Текст книги "The Rift"

Автор книги: Chris Howard

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THE RIFT

BOOK TWO OF ROOTLESS

CHRIS HOWARD

For the forests

“There’s a brilliant madness to this deadly post-apocalyptic world, filled with complex characters, shifting loyalties, and layers of mystery… a nonstop adventure” – Publishers Weekly, starred review of Rootless

Banyan was once a tree builder, creating scrap-metal forests for rich clients in a barren burned-out world. Now he’s traded his scaffolds for lookouts, his tools for guns. On a stolen boat, surrounded by a mutinous crew, Banyan has escaped from Promise Island with the last living trees on earth, and he’s desperate to smuggle them to safety.

But powerful enemies are in pursuit, seeking to claim the trees for themselves. To reach a safe haven, Banyan will need the help of the pirate girl he loves, Alpha, his broken friend, Crow, and his troubled sister, Zee. Only together can they cross the mysterious molten wasteland of THE RIFT. And when Banyan discovers a new threat to Alpha’s life, he fears he’ll lose not only the trees they sacrificed so much to find, but the girl who inspires him and gives him hope.

Howard’s “gift for the phantasmagoric” (Kirkus) is on full display in this thrilling second book of the Rootless trilogy.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE • CHAPTER TWO • CHAPTER THREE • CHAPTER FOUR • CHAPTER FIVE • CHAPTER SIX • CHAPTER SEVEN • CHAPTER EIGHT • CHAPTER NINE • CHAPTER TEN • CHAPTER ELEVEN • CHAPTER TWELVE • CHAPTER THIRTEEN • CHAPTER FOURTEEN

PART TWO

CHAPTER FIFTEEN • CHAPTER SIXTEEN • CHAPTER SEVENTEEN • CHAPTER EIGHTEEN • CHAPTER NINETEEN • CHAPTER TWENTY • CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE • CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO • CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE • CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR • CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE • CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX • CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN • CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

PART THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE • CHAPTER THIRTY • CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE • CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO • CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE • CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR • CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE • CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX • CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN • CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT • CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE • CHAPTER FORTY • CHAPTER FORTY-ONE • CHAPTER FORTY-TWO • CHAPTER FORTY-THREE • CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR • CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE • CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

OTHER TITLES BY CHRIS HOWARD

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

They’d figured me to be some sort of savior. After I’d rescued them on Promise Island, put guns in their hands, and busted them free. But as the strugglers glared at me through the neon gloom of the cargo hold, anger bubbled beneath their faces like they were pots ready to boil, and I had no words to cool them.

They scowled at Alpha as she paced before them with her shotgun on her shoulder. They sneered at Zee, soon as she attempted to speak. And the whole Banyan being a savior thing seemed a long time gone, I reckon, after sixteen days pushing south on this lake, one sunrise after another, with still no sign of land.

The boat lurched through the water, turning things more sour with each side-to-side sway. Me and the girls had come in here to talk reason, but these strugglers didn’t want to know how lost we were, or how close to starving we’d gotten. They just wanted out of the cargo hold. They wanted to piss in the wind instead of in a bucket in the corner, breathe the cold air as it wailed over the lake. And that would have been just dandy, except for who the hell were they? Sure, I’d saved them from GenTech, but they were still strangers. Nothing more. And that meant I’d be a fool to trust them.

“We fought our way off that island,” said some dude with green eyes and a crop of red hair. “We fought our way free, same as you did. Left agents in pools of blood on the snow. And for what? For this?”

When he pointed at the walls of the cargo hold, I saw his left arm had its hand missing—was just a stump below the elbow. And I reckoned GenTech could have grown him a new hand to fix that for him, if they had been in the fixing people business. But GenTech was more in the use people to grow trees and control every last thing that grows business. And my own parents had been tangled up at the heart of it all.

“You think you can just lock us in here and we’ll keep quiet? You think we’ll cower in fear, on account of that shotgun you’re wielding?” The redhead flicked his gaze at Alpha, his words shaking the crowd into a mutter and jeer.

“Damn right, Kade. You tell them, Kade.” The strugglers jabbered on behind him, their voices pushing him forward, puffing him up.

And I could think of no right thing to say to them. Weren’t my fault this lake stretched so damn far. And these folk didn’t know the first thing about what I’d spared them, so they could stare daggers at me all day long—least they weren’t being shipped back to the mainland as part of Project Zion. Least they weren’t the start of GenTech’s new crop of trees, covered in bark and shrubby with branches.

