Pacifica

  A cold sweat on his brow, he launched himself up the stairs, just making it to the bathroom in time to heave his guts out. When he could finally pick himself up off the floor, he peeled off his dirty clothes and got in the shower, watching the dirt and blood swirl down the drain.

  Then he dressed and went to his parents’ room.

  His mother was sleeping calmly, her lips parted, a black light-reduction mask over her eyes that blocked the news always playing on the large screen on the opposite wall. Beside the four-poster bed, on an antique wooden nightstand, was a glass vial and dropper of sleep medication, and a clock saying it was almost two in the morning. He pressed the button that turned on the lights, but she didn’t stir.

  His dad wasn’t home yet.

  “Mom.” Ross came close to the edge of the bed, looking at the plush gold comforter and thinking of the threadbare blanket on the cot in the clinic where the Shoreling girl had sat. “Mom,” he said, louder.

  She rolled onto her side, away from him.

  The screen caught the corner of his eye, a familiar face drawing his attention. The man was in his late forties, with brown skin, short salt-and-pepper hair, and narrow shoulders. He had a trusting look about him, serious, the kind that made you pay attention when he spoke.

  Noah Baker. Adam’s father.

  Ross’s breath stuck in his throat—he had to be addressing the press about Adam’s disappearance. Did he already know? Had Tersley told the Bakers what had happened? Ross scrambled for the volume button on the nightstand, and the vice president’s voice filled the room.

  “… been skeptical about relocation. I, like many of you, have a history below the cliffline. I was born there, as were my parents, and their parents. Our family store sold the fish my cousins and aunts and uncles caught at sea.” His smile was heavy with defeat. “The task force has announced the names of the first five hundred to be sent to Pacifica as part of the Relocation Act. It was decided that just like in the exploration of any new world, priority be given to the healthiest, which is why they claim no one over the age of forty, or under the age of fifteen, was included. I have been told that, due to high demand, additional spaces have opened for those interested, and for those not picked, a second wave considering all applicants will be sent in six months. Whatever your decision, I strongly urge you to consider what the loss of this middle block will do to the structure of the community they leave behind. If it will revitalize our culture, or further tear it apart.”

  Fury took Ross by storm. The people he spoke to considered him a leader. They were rioting because he said stuff like this. Because he couldn’t let go of his stupid revitalization. If he just got on board with relocation, there wouldn’t be riots. Adam wouldn’t be down in the docks, missing.

  The reporter pressed Noah, but the vice president had already turned to go. It was then that Ross noticed his suit—the same he’d worn to the dinner—and the backdrop of the museum. This had been filmed sometime tonight, maybe after he and Adam had left.

  Ross collapsed onto the bed, a guilty kind of hope overriding his anger. Maybe Noah didn’t know yet what had happened. Maybe he was still at the event. Tersley could have Adam back here before anyone caught on.

  “Sweetheart?” His mother inhaled slowly, and pushed up her mask. “Everything all right?” Her eyes closed again.

  Whatever temporary relief he’d felt plunged back into dread.

  If Tersley couldn’t find Adam, Ross had to do whatever he could to get him back.

  “Where’s Dad?” he asked.

  “I dunno,” she said sleepily. “Out? No, strategy session, I think…” She trailed off. “Big meeting with the SAF in the morning.”

  “I need to talk to him.”

  “He’s busy, sweetheart.”

  Ross bit his lip. Hard. Harder. He wasn’t a kid. He wasn’t going to cry. He wasn’t going to think about Adam’s parents, who would have stopped everything to make their kid breakfast, and sing him lullabies, and rub his damn forehead.

  He picked up his mother’s comm off the nightstand and dialed his father’s number. He didn’t answer. He sent a message. Still no reply.

  “I need to see him now,” Ross said, staring down at the small screen, willing his dad to look. He could call Ms. Scholz, his dad’s assistant, but that would mean involving more people. He wasn’t sure how his dad would feel about that.

  “Sorry,” she said. “You can talk to him after the meeting.”

  No, Ross wanted to say. No and now and I’m his goddamn son and please. But none of it came out.

  “I messed up.” He choked on the words. “Adam’s gone.”

  It was better to tell his mother first. She’d know he hadn’t meant for any of it to happen.

  But she was asleep again.

  He wanted to shake her awake. He wanted to throw her medication against the wall. He wanted to rewind the last day of his life and not be so stupid.

  Part of him knew he needed to go to the other wing and find Adam’s parents, but Ross’s needed to be the first to know. His dad didn’t like being surprised. He maintained his cool exterior by careful preparation, and there was nothing more unforgivable than jeopardizing his office.

  Adam’s family would have to wait.

  Ross rose and walked down the hallway to the stairs. He began to skip steps, the weight on his shoulders a physical thing, threatening to crush him if he didn’t move faster.

  He hit the stairs at a run, jumping the bottom three. The kitchen was a blur as he passed it on his way to the east wing, where the business was done.

