Chapter Twenty-Five
Fai tossed the last sack of topsoil into the footwell behind the Jeep's passenger seat and smiled at the satisfying thump it made. There, he thought.That ought to be enough. The reports he'd found indicated the soil around the facility was loaded with toxin-devouring microbes. By mixing this dirt into the fields back at camp, they'd be able to restore the acid-tainted soil to fertility. It wouldn't do much to boost the crops they'd already planted, but by next spring, the microbes would be flourishing, and the soil would be fit to support the camp's population. All they had to do was survive the winter.
Clapping the dirt off his hands, Fai turned his attention to the solar panels. He'd spent most of the drive contemplating ways to lower them from the facility's roof without dropping or damaging them—ramps, pulley systems, even a giant air mattress—but his half-formed plans had proven unnecessary. Rather than the rigid sheets of metal he'd been expecting, the solar panels were like flexible tarps layered with sunlight-catching rectangles. All he'd had to do to get them off the roof was disconnect the wires connecting them to the building and roll the sheets into bundles to carry back to the Jeep. It had been almost disappointingly easy.
Once he finished distributing the bundles among the various storage compartments, he slid into the driver's seat and turned the key. The engine turned over with minimal hesitation, then settled into its usual rhythm as he hit the accelerator. He drove at a crawl for the first few hours, taking care not to tear up any more vegetation than was strictly necessary, then sped up as the grass surrounding the facility thinned out, replaced by craggy tracts of land scoured barren by acid rain.
He was about forty miles from the camp when a smudge appeared in the horizon. Fai pulled to a stop, hastily unfastening his seatbelt so he could step out of the car. The Jeep had a plastic windshield but no windows—without the forges and factories of the old world, glass was almost impossible to make, and even dedicated scavenging efforts had turned up only small shards—so shift in the wind's direction had gone unnoticed beneath the air buffeting him from the sides. But now, standing still, he could feel the currents whispering over his skin, dry as dust and crackling with static.
Fai cursed under his breath. Dust storms had become commonplace in the decades leading up to the Departure, as famine had driven even the most environmentally-conscious farmers to overwork their fields. Combine that with centuries of acid rain and even mild dust storms could be deadly to those who weren't prepared.
And this one was heading directly toward the camp.
I have to warn the others, he thought, diving back into the Jeep and digging for the radio in the glove box. Of everyone in camp, only Kurogane knew where he'd gone. Maddy would know he'd been sent out on a mission—Kurogane would have had to inform her, lest she unwittingly draw attention to his absence—but this trip was meant to be secret, to avoid the inevitable arguments against risking a scavenging team for the sake of keeping Syaoran's batteries charged. There would still be backlash, of course, but by then Fai's mission would be finished, the camp richer by a dozen high-yield solar panels.
That didn't matter now. The storm was traveling fast, picking up more dust by the minute. It was possible he was overreacting, possible someone in the camp itself would notice in time regardless of whether he warned them. But that wasn't a risk he could afford to take, not when getting caught out in the open meant risking blindness or asphyxiation. He turned on the radio and lifted it to his mouth. "This is Big Kitty, calling base camp," he said, then paused for several seconds. When no reply came, he spoke again. "Base camp, are you receiving?"
Madiha responded a few seconds later, her voice crackling with static. "Fai, is that you?" she asked. "Wait, never mind, of course it is, that's your call-sign. Where are you? Has something happened?"
"There's a dust storm coming in from the south," he said, ignoring the first two questions. "I need you to let Kuro-chan know so he can call for everyone to get to shelter."
"Fai, I'm—need you to—" Madiha said, voice cutting out. Interference from the storm, perhaps? It was possible. With this much dust in the air, electrical anomalies were only to be expected.
Expected, and entirely inconvenient. Fai spoke into the receiver. "Dust storm," he repeated, focusing on the most important points, "coming in fast from the south. Tell Kuro-sama. He'll know what to do."
"—storm? I can't—ong with the radio. Where are you?"
Fai found himself smiling despite the urgency. "Don't worry about me. I'll be fine. Just make sure Big Puppy knows about the storm." He released the button, listening for a response, but he caught only a few disjointed syllables between bursts of static.