I pictured it for a second—all of them changing. Their human cells being used to grow a whole new species, forming the twisted beginnings of a forest, built for a world that hadn’t seen trees in more than one hundred years. And you think they’d have believed me if I told them? No. Only way they’d believe me is if I showed them, and that secret had to stay in the hull.

“It’s for your own safety,” Zee called out, trying to make some sort of peace.

“A sweet sentiment,” said this Kade guy. “If only it were true.”

He couldn’t have been much older than I was, but was the sort who acts like he’s got a lifetime on everyone, taking deep breaths instead of just speaking, leaving big gaps for the words left behind. And considering he’d been dragged north by GenTech and drugged unconscious and almost never woke up, I reckon you’d have to admire the guy’s spirit for still showing some fight. Gumption is what my old man would have called it. I called it a major pain in the ass.

“Quiet down,” Alpha yelled as the rest of the survivors started to squabble and roar even louder. She pump-snapped her shotgun, and it shut up most of them.

Not all of them.

“What?” Kade took two quick steps forward, drumming a knuckle at his skull. “You want to put a hole in my head?”

Alpha leveled the shotgun at him. “Don’t tempt me.”

“It’s a waste.” This was aimed at me, and the dude was slowing himself down again, as if his head might explode if he got to talking too fast. “We’re no use to you locked up in here. You should be putting us to work—we could help.”

“Help with what?” muttered Alpha.

“Whatever it was that you stole.”

“We didn’t steal nothing.” I tried to keep my voice as steady as his was. Reminded myself what I’d taken from GenTech was the remains of my father, and that man belonged to me, no matter what he’d become.

“I saw you rolling off of that island, bro,” said Kade. “All three of you came up and over the hillside, riding on a big steel box with a nice set of wheels underneath. Impressive-looking machine, don’t get me wrong, but any box is only worth as much as what’s inside it. Am I right?”

He’d been inching closer and was now just a few feet from us. Alpha looked about ready to snap. I stepped in front of her, coming between her and the redhead so as to block him from the barrel of her gun.

“I know you’re all angry,” I said to the crowd behind him. Kade was too close now. I could smell the stale reek of his old sweat through the outfit he’d pieced together. We were all bundled inside clothes made for agents, the purple fuzz and bright white logos glittery beneath the pale neon lights. “And I know you’re hungry. Hell, we’re hungry, too. GenTech didn’t exactly have the boat stocked for us to make our escape.”

“And you’d like us to starve in silence, is that it?” Kade said it calm and with a grin on his face, like he was all handsome smiles and smooth talking, too wise to be bitter.

“That ain’t what I meant. You just need to sit tight is all. Save your strength.”

“My strength, huh?” He took another step closer and prodded me in the chest with the clubbed stump at the end of his arm. We were about the same height, but he was twice as broad. “And what am I saving it for?”

Hell, his guess was as good as mine. All I knew was we had GenTech behind us, and plenty more GenTech ahead.

The dude started laughing then. Head thrown back, teeth sharp and straight. “You’ve no idea, do you? You don’t even know what’s out there past the water.”

“And you do?”

“Perhaps. Could be I know the northern wastelands like the back of my hand.”

“And which hand is that?”

I shoved his stumped arm away, turned, and strode for the door, the girls falling in behind me, Alpha keeping her shotgun aimed into the crowd.

I was sick of them. Sick of their noise. And sick of the stench of the cargo hold, and the way the boat rumbled my guts as it rocked back and forth.

“Come on,” Kade called after us. “I’m curious, bro. Where are you trying to lead us?”

“I’m just heading south.” When we reached the door, I threw him a final look, then threw a look at the rest of them strugglers, trying to make myself real clear. “I ain’t leading you people no place at all.”

Outside, the wind still howled, and the world looked just as we’d left it.

“That went well,” I grumbled, grabbing for the railing as my feet slid on the deck.

“Can’t let them see you’re afraid of them, bud.” Alpha padlocked the door to the cargo hold and triple-checked it was sealed.

“I ain’t afraid.” I shook my head at Zee. “Going in there was a stupid idea, that’s all.”

“You’re the one who said you wanted to quiet them down.” Zee wound back her long hair to keep it from the wind. My sister was the only one on this boat whose head hadn’t been shaved by GenTech agents, and it made her like the last pretty thing not messed with. “I still say we try leveling with them. Show them what we have in the hull.”

“There’s no leveling with that lot,” said Alpha. “Red’s got ’em too riled up.”

Right on cue, the strugglers started hollering and pounding at the door to the hold again, stamping their damn feet on the floor. The sound could drive you insane, so I tried my best to ignore it. Started scouring the horizon instead, hoping for land but fearing I’d see GenTech boats rushing towards us. And yeah, the fear could also drive you straight crazy. Especially after sixteen days.

