The Rule of One (The Rule of One #1)(63)

I reach the summit of a particularly unfriendly knoll, its incline steep and packed with loose rocks, and allow myself a moment to catch my breath. Sweat drips down my sides, pooling in my belly button, clinging my shirt to my skin, and I curse myself and this hill for wasting such essential water to the greed of evaporative cooling.

My quads are on fire but I stand, pivoting in a tight circle, searching for lights or a hint of the moon’s reflection bouncing off a lake or a stream. I have roughly three days to survive without water. Two and a half, I think, mopping the beads of sweat from my upper lip.

I complete my circle and end where I began. No lights. No reflections. Adjusting my rucksack, I descend the hill to begin another.

The darkness is total. Clouds cover the moon, and I can barely see my feet as I walk. Or am I climbing?

I stumble when the ground flattens out beneath me. I’ve reached another hilltop. Hilltop number eight. A batch of lights appears in the remoteness, disrupting the night’s reign. From up here the buildings of what must be a community farm look only a stone’s throw away. But I know it will take miles and hours of sweat-inducing toil before I make it to the luminous haven with its promise of water.

I trip my way down the invisible slope and plunge once again into the pitch-black void. Deep within the nothingness, thoughts of my mother’s twin come to light.

Are you here inside this vacuum? Or did you make it out? Are you alive somewhere out beyond this empty space I find myself in?

She doesn’t respond. No one can hear you here.

A ring of wind-powered streetlamps illuminates a square-shaped cluster of sustainable homes, with a small garden flourishing in the center. Ten yards beside a leafy row of bush beans and newly ripe parsnips is the rainwater tank I’ve traveled and gambled for. I linger on the outskirts behind a wooden fence, evaluating the risks.

Solar shingles glimmer from every rooftop, exposing corner after corner of defaced surveillance—six cameras all dangling from the gutters, swinging like dead men from their wire ropes. These are just the local farmers’ cameras, used for their own crop security. Why would they be . . .

I shake my head and refocus. I don’t care why the cameras were damaged, or how. Only that it blinds my sprint to the rainwater tank. A fiberglass container that is guaranteed to be locked or require an authorized chip scan.

It matters that I try.

My feet stutter. Ava spoke those words to me. Today, or was it in another life?

Time doesn’t matter; none of that matters anymore. All that matters is water.

I crouch, scurry, and creep the rest of the way to the tank, veering well away from the community garden likely ready with the slightest brush of air to alert those sleeping that I have come to steal their most precious resource like a shameless thief in the night.

Like a coward, Ava’s ghost whispers beside me.

No alarm sounds. I hold up my empty bottle, self-destructively optimistic. I leave my four-inch blade sheathed in my pocket. I won’t need it. The tap will turn, the water will pour, and the dreamers behind the walls will go on dreaming of their fifteen-hour shifts.

I keep up this visualization as I squat on my heels beside the tank, willing it as prophecy. I grip the knob. To my amazement, the tap turns beneath my fingers, and the water pours. How? Why? Vague answers form inside my head, but I let them all disappear, strangely uncurious.

With one last check at every window and shadow to make certain I am alone, I tilt my head below the spout and fill my stomach until it swells, and then until my bottle overflows.

The steel lid from my water bottle, a thin string of rope, five sticks, a wad of kindling, a piece of flint, and the scrape of my blade.

It took half my patience and all my resolve to make the water boil inside the lid. And to wait for the water to boil. But under the teepee of my jacket and over the steady flame, the liquid reached 212 degrees Fahrenheit, and the surface turned bubbly, telling me it was dinnertime.

I added half a cup of the boiling water to my freeze-dried chicken. The instructions said to let it stand for five to seven minutes. I let it sit for thirty seconds and ate my meal in one meager mouthful.

The flame gone, I toss aside my jacket and breathe in the balmy country air. I pack up my supplies, drape my taupe cotton scarf around my head and shoulders, and recline across my rigid bed.

I lie inside an old wooden rowboat I found abandoned in a field. Its splintered, rotting shell rests in the center of a shallow depression, wide enough to have once been a pond. Spiked ends of grass peek out above the stern, their wave-like movements creating the illusion the boat still floats on water. I flick my eyes up, settle in, and gaze at the night sky.

The clouds have cleared, revealing a blanket of a thousand stars, and I wonder whose fault it is I am here. The crippling guilt I’ve carried within me my whole life has told me it was, is, and always will be my own. Or is it yours, Father and Mother, for conceiving me? Or is it the universe’s, biology’s? Some cruel creator’s?

My fingers twitch as sleep pulls me under. My eyes close, my muscles relax, but before I fall too deep, a warm flash of light snaps my lids back open. All at once, my muscles clench and I’m wide awake. The stars dim as four beams of light slash across the sky.

Spotlights.

“Everyone outside, immediately!” a harsh electronic voice commands.

I wrap my arms around my rucksack and slide my hand inside my pocket. My fingers slip through the brass rings of the knuckle duster and crush my fear into the handle of my knife.