"Stay safe, Maddy-chan," he whispered, returning the radio to the glove box and glancing over his shoulder. The shifting line on the horizon had expanded into a churning wall of dust, sweeping across the barren plains.
Guess I'm sheltering in the Jeep, he thought with a grim smile. He dug underneath the passenger seat until he found a folded-up tarp, along with some elastic cords to tether it to the vehicle's frame. It wouldn't keep the dust out entirely, but it would keep the storm from scouring every inch of the Jeep. Fai dragged it from its hiding place and pulled it over the top of the vehicle, securing it so only one corner on the leeward side was free.
By then, the wind was picking up, scattering fine particles of salt and dust into the air so Fai had to squint to avoid being blinded. He crawled through the gap left by the unsecured corner, then hooked the cord through a loop on the tarp's edge and attached it to the wheel hub from inside the Jeep.
"Goggles, goggles," he murmured, searching first the console, then the glove box, then the little cubby inside the driver's side door. No goggles.
Wonderful. He surveyed the car's interior, searching for something else he could use to cover his eyes, and found a blue fleece blanket on the floor of the backseat. Wrapping it around his face, he crawled into the footwell where he'd stowed the bags of topsoil, drawing his legs up against his chest and coiling the trailing ends of the blanket around his hands. Dust would still get in, but between the tarp, his clothing, and the blanket, he'd be protected well enough.
Outside, the low drone of the storm rose to a howl, flurries of dust scraping against the parts of the Jeep the tarp didn't cover, a mere prelude to the storm itself. Fai kept his head down, breathing slowly through the thin fabric as the flurries grew more abrasive, the moaning of the storm deeper and more savage. Fai thought of the nature documentaries he'd sometimes watched with Yuui, the ones filmed in the frozen plains of the Arctic Circle, where blizzards tore across the landscape and the wind sang with an almost subsonic hum.
This storm sounded like that, but louder, full of rasping whispers and distant thunder. Fai huddled behind the passenger seat, unnerved. Dust storms sometimes produced lightning—not as frequently as ordinary storms, but often enough that he'd had Kurogane install a lightning rod at the edge of their camp so that any discharges would be redirected away from their tents. As another flurry of dust skated across the Jeep's undercarriage, Fai wondered at the wisdom of sheltering inside what was effectively a metal box. Theoretically, the car would act as a sort of Faraday cage, channeling the electricity along the outer frame, but that didn't preclude damage to the wiring. He might weather the storm only to find himself stranded in the middle of nowhere.
Thunder crashed overhead, sharp like breaking glass. The storm must be very close now, Fai thought, wind-tossed particles scraping the outside of the Jeep. Fai risked a peek through the fleece blanket and saw dust puffing up around the edges of the tarp. One of the cords was loose, the thick canvas billowing whenever the wind caught it.
Fai thought about leaving it, reluctant to stick his hand into the abrasive wind to fix it, but as another gust made the canvas flare, he relented. Better to secure it now before the brunt of the storm hit. He inched along the backseat, one eye covered by the blanket, the other exposed just enough for him to see his hands as he reached down to unhook the cord so he could fasten it deeper in the wheel hub.
Several things happened at once.
A gust of wind slammed into the side of the Jeep. Dust rushed in through the now-unsecured gap in the tarp. Most of the particles consisted of eroded flecks of dirt, irritating but largely harmless, but a few were formed not from dirt but from traces of acid left to crystallize in the wake of the last rainstorm. As the wind pushed these jagged particles into the sensitive tissue of Fai's exposed cornea, he reeled back, his grip on the cord slackening.
The corner of the tarp, now lacking anything to tether it in place, flapped wildly in the rising wind, adding strain to the remaining cords. Despite this, their elastic material stretched as it was meant to, sturdy but flexible, and the cords held.
The rust-spotted hub of the front wheel did not.
The corroded metal had been thin to begin with, a weak point in the Jeep's outer shell. At the first brutal snap of the tarp, it bent sharply, flakes of rust falling away. It might have held long enough for Fai to refasten the tarp, had he not been occupied by the burning pain in his eye, had he attached the cord to the slightly thicker section of the wheel hub further back, where the rust hadn't fully penetrated the steel.
Instead, the piece of metal snapped, the cord giving an alarming ping as it lost its anchor, and the tarp tore free with a sound like ripping fabric.