The Water Knife

  Maria poked her in the ribs. “Score’s only half done, girl. Come on. We got to turn our water into money. Can’t just sit on it. And I want you with me to walk it over.”

  Maria made her voice as authoritative as she could, pretending she had a plan and was in control. But it made her nervous, staring at that pile of water they’d scored. Knowing the days of life it would support. Knowing that people would be inspired to just take it from her. She needed this water turned into cash. Compact paper that she could shove into her bra and have a hope of protecting.

  “Vultures are circling, girl. We got to do this now. While everyone’s asleep. Before Toomie heads out for work. Toomie’s our ticket.”

  Sarah sat up, grabbed her sheet back, and pulled it over her head. “I was sleeping.”

  She reminded Maria of a kitten that she’d found mewling inside a banged-up trash can. The kitten hadn’t had a mother, probably because some needleboy had caught and cooked her, and there this little kitten was, curled up and begging for something it would never get.

  Maria had petted the tiny creature, understanding its need—the wishing for milk that would never come, the desperate desire to have someone come back and take care of you—but you couldn’t just lie there praying for rescue.

  Sarah, though…Sarah acted hard, but the girl was soft. Even when she peddled ass, she expected someone to be taking care of her. Kept thinking the world gave a damn about her worthless life.

  Sarah. That kitten. Maria’s father. They were all the same.

  Maria gave Sarah a hard shove. “Come on.”

  Sarah sat up, her blond hair tousled, squinting. “I’m up. I’m up.” She started coughing. Spasms wracked her. Coughing up the smoke and dryness that had settled in her chest overnight. She reached for one of the bottles of water.

  “That’s our money you’re drinking,” Maria reminded her.

  Sarah gave her a dirty look. “It’s my money, you mean.”

  Maria made a face back, then grabbed their Clearsac and climbed the basement steps.

  In the smoky dawn light, she hustled across red gravel landscaping, flip-flops slapping her heels, to where her father had dug a latrine inside the house’s back shed. He’d called it an outhouse, something to civilize their lives, so they wouldn’t just be shitting in the open like all the other Texans who couldn’t find a Jonnytruck in time.

  Maria closed the door and looped string over a nail to lock it. She crouched over the trench, wrinkling her nose at the stink, opened the Clearsac, and peed into it. When she was finished, she hung the sac on a nail, then finished her business, wiping with ragged squares of newsprint that she and Sarah had torn from Río de Sangre. She pulled up her shorts and hurried out, carrying the half-full Clearsac, glad to be back out in dawn’s open smoky air again.

  “You got my rent?”

  Maria yelped and spun, almost dropping the Clearsac as she went down.

  One of the Vet’s thugs was leaning against the outhouse, partly shielded by the door. Damien. Thick blond dreds and a lazy eye that looked wrong at the world, a face pierced with bone and silver, and white skin that had burned and tanned and burned so many times that he was a mottled peeling patchwork of deep golden browns and sun-scorched red.

  Maria glared at him. “You scared me.”

  Damien’s cracked lips split into a sly smile. Proud of himself. “Awww, you got nothing to fear from me, girl. You don’t got nothing I want—except rent.” He paused. “So? You got it?”

  Maria got to her feet, carefully holding the unspilled Clearsac. It was frightening to find him standing there like that, a chilling reminder that just because the Nguyens didn’t raise an alarm didn’t mean she was safe.

  Maria’s father might have helped them out by driving Mrs. Nguyen to the Red Cross tent in the back of his truck when she’d been septic with her pregnancy, but that didn’t mean they owed Maria now. Not if it meant crossing someone who could wipe out their family.

  “Don’t sneak up on me like that,” Maria said. “I don’t like it.”

  Damien just laughed. “Poor little tejana don’t like being sneaked up on.” He sauntered over to her. “Call it a free lesson, putita. Lots of people sneak better and hurt harder than me.” He chucked her under the chin. “Swimming pools are full of girls like you. Free advice? Think like a rabbit and put your damn ears up before you come out of your hole, right?”