“But what if it’s true?” Zee stared at the steel door between us and the strugglers. “You think that guy could know what’s out here?”

“Only if he’s an agent,” I said. “GenTech kept us drugged the whole way north. And that dude ain’t no agent. You saw the holes on his arms. He was plugged in ready for Project Zion, wired up to those purple cables just like the rest of them.”

“We should give them a chance.” Zee glanced at Alpha. “It doesn’t sit right, and both of you know it.”

I stared past the top of the cockpit to where the gun tower stuck up. And it almost looked like a skinny bit of scaffold poking at the rainclouds, like something me and Pop would have climbed to build trees as tall as our metal could fly. But I’d traded my scaffolds for lookouts, I reckon. Traded my tools in for guns.

It was up in that tower, wrapped in sheets of plastic, that we’d stashed every weapon but for the one Alpha had slung from her shoulder. Soon as those strugglers had first fallen asleep, we’d crept between them, gathering up their guns. Didn’t see them wake up—we were out on the deck, the door to the cargo hold padlocked shut—but I won’t ever forget the sound that they made.

“We can’t trust ’em,” Alpha said, following my gaze to the gun tower. “And we don’t owe these people a thing.”

“I know it,” I said. Hell, they were lucky just to still be alive, and I told myself that over and over. Besides, there were only seven of those saplings growing out of Pop’s dead body, stowed down below on this stolen boat. Seven last trees for a world made barren. And seven weren’t enough to go sharing.

“We hit land, we’ll make it so they can break through that door,” I told Zee. “Then we leave them behind us, and they can fend for themselves.”

Alpha leaned and spat off the deck as the wind rattled the water. “Can’t come soon enough.”

She was right. We’d all been stuck on this lake long enough to be praying for what lay beyond it, even though we’d no idea what that might be.

All we really knew was that at some point we’d have to cross the molten wastelands, the Rift. The lava fields where no one dared travel, the endless heat, the steam and ash and who knew what other flavors of hell. The Rift lay north of the dusty world we’d been plucked from, but it had to be somewhere south of the cold world we were in now.

I squinted at the low sun, then peered at the bow, and there was Crow, just like always. He’d been stood in the same damn spot, nearly all day long, for more than two damn weeks.

“Look at him,” I muttered. “He’s like a statue up there.”

“Don’t.” Zee’s eyes were watching mine, her brain guessing what mine was thinking. “You should leave him be.”

“Ah, there’s no stopping your brother.” Alpha smirked as she tugged up Zee’s purple hood, shielding her from the spray off the water. “He’s what we call a glutton for punishment. Ain’t you, bud?”

“Reckon I must be,” I said, and I pushed off towards the bow.

CHAPTER TWO

I put my hands on the railing next to Crow’s and stood with him at the bow, trying not to think about how deep the lake was, or how being no good at swimming makes you so good at drowning.

“How’s the south looking?” I said, but got nothing from him.

Back when we were trying to find the trees and my father, there were plenty of times I’d have done anything to shut Crow’s big mouth. In those days, most things he’d said had seemed like a lie. But that was before we’d become bound together, I reckon. Because now, his silence left me hollow.

“You’re doing an awful lot of watching for someone who’s all done being a watcher.”

I’d made this joke before, and Crow closed his eyes for a moment, shook his head just the littlest bit. Reckoned that meant I was getting to him, though. Just had to keep on trying.

Even stooped, he towered above me. A bona fide giant, more than ten-foot tall now, on account of GenTech growing him his new pair of legs. His face had healed pretty good, too. The scars had faded on his dark skin. Still there, but not so bad, considering the burns and blisters he’d earned when Harvest’s slave ship had exploded into flames.

“Didn’t do a damn bit of good, waltzing into that cargo hold,” I said. “I knew it was a waste of time. Some punk with one hand’s the ringleader. Kade, they call him. Told him to watch out, or you’d head in there and kick his ass.”

Finally, Crow turned to look down at me.

“Guess he weren’t real scared of that prospect.” There was no color in his voice, it was thin and bloodless, and when he cocked his head at the noise spilling out of the cargo hold, I tried to interrupt, but Crow weren’t done yet. “And why should he worry? One hand’s better than no legs.”

“You got legs,” I said, staring down at the lake. Anything but see the look in Crow’s eyes.

“Sure I do. Big pair of wooden legs I can’t use right.”

