Case laughed. "It's the first rule of bureaucracy: any message worth sending is worth sending in triplicate."








Angel was starting to grin, feeling the familiar rush of adrenaline that came when all bets were made and all anyone could do was find out what lay in the dealer's deck.








"Countries..." Angel trailed off, thinking back on his own early life in Mexico, before the Cartel States. "They come and go."

"And mostly we don't see it when it's coming", Case said. "There's a theory that if we don't have the right words in our vocabularies, we can't even see the things that are right in front of our faces. If we can't describe our reality accurately, we can't see it. Not the other way around. So someone says a word like Mexico or the United States, and maybe that word keeps us from even seeing what's right in front of us. Our own words make us blind."








Angel had always liked the desert for its lack of illusions. Here, plants spread their roots wide and shallow, starved for every drop. Their saps crystallized to hard shellac, fighting to keep every molecule of moisture from evaporating. Leaves strained up into the unforgiving sky, shaped to catch and channel any rare drop that might happen to fall upon them.








The desert never took water for granted.








Toomie gripped Maria's arm, eyes serious. "You got to understand, Maria. You keep worrying about right and wrong, you'll end up just as dead as your daddy. He liked to lawyer things, too. Kept talking about how the Supreme Court was going to open up interstate travel again.

"You get worked up about what's right and wrong, but that shit's only in your head. Rules are what the big dogs say they are. The reason you pay tax is so they forget to kill you today. That's what you buy with tax. You got it?"








Timo sometimes talked about people walking on your grave. If you were paying attention, he claimed you could feel death's wings, flapping over your head, and that was the moment you needed to hightail it to a Santa Muerte shrine and make some big fucking offerings. If you were quick, the Skinny Lady could lay protection on you - if she liked you. If you made the right offerings.








Catherine Case saw the world in terms of a mosaic. She spent her time trying to gather data, then shape that data into a picture that pleased her. But that wasn't Angel. He didn't need to shape a picture - he needed to see what was already there. Mosaics made you hope that you could push pieces around to create a picture that didn't exist, instead of letting all those little pieces click click click right into place. Instead of letting them tell you what was right in front of your face.








Angel smiled to himself, content. They were the same, and they both knew it. He'd seen the same eyes in other people. Some cops. Some hookers. Doctors and EMTs. Narcos. Soldiers. Even the sicario who had scared him to death when he'd just been a little kid. It was the same look every time. A tribe of people who had seen too much and had given up on pretending that the world was anything other than a wreck. And Lucy Monroe was right there with him. Lucy saw things. They were the same.








"Had to be California," Timo said as he fiddled with the computer. "This is government issue", he muttered. He glanced up, concerned. "This ain't a cop's, is it?"

"No."

"Well, it might as well be. It's missing its key."

"That's what I wanted you for."

He grimaced. "I can't get in. This is designed to feed through a cryptolink. Probably some corporate card - a phone maybe. Might be a piece of jewelry, something like that, passes info back and forth. Crypto goes in one side, comes out the other. If you've got the key with you, it works. If you don't, it don't."








"You give people something to do, and that's what they are. People." He shrugged. "It's the job that pulls people's strings, not the other way around."








"Everybody breaks", Angel said. "You find the right weak spot, everybody breaks."

"You'd know."

"It's what I do." He reached out to her. Hurting. "Come here a sec."

She looked like a cornered animal, wishing for anything other than to be close to him, but she came closer anyway. Knelt beside him.

He reached out and took her hand. "Under the right pressure, everyone breaks. You beat someone enough, they talk. You threaten someone enough, they move. You scare someone enough, they sign."








Lucy might measure the weight of his debt against her own guilt, but Angel didn't blame her for the betrayal. You didn't judge people for caving under pressure; you judged them for those few times when they were lucky enough to have any choice at all.








"If he was so smart, he should have seen what he was getting into. Maybe he'd still be alive."

"There are different kinds of smart."

"Alive smart. And dead smart."








"Sorry I shot your girl", Maria said finally.

"Yeah, well", the water knife sighed, "she didn't give you a lot of choices."

"She had old eyes", Maria said. "My dad had that problem, too."

"Yeah?"

"She thinks the world is supposed to be one way, but it's not. It's already changed. And she can't see it, 'cause she only sees how it used to be. Before. When things were old."













The Water Knife
By Paolo Bacigalupi
Published 2015