  Why did she trust him? Maria wondered. It wasn’t like he was her friend. There was no doubt that if she didn’t make rent he’d toss her out, or drain her blood and black-market it, or sell her ass to make up his quota for the Vet.

  And yet these days, when she prayed to be protected, more often than not it was Damien’s face that was in her mind. Damien wasn’t her friend, but he also didn’t hate Texans. Whatever sicknesses he might have, they weren’t the kind that fed on the likes of Maria. She took what she could get.

  “You got my money?” he asked.

  Maria hesitated. “I still got till tonight.”

  “I guess that’s a no?”

  When Maria didn’t answer, Damien laughed. “You think you’re getting your rent in the next twelve hours? You peddling that tight little culo of yours without telling me?”

  Maria hesitated. “I don’t got cash. I got water. Whole bunch of liters. My rent’s in water till I sell it.”

  Damien smirked. “Oh yeah. I heard some little putas made out big at the Friendship pump. Got themselves a whole red wagon full of Red Cross water. I ought to tax you, just for bringing it in.”

  “I got to sell it, if you want our rent.”

  “Maybe I take your pay in water right now. Save you the effort.”

  “This water?” She held up the Clearsac, full of dark yellow pee.

  Damien laughed. “I don’t drink that shit. That’s for Texans.”

  “Once I squeeze it, it’s just water.”

  “Keep telling yourself that.”

  He’s just testing me, Maria thought. But still she was afraid. Damien could just take all her water if he wanted. All that water that she’d gotten so cheap and was supposed to sell so high…

  “If you pay me what they’ll pay at the Taiyang, you can have it now,” she said.

  “What they pay at the Taiyang?” he laughed. “You really think you can bargain with me?”

  She hesitated, trying to measure the threat. He had to be here because he’d heard about the water. But if she sold to him, she’d just end up breaking even, back to broke again, instead of getting ahead. He watched her, smiling slightly.

  “Please,” she said. “Just let me sell it. I’ll pay you as soon as I get back. You know I can make more over by Taiyang. Workers got cash, don’t mind spending it. I’ll give you a cut.”

  “A cut, huh?” He shaded his eyes at the sun, where it was rising and burning through the smoke and dust of morning. “Lemme think about it…gonna be a hot one. Lots of money to make, lots of drinks to serve…” He grinned. “Okay, sure. You want to sweat like that, you go run your play.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I always say I can be reasonable. But if you really want to make money, you should work for me. We dye your hair blond, I can put you in with the Chinese construction guys. They’d buy your time, easy. Or maybe I run you past the Red Cross tents, make some introductions. Meet ourselves a nice humanitarian doctor.” He smiled. “Every girl wants to marry a doctor, don’t she?”

  “Cut it out,” Maria said.

  “No hard thing, girl. You go peddle water at the Taiyang, if that’s what you want. But you better pay off Esteban first, make sure you’re kicking up to the Vet.” He quirked an eyebrow. “He’s over at the Vet’s place.”

  “Can’t I pay you here?”

  “Vendors ain’t my turf. I take your money—Esteban don’t know you. If I tell him some tejana might be peddling water, he don’t know which one, don’t know you paid or not. Best you take it up to him. I don’t need that fucker banging down on me. I got enough troub
le from him as it is.”

  Sarah came up the stairs out of the basement.

  “Oh. Hey, Damien.”

  Damien smiled. “Just the güera I was looking for! You have a good night? You got rent?”

  Sarah hesitated and her eyes darted to Maria. “I—”

  Damien made a noise of disgust. “God damn, Maria. You got my girl’s cash wrapped up in this, too? You’re worse than a pimp, taking her cash like that.”

  “We got the water,” Maria said. “We’ll get you your money.”

  “You got rent due is what you got. Plus her kickback to me. So hurry the fuck up and go hustle.” He motioned at the streets. “And remember, I’m the good guy here. If I got to call in muscle, you’ll end up at one of the Vet’s parties, and you know you don’t want that.”

  Maria could almost see the shiver of fear that enveloped Sarah at the mention of the Vet’s parties.

