaying slightly, as if it were moving in a breeze. I thought about all that had happened, each event leading inexorably to the next: if I hadn’t seen Kai; if we hadn’t become friends; if I hadn’t gone to his home; if he hadn’t come to mine; if he hadn’t told us about the river, or showed me the secret spring; if we’d never kissed. But I also knew many things had been set into motion years before I was born: if there hadn’t been the Great Panic; if there hadn’t been war; if there had been enough water…Where did it all begin? Our father remembered rivers, but now the rivers were gone. Our mother remembered boat trips and warm baths, but now she was ill. Even Will could remember school before they closed the doors at recess and forbade students from going outside. What did I remember?
Our mother at the kitchen table, laughing at something our father had said. Both our parents, hand in hand, watching the news on the wireless. Climbing into our parents’ bed with Will in the morning—the warm blankets and the clean smell of newly sanitized sheets. Will and I running for the bus, screaming madly as we raced to be first. All those memories—once vibrant, now faded. Earth itself changed.
Somewhere in my recollections, I nodded off, and then the memories mixed with dreams and became tangled in half-truths and impossibilities. My mother was lifting me in the air as the clouds spiraled and the sun broke through in curtains of yellow light. Again, I cried. Again! We twirled and spun beneath the luminous rays. Her head tilted back, my mouth tilted open, spinning, breathing, whirling, alive.
There was a thump and then a bang, and suddenly the outer door swung open.