Текст книги "The Rift"

Автор книги: Chris Howard

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

We found Crow facedown in the water, and we spun him upright and hauled him to shore. Gray clouds crept across the sky, and the cold wind moaned. The three of us were shivering, but Crow weren’t shaking at all. Hell, he was hardly even breathing.

Zee shoved at his guts till water came heaving up out of him, then we pushed him onto his side, his eyes still shut down and fluttery, his chest moving slow, and his lips gone blue.

“His legs,” said Kade. “Look at his legs.”

The rags Crow had wound around his tree-legs had come all undone in the water, and Kade was picking at the knots and grooves of the bark. He pinched water out of the wood with his fingers. “GenTech?” he whispered, his green eyes wide and his mouth wide open. “They did this?”

“Get your lousy hand off him,” I said.

“It’s wood, though. Real wood?”

“I said leave it.” I went to shove at him, but he gripped my wrist with his fingers. It was like his one hand held the strength of two.

“Careful.” Kade stank worse than ever of old sweat and hunger, and he tugged me closer, clamping down on my wrist as if to snap off my hand. “I’m all the help you’ve got left.”

It was like a switch got flipped inside me.

“What did you do to her?” I whispered.

“What?”

“She had that gun before you did. I know that she did.”

“Banyan.” Zee tried to stop me. But it was too late. I swung my fist at Kade’s head, breaking his grip. Then I dragged him by his ears and smashed his skull on the rocks.

I pinned my knees on his chest and beat his face bloody. Zee quit holding Crow and started dragging at me, shouting, but I just shoved her aside.

“What did you do to her?” I screamed at Kade, spit flying out of my mouth.

His eyes bulged as I throttled him. He was fighting back with his one hand, wrestling me off him, trying to get up.

“I’ll kill you.” I roared the words in his face. But then there was Zee’s voice behind me.

“I saw her, Banyan. She came for the children. In the hull.”

I let Kade pull away from me.

“It all happened so fast,” Zee said. “We were sinking.”

“The water,” I whispered, staggering backwards and spinning back to the lake. She’d been below me, in the water. I could have looked for her. I could have jumped aboard that boat even though it was sinking. But I didn’t. Not once I had my hands on those trees.

“Please,” Zee said. Maybe she was sobbing. Hell, I don’t even know. I had no juice left. I was shaking and crying and couldn’t think straight. And I couldn’t look no more at that city. Not if my girl was cold and heavy beneath it. Lost in the depths I could not fathom.

I glanced at Zee, and she seemed to cower below me. As if I were a stranger. Like I was no longer Banyan and would have to be somebody else.

The trees. That’s what I’d gone after. That was the path I had picked.

I splashed back into the water, and the cold slapped at me as I reached the tank. The control pad’s wires were tangled and frozen, and I worked them loose with numb fingers, slowly untying the knots. Then the tank moved forward, when I punched the right buttons. It ground up onto the shore, and there were bones as well as rocks on this beach. Skulls burst under the tank’s heavy wheels, and the sound mingled with the sound of dirty water lapping at the shore, the muted sounds of the dead.

I pulled Kade off the crusty ground and handed him the sub gun. His face was frosted and bleeding. A handsome face I’d made ugly and weak.

Zee scrambled between us as Kade checked the gun. “We have to work together,” she said. “We have to stick close.”

Kade spat a wad of dark blood on the rocks.

“You owe me a beating,” I told him as he propped the gun on his hip. “Put a hole in my head if you want to.”

“What?” His voice cracked. “And let you off easy?” He was holding onto the gun with one hand and trying to wipe the blood off his face with his stump.

“We’ll put Crow on the tank,” Zee said, tugging at me. She stared into my eyes like she was wanting to find me in them. “I’m sorry, Banyan. I’m so sorry. I know you loved her so much.”

“You don’t know shit.”

“I know she was special. Strong.” Zee blinked up at me. “And I know what it feels like.”