  “We’re not behind yet,” Sarah said, finally.

  “Keep it that way. You won’t like how the Vet pulls his payback out of a couple Texas bangbangs like you.” He turned to leave and then turned back. “And pay Esteban his tax, too. Make sure you got his permission before you get all entrepreneurial. That ain’t my territory.”

  Maria looked away, not saying anything, but Damien caught her expression. “You listen tight, girl. Vet will nail your little tits to the wall if he catches you entrepreneurializing without permission.”

  “I know.”

  “You know.” Damien made a face. “Sure you know. That’s why you’re looking all shifty. You remember this: if I got my eye on you, it means other people got their eyes on you, too. If the Vet’s boys catch you over by that arcology peddling without tax, he’ll make your pretty smile real wide with some fishhooks and a knife. No joke. You’re too pretty to get cut like that.”

  Sarah tugged Maria’s shoulder. “We know, Damien. They’ll get their cut.”

  “And I want mine, too.”

  Maria started to protest, but Sarah squeezed her hand so tight, it felt as if her fingers were breaking.

  “You’ll get yours, too.”

  When Damien was gone, Maria went off. “What are you doing? You know how much of a cut that’s going to take?”

  Sarah didn’t even raise her voice. “You’ll still make plenty. Now come on. We got to get Esteban paid and get this wagon over to Toomie before people start waking up.”

  “But—”

  Sarah just looked at her. “It’s the way it is, girl. Ain’t no point fighting it. You can’t get hung up on how these things are. Now let’s go pay our tax and get your money.”

  Her voice was low and coddling, urging Maria to see that no matter how much she mewed, no one was just going to give her any milk.

  CHAPTER 7

  Angel flew south, a falcon hunting.

  The Mojave lay sere and open, a burned, wind-abraded scape of oxidized gravels and pale clays, scabbed with creosote bushes and twisted Joshua trees. One hundred twenty degrees in the shade, and heat rippling off the pavement, mirage shimmer. The sun raged across the sky, and the only movement on the interstate was Angel’s Tesla, blazing.

  It had been a desperate land before, and it was a desperate land still. Angel had always liked the desert for its lack of illusions. Here, plants spread their roots wide and shallow, starved for every drop. Their saps crystalized to hard shellac, fighting to keep every molecule of moisture from evaporating. Leaves strained up into the unforgiving sky, shaped to catch and channel any rare drop that might happen to fall upon them.

  Thanks to the centrifugal pump, places like Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas had thrown on the garments of fertility for a century, pretending to greenery and growth as they mined glacial water from ten-thousand-year-old aquifers. They’d played dress-up-in-green and pretended it could last forever. They’d pumped up the Ice Age and spread it across the land, and for a while they’d turned their dry lands lush. Cotton, wheat, corn, soybeans—vast green acreages, all because someone could get a pump going. Those places had dreamed of being different from what they were. They’d had aspirations. And then the water ran out, and they fell back, realizing too late that their prosperity was borrowed, and there would be no more coming.

  The desert was different. It had always been a gaunt and feral thing. Always hunting for its next sip. The desert never forgot itself. A thin fall of winter rain was all that kept yucca and creosote blooming. If there was other life, it cowered alongside the banks of the few capillary rivers that braved the blazing lands and never strayed far.

  The desert never took water for granted.

  Angel opened up the Tesla. His car sank low on the pavement and accelerated, burning across the truest place Angel had ever known.

  He slashed through checkpoints, radioing credentials ahead. Nevada guardies stood by in flak jackets, waving him on. Drones circled overhead, invisible in the smoke-and-blue sky.

  Occasionally, Angel caught glimpses of militias: the sun-flash of high-power scopes tracking as the Tesla shot down the empty highway, Mormons and northern Nevada ranchers doing volunteer rotations: South Border Marauders, Desert Dogs, a half-dozen others recruited from across the state—Catherine Case’s second army, all of them doing their bit to keep refugees from swamping their fragile promised land.

