Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Gotcha.
My prey hovers over the swamp, unbothered by the thick, muggy air that sticks to everything in the ’glades. Through the reeds a few yards away, I watch it zoom from one mangrove to another, like it’s a giant dragonfly instead of a chrome-plated drone. But the dragonflies belong here—the buzzball is an intruder. It begins another loop around the half circle of trees, and I shift in my wading boots, gripping the net in my hands tighter. Almost . . . almost . . .
A steady hand comes across my chest.
“Wait,” Henry whispers. “Don’t jump the gun.”
“I’m not,” I hiss. “It’s right there—”
“Yes, you are.” He shakes a lock of dark brown hair out of his eyes as he crouches beside me. “You always do. You get as antsy as a hopped-up hummingbird. If I hadn’t been there last month at the West Lake trail—”
The buzzball pauses at Henry’s raised voice, spinning in place to locate us. We duck down farther, nestling between the reeds and an old boardwalk post, then rest our forearms in the soft mud. After a few seconds of holding our breath, the drone moves on, satisfied that it’s not in danger.
“That was not me jumping the gun,” I continue. “That was me wanting to get in and out as quickly as possible during gator mating season, and you taking dusting forever to—”
“I was waiting for the right moment!”
“The right moment to get snapped on, maybe. You may not care about your limbs, but I do.” We stare at each other, shoulder to shoulder, neither one giving in. And there it is. The crackle of energy that’s been sparking between us for the past few weeks. It was so faint at first, I thought I was imagining it. I wanted to be imagining it—Henry’s my best friend, after all. His family practically adopted me after my mom decided that parenting in this nightmare of a world was too much. Plus, Henry’s always had his pick of girls, the latest being the Zone 8 fumigator’s daughter Serena Tran, who’d never be caught dead elbow-deep in swamp mud. So falling for him would be inconvenient at best, disastrous at worst. But from the way he’s looking at me now as the constant pulse of the ’glades has suddenly gone still and quiet around us, like we’re the only living creatures left in the world, I know he feels it too.
Wait. Still and quiet?
Henry’s pale green eyes, unfathomable as the swamp itself, darken at the frown on my face. “What is it?”
I lift up to my knees and peek out of the reeds, just in time to see the buzzball whizzing away.
“Dust it!” I climb back onto the rickety boardwalk above us and sprint after the drone, trying my best not to put my boot through the many missing or rotted planks. My waders—navy-blue rubber overalls with boots attached—squeak softly as I run. With every step, the smell of musty rubber wafts into the air. These waders are a few years old, and I bought them secondhand to begin with . . . they’re not exactly fresh. But today, funkiness is the price I must pay for survival.
Henry’s sure footsteps are right behind me as we track the drone through the trees. This close, I can see the Legion Fitness logo etched on the drone’s side, along with an ID number that reminds me that this buzzball is one of thousands. Legion deploys its drones across the country to record videos that they package with names like Relaxing Great Plains Sunset Conditioning Course and Rocky Mountains High-Intensity Interval Trail. Of course, they edit the videos to the dusting skies and back, oversaturating the colors and removing any signs of environmental collapse, to the point where the recordings might as well be footage of another planet. But if Legion left the videos untouched, their obscenely wealthy customers would have to confront the damage they inflicted on the world.
First, the biggest companies in the country—GemCo, NutriBiz, and Aquadictum, to name a few—destroyed the environment, polluting the air and water with their factories, destabilizing the ground and destroying entire ecosystems in their never-ending quest to capitalize on natural resources. When things got really bad—record drought, crops and fish killed due to rising land and ocean temperatures, hundreds of thousands of people dying from heatstroke—the US government finally tried to step in and regulate, but the corporations convinced them they didn’t know enough about the industries to put the right rules in place. “Best leave it to us,” they said, “or you risk sending the economy into free fall.”
Thus, the Ministry was born. The heads of the largest corporations in each sector were put in charge of that sector—Housing, Food & Agriculture, Energy, Media & Technology, Law & Order, Water, Mining, Education, and Transportation—each of them effectively crossing their fingers behind their backs while swearing to Congress that they’d use their powers for good instead of evil. That was twenty years ago, and today the Ministry essentially is the government. Some good this shift in power did us. The Great Plains are nothing more than a tumbleweed factory now. I hear you can barely see the Smokies these days, through the smog. I can’t imagine a worse system, unless this nine-headed beast somehow merged into a monopoly. Then we’d be truly dusted.
