The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi Read Free Book Online Page A

border-control laws that said you had to stay in a relief zone and starve instead of going where God still poured water from the sky.
    “A Yokohama cutter slices through
anything
,” he’d said, and snapped his fingers. “Just like butter.”
    So maybe it was a Yokohama cutter that they’d used on the Red Cross pump. But even that tool hadn’t gotten them a drink.
    You could cut your way to China, maybe, but you couldn’t cut your way to a cool glass of water in Phoenix.
    Maria wondered what price had driven the person to go after the pump.
    Ten dollars a liter?
    Twenty?
    Or maybe it had only been $6.95, just like now, but to those people, $6.95 had seemed like their first Phoenix police baton to the teeth—something they just couldn’t accept. Maybe those way-back-when people hadn’t known that $6.95 was going to be as good as it got, forever after. Didn’t know that they should have been counting their blessings instead of taking a cut at the pump.
    “Why are we here?” Sarah asked for the fifth or sixth time.
    “I got a hunch,” Maria said.
    Sarah made a noise of disgust. “Yeah, well, I’m tired.”
    She coughed into her hands. Last night’s storm had messed with her chest more than usual, bits of dust burying themselves deep in the dead-end branches of her lungs. She was coughing up blood and mucus again. More and more, the blood was a common thing that they never spoke about.
    “I want to see if something happens,” Maria murmured, her eyes never leaving the pricing gauge.
    “Is this like when you dreamed about the fire and the man who walked out of the flames without getting burned? Like Jesus walking on water, but with fire? You told me that was going to happen, too.”
    Maria didn’t take the bait. She had dreams, that was all. Her mother used to call them blessings. Whispers from God. The wingbeat of saints and angels. But some were scary, and some didn’t make sense,and some read clear only afterward, like when she’d dreamed of her father flying, and she’d thought it was a good dream about them getting out of Phoenix, and only later found out it had been a nightmare.
    “You want to see if something happens,” Sarah muttered resentfully.
    Her shadow moved in the darkness, trying to find some part of concrete that hadn’t absorbed the day’s heat. Finally she gave up and sat on the wagon, pushing aside the plastic bottles that Maria had scavenged. They plunked hollowly against one another. “So now I got to lose my beauty sleep, ’cause you want to hang with Texans.”
    “You’re a Texan,” Maria said.
    “Speak for yourself, girl. These
shagua pendejos
don’t even know how to take a bath.” Sarah spat something black onto the pavement as she watched the movements of the nearby refugees. “I can smell ’em from here.”
    “You didn’t know how to use a sponge and bucket either, till I showed you.”
    “Yeah, well, I learned. These people are dirty,” Sarah said. “Just a bunch of dirty fucking Texans who don’t know shit. I ain’t no Merry Perry.”
    In a way it was true. Sarah was schooling away her Dallas drawl, scraping away Texas talk and Texas dirt, scrubbing and scraping as hard as her pale white skin could take the burn. Maria didn’t have the heart to tell her that no matter what Sarah did, people saw her Texas coming from a mile away. The point wasn’t worth arguing.
    But for sure, the Texans around the pump stank. They stank of fear and stale sweat that had moistened and dried. They stank of Clearsac plastic and piss. They stank of one another from lying crammed together like sardines in the plywood ghettos that they’d packed in close to wherever the Red Cross had spiked relief pumps into the ground.
    The blocks around the Friendship pump were an oasis of life and activity in the drought-savaged wilderness of the Phoenix suburbs. Here, among the McMansions and strip malls, refugees clogged parking lots and streets with their prayer tents. Here, they erected