Carson Thirst

A Climate Change Story
1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4835-9338-8
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 300 Seiten

In the year 2045, climate change is killing people. Fifteen-year old Lily Star must use her power over water to save her family and thousands of refugees in the parched, superheated American West. She's a powerful Diviner who can call water from from deep underground at Everspring, the family's only source. The Star family must ration every drop to stay alive. Ash from forest fires falls like snow, relentlessly blowing sand and dust are a fact of life, and millions of Floaters, driven out of their homes by flooding coastlines, drift inland looking for food, water, and new homes, which are in desperately short supply. The United States has split into two unfriendly factions, the United Western Republic and the Eastern Alliance. When the Republic's Minister of Water, Tanner Voles, discovers that Lily has the power that he's been seeking, he pressures her to use it for his own political gain and the benefit of the water-hungry capitol, Aquion. But Lily and her family refuse, suspecting that Voles, a notoriously self-serving man, will use her to get the water for the Republic and then kill her so nobody else can use her power. To gain control over her, he sends the family to Floater Camp 65, a broiling wasteland filled with thousands of Floaters. There Lily befriends Nate Arnett and the group 1Planet, an underground resistance group of kids who fight the government and give their generation hope for the future. Along the way, Lily's belief in herself will be sorely tested, her like of Nate Arnett will turn to love, and she will be wracked with grief and guilt over the violence she leaves in her wake. Ultimately, she will come to believe that she can change the planet, at least her small slice of it.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Carson, Michael