“Please shut the hell up.”

“I lost my mother.” Her voice snapped in the middle. “I lost Sal.”

“This ain’t like losing some fake little brother.”

“He was more of a brother to me than you.”

“You can’t say that. I weren’t even there. I didn’t even know you.”

“But you’re here now, and I need you. And when you lose someone, you have to bring the rest close.”

“The rest?” I would have laughed at her if I hadn’t been crying.

“You can lean on me.”

“I don’t want no one to lean on. All that happens is they leave in the end.”

I was blank as I’d ever been. Like a blind man blessed with sight for one day only, and now night had fallen too soon.

“Think about Crow,” Zee said quietly. “Think about me.”

“You’re wasting your time with him.” Kade was studying the angle of the sun and the shadows. Same way that Alpha would have done it. And he kept sniffling and snuffling, like he was dead set not to cry. That was Kade. Our damned fearless leader. He pointed the sub gun at the slope of frozen mud. “South is over these hills, and we have to start moving. If we’re to honor those that fell behind.”

I broke free of Zee’s grip and stumbled over to the tank, my fingers shoved under my armpits, trying to thaw out my hands before I set them to work. Then I scraped at the panel till I pried the steel open.

There was a crack down the far side of the glass, near the top, and the tank had lost about a third of its liquid, and the damn red lights still flashed at the gold and the green. And there at the bottom, the dwindled remains of Pop’s torso had gotten tumbled and mashed, the saplings unruly and too bunched together.

“What about the counter?” Zee said, and I stepped back from the glass so she could see it. “Nearly two hundred thousand,” she said, which meant nearly two hundred thousand and not nearly enough.

“And what happens at zero?” Kade was still smearing the blood off his face with his fingerless stump. “If the charge runs out?”

“We don’t know.” Zee glanced at me as she said it.

“Sure we do,” I muttered. “Everything we fought for gets taken away.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

The only thing was to head south, and so that’s what we did. Never stopping. Never resting. We just made soggy strides through the crusted mud, working our way up from the shoreline, heading for the frosted hills. Zee steered the tank as we trudged along beside it, and me and Kade had to keep making sure Crow didn’t fall off.

Got high enough we could see back over the scrapers and all the way to where the boats still bobbed on the water. I gazed at Harvest’s fleet, wondering if he could see us now, wondering if he was watching us through some magnified lens. And just in case, I quit breathing so hard and looking so bent full of sorrow, though the truth was, sorrow had just about snapped me in two.

“Pass me the gun,” I said to Kade, but he wouldn’t hand it over. Not all the way. He just held it for me so I could peer through the gun’s scope, tracking over the buildings to the place where our boat had disappeared.

I felt like sobbing again. The feeling kept catching me unawares.

“Let’s go.” Kade tried to pull the gun away from me. “There’s nothing to see.”

He was right. There weren’t nothing to look at. But I grabbed hold of the gun’s scope and kept staring at the lake as if Alpha might emerge from it, shaking the water off her golden-white skin.

Kade thumped me in the gut. Snatched the gun away. “I said, let’s go.”

“And you’re in charge now?”

“Even if you were the one with this gun, you’re in no shape to be calling the shots.”

What did it matter? I stared at the landscape ahead. Rocks here, a muddy patch there. Mostly, though, as the hills drifted higher, the ice shone thicker and the snow grew more deep.

And behind us, we were tracking a mess much too easy to follow, leaving footprints and wheel ruts in the mud, and there weren’t any way to clean that mess up. Not unless it rained, maybe. I peered at the cold ceiling of sky. We only had a couple more hours of daylight. And rain would be bad, even if it covered our footprints. But snow would be a whole lot worse.

We stumbled on without speaking. Breath steaming, bellies tight. By evening, a mist rolled inland off the lake, soaking up what was left of the sun and making my GenTech clothes even damper, the wet fuzz binding my limbs together and chafing my skin. The sleeves of my jacket unrolled into gloves, and I shoved my hands inside them, but it didn’t stop my fingers going numb.

