Earth Thirst (The Arcadian Conflict) - By Mark Teppo Page 0,9

thirst. The boy's eyes are open; there's still life in that flesh, and though he can't speak, he's trying to get our attention. Trying to beg for his life.

His name is Francis, and his tragic flaw is his nicotine addiction. If he hadn't been heading out to the deck for a cigarette, I wouldn't have met him in the corridor. If he had stayed in his tiny bunk, he might have had a chance to become a helpful statistic in the media war against the tobacco companies. Forty-three percent chance of contracting lung cancer by his fortieth birthday. As it stands, he won't turn twenty-six.

His blood is polluted, of course, awash with a cocktail of carcinogens and nicotine, but there are still raw nutrients that Nigel can extract. It won't be enough, like Phoebe warned us, but Nigel will be able to repair some of the caustic damage from the aerosol spray. The blood will help.

“We have to be strategic,” I say to Talus. “There might be a few assets we can leverage here. We need to be careful with our resources.”

We're in the middle of the fucking ocean, I don't say, we can't afford to let our fear rule us. That's what they want us to do.

“They don't know how well it worked,” Phoebe says.

“That's right,” I echo. “We got off the boat. All they'll have is video footage, but it won't tell them much. They don't know how well it works. Until they can be sure, they'll be cautious. They'll want more data.”

Talus chewed on the inside of his cheek for a moment, his attention straying toward the dying boy. “Nigel will need more blood,” he says.

“No.” I shut that conversation down.

He whirls on me, a blur of motion, and his hand moves even faster. I feel it coming, but I don't move out of the way. My head snaps to the side, and my mouth fills with the warm taste of blood. “Know your place, liar,” he hisses.

I don't cringe, nor do I reply right away. I take a moment or two to watch his eyes. “I do know my place,” I respond. “And that is to respect and serve. But if you fail to uphold the first, then I am not bound to the second.”

He starts to sneer at me, and then his gaze flickers to Phoebe behind me, and the expression vanishes like a shadow fleeing the rising moon. “The reporter is dangerous,” he says, recovering and retreating to a safer position.

“Agreed,” I reply, meeting him halfway. “But to whom?”

He growls in his throat, and I hear the accusation caught there. Liar.

Suddenly weary of this conversation, I turn away from Talus. “I will find out what she knows—because she will tell me—and then we will decide if she can still be useful to us,” I say. “We will decide together. It will be a group decision.”

I watch the light go out of the boy's eyes. His face goes slack, and Nigel lifts his mouth from the boy's neck. A shudder runs through his frame, and it isn't the same sort of spasm he had been exhibiting earlier.

Talus glares at me. I've challenged his authority. I will have to answer for my insubordination eventually, but he's smart enough—he's old enough—to know the truth of my words. We need better intel. We need to know who we are fighting and why. He doesn't like it, but we need Mere.

He doesn't like having to trust a human.

I don't blame him, but we don't have any choice.

We're cut off from Arcadia. On our own and in dangerous terrain. In such conditions, there are rarely good choices. Only the expedient ones that increase your chance of survival.

FIVE

Ostensibly, our mission was an intelligence-gathering assignment, but I had been party to enough cluster-fucks designed by an armchair committee to know the signs. We were being exiled, and the Grove wouldn't be terribly saddened if none of us returned. I suspected my previous incident with Meredith was the reason I had been chosen—and it was starting to occur to me that her presence on the boat simply made things easier if the Grove was attempting to purge weeds from the garden. It had been a couple of decades since I had seen Phoebe, and it had never been easy to tell what she was thinking. She was like that though—perpetually inscrutable. In many ways, it didn't matter if we were talking to one another. She and I were bound together. There may be