Chapter 21: Blood in the Water

(True-but-unseen account)

If you are searching for a story in which the villain announces himself with a mustache and a laugh, close this book now. Dear Reader, the man in this Chapter wore a good suit and asked one question, and he did not look up from his phone to ask it. It was the worst question anyone has asked in this book so far, and it was about water. I suggest you put down your glass.

The lamp on its cable had stopped swinging. Nothing else in Carter’s house had.

Lyra lay on the plaid couch with her eyes on the boards, and the gap of light in the window had gone the color of rust. On her wrist, under the cuff of the gray sweatshirt, the mark blinked. Arthur, standing in a borrowed copy of himself, counted the gaps between blinks. They were not quite even, and they were getting shorter.

"My father was an engineer," Lyra said.

She said it like a name she had practiced on an empty room.

His name was Yusuf, and he worked at NileCorp, which made water run to places. It sounds like a dull job. For a while, it was the best thing that had ever happened to him.

"He designed pipes," she said. "Long ones, under whole cities. He used to say a pipe is the only honest thing in a town, because it either carries or it doesn’t."

Arthur stood very still. The clone’s hands were cold, and the house smelled of canned soup and old wood.

"Then the filters started to fail. A little at a time, in the places nobody checked." Her mouth twisted. "He found it first. Then he found where the bad water was going, and where the good water was going instead. They weren’t the same places."

She sat up slowly, the blanket pooling at her waist. In the dim light she looked younger, as if the sedative had loosened her years.

"He put it all in a folder. Photographs. Test sheets. He carried it up to the top floor, to the man whose name was on the building."

And then she did the man’s voice.

It was not a voice for a villain. It was flat and pleasant and a little bored, and as she spoke, her thumb moved on the blanket, scrolling nothing.

"’Is it going to the important neighborhoods?’"

She let a silence sit. Then she did her father’s voice, small and stubborn. "’No. But—’"

"’Then it’s not my problem.’"

Arthur realized she had never been in that room. She had only heard it told so many times, on so many bad days, that she could do the part where the man does not look up.

"He tried the city next," Lyra said. "The council. The health office. They all said the same thing. Fix the pipes and the price goes up, and if the price goes up, people riot."

Cheap means costing very little, which is a lovely thing to be right up until somebody asks who paid the rest.

"And besides," she said, "nobody important was drinking it. The important people had their own wells."

Arthur had come into her head looking for a man with a red pen. He had not expected to end up at the wrong end of somebody’s faucet.

"He didn’t fire him," Lyra said. "That would have been too obvious. He waited. Then he did it politely."

First the credentials went, on charges that were never quite true and never quite false enough to fight. Then came the whispering, the kind that never says a name. Then the savings, which went to lawyers one envelope at a time.

"My mother screamed at him every night. I thought that’s what her voice was for. I never listened to the words."

She had left, and come back, and left again. She couldn’t find anything better, and a divorce would have given her nothing, because he had nothing. "I used to hope she’d stay gone," Lyra said. "Not because I hated her. Because the quiet was easier to sleep in."

The apartment was one room. One hotplate, one window, one view of a wall. Her father, who had once designed the pipes under a city, fixed other people’s sinks for less than a beggar might make in a good week.

"I thought that was funny," she said. "Even then."

At night he coughed. She would lie on her side of the room and count the coughs, like a clock with something wrong inside it.

The faucet ran brown. She said it plainly, the way you say it’s Tuesday. But sometimes I could almost remember it red.

"The same water he’d tried to warn them about, coming out of our own tap. He never let me drink it. He boiled it, and strained it through a cloth, and strained it again, and gave me the cup." She looked at her hands. "He drank what was left."

Above the camp stove, something shimmered. A crystal lamp with a pleated shade, perfect in every fold, hung in the air for as long as a held breath and went out. Lyra did not look at it. She had made a great many lamps. She had never once been fooled by one.

"Do you know the worst part?" she said. "Everyone who loved me gave me the second bowl, and I never once asked where it came from." She said it all disoriented, like she didn’t want to say it, it just came out.

Arthur tried to say something and found his mouth empty. In the back of his skull, a window opened, dry as a receipt.

[NO QUEST AVAILABLE. BOOPHONE CHECKED.]

He closed it. He was a boy who could not stand an unfinished story, and he was standing in front of one that had no ending he was allowed to write.

A father pours the clean cup first;

he keeps the rest, and drinks the worst.

On the porch, Hadjer had put one hand flat against the doorframe, and the wood under her palm had gone gray.

NileCorp. That was her father’s company. She had been to its top floor exactly once, on a Take Your Daughter to Work Day, and had spun in a leather chair until she felt sick, while a man in a good suit laughed and checked his phone.

She did not move. Behind her, Carter stood at the exact distance of a man beside a hot stove, and for once he did not say a word. Under her sleeve, her mark gave one slow pulse, as if it had heard its own name.

"Rivers," said the body at the porch rail, to the dandelion, "are just rumors that found a slope."

Carter, who had spent the whole afternoon afraid of that voice, did not object.

"Third grade started on a Tuesday," Lyra said, "at a school with a fountain by the gate. I drank from it before I’d learned not to trust fountains."

There had been better schools. Bigger gates, softer lawns, places that would have taken a scholarship girl with open arms. Her father had picked that one, and she had never found out how. She used to think it was pride. Now she thought he had wanted her to look at it up close.

"The teacher took attendance. She got to the L’s." Lyra’s voice went careful. "’Hadjer Lotus.’ A girl by the window put up her hand. Her ribbon was the color of a new coin."

She swallowed.

"And I knew the name. I’d heard it every night through a wall, in my mother’s voice. Lotus. Lotus. Lotus. I thought it was a swear."

"Lyra—" Arthur began.

"Don’t," she said, not unkindly.

She had gone home and found the folder at the bottom of the closet, under the winter things. Every page had that name at the bottom, in blue ink. She asked him at the table, where he sat sorting screws into jars, and he looked at her for a long time.

"And then he did the thing I’ll never forgive him for," Lyra said. "He told me not to hate her."

Her mouth bent.

"’Children are not their fathers,’ he said. ’Be kind to her.’ So I was. I was so kind."

A kindness can be a knife with a bow;

the sweetest gift is the one you owe.

The next morning she had carried her tray to the seat by the window. Hadjer shared her pencils. Hadjer said she had a nice laugh. Lyra smiled at the camp stove, a small, tired, terrible smile.

"I laughed for months."

What a poor, unfortunate soul, Arthur thought.

"You should have listened to your father," he said slowly.

"In a way, I did." She turned her head, and in the half-light her eyes were perfectly dry. "I was the best friend that girl ever had. And I never liked her for one minute."

He waited. She let him.

"Why else would anyone sit next to a Lotus?" said Lyra. "I became her friend for one reason."

The lamp on its cable began, very slightly, to swing.

"Revenge."

On the floorboards, a long, thin shadow slid in from the doorway, and the brick that held the door slipped a quarter-inch. On Lyra’s wrist, the mark blinked faster. Somewhere out on Alder Street, an engine idled.

Arthur did not have to turn around to know whose shadow it was. Every green thing in the yard had just given up at once.

Lyra did not look at the door either. She was smiling at the ceiling, like a girl who had waited patiently for exactly this audience.

TO BE CONTINUED...