End of one hill meant the start of another. The bottom of each slope turned into straight back up. So we made hard work of cresting each ridge, and by the time it got all the way dark, you could even smell the cold getting worse.

The icy air pried at my lungs and pressed at my bones, making everything ache and sting. My face was all snotty and raw, and I started picturing big bags of popcorn bursting with steamy flavor, me shoving my face down into the hot food. But then I forced the image from my mind. Tried to imagine apples instead.

We stopped now and then to peer through holes in the mist, trying to get our bearings, and if he was feeling generous, Kade would hold the gun’s scope so I could stare back the way we had come.

“Give it up,” Kade said, when I asked to stop one time too many. “Please. There’s nothing back there.”

“What? You don’t reckon Harvest’s behind us?” I watched the wind blow across the hills, moving the mist in sheets around us.

“Oh, I’m sure he’ll keep hunting,” Kade said, because he always had to let you know he was so sure about everything.

“You think he’s working for GenTech?” Zee asked him.

“I doubt his allegiance is to the Executive Chief. I’d say he’s more likely biting the hands that feed him. Trying to exploit some weakness in the GenTech Empire he’s been trading with for years.”

“So how did he even know to come up here?” I said.

Kade shrugged. “How did you know?”

“I didn’t. Just got dragged up on that boat. But you know all about what’s out here. Right? You know these wastelands like the back of your hand.”

He pulled up the sleeve of his coat to show me the stump at the end of his arm. “Wrong hand, I suppose.”

“Meaning you’re as clueless as we are.”

“At least I still know which way is south.”

“And how do we even know that’s true?”

“I’m not pretending at anything, bro.” His smile weren’t so fine-looking since I’d smashed up his face. “Look at me. I’m an open book, same as you.”

I just stared at him. Never knew the expression.

“Means he’s honest,” Zee said.

“Great.” I started pushing on again. “Open book. Gets cold enough, we got something to burn.”

Zee started to stagger and shrivel, and Kade had her sit up on the tank, telling her to make sure Crow was still breathing, as if Kade gave a damn about Crow.

And it slowed us down even more, the tank slipping worse in the mud and old snowy patches. I found myself cursing Zee and her skinny ass. Alpha would have still been walking. Hell, she’d have been out there ahead of us, coming up with a plan by nightfall.

But night fell with no plan. Just a black, damp sky clamping around us. And still I stomped and strode and shook.

“She’s going to die,” Kade said quietly, pointing at Zee as she coughed on her fragile lungs, slumped up on the tank, ahead of us. We’d reached a plateau, the hills leveling out into something flatter. For now. “Your friend will, too. If he’s not dead already.”

“So what else can we do?” My voice was as weak as the rest of me. “Stop, and it’ll get colder.”

“There’s colder?” He made a wheezing sound that was meant to be laughter. “You might make it through the night, but she won’t. Can’t you hear her breathing? Crusted lungs, bro. She’s as rough inside as she is good looking.”

“Take it easy,” I said. “That’s my sister you’re talking about.”

“You don’t act much like her brother.”

“And you’re some sort of expert?”

“Could be a little nicer to her, that’s all,” he said. “Soon as you get done feeling sorry for yourself.”

“Guess there’s not a whole lot of nice going around.”

He pointed at his busted face. “You should learn to use your anger in the right direction. I told you before—too many enemies to keep making new ones.”

“Man, you’re just full of advice.”

“I mean it. Your own sister’s scared of you. Good thing I was there to take the brunt, I suppose.”

“Shut your damn mouth.” I quit walking and stared at him, my breath puffing out like white smoke. “I wouldn’t ever hurt Zee.”

“I thought stopping was a bad idea.”

“So is you talking.”

Kade shifted his sub gun from one shoulder to the other. “Meaning you don’t want to hear my plan?”

“Here we go.”

