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

wooden crosses and begged for salvation. Here, they posted numbers and names and pictures of loved ones they had lost on the bloodyroads out of Texas. Here, they read handbills passed out by street kids hired by the professional coyotes to get out the word:
GUARANTEED ENTRY!
    THREE TRIES into CALIFORNIA, or your MONEY BACK!
    ONE PRICE, ALL INCLUSIVE:
    Truck to border. Raft and Floats. Bus or Truck to San Diego or Los Angeles.
    MEALS INCLUDED!
    Here, close to the relief pump, there was life: bonfires burning two-by-fours hacked from the husked-out corpses of five-bedroom houses. The tents of the Red Cross, swaybacked with the recent storm’s accumulated dust. Doctors and volunteers wearing filter masks against the dust and valley fever fungus, tending to refugees lying on cots, and crouching over infants with cracked sandy lips as they took saline drips into their hollowed bodies.
    “So what’s this about, girl?” Sarah asked again. “Tell me why I’m out here when I should be with a client. I got to earn if I’m going to make the Vet’s rent—”
    “Shh.” Maria motioned her friend to keep her voice down. “It’s market price, girl.”
    “So? It don’t never change.”
    “I think sometimes it does.”
    “I ain’t never seen it.”
    Sarah’s miniskirt rustled again as she tried to find a more comfortable position. Maria could make out her shadowed silhouette under the dim blue light of the pump’s price readout: the gleam of the glass jewel in her belly, the tight little half-shirt meant to show off the cup of her breasts and the plane of her sleek stomach. The promise of a young body. Every bit of her clothing trying to make Phoenix give a damn that she was here.
    We’re all trying
, Maria thought.
We’re all trying to make it
.
    Sarah shifted again, shoving aside Pure Life and Softwater, Agua-Azuland Arrowhead labels. A bottle fell out of the wagon and bounced on the dusty pavement with a hollow rattle. Sarah reached down to pick it up.
    “You know, they let you just get water for free in Vegas,” she said.
    “Fangpi.”
Maria used the Chinese word that she’d learned from the construction managers who had worked with her father.
    Bullshit.
    “
Fangpi
yourself,
loca
. It’s true. They let you take it right out of the fountains in front of the casinos. That’s how much water they got.”
    Maria was trying to keep her eye on the pump and its price. “That’s only for the Fourth of July. It’s like a patriotic thing they do.”
    “Nuh-uh. Bellagio lets you take a cup anytime. Anyone can go and get a cup of water. Nobody neverminds it none.” Sarah tapped the empty Aquafina bottle on the edge of the wagon, an idle hollow thunking. “You’ll see. When I get to Vegas, you’ll see.”
    “ ’Cause your man’s taking you there when he leaves,” Maria said, not bothering to hide her skepticism.
    “That’s right,” Sarah shot back. “And he’d take you, too, if you partied with him. He’d take us both. Man likes to party. All you got to do is be friendly.” She hesitated, then said, “You know I’d let you be his friend, too. I don’t mind sharing.”
    “I know you don’t.”
    “He’s good people,” Sarah insisted. “He don’t even want nasty things. He’s not like the Calies in the bars. And he’s got that fine apartment in the Taiyang. You wouldn’t believe how nice Phoenix looks when you got decent air filters and you’re up high. Fivers live good.”
    “He’s only a fiver for now.”
    Sarah shook her head emphatically. “For life, girl. Even if his company don’t send him to Vegas next like he says, that man is a five-digit forever.”
    She went on, waxing romantic about her man’s fiver lifestyle and her own prospects for after he left Phoenix, but Maria tuned her out.
    She knew why Sarah thought there was free water in Vegas. She’d seen it, too.
Hollywood Lifestyles
had been following Tau Ox, and Maria had been watching from the doorway to one of the bars where