“You’re standing, ain’t you?” I saw him grip tighter at the railing as I said it. “Hell, you used them before. Scampered all the way up the hill and off of that island.”

“One time being better than never?”

“You’ll get it back.”

“Zee put you up to this?”

“What?”

“Always coming up here and pestering me?”

As the wind picked up, Crow wobbled against it, and he seemed to age a hundred years in one second. His fists clenched even tighter on the railing, and his voice became an angry whisper, like he was ashamed to even be speaking at all. “Even if I appreciated it, I don’t need it, Banyan. I do not need it at all.”

“So tell me what you do need.”

“Nothing you can give.”

I studied the horizon, searching for GenTech boats or a glimpse of land, so used to seeing nothing at all.

“You think you’re the only one who lost something on that island?” I said. “I lost the father I’d come looking for, and a mother I never even knew I had.”

“Well, I be the only one who ended up a cripple. I’m the only one who’s a freak.” Crow spat the words at me, then glared down at the thick tree-legs that had been forged to his hips. He’d covered them with strips of purple fuzz, hiding the knotted bark, the gray-brown grooves and ridges, and all across the fabric, the GenTech logo was stitched in tiny white letters, as if claiming ownership of their handiwork, and ownership of Crow.

“Freak of nature,” I said. “So? You’re one of a kind.”

“Not nature, Banyan. Science.” Looked like Crow had tears brewing on his eyeballs, but I told myself it was only the wind.

“They fixed you with that science. Best that they could.”

“Aye. After they tore me in two.”

“You’ll be sprinting come springtime, you’ll see.”

“Spring, you say?” He shook his head. “Just get me to Niagara, little man. That all I be asking.”

“Waterfall City, huh.” Mightn’t be a bad idea, I reckoned. The Rastas there had held onto some power, on account of all the fresh water they had to barter. Some said they even traded water to GenTech, forming an uneasy truce with the same folk they’d once battled real fierce. And agents kept out of Niagara, for the most part, anyways, so it mightn’t be a bad place to plant us those saplings. We could keep them hidden there, amid the rivers and rocks. And even if the locusts found them, my mother had said these new trees weren’t something the swarms could go eating, she’d said they were even stronger than the plants in GenTech’s cornfields. So maybe someday, we’d watch our trees grow tall and see the branches bend down towards us, full of apples, limbs heavy with fruit.

Crow rubbed a hand at the scar on the back of his neck, where he’d once been burned with the red lion, the mark of the Soljah warriors who call Niagara home. “Sure, man. Waterfall City. Get me there, broken or not.”

“Must be nice to have someplace to get back to,” I said, staring at all the emptiness that lay south.

I sat in the cockpit and pieced together a small tree out of purple clips of wire, hung with pierced bits of white plastic I’d cut to the shapes of leaves. Thing was small, not a foot high, but it felt good to sit there and twist at it, even though I had to ignore the hollering in the cargo hold right beneath me the whole damn time.

That noise was a constant reminder of everything I wanted to forget—the locked-up survivors, the fear of never finding land, and the fear of running into GenTech. But I tried to put it all out of my mind and just focus on the wire and plastic I’d spread across the control panels, draping my little tree building project over all the gizmos and dials we didn’t know what to do with. Boat had started steering itself once we’d hit open water, plowing south like it knew where it wanted to go. And even if we’d been able to change our direction, south seemed like the only place to head.

“Why’d you make it purple?” Alpha leaned over me, her chest pressed at my shoulder, her breath steaming.

“All the color I got.” I tugged at the GenTech wires, resting my head against my girl as the cries leached up from the cargo hold. “I sure wish to hell they would shut the hell up.”

“I know, bud. Me, too.”

“You think Zee’s right about telling them? Letting them out?”

“No. I think your sister’s too soft for her own good.”

“I don’t know.” I thought about what Zee did to that old bastard Frost, back on Promise Island. “You’ve not seen her with a nail gun.”

“Crow say why he’s giving us the moody?” asked Alpha, and we watched him on the bow through the glass eyes of the cockpit, as water sprayed off the lake and soaked him to the bone.

“Just said he’s a cripple.” A piece of wire broke off in my hand. “Thinks he’s some kind of freak.”

“He is pretty freaky-looking.”

“Don’t let him catch you saying it.”

“But look at the size of him.” Alpha slumped into a chair beside me, and that meant I was all done looking at Crow, because Alpha was by far the best thing to look at, just like she was by far the best way of forgetting all the pain that filled up this boat.