“The buzzball’s following the old pier trail!” Henry shouts. “This way!” He veers left at a fork in the boardwalk’s labyrinthine trail, not hesitating when the collapsed pier sinks into tea-colored water. I hope against hope that today is not the day I discover my waders have a leak, and then plunge in right behind him. Miraculously, I’m still dry after I’ve submerged myself up to my chest. Henry tosses me my half of the net before walking out to the other side of the narrow inlet. In unison, we hunch our shoulders, sinking as deep into the water as we can before the swamp pours over the tops of our overalls.
We wait.
A mayfly flits across the water, landing so briefly it barely creates a ripple. Somewhere in the reeds, a bullfrog announces itself. Henry and I crane our necks, tuning out the many songs of the ’glades as we wait for the buzzball’s telltale hum. Our eyes widen when we hear it growing louder until it rounds the bend and glides into view. The drone is flying low, maybe four feet over the water. Low enough to catch, high enough that it will never see us coming if we play this right.
Henry’s face is serious, jaw clenched as the drone buzzes our way. When it’s only a few feet in front of us, I leap straight up out of the water and throw the net as high as I can. Henry follows a fraction of a second later. I shut my eyes tight on instinct, but the familiar tug on the net tells me everything I need to know. When I open my eyes, Henry’s smiling wide, closing the distance between us as the buzzball thrashes wildly. I give him my ends of the net so he can create a makeshift sack.
“This one’s feisty.” Henry grunts against the buzzball’s frantic straining in the other direction. It’s already shrieking an electronic distress call, signaling its friends and whoever might be listening at Legion’s HQ that it’s in trouble.
“You say that like you think it’s got a personality,” I say, fishing my screwdriver out of my waterproof waist pack.
“You don’t?” He swings the sack from over his shoulder. With a thwack, the buzzball slams into the mud beside a manchineel tree, spraying us and the surrounding plants with specks of brown goop. Henry and I are careful to give the small tree and its fallen fruit—sometimes called beach apples— a wide berth. The manchineel was one of the first plants Henry’s mom warned us against when we started hunting in the ’glades. Its round green fruits look enticing, especially after a long morning chasing after flying drones. But that’s the plant’s deception. Everything about the manchineel, from its bark to its sap to the plump fruit it produces, is extremely poisonous. Hence the fruit’s other name: the little apple of death.
The buzzball seems firmly lodged in the ground, but Henry holds the drone steady with his strong, tanned hands, the same color as reed stalks in winter. His eyes dart periodically from our chrome-coated catch, to the manchineel, then to me, like he’s trying to make sure the tree doesn’t sneak up on us. He’s panting from the exertion of keeping the drone in place, and I can’t help but notice the muscles in his broad shoulders flexing with the effort.
“A little help here, Eden?” he calls over his shoulder.
I blink the rest of the swamp back into focus. What were we talking about again? Oh, right. “I don’t believe buzzballs have a personality,” I say as I kneel and begin unscrewing our catch’s control panel. The drone’s front camera clicks in and out of focus. Henry smothers the lens with a scoop of mud, in case whatever Legion quality control analyst happens to be on duty tries to file a report with a description of the buzzball’s assailants. I keep twisting the screwdriver as I finish my thought. “If anything, all this wriggling’s simply a new patch in the code. Additional evasive maneuvers.”
The drone’s shrieking grows louder as the panel cover falls off and I find the wire I’m looking for. Cry all you want, my shiny friend. No one’s coming to save you; soon you’ll be a pile of metal scraps. I wedge the screwdriver under the wire and flick it upward to sever the connection, and the drone goes silent. Under the mud, I hear the camera aperture twist shut. If I didn’t know any better, I’d feel bad for basically ending this little guy’s existence. But I do know better, and while this drone—serial number LGN-982-5821-EO6—is just a machine, I—Eden Lowell—am a living, breathing eighteen-year-old girl who needs water to survive, and money to pay for it.
