“He lied, Talen,” Aerin says softly as she sits down beside me. “My mother says the government knew about the West years ago but never told anyone. They needed a way to reduce the population without causing panic.”
“He ended the program.” Bile fills my throat again. “That’s when I started the protests—when Dad stopped the funding for the relocation program.”
“Why did he do that, Talen? Why did he stop the program?”
“I thought he just didn’t want to pay for it,” I say. “He didn’t want all the funds and equipment going to Naughts. I thought…I thought…”
I can’t hold it back any longer. I get up on my hands and knees and retch over the edge of the lookout tower, gripping the cold, rusted metal railing as tightly as I can as my eyes water. When my stomach is empty, I feel Aerin’s hand on my shoulder.
“Take this,” Aerin says as she hands me some water. “You’re going to get dehydrated.”
I take a sip and hand it back to her. My throat still feels as if I’d been screaming for hours, but my stomach has settled a little. I stare back out at the endless water and try to process what’s in front of me.
How many people did I send to their deaths? How could I not have known?
“Do you really think he knew?” I finally ask. “Do you think my father knew what was happening to them and still used me to help?”
“I don’t know,” Aerin says, “but my mother thinks so.”
“Just in case I need another reason to hate him,” I mutter under my breath.
I stomp over to the stairs and make my way back down to the ground. Aerin stays close to the shelter of the lookout tower while I walk over to the edge and stare down at the sheer cliffs and try to collect my thoughts. If my father knew and kept it from me, I feel like a complete idiot. I should have known that he had no interest in helping anyone outside the community, but I was too excited to be helping the Naughts to consider what he might have really been planning.
What did he do with them all? Take them somewhere else, maybe north, and let them starve in the cold? Or did he actually line them up and have them all killed so he didn’t have to pay the transportation costs?
“That’s about the time they stopped funding the ICTs, like Hilltop,” I say as I turn back to address Aerin. “The construct towns project wasn’t working out, and they were going to try Naught relocation instead. What did they do with all those resources if they didn’t use them for the Naughts and weren’t using them for the ICTs?”
“I don’t know,” Aerin says.
“They have to be using that equipment somewhere,” I say.
Aerin shrugs.
I’m grasping, and I know it. I need to come up with some reasonable explanation that doesn’t involve the deaths of all those people, but nothing comes to mind. The sheer amount of farming equipment, livestock, and seed collected for the project had to end up somewhere. It was far too valuable to waste, and I’m sure it didn’t come back to the capital city.
“What do we do now?” I ask.
“I need to get a sample of the water,” Aerin says. “Knowing what’s in it—is it fresh or salt—will go a long way in explaining what’s happening. If it’s fresh, there should be land surrounding it. If it’s brackish, it’s all ocean. Silt samples will provide information as well. That’s why I need to get down there.”
The wind picks up, making me shiver, and we move to the inside of the lookout tower’s base for shelter. Aerin sits with her back to the stone wall while I stand at the opening, letting the wind blow past my face.
“I don’t smell salt,” I tell her. “I’ve been to the East Coast, and I know what the ocean smells like.”
“That’s only if there is a high concentration of salt,” she tells me. “I need to know how much salt there is, if any.”
“Why?” I leave the tower’s opening and sit beside her against the stone wall.
“If this water is ultimately connected to the rest of the oceans around the world, then it will have a higher concentration of salt, even if we can’t smell it or taste it.”
Even though she’s explained it a couple of different ways, I’m not quite comprehending what she means. I can’t wrap my head around it. Once again, I leave the shelter and go to the edge of the sheer cliff, looking out over the edge. I come back inside and steer the conversation to something more basic.
“That rope isn’t going to get you down there.”
“Yeah, I see that now.” She sighs as she places her hand on top of her pack.
“We can’t get down these cliffs, not without proper climbing equipment. They’re too steep.”
“I think we’re going to have to keep moving until we find a place where we can get down.” Aerin looks north.