The Last Tree Read online

  “The thing is,” Tuck continues loudly, “I had to promise him somethin’.”

  I freeze mid-step, taking a quiet moment to count to ten. I can guess where this is leading. “What did you promise him?” I ask softly.

  “Water.”

  I tip my head. “Say again?”

  “Makes sense, don’t it? His brother lives out by the wind farm. His property includes an old well. Well’s empty now, o’ course—hasn’t drawn water in ages. I told him you’d fill it for him. No one ever needs to know. But if he can keep it secret, his family will have a supply of fresh water for a long time. A thing like that is worth more than credits. And if anyone does find out, he can just tell people the water showed up in his well the same time water showed up in Lost Lake, so it must be a side effect of the Territory’s project.”

  I bite my lip, trying to calculate how much this will affect our departure. “It’s not just filling the well, Tuck. You understand that, right? It’s filling the entire groundwater source that used to supply the well. This isn’t something that’s going to happen overnight. I have no idea how large the space is or how long it will take to fill. It’s going to create a delay ….”

  J.D. interrupts. “It’s okay,” he says calmly. He sends me a reassuring look designed to nip agitation before it dissolves into a meltdown. Tempers are fraying, not only because Tamara isn’t with us but because we’ve been cooped up together in this cavern for too long. We’re used to being on the road, moving forward with a clear destination. “We’ll explain it to ….” He glances at Tuck.

  “Ivan.”

  “We’ll explain the situation to Ivan. I’m sure we can make him understand. Since Ivan has a schedule to keep, he’s in charge of our departure time. Kira, you’ll go in and get the water process started at his brother’s well. We’ll explain to Ivan there will be a delay for the well to finish filling, and he’ll have a choice to make. We can all wait together until the water table has time to rise and he has proof it worked. Or we can depart as soon as we have everything we need, and his brother can confirm—once we’ve arrived at HQ—that the well is drawing water.”

  I take a deep breath and exhale slowly, feeling my heart rate return to normal. I know J.D. is purposely calming me, and I don’t mind. Calm under pressure was his gift, one of several. It used to make me angry when J.D. interfered with my emotional trajectory—whatever it was. I’ve never liked people telling me what to do. But I hope I’ve learned a few things in the past year. I look at Tuck. “I’m guessing your man may need a few days to procure the items we need.” At his nod, I shrug one shoulder, giving the guys a half smile. “Who knows? The well may fill up before we leave. When is he expecting us?”

  7

  I watch as Ivan and his brother wield iron crowbars to remove the heavy cap from the old well. The well is located in the back corner of a shed used to store tools. There’s no way to know when it last held water.

  As soon as the men slide the cap off, everyone walks to the edge of the round concrete wall to peer into the hole. I examine the rough-hewn sides, dry and white, but the view quickly disappears into darkness. I pick up a pebble from the ground and drop it into the hole. I don’t hear anything. I look around until I find a larger stone. I drop it and begin counting silently. After sixteen seconds, I think I hear a muffled thump but it could be my imagination.

  “What do you think? Maybe a hundred … a hundred twenty meters?”

  J.D. looks at me. “Are you going to be okay in there?”

  “It appears to be wide enough—at the top anyway.” I nod to the two men, who approach to strap me into the harness. The plan is to lower me down into the well with ropes. Once I reach the bottom, it’s one tug to let them know I’m down, then two sharp tugs on the ropes when I’m ready to come back up.

  As soon as the ropes are secure, I lift one leg over the wall, then the other. I sit on the ledge for a moment, contemplating the drop. If the diameter is consistent all the way down, there should be sufficient room for me to fit. If the hole narrows near the bottom, we could be in trouble. If the well is too narrow, they’ll have to withdraw me before I’ve completed my task. Precious time will be spent widening the hole before I can try again. I’ll still try to call forth water, from whatever depth I reach, but I suspect I’ll be more effective if I’m physically present at the level of the water table. I’ve discovered the more I’m able to connect to the actual location, visualize it, and map it in my mind in some intangible way, the better it seems to work. There was one time I brought up water from beneath a building where J.D. and I were being held prisoner. That was done from a distance—and it took a very long time.

