The Rift - Howard Chris - Страница 4

“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.”

CHAPTER THREE

In the far corner of the hull, I could see Pop’s tank looming in the shadows. Apart from a few crates and boxes, it was the only thing down there, and our footsteps echoed against the metal walls as Zee and I rushed down the ramp and ran to the trees.

Still cloaked in black steel and sat up on thick wheels, the tank was more than six-foot high and maybe five feet wide. And where the small viewing panel—a steel flap hanging down to reveal some glass and all that was inside—was popped open, red lights were pulsing and splashing out. So I reckoned that meant Zee was right to be freaked. Something was wrong, all right. The insides of the tank had always been lit up solid gold before now.

I peered in through the glass at the thin green saplings floating in the liquid. They were about two-foot tall and still tethered to the remains of Pop’s body, which was crumpled at the bottom of the tank and bobbing up and down. Twiggy hair clung to his scalp, and his fibrous skin was knotted to his crooked bones, and somehow, it felt like looking in at the strange guts of this shiny machine. All of it strobing beneath the electric red lights.

“What’s it doing?” I asked Zee, watching the lights flash gold but then red, the colors of a sky at sundown.

“I don’t know. But there’s something else.” She pointed inside the steel panel, and shimmering at the base of the glass was a number—bright and white and blinking each second. A long number. Hard to work out.

“Can you read it?” I asked her.

“Almost three hundred thousand,” she said, but before Zee finished, the number changed. “It drops by one each second that passes.”

I watched the last digit change to a five. Then a four. And above us in the cargo hold, the strugglers stomped their feet and raised their voices.

“Those bastards need to give it a damn rest,” I yelled up at the ceiling.

“Calm down.”

“Calm? How can we be calm? What the hell’s this thing counting down to?”

“Zero.”

“I guessed that much. I mean, what happens then?”

“Your mother would have known.”

But there was nothing left of my mother except this thing she had started. She’d sacrificed herself in the end, so I could keep living. And as I stared at the remains of my father, the echoes of something human bouncing around in the tank, I figured my mother only lived on in the same way that he did. She lived on in those bits and pieces of a dead man from which she’d grown the last trees on earth.

“They’re bigger,” Zee said, peering into the tank with me. And she was right—each sapling had grown a little longer since we’d left the island. Their thin, budding limbs stretched further out of Pop’s flimsy body, which had in turn shrunk at their base, as if being used up as the saplings spiraled higher through the liquid, groping closer to the lights above. “Bigger has to be better, right?”

“Of course.” Didn’t take a tree builder to know that. I stared at the bark that had grown over Pop’s skin, and it suddenly made me feel so lonely to see what my old man had become. Trees or no trees, bones or no bones, Pop was gone, and he couldn’t get goner.