  The décor changed. At a corner, the tile on the floor became white, the walls a dusty yellow. He reached a large glass door—fireproof, bulletproof, and locked by a fingerprint scan—and placed his hand on a black circular podium, then waited for the click of the locks. When the door slid back, he was off again, feet keeping pace with his galloping heart. Pictures lined the sides—paintings of great men and women, past leaders who’d probably never made stupid, impulsive mistakes that had gotten someone shot. Marble statues immortalized some of them as heroes, and Ross felt their eyes look down on him in shame.

  There were people here—there always were, even in the middle of the night. Officials. Security. Aides and interns, laughing like the world wasn’t upside down just miles down the road. Most of them ignored him, acting as if the sight of a guy sprinting down the corridor of a federal building was a regular occurrence.

  But he knew he was watched. The cameras on the ceiling tracked his every move. If he was deemed a threat, the building would immediately go into lockdown. The doors would remain inoperable until someone manually provided a key code. The film on the windows would black out, along with the lights, disorienting him. Security would have him on his face in seconds.

  No one stopped him.

  He didn’t slow until he came to a sitting room, adorned with more antique wooden furniture and sofas and small lamps atop circular tables. Sweat dripped down his temples. His lungs burned.

  A security officer stood in front of the main meeting room, where he knew his father was currently doing business. He didn’t know what was on the agenda. He didn’t care.

  “Everything all right, Mr. Torres?” asked the guard. His suit was the same kind Tersley usually wore—plain, dark fabric, straight lapels, buttoned down the center.

  “How much longer?” asked Ross.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “I’ll wait.” He sat down on one of the sofas. He stood. He stalked to a window and back.

  Every second that passed felt like a lifetime. Right now Adam could be being tortured. Who knew what the Shorelings were capable of? If word got out that a girl had been hurt, maybe killed at the hands of law enforcement, things in Lower Noram would only get worse. Adam had been right when he’d said that hurting her would mean trouble. They should have left her at that clinic when they had the chance.

  Minutes passed. The halls quieted. Still no one left that room.

&nb
sp; “Mr. Torres, you know I can’t let you in there.”

  He was standing in front of the door again, the security guard blocking his way.

  “I can’t wait any longer,” said Ross. He tried to push through him, but the man was bigger and stronger, and hooked him around the chest.

  “Mr. Torres, if you’d like…” He set him back. “If you’d like, I can call into the meeting and see when they’re going to be done.”

  Ross followed his gaze to a black message pad on the wall. One press of the button, and a red light would flash in the meeting room, indicating someone was waiting outside. His father had shown him this once, long ago.

  “Call him,” said Ross. “Do it. This is an emergency.”

  The guard left him to reach for the wall unit. As soon as he was out of arm’s reach, Ross grabbed the handle and entered the room.

  The second he was inside he knew he’d made a mistake. A dozen faces whipped in his direction. They gathered around a sleek black table, his father in the center. The secretary of trade was there beside him. Despite the late hour, everyone was dressed professionally and looking fresh, though Ross had seen almost all of them drinking at the museum just hours before.

  Adam’s father was absent—something that made Ross equally grateful and anxious. Still, it was odd he wasn’t here.

  “Shut the door,” hissed a woman behind him. Ms. Scholz, his father’s birdlike assistant, appeared at his other side, and closed the door quickly, motioning the guard to step back.

  His father, cheeks pale and mouth tight, held up a flat hand in his direction. The move seemed to shrink Ross. It was like when he was ten years old and his father had brought him to a session of Congress, and he’d ruined it by burping into a live microphone.

  “Your silence is taken as agreement?” A female voice, eager and robotic, came from all around them. Ross backed against the door, shoulders drawing inward, hands in his pockets.

  “My apologies, Píero. We had a brief interruption. Please continue.”

  Ross saw then that they all faced a wall of large screens, dark except the one in the center, where a red light glowed above the face of a man wearing a sheer white wrap over his shoulders. His skin was darker than most of those in Noram, his eyebrows like coal. A crinkled brown beard reached halfway down his neck, stopping just above a pendant, a black bird with outstretched wings, that hung on a gold chain. He began to speak, his words fast and foreign. Ross recognized some of them from his world language class, which taught a hybrid of English, Spanish, French, and Japanese, but it was too fast for him to keep up.

  The translator’s voice began in the common language, speaking over the man.

  “You have no choice but to comply,” said the interpreter program, and Ross was struck by the grim meaning of her words and the contrasting friendliness of her voice. “We have oil. Offshore. Onshore. We swim in it. We bathe in it. And if you want it, you’ll pay for it.”

  “Píero,” said Ross’s father. “You’ll understand if we’re reluctant to make arrangements. Our nations have a tumultuous history, and the people of the Alliance have a long memory. Even if a trade were mutually beneficial, I can’t drive my people into debt with the SAF. You understand why.”

  His father was talking to the leader of the Oil Nation—technically called the South American Federation. Ross pictured it as he’d seen it on a globe in one of his classes. Mountainous, snakelike in shape, twisting toward the bottom of the globe. The eastern side was mostly a dead zone. Desert. Too hot to be habitable, like the middle of his own country.