  Carefully, I enter the hole, bracing one leg against each side of the well. Once I feel both men have secure hold of the rope, I let go and relax into the harness. They begin to lower me, and I use one hand to brace against the wall. I bump into the sides a bit on the way down, scraping my arms, but it’s not too bad. I have a flashlight. As I sink deeper into the hole, I turn it on to scan the sides of the walls. I can detect faint patterns that look like moss or lichens, which must have grown on the wall at one time, nourished by residual soil and moisture from below. All of that is gone now.

  The deeper I drop, the shallower my breathing becomes. The walls begin to close in on me. Is it my imagination or has it really become harder to breathe? I struggle to keep my breathing regular and even, but I can feel my heart pick up speed. My hand trembles on the flashlight, and I sense a full-fledged panic starting to take hold. This is different from the underground cavern at the Opawinge aquifer. That had been spacious and moist, with water droplets glistening on walls. And I hadn’t been alone.

  This is as dry as a tomb—dry, dry—like it has given up even the memory of water. The darkness wraps around me, isolating my senses. The walls press closer. I glance upward and can see the dim outline of the opening far above me. Closing my eyes, I tighten my grip on the flashlight and give in, momentarily, to the fear. Then slowly, I reason myself back. The men have hold of the rope. If the worst happens and a rope breaks, I’m probably close enough to the bottom to survive. And they will rescue me. J.D. will make sure I’m okay. Therefore, I’m okay. I can relax.

  I feel my heart rate return to normal as I continue to drop through space. I try not to let my imagination get the best of me. But for a moment, I imagine this dark place to which I’m descending is the dark place I carry within myself. I’m aware of it always, avoid it daily … try not to peer too often or too intently into the abyss. Does everyone have this place inside them? I don’t know. I only know it has the power to make me feel small and alone. Some days, I think that if I ever truly opened up that space within me, I’d sink and be gone. It would be so easy. So I keep the cap on tightly. I remind myself that even if the human race goes extinct in the next generation, there are still things to do, still work to be done which might ease the journey for even one fellow traveler in this world. It’s worth staying in the fight.

  My feet touch solid ground.

  “I’m down,” I yell up at them, unsure if the sound will carry. I give one sharp tug on the rope and receive an answering tug. I turn to assess the tight dimensions of the space. Barely, I am able to crouch down and physically touch the rock beneath me. It’s firm, porous certainly, but also solid. I scan the space around me, sensing rather than seeing the small insects skittering away. From the ground upward, the walls are darker, old stains showing where the water level once measured. From changes in coloration, I can see where the well was deepened on at least two occasions, no doubt as groundwater levels diminished.

  Screwing up my courage, I turn off the light and close my eyes. I picture the well and what extends beneath and beyond it. I picture water that once pooled here, that had dripped, trickled, collected over millions of years into a small aquifer among the layers of silt and sand and decomposed granite. The water would have filled the soil pore spaces and oozed through fractures in rock formations. And it would have
been mineralrich water, containing arsenic, iron, and manganese.

  I press my hands against the rock around me and wish for water. I reach down to the ground and wish again, letting everything in my mind drift away so it can be replaced by coolness, flowing into all the hollow places. Water is the lubricant. Once upon a time, it had given the planet so much—bubbling springs and winding rivers, hidden oceans and raging seas, clouds and rain and everything alive that was on the Earth. It takes imagination, I think, and not for the first time, to summon water to this place. It takes imagination to know what to look for and how to attract it. Truthfully, I don’t know how it works, but over time I’ve learned to recognize an internal tingling sensation that is connected to the water itself.