  Angel suspected that he knew some of those hunkered behind the stony ridges. He remembered their hatred-hardened faces and murder-flicker eyes. At the time he’d sympathized with their hopeless hate. He was their worst nightmare: a Vegas water knife, sitting in their living rooms, making offers they couldn’t refuse. The Devil in black, offering a bloody deal for their salvation. He’d perched on frayed couches and sagging La-Z-Boy recliners. He’d leaned against peeling-paint porch rails and stood in the hot close air of horse barns, always making the same offer. He’d spoken low, conspiratorially, laying out the deal that would save them from the hell that Catherine Case was busy creating for them as her pipeline projects pumped away their water.

  The offer was simple: work, money, water—life. Stop shooting at Vegas and start shooting Zoners. If they yoked themselves to the purposes of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, all things were possible. They might even grow a little, with a friendly tap into the East Basin Pipeline. She’d let them drink. Maybe even let them smear a bit of water across the land. Angel went from house to house and town to town, offering one last chance to haul themselves out of the abyss.

  And, as Case had predicted, they’d seized it with both hands.

  Militias sprang up on the border, perched along the shoulder of the Colorado River, looking across the waters toward Arizona and Utah. Scalps appeared as warnings along interstates. Chain gangs of Zoners and Merry Perrys were marched back down into the river and told to swim for the other side. Some people even made it.

  Senators back east demanded that Nevada end its militia lawlessness, and Governor Andrews dutifully sent out the guardies to hunt down the bandits. He paraded theatrical arrests in front of news cameras and lined up defiant citizen defenders in court. And as soon as the cameras went dark, the cuffs came off, and Catherine Case’s militias returned to their posts along the river.

  Angel crossed the border at Lake Mead. The bathtub rings of the reservoir stood stark against the pale desert stones. At one time, long before Angel’s tenure, Lake Mead had held waters that nearly topped the Hoover Dam. It had been full. Now marinas lay like toy ruins on the mud flats of the lake, and guardies and drones buzzed above the dam, keeping watch over Vegas’s shrunken reservoir.

  Every car that sought to cross the bridge that spanned the canyon of the Colorado River was searched. These days nothing came close to the dam without being inspected multiple times.

  Rather than go through the hassle, Angel dropped his car at the border, handing it off to an SNWA employee, and walked across the bridge with the rest of the foot traffic. Peering over the embankment with all the other tourists at the gleaming blue waters of Lake Mead. The lifeline of Las Vegas
. A portion of the lake was covered with a half-finished gossamer structure, a carbon fiber roof that would eventually enclose the entire lake. SNWA’s latest megaproject, trying to reduce evaporation.

  On the far side of the river, Angel processed through Arizona border security, submitting to the state’s arbitrary searches. He ignored the angry faces of the Arizona Border Patrol and let them do their searches and paw through his fake credentials.

  They had their dogs sniff him, and they searched him again, but eventually they let him pass. Border guards were border guards, and at the end of the day Zoners still wanted people to come visit their beat-to-hell state. To spend money there, to give them a little bit of what they’d lost.

  Angel came through the last checkpoint and legally stood on Arizona soil. Up on the embankments, refugees had set up their tents. People intent on attempting a midnight run across the river, right into the teeth of the people Angel had recruited to stop them.

  It was a nightly ritual. Texans and Mexicans and Zoners would rush the river. Some of them would get through. Most of them wouldn’t. All up and down the river, from Lake Mead down south to Lake Havasu and farther on, there were encampments like this.

  Pure Life and Aquafina and CamelBak had set up relief tents. Getting good PR photos of how they cared for refugees.

  Your purchase helps us mitigate the impacts of climate change on vulnerable peoples around the world.

  Angel wandered among the relief operations, until he found a revival tent full of Merry Perrys. He eased in.

  People were in line, confessing sins, buying tokens of devotion. Whipping themselves into a frenzy as they prayed to the same God that was hammering them with drought to give them some luck as they attempted their runs across the river.

  A man came up beside Angel and offered him a Merry Perry token.

  “Mark of God, sir?”

  Angel dropped a dollar coin into the man’s coffee can. The man handed Angel a keylink along with an atonement token and passed on.