He whistled, and Zee brought the tank to a stop. Then Kade strode up to it and tapped its steel walls. “This thing come off? The metal?”

“Sure. You want to carry it? This walk ain’t been hard enough for you?”

“I’d like to use it as a shelter.”

“You’re crazy. That steel’s keeping the trees safe. There’s just glass underneath.”

“No. Wait,” Zee called out, sliding off the top of the tank. She tried to clear her lungs and breathe easy, but she was all gurgled and filled up with spit.

The air was clean out here, but it was so damn cold, it was hard enough for me to breathe proper. And that meant it was way too hard for Zee, whose lungs had been wrecked by the dust storms and hazard winds that blew across the barren lands we were trying to get back to. And so that was one more reason to feel like a bastard. I’d led Alpha nowhere but down to the bottom of that lake. I’d managed to lose the rest of the strugglers. And now my sister might not make it till morning.

“Take your time,” Kade said to her, shielding Zee from the wind.

“It’s the liquid that protects the trees,” she said after she got done coughing. “Not the metal. The liquid preserves the microclimate.”

“The metal got put on this thing for a reason,” I said, shuffling over to them.

“We won’t move it,” said Kade. “Not during the night.”

“We could get warm, Banyan. Out of the wind.” Zee’s face trembled inside her big purple hood. Her eyes big as fists. Kade reached an arm around her, trying to rub some heat into her, and even miserable as I was, seeing him touch my sister like that sparked something inside me. I mean, it looked a little too damn friendly, if you asked me.

“It’s too risky,” I said. “For all we know, Harvest’s troops are right behind us. We gotta keep moving.”

“She can’t keep moving.” I could hear the scowl on Kade’s face, like he was all out of patience. Like I should be cheering him on for bossing at me.

“He’s right, little man,” said a voice above us, and Crow was leaning down off the side of the tank towards me.

“Decided to wake up, did you?” I might have smiled at the sight of him, but my jaw was frozen stiff.

He peered about at the black sky and the dirty slush. “Where are the others?”

“Gone,” Zee whispered.

“All of them?” Crow said, and I saw he was shivering like we were. Made him look smaller, somehow, like he was being eaten away by the cold.

“Everyone,” I told him, and the word was like a splinter. Got worse the longer it sat.

Crow shut his eyes. Couldn’t look at me. “Some folks be precious, Banyan. But no folks be for keeping.”

I felt frosty tears on my cheeks, a sick, sad knot in my gut.

“The redhead’s right,” he went on. “The night’s too cold. I’m gonna die and so are you, and the trees won’t get nowhere if we all be dead.”

“You want to stop?” I asked him. “Make a shelter?”

“Not a want, it’s a need.”

“Fine,” I said, because I couldn’t risk losing him, too. “But you better drag your ass down here. We can’t lift off this steel shell with you sitting on top.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The snow began to fall. Hard and mazy. White flakes clouding the darkness, trickling inside our hoods and sneaking up the sleeves of our coats. We had to unclamp where the metal was paneled and latched beneath the tank, frozen hooks and fasteners connecting the protective steel cloak to the glass and sealing things tight. Took ages, working the right pieces loose, especially around the tank’s wheels. And when I stood back up, the snow was already half as high as the top of my boots, and coming down in a bright white spiral.

Zee kept clutching her chest and coughing, while me and Kade grappled with the metal box, working the shell upwards, the steel squeaking on the glass. As we unpeeled the tank, its lights spilled out, red and gold, glowing like a fire in the dark.

“Quickly now,” Kade said, because I was just standing there, staring through the glass at the sapling that grew from Pop’s mouth. What was left of my old man’s face was bent up as if he was looking straight at me. As if he still had eyes that could see.

“Banyan,” Zee said. “We have to get out of this cold.”

“Hold on,” I told her.