  After a few moments have passed, I know there is nothing more I can do. I flip the switch on my light and flash it upward, simultaneously giving two tugs on the rope. There’s a short wait. Then I feel the ropes tighten, and I begin to rise.

  8

  I board the vehicle to find that Tuck and Ivan have already stowed the supplies gathered for our rescue operation. We received good news this morning. There is water in the well. Ivan is whistling as he prepares for our departure.

  I buckle myself in and try to relax. We’ll be at UTC headquarters by nightfall. As we set off, I take a last look at Bio-19, absorbing the view of the enormous sheltering dome and the rocky outcrop that borders the new lake. Ivan said the biosphere residents are already discussing how to conserve the water for maximum benefit to the community. I hope their ideas work—at least until I can return and add more water.

  Beside me, J.D. has his eyes closed, but he’s not sleeping. He’s got something on his mind. I know not to rush him when he is mulling over something. He approaches conversations on his own terms and timetable. I take advantage of his preoccupation to watch him covertly. J.D. has maintained a distance from me ever since Tuck returned to the cave without Tamara. Sometimes, I wonder if I dreamed our moment of intimacy in the cave. Then I’ll catch J.D.’s eyes on me when he thinks I’m not looking and a shiver raises goose bumps on my flesh. I push that thought away. Distraction isn’t an option. Rescuing Tamara has to be our only focus.

  We are halfway to our destination when J.D. finally speaks up.

  “Once we’ve got Tamara back, we have to decide if Eric’s research is important enough to continue pursuing or if we should redirect our efforts.”

  “Don’t you think Tamara should be part of this conversation?” I ask. “Eric was her husband.”

  “Bear with me for a moment.” He takes my wrist as he speaks, not caressing it in any way, just holding it. Is it to anchor me or himself? It doesn’t matter. I’m grateful for the connection. “We have hours to pass before we reach HQ. I’d like to talk through some thoughts I’ve been having.”

  “Okay,” I agree. I glance back at Tuck, who gives a shrug.

  “I want to go back to when you examined Dr. Gallagher’s laboratory. You said the data drive wasn’t where Tamara hid it. But the lab was otherwise undamaged, so it’s reasonable to assume someone found the data drive.”

  “That makes sense.”

  “Do we have any idea who would be interested in Eric’s research? Who might have known what it was or understood the implications of his data?”

  I think back to my first conversation with Tamara on this subject. It would have been over a year ago, when J.D. and I stopped in Bio-4 on our way to Slag. We’d run out of sunblock and needed to restock supplies. It was supposed to have been a short stopover but stretched into weeks as we grew comfortable living under the dome. Biospheres house most of the planet’s human population—what is left of us. The Devastation, a global event which preceded my mother’s generation, had damaged the Earth with decades of chemical and biological warfare. The pathogens those weapons left behind were still wreaking havoc, evolving and mutating, aided by cataclysmic environmental change which created a toxic biofeedback system within the water and air and soil.

  “I remember the night Tamara first told me she’d been married,” I recall slowly. “You and Tuck were off doing something—I forget what. I asked Tamara how she and Shay had come to be at Bio-4. She told me that after Eric died, she suspected she was being watched by Territory officials. It made her afraid for the baby. Before he got sick, her husband had been approached by members of the Unified Territories Council with questions about his research. I guess he’d published a paper on the Nets that introduced a theory about the spike in human mutations. The scientific community believed the rash of mutations was caused by toxic residue left behind after the Devastation. Eric had a different idea. He suspected some type of virus evolution was at work.”

  “A virus didn’t cause your mutation, Kira. Your mother had the same mutation.”

  “If Thorne was telling us the truth, then my mother could also call forth water. But it’s possible my ability may not be due to a fragment of genetic code inherited from my mother. Eric’s theory would have been that my mother passed the viral agent to me, either when she was carrying me or when she was nursing me.”

  “I thought Eric’s area of expertise was soil toxicity, not virology.”

