The Water Knife Read Free

good for anything except firewood and copper wiring because Catherine Case had decided they didn’t deserve their water anymore.
    Sparse and lonely campfires perforated the blackness, beacons marking the locations of desiccated Texans and Zoners who didn’t have enough money to get into a Cypress arcology and had nowhere else to flee. The Queen of the Colorado had slaughtered the hell outof these neighborhoods: her first graveyards, created in seconds when she shut off the water in their pipes.
    “If they can’t police their damn water mains, they can drink dust,” Case had said.
    People still sent the lady death threats about that.
    The helicopters crossed the last of the wrecked suburban buffer zone and passed out into open desert. Original landscape: Old Testament ancient. Creosote bushes. Joshua trees, spiky and lonely. Yucca eruptions, dry washes, pale gravel sands, quartz pebbles.
    The desert was entirely black now and cooling, the scalpel scrape of the sun finally off the land. There’d be animals down there. Nearly hairless coyotes. Lizards and snakes. Owls. A whole world that only came alive once the sun went down. A whole ecosystem emerging from burrows beneath rocks and yucca and creosote.
    Angel watched the tiny thermal markers of the desert’s surviving inhabitants and wondered if the desert returned his gaze, if some skinny coyote looked up at the muffled thud-thwap of Camel Corps gunships flying overhead and marveled at this charge of airborne humanity.
    An hour passed.
    “We’re close,” Reyes said, breaking the stillness. His voice was almost reverent. Angel leaned forward, searching.
    “There she is,” Gupta said.
    A black ribbon of water, twisting through desert, cutting between ragged mountain ridges.
    Shining moonlight spilled across the waters in slicks of silver.
    The Colorado River.
    It wound like a serpent through the pale scapes of the desert. California hadn’t put this stretch of river into a straw yet, but it would. All that evaporation—couldn’t let the sun steal that forever. But for now the river still flowed in the open, exposed to sky and the guardies’ solemn view.
    Angel peered down at the river, awed as always. The radio chatter of the guardies ceased, all of them falling silent at the sight of so much water.
    Even much reduced by droughts and diversions, the Colorado River awakened reverent hungers. Seven million acre-feet a year,down from sixteen million…but still, so much water, simply there on the land…
    No wonder Hindus worshipped rivers
, Angel thought.
    In its prime, the Colorado River had run more than a thousand miles, from the white-snow Rockies down through the red-rock canyons of Utah and on to the blue Pacific, tumbling fast and without obstruction. And wherever it touched—life.
    If a farmer could put a diversion on it, or a home builder could sink a well beside it, or a casino developer could throw a pump into it, a person could drink deep of possibility. A body could thrive in 115-degree heat. A city could blossom in a desert. The river was a blessing as sure as the Virgin Mother’s.
    Angel wondered what the river had looked like back when it still ran free and fast. These days the river ran low and sluggish, stoppered behind huge dams. Blue Mesa Dam, Flaming Gorge Dam, Morrow Point Dam, Soldier Creek Dam, Navajo Dam, Glen Canyon Dam, Hoover Dam, and more. And wherever dams held back the river and its tributaries, lakes formed, reflecting desert sky and sun: Lake Powell. Lake Mead. Lake Havasu…
    These days Mexico never saw a drop of water hit its border, no matter how much it complained about the Colorado River Compact and the Law of the River. Children down in the Cartel States grew up and died thinking that the Colorado River was as much a myth as the
chupacabra
that Angel’s old
abuela
had told him about. Hell, most of Utah and Colorado weren’t allowed to touch the water that filled the canyon below Angel’s chopper.
    “Ten minutes to