I inspected the glass, making sure it had not got too damaged in all the ruckus and sprung itself a major leak. That steel cloak had done its job, though. And this GenTech-grade glass had been built too hard to shatter. There was just the one crack in it, and the tank was still two-thirds full of liquid. The glass was real warm to the touch, too, like the tank was being heated. It was certainly a sophisticated machine. And I knew one day, if we were lucky, we’d get to lift those saplings out of this tank and watch them blowing in the wind, instead of floating in liquid. There were hinges on top where you could peel the glass open, and I tried to picture myself tugging the trees free.

“Anytime you feel like helping.” Kade was still wrestling with the steel box. So I went over and gave him a hand.

We got the thing upright, its opening facedown on the stamped-down snow, and the shell formed a decent shelter. All sealed up but hollow inside. It was just about big enough, too.

We had to lift up one corner so Zee could get Crow in there, dragging him through the snow. Then Kade slid in after them, and I took one last glance at the tank, the trees, then scooted in, too, the walls sealing tight around us.

We bunched up cowering against one another, huddling against the cold steel walls. And as the air got stale, we began to get warmer. Little by little, I felt my joints thaw, and my heart slowed down as my bones quit shaking.

“You think we might run out of air?” I asked.

Crow was out again, shut down already, curled up in a bulky ball. And I could hear Zee wheezing, bent crooked as she slept beside me.

Only Kade was still awake, his face just inches from mine.

“We could open that panel,” I said. “The one we used for looking in here.”

He was worried we’d lose too much heat, but once we popped the panel loose, it weren’t so bad. You could hear the gusts outside but not feel them. Snow puffed in on occasion, but not enough to freeze us out. And this way, if we were discovered out here, I figured at least we might hear Harvest’s troops coming. Though there’d not be much we could do about it.

I twisted my head back to watch the snow flurries through the opening. I could see the snow change from white to gold to red, and I sat that way for a long time, watching the glow from the tank, going over things in my mind, like I was hammering a nail into place.

“You awake?” I whispered, to see if anyone might answer.

“Try to sleep,” Zee said softly, her head at my shoulder.

I thought about what Kade had said about me being nicer to her, and if Harvest did find us in the night, I’d not likely get the chance again.

“You all right, sister?”

“The cold sits tight.” I heard her thump at her chest.

“Least it’s not dusty,” I said. As if there was some positive spin to be found.

Back on Promise Island, I’d told Zee I’d keep her safe, but now look at us. Freezing and lost, hunted and starving in this winter wasteland.

“You still think we should have given them up?” I asked her. “Handed the trees over?”

“It’s too late, Banyan.”

“I mean, if we had to do it over.”

“I know what you meant.”

“I miss her so bad.” I cupped my head with my gloved hands. “I miss her so bad, and I don’t know what to do.”

“I miss her, too.” Her voice was almost not there at all, and it surprised me to hear her say it. Made me think I didn’t know Zee even nearly enough. I mean, she was my sister, and I knew I should love her and take care of her, but we were so different. Hell, she’d never even known our old man.

And I wasn’t sure I could handle having someone else to look after. Hadn’t it been easier in those days of dust and metal, when I’d been roaming around all on my own?

“I miss my mom,” Zee whispered. “I know she wasn’t anything much like Alpha, but she still made me feel safer, you know?”

I didn’t know. I’d grown up with no mother. And Hina had just seemed strung out and vacant, when I’d traveled with her on the road.

“Even with Frost around,” Zee said, “I felt safer with her. And with Crow. He’d look out for me, when he could.”

“Right. The watcher.”

“It was like all of us against Frost, we just couldn’t say it. We just couldn’t leave. I mean, my mom tried. At first, anyway. I know she did.”

“You don’t have to defend her to me.”

“If she’d been more like Alpha, things would have been different. So fearless. So sure in what she wanted. I never knew someone like her, Banyan.”

“I know. Me, neither.”

Zee let her head press at my shoulder, her hair wet and cold against my neck. I tried to get my arm unhooked so I could put it around her, but it felt too awkward.