Leseproben

CHAPTER 1 I’m standing on a boulder in the middle of the once-great Everspring. It’s early, about eight in the morning, but already hot in our southern Oregon home. Ash from a forest fire burning north of here filters down through the trees like snow, though I can only guess what snow looks like, since it stopped snowing here decades ago. I’ve only seen it on the internet and wish I could actually feel it on my face someday. A large butterfly with orange and black wings flutters around me. I’ve never seen one like it before. It’s beautiful and enchanting. I’m here with my grandmother, Gran, to call water from the spring. I’m anxious about it because Everspring has been producing less and less due to relentless heat and drought, and it’s my family’s only source of water. The boulder I’m standing on is called Turtle Rock. It sits in Everspring’s main pool, but the pool is dry now, whereas a year ago the water was ten feet deep. Smoke from the fire drifts around me. I raise my arms and chant: Water of the lake, come to me now Water of the lake, show me how The “lake” is the Black Lake, a massive body of water that lies a mile underground. It feeds Everspring and has done so for thousands of years. I repeat the chant about ten times, and after a while, a miserly amount of water flows out of the large opening in the spring’s headwall, which looks like a wide black mouth with a few broken teeth. But it’s not nearly as much as Gran and I expected. It’s barely enough to fill half of a five-gallon jug, and as I watch the water recede back into the black mouth, panic clenches my stomach. We need at least twenty gallons to make it through a week, and that’s just for drinking, cooking, and cleaning ourselves the best we can. We ration the water carefully between the five members of the family. We wash our dishes one at a time with a damp sponge. Our clothes sometimes go unwashed for a couple of weeks. I walk across the dusty pool to the bank where Gran is waiting. The butterfly is still flitting around, sometimes going higher then coming back down, but never straying very far from us. “That’s all I can get,” I say. “It’s harder every day.” Gran looks at the headwall and sighs. “It won’t get any easier, Lily. In fact, we might not get any more water at all. I think the warming has killed Everspring.” If that’s true then our family is in trouble. Everspring has been our only source of water ever since my grandmother and grandfather, Ethan, now dead, bought the property fifty years ago. They named it Skywood for the giant sequoias that tower hundreds of feet over our heads. “What will we do for water, Gran?” I ask, upset that my power, which I call the Water Thing, isn’t strong enough to get what we need. Gran also has the power, and once it was great, but seems to have waned with age. She doesn’t call the water any more, instead coaching me from the bank. “Have it trucked in, like Riverdell does,” she says. “It will be very expensive. But it’s better than going to Floater camp – anything is better than that.” Floater camps are where climate-change refugees end up when they have no place else to go. They’re called Floaters because many of them have been driven out of their homes by the rising oceans. Others have been burned out by forest fires. We’ve all heard horror stories about the camps – overpacked, dirty, riddled with disease, sometimes violent – and Gran is right. It’s the last place we went to be. I heave our meager stash into the trailer behind the ATV that we use to transport water from Everspring to our house. A gust of wind blows sand and grit into my eyes, making them tear up. We wear goggles to block it, and respirator masks to keep from inhaling the ash and smoke. The sand is carried from the harsh desert that much of Oregon has become. The ash and smoke can blow in from forest fires burning all over the west. The sand bounces off my goggles and ash smears them as Gran drives us home. She’s been doing it so long I think she could get us there with her eyes closed. I’m free to watch the amazing sequoia forest pass by. It’s like living in Jurassic time, only then it would be raining and the undergrowth would be thriving. Now the enormous ferns and rhododendrons are parched and wilted in the intense heat. Some have died. I know that the sequoias, which need to drink two thousand gallons of water a day, are suffering too. The trees are over a thousand years old. I want them to live for a thousand more, but now worry about them surviving for the next ten. If even lush, green Skywood is starting to turn crispy, the Earth really is in peril. I get so angry sometimes that I want to scream. People could’ve acted decades ago to prevent all the horrible things that have happened, but they did too little, too late. My generation didn’t cause climate change, but it seems like we’re the ones getting the worst of it. I’m fifteen. Most of the kids I know just try to get by day to day now. They don’t think about the future – they assume they won’t have one. I think that’s tragic, and wrap my arms around Gran, both to hold on and to comfort myself. When we get back to the house I’m shocked to see three vehicles parked in the circular drive. There are two black SUVs with United Western Republic logos on the sides, and a military transport with a machine gun mounted on top. Underneath the logos are the words “Ministry of Water.” The Capitol of the Republic, Aquion, is rumored to be a shining city awash in water in the Utah mountains. I don’t know anyone who’s ever seen it, and wonder if the stories of its magnificence are true. There about ten armed soldiers standing around the transport. Their attitude is macho casual but the guns make them look menacing. There are another four guys in black suits and dark glasses who look like Secret Service types, plus a bald, tightly-muscled man wearing a green Republic Special Forces t-shirt. I’m so alarmed at the display of force that it takes me a moment to notice that Mom, Dad, and my little brother Justin are on the porch, talking to a tall man in a gray suit. My anxiety level clicks up another notch. Even though I’ve never seen him in person, I know who he is. His name is Tanner Voles. As the head of the Ministry of Water, he’s on a search for someone who can find it. He has said that believes decades of global warming have almost surely caused a genetic mutation in someone that will let them find and raise water when the Republic’s science fails. Now that all of the water has been baked out of the west, he’s looking for a Diviner. A Water Witch, some say. He’s looking for me. Gran stopped the ATV by the garage, which is separated from the house by about thirty yards. As we’re removing our goggles and masks she says, “Don’t be afraid. His tests are primitive and you can fool them. He’s not taking you from us.” We join the rest of the family. Voles is holding a tablet computer in one hand. In the other is the butterfly that I saw at Everspring. I’m confused. How did it get here so fast, and why on Earth is it sitting in Voles’ hand? Mom takes me aside and whispers, “Your timing couldn’t have been worse. They only just got here and Voles has a video of you. It’s not good, Lily.” Justin, who’s only eight, is holding onto Dad’s leg, trying to hide. I’ve often wondered if Justin has the Water Thing, but has shown no sign of it yet other than occasionally making juice vibrate in a cup. “Lily!” Voles cries. “And Annie, or should I say Gran? How nice of you to join us! I was just sharing a little film with Alex, Rachel, and Justin. It’s quite fascinating. Would you like to see?” It bothers me that he knows our names, but then, he is with the Republic, and they seem to know everything about anybody they choose. It’s rumored that Voles knows all the families in Riverdell that have children between the ages of ten and eighteen, and is testing them all. Then he reports the results to Denton Creed, a weapons manufacturing billionaire who’s now President of the Republic. My heart skips a beat when I see that there’s a cable running from the butterfly to the tablet. Even though it has soft wings and a body that looks completely natural, it’s not a butterfly at all: it’s a drone, and it must have shot video of me at Everspring. How did Voles know to send it there? The only explanation is that he must’ve been watching us for some time. With a sick, sinking feeling, I watch myself on the tablet. The butterfly drone caught everything: me raising my arms, chanting, the sound of water coming up through the rock, and the meager amount that trickled out of the headwall. The video cuts off as soon as we climb on the ATV. That must be when the butterfly flew back here to Voles, beating us home and revealing the secret that we’ve kept for years: I am indeed a Diviner. I have the power Tanner Voles seeks. Though I hate to admit I agree with anything Voles thinks, I believe his theory is right: my power is genetic, an adaptation caused by the intense heating of the planet. I can find water deep in the Earth. I can call it to the surface. I can manipulate it in a number of ways that seem like witchery, but really are just extensions of my genetic gift. A gift that’s been exposed on video, which is hard to deny. But we try anyway. “That doesn’t prove anything,” Dad says. “They were at the spring,...