Noor(24)

“Na wao,” I said. “Never knew that.” But why not make some money off of a disaster? If they’d been the first to think up the idea, they deserved the wealth they made. But seeing a Noor up close like this, the enormity of the turbines, so many of them, all to profit from a disaster, how could that kind of thing be good? And how the hell had they built them? The helix structure didn’t just harness the wind, it maximized the wind by containing it. The traditional designs might have been able to withstand the extreme winds of the Red Eye, but these helix designs were able to intensify the Red Eye’s power and then harness it.

As the winds strengthened and the swirling dust increased, I moved closer to DNA. GPS and Carpe Diem instinctively trotted closer to us both. The sun was still out and relatively viewable, but it wouldn’t be for long.





CHAPTER 10


    A Failure



We’d passed two more of the monstrous Noors, both times while at a safe distance of a half-mile or so and never in their draft path. And even then, we could feel the strength of the accelerated winds blasting out their north-facing ends. And the sands were nearly unbearable, at least to me. GPS and Carpe Diem had their heads down but otherwise seemed okay, and DNA had wrapped his veil over his face but he didn’t slow his gait. Until this moment.

“It’s going to get very bad soon,” he said, switching on his anti-aejej armband. Immediately, the sand that had been scraping at my clothes dropped and the four of us were in a tight bubble, protected from the sand. The barrier reached less than a foot above my head and inches from around us. If he’d waited this long to turn it on, its battery power must have been limited.

“Better?” he asked me with a smile.

“Much.”

“You looked like you wanted to die,” he said.

“Thought I was going to,” I muttered.

We walked for another twenty minutes. Though the storm appeared to be close, for a long time, it seemed to stay in the same place as we walked toward it. It was that huge. The winds decreased here and he switched off his anti-aejej. While the storm lurked near yet far, we came across another menacing thing: The charred remains of an Ultimate Corp warehouse. Like the head of a great desert djinn, it loomed at the end of a parking lot whose asphalt was covered with a layer of shifting sands.

“Whenever I see this place, I think ‘failure’,” he said, patting Carpe Diem and GPS on their sides as he glared at the warehouse. “The biggest business out here is with the small people—nomads, people escaping, people hiding, the people of the desert have the biggest black market in the world. Not Ultimate Corp.”

As we crossed the parking lot, I squinted at the warehouse. It looked like it had burned long ago, though I could have sworn I still smelled smoke. Minutes and about a half mile later, the winds grew strong and dusty. Somehow, the smoky smell of the burned warehouse withstood the winds for the moment.

“What happened there?” I asked. “Never heard of a warehouse in the north. And it’s so close to the Red Eye.” Across the empty parking lot, where a road ran into the distance, was a large sign with the Ultimate Corp logo, a stylized outstretched blue hand. Several chunks of the tiling had fallen off and shattered to pieces below.

“For a while, even Ultimate Corp tried to get in on business with people living in the Red Eye,” DNA said. “They had these crazy delivery drones that could fly through the wind in the Red Eye. But they couldn’t compete with the black market. Especially when thieves kept breaking into the warehouse and waylaying delivery drones, then reselling the stolen goods. Ultimate Corp tried to fight back; we call that day The Reckoning.”

“Wait, was it that day when those desert black marketers ambushed those Ultimate Corp delivery drones?” I asked. “I saw coverage of that back home! It was the first time I ever saw people of the desert who weren’t, no offense, Fulani herdsmen terrorists.”

DNA looked deeply annoyed. “We aren’t terrorists, it’s those stupid men who sold off or lost their steer. And no one attacked those delivery drones. The Reckoning happened because Ultimate Corp tried to fight black marketers on their own turf.” He laughed. “So so stupid and arrogant. Afterwards, all their employees fled and none came back.”

“There was no Ultimate Corp warehouse on the news or anywhere else.”

“Of course not. How would it look to know that Ultimate Corp was trying to do business with the ‘wild people’ living in the Red Eye. But they were. Those drones that could move through the wind, whipping sand and dust. They tried to use those to attack desert people. That’s when everything went to shit.”

“Interesting,” I said, looking back at the warehouse. It must have been a battlefield back then.

“We come from dust, to dust we all return, even failed Ultimate Corp projects.”

We spread the red cloth right in the middle of the parking lot, using stones we found littered around the place to hold it down. And there we ate a heavy lunch from the food packed for us. He used his small capture station to draw cool water; it was small but still much bigger than the one I had. Mine certainly couldn’t have drawn enough water in minutes to slake ours and the steer’s thirst. Even with the clouds in the sky, my personal capture station was the size of a keychain and would only have drawn a few cups of water. The steer drank noisily from the bag; thankfully, I’d taken water into my cup first. I shuddered when I saw him drink his water after the steer. Fried chicken, goat cheese, dates, something he called latchiri, some kind of vegetable soup he called takai haako—by the time we finished, both our bellies were comfortably full.