The Water Knife by Bacigalupi Paolo

Author:Bacigalupi, Paolo [Bacigalupi, Paolo]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Thrillers, Science Fiction, Literary, General, Fiction
ISBN: 9780385352895
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2015-05-26T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 19

The guard kept pace with Lucy, making sure she actually left.

She’d seen ejections happen before, but hadn’t thought about it from the squatter’s perspective.

She’d been sitting at Saguaro Coffee, just on the far side of the plaza, meeting with a Chinese engineer who specialized in biodesign.

He’d talked about how the pond they were sitting beside was actually part of the entire water-treatment structure, how each reed and fish had been carefully engineered and selected to accomplish specific cleaning tasks.

In the midst of the conversation, she’d seen the guards ushering someone out. She’d sipped her coffee, watching as it happened. Pitying the person but not really feeling their desperation.

And now she was the one being guided out, while others at the coffee shop pretended not to see it happening.

Behind her a man gasped. The sound was loud enough that Lucy turned.

She half-expected to find someone knifed, from the way he sounded. But instead the man was standing stock-still, staring upward.

Others were gasping as well, bolting to their feet, gawp-jawed. A ripple of astonishment running through the entire Taiyang plaza. Surprise and alarm, and everyone looking up at the sky. No, not the sky—The monitors. The huge TV screens that hung throughout the atrium.

Lucy followed their gaze. “What the—?”

The cop shoved her to keep going, but she shook him off.

“Wait.”

He made to grab her again, but then he, too, paused, and just like that, they were no longer security guard and trespasser, but two people watching TV. Two people, together, suddenly made into brother and sister by changing circumstances.

Up on the televisions, images of a huge placid lake flashed. A dam.

The text beneath the images had it labeled.

Blue Mesa Reservoir. Gunnison, Colorado.

An azure jewel pooled among yellow clay hills, cliff scarps, and sagebrush.

At one narrow end of the lake, a wall of boulders corked a deep craggy canyon, stoppering the blue waters behind it.

Except the bouldered face of the dam was weeping water. Three separate cascades. The spouting froths seemed to be growing.

Lucy could make out people clambering off the dam, running, tiny little ants in comparison to the leaks that had sprung. A car was racing across the highway that ran atop the dam.

There were crews on rappelling lines, down on the dam face, trying to figure out what they were supposed to—The dam started to give way.

The guard’s hand fell from Lucy’s arm. Behind her someone cried out, horrified. The dam spat more and more water. Monolithic hunks of it peeled away. More water shouldered through the gap, spouting. More and more, faster and faster. The people were specks on the edges of the dam, all fleeing. The scale was almost too big to understand, the people tiny beside the jetting waters that blasted through the dam under pressure.

A top piece of the dam collapsed. A cement mixer went with it, bobbing and piling down into the tight canyon confines. A toy tossed by the waters, floating and swirling in the increasing torrent.

Someone keyed the sound for the monitors.

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