TITLE: Undercurrents
GENRE: YA Science Fiction
In a world when water is more precious than oil, fifteen year-old Marin Holbert takes a summer job to earn more water rations for her family; there she inadvertently uncovers a plot to take over water resources across the country and must find a way stop it.
The water level in the cistern was low. Too low. And no amount of checking the gauge ever changed that, or the fact that I hadn't had a real shower or done a proper load of laundry in months. Despite myself, I stared at the gauge anyway.
Grandma caught me. "A watched cistern never fills, Marin" she warned.
It never seemed to fill, watched or not, I thought.
“Did you know that when I was a girl it rained every afternoon at this time of year?” Grandma asked. I wasn’t meant to answer. Grandma herself was like a fountain that just kept spouting stories and recycling them. She continued, “Not that it mattered – we washed our clothes or took a shower any time we wanted.”
I glanced over at her on the couch. I loved my grandma. I really did. But if she hadn’t moved in with us last spring, I might have had a better chance at more than just clean underwear. I sometimes wished she would’ve just stayed put in Tucson, even though no one was staying put in Tucson. Or anywhere in Arizona. Or Nevada. Or Texas. Yet that was beside the point. I didn’t need Grandma’s fountain of stories. I needed real water.
“Sounds nice, Grandma,” I answered.
She put her ancient book, one actually made of paper, on her lap. “It was,” she said, her eyes not looking at me anymore, but inside her memory to a time when water just flowed and nobody thought much about it. Her dreams were probably decadent.
5 pages
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