  “What if the virus originated in the soil? We know soils can be breeding grounds for unusual viral species. According to Tamara, Eric believed that advances in soil research might reveal a reservoir of genetic diversity that could prove beneficial to our survival—or destroy us completely.”

  Tuck interrupts. “Okay, assuming this is true, someone has to catch the virus first in order to pass it to a child. How does the virus get into the system of pregnant women? They touch it, eat it, inhale it?”

  “Perhaps all of that,” says J.D. “Or maybe they eat something grown in soil containing the virus. Maybe the virus or mutation agent was dormant in the plant or its effect was neutralized by adult immune systems ….”

  I begin to see the point he’s trying to make. “But for pregnant women, once it was ingested, it passed to the fetus, creating a mutation at the molecular level.”

  “I’ve seen some bizarre mutations,” Tuck says, twisting in his seat to look at each of us. “I had a caseworker once who had orange skin and blue fingernails. I’m not kiddin’. She was a work of art. The idea that a mutation can pass through a plant to a human baby isn’t any weirder than some of the stuff I’ve seen.”

  “We know the Devastation created toxin interactions in our environment which scientists are still working to understand,” J.D. acknowledges. “The speed at which population levels are declining indicates the planet is increasingly unfit for human habitation. But Tamara got me thinking in a new direction when she described the outbreak that occurred in Bio-19. What if there’s another way to think about the mutations people are experiencing?”

  “Like what?”

  “What if there’s something significant taking place at the cellular level of all living creatures, not just the ones with obvious mutations? Maybe there’s something in the soil that’s acting as a catalyst, and that’s what Eric found.”

  “That’s scary,” I say.

  “Maybe not,” he responds. “What if the hyper-mutations we’re seeing are the universe’s way of helping us adapt more quickly to the threats we’re facing?”

  I think about my ability to attract or somehow generate water bonds. And I think about Baby Shay’s second set of ears. Our mutations had nothing in common. It had been easy to blame the chemical and biological agents left behind by a global war for the strange anomalies. But what if J.D. was onto something? Maybe the mutations were nature’s way of trying to help us—help all living things really—adapt to rapid changes in our environment.

  “Isn’t mutation supposed to be random?” I ask.

  “It’s random until it works …. A mutation comes at just the right time and in just the right way that it creates a natural advantage. Then it gets passed to the next generation and it spreads. For millions of years, natural selection has been the process for evolutionary
adaptation.” He shifts in his seat. “Unfortunately, this process isn’t a straight arrow. It doesn’t happen in one generation. It’s hit-or-miss. Each mutation is a shot in the dark. Occasionally, those changes are lethal. Occasionally, they’re neutral.”

  “Like orange skin,” Tuck pipes up.

  “If there were no other coinciding expressions of the gene, then yes, I would say orange skin is a neutral mutation,” J.D. says, grinning slightly. “But maybe it was advantageous. Maybe that orange skin protected her from a thinning ozone layer and increased levels of ultraviolet in the atmosphere. Maybe she passed that natural resistance on to her orange children.” He turns to me. “What about your mutation?”

  I hold his gaze. “Not lethal. Not yet anyway. Not neutral either. Beneficial.”

  “And Thorne revealed at Slag how interested he is in the beneficial mutations, the ones that could make our species more resilient.”

  I stare at him, wide-eyed, as understanding begins to dawn. “We’ve been trying to locate individuals with specific mutations that could help restore the health of the planet to its former state. But if there’s a major leap in evolutionary biology taking place right now, across generations, it could represent an attempt at the cellular level to create a new branch of the genetic tree with species that can survive our current planetary conditions. So maybe we don’t have to change the planet; we simply have to change ourselves.”

  “Exactly.” His lips quirk. “I was really hoping this would make sense to someone other than me. I know how frustrated you’ve felt about your work lately. No matter how many lakes or reservoirs you fill, it’s still a stop-gap measure. It might save one generation from extinction. But restoring our planet’s health could take thousands of years, if not longer.”