  He may not have paid a lot of attention in his classes, but he knew the Alliance had been at war with the SAF after the Melt. A settlement had been reached forty years before he’d been born, but trade between them was tenuous. He’d heard his father mention it to the other officials more than once.

  “You call me out of bed for this?” Píero threw his hands up.

  “I wanted to get back in touch with you sooner,” said the president. “My attention was needed elsewhere.”

  Like at a party, Ross thought.

  “You wanted to catch me unprepared,” said the translator cheerily.

  Ross’s father did not disagree.

  Píero spoke to someone offscreen, and then turned back toward the camera.

  “We can serve each other,” said the translator. “You still have food. My people are starving. Your people need oil. I have it.”

  There was a rise of whispers in the room. Strained glances were shared across the table.

  “You’re making assumptions, Píero,” said Ross’s father. He was stoic, his expression unreadable.

  Now it was Píero’s turn to look uncomfortable.

  “Your vice president seemed to think your nation was scraping the bottom of the barrel, so to speak,” the interpreter said.

  “That was speculation only,” said his father with a wave of his hand. “Our offshore drilling sites continue to prosper. It’s true, solar power is inconsistent due to the weather, and wind has proved unreliable because of the storms, but our people are researching new renewable energy opportunities. With our current level of independence, we have no reason to look outside our own nation for fuel.”

  He remembered something Roan Teller, the woman in charge of Pacifica, had said at the fund-raiser. I imagine my investors would be very interested in supporting the candidate who assured our continued independence. That seemed a long time ago now.

  “Now,” his father added, “if you were in need of an aid package…”

  Píero’s eyes narrowed. “Such a thing would indebt us to you. And then what? We can’t pay for it, and then you would turn around and take our oil anyway. I am offering you a trade, President Torres, not looking for scraps.”

  “It’s just an option,” said Ross’s father.

  “Where is Noah Baker?” asked the translator. Píero had lowered his chin, his lips pulled into a tight line.

  Ross flinched.

  “Ill, I’m afraid,” said Ross’s father. “But the vice president and I stand together on this. There’s a lot of repair work that needs to be done before we can negotiate terms.”

  “Stand together,” repeated the translator. “Like you do with your relocation plans?”

  George Torres gave a slow, dangerous smile. “Like we do with our growing concerns about the mobilization of your troops on your western border.”

  Silence followed, and in it, Ross was afraid to move, even if he was offscreen. The tension was thick enough to arc half the globe.

  He had barged into the wrong meeting. His own concerns were stripped back, replaced with a sudden real and terrible fear that the SAF might be preparing for war, that his father might be the only thing protecting his country.

  “A training exercise only,” said Píero via the interpreter. “You understand the need to always be prepared.”

  “Of course,” said his father. And after another strained moment: “I appreciate the late meeting, Píero. Sleep well. We’ll talk again soon.”

  It sounded more like a threat than a polite goodbye.

  Píero’s lips muttered something that didn’t come through on the translator. After a moment he gave a curt nod and the screen went black.

  Around the room, voices raised, all in a jumble, each trying to speak over the other. Ross caught words like “soon enough,” and “self-important,” and “strategy.” He shrunk farther into the shadows.

  His father was meeting with foreign leaders, trying to resolve international conflict, while Ross was running through riots looking for fun. Shame didn’t even cover it. He despised himself.

  “Give me ten,” his father said. He didn’t get up. One by one, people filed out of the room. The trade secretary glanced at him in surprise, as if he’d forgotten Ross was there.

  Soon, Ross was alone with the president.

  “Are we going to war?” he blurted.

  George Torres tapped his fingers on the table. “We’re on the verge. Whi
ch makes this day no different than any other day since I took this office.”

  If this was supposed to make him feel better, it didn’t.

  “You always said that they were smaller than us, though, right?” More land, his father had once told him, but so little of it livable because of the inaccessibility of water. “They couldn’t do any real damage.”

  “They’re the largest arms manufacturers and distributors in the world. They could take out half the Alliance if they got through the Armament.”

  “But…”

  “It’s a stunt to get our attention, nothing more.”

  The way his father said it made Ross think he should have already known this.

  “What about the riots in Lower Noram? Are they a stunt too?”

  They weren’t. This he knew with absolute certainty. What he’d seen had not been a game.

  The president gave a small, annoyed sigh, and though Ross’s head was screaming for answers, something to help him make sense of what had happened, he knew his father would not tell him more.

  He became increasingly aware of the chill in the room; it stuck to every droplet of sweat on his brow and down his back. Talk fast, he willed himself. Get this over with. But he couldn’t even bring himself to meet his father’s gaze.

  “What you did here was unacceptable,” George finally said. “And it will never happen again, do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  His father stood from his chair and turned to the back of the room, where a long table against the wall held a carafe of coffee, mugs, and a three-tiered serving plate of fresh fruit and breads and meats. Ross wasn’t sure how he hadn’t noticed it until now, and it occurred to him that the leader of the SAF must have seen it during their meeting, when he had talked about his people starving.

  His father sat down. He placed a cloth napkin on his lap. His plate was piled high with thick breads and bite-sized pieces of fruit.

  “What is it,” his dad said flatly, without looking up.