Parched Read Online Free Page A

Zhukov once gave a local boy a black eye for refusing to pay for a bottle of lake water. I shudder to think what he’d do to me now.
    I take a turn so tight we tip to one side, so close to the ground my ponytail skims the earth. My stomach rockets into my mouth. Ling lets out a little shriek, but I manage to pull us upright, heart drumming furiously in my chest.
    We pause at a cramped cross street. Left or right? In a roar of twin engines, the Divers appear at the far end of the street to my right. They whip themselves in our direction.
Left
.
    â€œWe have to lose them!” calls Ling.
    â€œYou don’t say!” I call back.
    Red dust sprays out on both sides as if we were cutting through water. We curve left, then right, shooting up streets as squiggly as noodles. Through an upcoming archway, I spot a flight of stairs. My teeth chatter as we hurtle up them and I almost run straight into a woman with a huge basket of pots and pans. The basket goes flying. She curses at me furiously over the oddly musical sound of metal clattering down the stairs.
    â€œSorry!” I yell over my shoulder.
    At the top of the stairs, I pause. We’re on the second floor, which overlooks a square interior courtyard. A handful of young girls are playing in it, amid trash and debris. “This used to be a school,” I tell Ling quietly. “But people live here now.”
    Slowly, I begin chugging us down the corridor. Dirty clothes arestrung up between gray concrete pillars. Most people can’t afford water to wash them, but sunlight gets rid of some of the smell. Through the open doorways, we pass classrooms repurposed as one-room apartments. Some are jam-packed with dozens of makeshift beds, some contain no more than a bedroll and a bucket. Looks of surprise morph quickly to anger, and within a minute, we’ve attracted a trail of men and women yelling at us to get the hell out of their building.
    â€œTess?” I hear Ling say uncertainly. “I don’t think we’re exactly welcome.”
    â€œWe’ll just be a minute,” I mutter. I need to stretch out our hideout as long as possible.
    In a familiar roar of engines, the Divers appear at the top of the stairs behind us.
    I power us forward at full throttle.
“Yídòng, yídòng!”
I shout at the Badlanders coming out of doorways in front of us to see what the fuss is. I hear Ling gasp as we take the first turn. The dull buzz of the Divers behind us echos around the corridors. Another turn. Another. Then we’re in the final stretch. “Hold on!” I yell to Ling as we careen back down the stairs. The woman with the pots and pans is standing in the stairwell entrance chatting to someone.
“Yídòng!”
I yell, and she does, just in time.
    Back in the streets, my foot jams on the accelerator. “Are they behind us?” I yell to Ling. I feel her body twist as she turns to look.
    â€œYes!” she calls. “Gaining!”
    â€œC’mon,” I mutter anxiously, scanning the storefronts for a way out. An alley. I wrench the floater into it, barely keeping us horizontal. We fly toward the bright light at the end and burst out onto a market square.
    Hundreds of men, women, and different kinds of junky substitutes—Divers, Sweepers, Strongs, Mulchies—crowd around us. Beat-up old floaters laden with cages of cackling prairie chickens are crammed next to guys haggling viciously over livestock and solar bars and barrels of aqua ferro. I almost laugh in relief. We’re saved.
    Amid a chorus of honks and beeps and yells, we start blending into the ragtag crowd. After a few minutes, I’m sure we’ve lost the Divers. Eventually, we pass all the way through and emerge on the other side. With no particular destination in mind, I join a throng of floaters heading for a main road.
    â€œThere’s another reason you might want to come back,” Ling calls from behind me.
    â€œOh