“I should have saved her,” I said.

“You can’t think about it.”

“Ain’t me thinking it that’s the problem.”

But maybe it was. Because as I sat there, I thought about it all, all over again.

I thought about my mother—so many years trying to make trees for the mainland. All those lives she took, and then, in the end, taking a bullet for me. I thought about Hina. I thought about Sal. I thought of all the strugglers behind us. And I thought about my father. The dead and the gone.

But mostly, I thought about Alpha. Little things that were big things. The way she’d talked to me and how her brown eyes had turned soft when she smiled. Her hips and her warm lips. Goosebumps on her golden skin.

I thought about the way she’d trusted me, and the way I’d felt I could trust her forever. And I remembered the first time I’d held her, on the walls of Old Orleans.

I tried to put myself back inside that city. Tried to relive each moment, making dreams out of memories, but I couldn’t do it right. It was like all my dreams had burned down.

“Zee?” I said, but she was sleeping again, and it was Kade’s eyes that snapped open.

“What you doing?” I asked him.

“I’d be sleeping. If you could keep your mouth shut.”

I listened to the sound of Crow snoring, and the endless beat of the wind, and Kade sank back into the gloom, then let his voice soften. “How are you holding up, anyway?”

“Like you give a damn.”

“Of course I do.” He let out a sigh. “Who else can I count on? The giant’s just dead weight.”

“Don’t say that.”

“He could hardly walk before. Now look at him.”

“He’s a Soljah,” I said.

“Used to be. There are no Soljahs in this wasteland. It’s a blank slate out here, my friend. For all of us.”

“So what did you used to do?” I asked. “Before you got taken.”

I figured if we were stuck with this redhead, I’d better get the lowdown on him, blank slate or no.

“Thought I told you,” he said. “I was a scholar. And a drunk. A chaser of women.”

“Said you were a poet.”

“That, too.”

“Ah, you’re full of crap. Come on, what did you do? Open book, and all that.”

“Bootlegger,” he said. “I ran corn all around the southeast, helping out those who couldn’t afford GenTech’s prices.”

“Fine. Don’t tell me.”

“You can’t picture me bootlegging?”

“We can drop it,” I said, deciding to act like I didn’t give a damn. Figured that might make him more honest. Someone thinks you don’t care about their story, they’re more likely to start itching to tell it.

“Would you believe me if I said I worked the fields?” he said, after we’d sat in silence for a bit.

“In the corn?” Now this, I could believe.

“Yeah,” he said. “I was a picker. A good one, too.”

“You ever drive them big dusters?” I asked, but then I wished I hadn’t. I remembered me and Alpha trapped inside of that duster’s cockpit, when we were escaping the locusts, back in the cornfields. That was the first time she’d really touched me. The first time we’d kissed.

Kade was shaking his head. “A duster comes back, and there are cobs in the blades and under its wheels, bits of corn caught all over. I worked on the crew that picks it clean.”

“Your whole life?”

He pulled up his sleeve and examined the stump of his arm. “Until my hand got plucked like a kernel. Snatched off by blades that weren’t meant to be moving. Then I was useless to GenTech, and they dispose of any field hand that’s unable to work. Some get killed. Some get taken. So I ran before the agents could get ahold of me. I traveled all over after that. Did all sorts of things, like I said.”

A cloud of snowflakes blustered in through the open panel, and I glanced outside, listening for the sound of Harvest’s commandos, imagining them trudging through the blizzard towards us.

All I could hear was the wind.

“How’d you learn to be good with a gun?” I asked, but it was one question too many.

Kade sank back inside his hood. “What makes you so interested?”

“Just curious how you ended up taken. Ended up on that island.” I decided to pry a little further. “Got snatched by Harvest?”

“GenTech agents,” he muttered. “Harvest doesn’t take field hands.”

“What else do you know about him?”

“I know enough.”

I faked a yawn, acted like I’d lost all interest.