She stretched out her legs, propping her tall boots on the control panel, her thighs like pale gold beneath her purple rags and old bandages, and I felt sped up just at the sight of her. We’d fooled around up in the gun tower, when we could sneak up there and get away from Zee, but each time had just left me more frazzled and my lips more dry. I didn’t know where to go next with it. And how the hell could I? My old man had barely mentioned women at all. He made sure I didn’t stare too long at the ones we’d built trees for. Avert your eyes, he’d say. The good ones can burn you worse than the bad. But that was about all I got from him, all those years on the road. Still, seeing as what happened between him and my mother, I can’t say as I’m surprised.

“So where do you think we’ll put them?” Alpha said, swinging her boots off the control panel and resting them in my lap. Her skin had been tinged a whitish sort of green at first, after I’d unplugged her from GenTech’s cables, but that was one thing that had gone back to normal.

“The trees?” I said. The caged voices in the cargo hold surged up even worse, but I could hardly think about nothing now my mind was on Alpha.

“Yeah. When we get back.”

“If we get back. I don’t know. Long as GenTech don’t get them. Ain’t right for there to be two things growing, the corn and these trees, and for GenTech to own both.”

“Your sis says the trees’ll start spreading.”

“Supposed to. Once they get in the ground.”

“And the apples?” Alpha crossed one leg over the other.

“They’ll come. Once it gets warm.”

“So we’ll have to keep them hidden.”

“Yeah.” I pointed out the window at Crow. “Our buddy yonder’s set on Waterfall City.”

She frowned then. Tapped at my chest with the toe of her boot. “What do you think your old man would have wanted?”

“Pop?” I’d been trying not to think too much about him. “Man was a nomad. A drifter.”

“So what about the statue? The woman he built in Old Orleans?”

“What about it?”

“We could keep the trees safe down there.” She pulled her chair closer to mine. “And when we get the rains that far south, the mud runs dark and deep. Good for growing a forest, I reckon.”

I wasn’t sure what Crow would think about that—hiding the trees with Alpha’s old band of pirates in their crumbling city on the southern plains. But what did I care? Long as the trees were kept safe, and kept out of GenTech’s reach. I was just as much a nomad as my father had been, and a whole life spent on the road doesn’t leave you with much allegiance to one place over the next.

“We get to Old Orleans, and then what?” I asked. “The rest of the pirate clans would all rally around? Said once, you’d be queen of every pirate army if you came home with fruit trees to grow.”

“Sure.” Alpha stretched her legs around me and worked her way onto my lap, wrapping me up in her. “And you’d be the king,” she whispered, touching her forehead to mine.

“But I’m just a tree builder,” I said, smiling as I held the fake tree between us.

And then we were kissing. Hungry mouths and chapped lips, and it felt like the morning sun was flowing through my veins. My plastic tree fell to the floor, forgotten, as Alpha put her hands on my hands, steering my fingers to here and there, soft and then hard.

We rolled from the chair to the control panel, and the gadgets and levers prodded us down to the floor. And it was there that Alpha began unwrapping the rags from around her, stripping down till her top half was naked but for my eyes on her skin.

I stopped kissing her then. Pulled back and just stared. Her body was like a whole world unexplored, so I just acted on instinct, tracing my fingers along the contours of her shoulders and her collarbone, working my way down, and down. And there on her belly, still a little green and pink but mostly the same golden-white color as her skin, was that patch of bark GenTech had used to fix her, the stiff patch of wood they’d sewn her up with after she’d been shot in the cornfields.

Alpha tensed as I touched the place where the flesh and bark met and one became the other. “Stop,” she whispered, shrinking away from me and pulling bits of clothing back on.

“It’s part of you,” I told her. “There ain’t nothing wrong with it.”

“You don’t need to touch it.”

“So what do you want me to do?”

“Just pretend it ain’t there.”

The rest of the world seemed to flood back inside me—the moaning in the cargo hold, the secrets in the hull, memories across the water, and dreams at the bow.

“I love all of you,” I said, my skin suddenly flushed hot and guilty. Sick that I’d upset her somehow.

“You don’t know all of me.”

I didn’t reckon it was the knowing that mattered, but Alpha had finished tying her clothes back together, and as she pulled her knees to her chest, I realized that twice now, I’d told that girl I loved her, but neither time had she said the words back.

I heard someone on the ladder outside, clanging up the rungs in a hurry, and I tore my gaze from Alpha’s brown eyes as the cockpit door flew open.

In burst my sister, looking all shaken up.

“What the hell’s wrong with you?” I stood, glancing out the cockpit windows to make sure GenTech hadn’t appeared on the horizon.

“It’s not me.” Zee’s voice trembled. “It’s the trees.”