“And I don’t think Harvest snatches anyone anymore,” Kade said. “Now he’s just after the trees.” He was scratching at his arm, fingering the holes GenTech’s cables had left behind. “I knew a woman once who said they had to be out there, growing somewhere. Across the ocean, maybe. Somewhere we couldn’t get. She said we wouldn’t be able to breathe unless there were still trees left. Still, I never believed it.”

My old man had always said GenTech’s cornfields made it so we had air to breathe. But I kept quiet now. I felt like there was something Kade wasn’t telling me, and my silence was the one thing that might get him to speak.

“Come winter, when there were no locusts hatching, we would rove all over the fields,” he said, almost whispering now. “Anywhere the agents told us to go. But all summer long, every field hand has to live in the Stacks, right in the heart of the fields. You’ve heard of them? The Stacks?”

I acted like maybe I was sleeping, though I was trying to picture how any sort of settlement could survive in the cornfields—corn being the one thing locusts can’t eat, but the stalks being the one place they can nest.

“The Stacks are made of blood, sweat, and tears,” he went on, like he was happy enough just to talk to himself. “The walls are made of woven cornhusks, layered five yards deep. Gets so hot, but no one ventures outside when the locusts are hatching. Unless you’re on shift, of course. Agents get rid of the lazy ones faster than you can sit down on the job.”

When he paused, I knew there was more.

And I knew he wanted to tell me.

The wind rattled the walls, another gust of snow blew in.

“Better close that panel,” Kade said, and he unwound himself so he could reach up and latch the steel back in place. It sealed us inside, making the wind no more than a distant rumble.

I waited for him to speak again. Biding my time.

“There’s nothing to do in the Stacks,” he said at last. And it was like some part of him had just been unplugged, his voice was so flat. “There’s nothing to do in the fields, either. Except watch for the locusts and make sure your work gets done.”

“Long days,” I said, a little prod to keep him going.

“Every day. It’s mindless. There’s nothing to think about. Nothing to hope for.” He took a deep breath, then blew it out in a big, sad sigh. “So you hit the crystal pipe as soon as your work gets done.”

And there it was. The dude was a crystal junky. Or he had been, anyway. And either way, it didn’t fit with his smooth talking or his acting like he was so in control.

I remembered Frost, all hopped up on that shit. And being hooked on crystal ain’t something you just make go away.

“GenTech turns a blind eye?” I asked.

“A blind eye? They’re the ones that made sure we got it. Used to be field hands would smuggle it in, now agents bring it to the fields and deal it direct. Half of them are hooked on it, too, of course. But what they don’t smoke, they pass out to the workers.”

I wondered if that’s how old Frost had reached Promise Island. Had he traded crystal for a way to the trees?

“Where do they get it all?”

“The crystal? Straight from the source, bro.” Kade was on a roll now. “The Samurai Five.”

I’d heard of them gangsters. A syndicate, is what people say. They’re like ghosts in the Steel Cities. You don’t see them, you don’t know no one who knows them. But they brew the crystal that cripples anyone who touches it. Take one hit, and you’ll crave it till the day that you die.

“So you used to smoke it,” I said, not a question.

And Kade didn’t answer. He was coiled and hunched in the darkness, and I wondered how deep the demons burrowed inside him. They say once you been hit by the crystal, nothing’s the same in your head.

“You think any air’s getting in here?” I asked, almost worried about him, wanting him to say something to let me know he was all right.

“Wake up, and we can crack the panel again,” he muttered.

“What if we don’t wake up?”

“You ever wonder if that might be a blessing?”

I thought about all the life this guy had lived already, imagining the pain he’d burned through. And I thought about pain all the way till I slept.

“Banyan,” a voice started calling, hours later.

The voice came from behind me. Below me. And the voice kept calling, louder and louder, till finally I busted awake.

It was Crow. His legs were trapped beneath me, and I squirmed around, trying to get free of these bodies I was all jammed up against.

“What is it?” I asked him.