Sand

19 • The Prodigal Daughter

All of life was like the deep sand, Vic had learned. From birth to death it was a series of violent constrictions, one after the other, an oily fist gripping hapless souls who popped free long enough to gasp half a lungful before they were seized again. This was how Vic had come to see the world. Everywhere she looked, she saw life squeezing people, forcing them from one tight spot to the next, the cruel palms of misfortune wrapped around hapless necks.

The secret to surviving these sufferings, she had found, was to keep perfectly still in its clutches. Learning how not to breathe was the answer. Learning how to find joy in not breathing. The only difference between a choke and a hug was an open pathway. Which was why Vic had taught herself to hold her breath. And then life had become a series of uninterrupted embraces.

At six hundred meters, sand refused to budge. It grew deaf as a selfish lover to her thoughts and wishes. It pinned her and held her helpless. Six hundred meters was well past where divers perished. Long before they reached these depths, most died because they struggled to simultaneously breathe and flow the sand. Wrestling two men at once was futile. Vic knew.

Another two minutes on that lungful of air, and she would pass out. Already, lights popped in her vision, the edges growing dim. It would take her thirty minutes to get to the surface from that depth. Thirty minutes to go on two minutes of air. She would be fine. She spotted two of the hard metal cases near one another, the kind with the good seals. The cases stood out bright orange in her vision among the greens and blues of the softer bags. The oval conveyance device from which the bags had spilled was a brilliant white. All that metal, preserved by the deep pack of sand. It would live there forever, that buried and gleaming steel. Too deep to pull it apart and haul it up. Too risky.

Vic grabbed the two cases, hoped they were the silver kind, the Samsonites, and flowed upward. She left through a gaping hole in what must’ve been a fabric roof at some point, a tent roof, a tent bigger than half of Low-Pub. She surged up and away from the giant metal birds with their outstretched wings and their hundreds of glass eyes in two neat rows, up toward the flashing transponder at four hundred meters, arriving with just enough air left in her starving lungs.

She found the tank she’d left buried and flowed the sand around the regulator. Slipped it into her mouth. A minimal amount of grit hit her tongue. She stopped thinking of moving and only of that column of sand high above her, all that weight pressing down and from all sides. She deflected that weight and took a deep breath. Another. Her suit thrummed with energy and impatience. It lived for the deep sand.

Leaving the tank and the transponder behind, she flowed upward to the next blinking light. Two more stops to the surface. Ignore the need to breathe. It wasn’t the lack of air that made a person panic; it was the urge to exhale. It was the poisonous gas building up in her system that signaled her brain to expel the contents of her lungs. Her father had taught her this, had taught her all the mysteries of breathing. The body was not to be trusted, he had said. It could go for a long time without air. Longer and longer the more one worked the more mental of muscles.

Next stop. Another tank buried in advance. Here, the sand was almost back to normal. As the pack grew less dense, the colors seen through her visor shifted along the spectrum. She had her visor adjusted well beyond spec for the hard pack of near-concrete below. As she rose, the sand around her became like open air, shimmering with purples and unnatural hues. Her suit became similarly amped, even as its batteries ran dangerously low. She could feel a hum there in the looser sand. Her suit was made for the depths; it was revved. Turned up like this, she could feel its energy in her teeth. Here was another secret of the deep dive: you had to be willing to don a suit that felt as though it wanted to kill you. You had to pull on a visor that showed you nonsense. And then you had to dive straight down until the world felt right again.

Vic reached the next buried tank and took a long pull, swallowed some sand in the process. The most important part of diving deep, of course, was convincing everyone else that it was impossible. Part of this was letting people think she never dove on tanks. And mostly, this was true. Other divers had seen her go down to three hundred meters on a single breath. When she started staging tanks to go deeper, she told no one.

The secrecy was important, because if anyone knew it was possible, they would strive until they found a way. All great discoveries were like this. It was the rare souls full of hope who showed the world what could be done; and then came the thundering herds, those doubters and naysayers who had once put up barriers, now shoving everyone out of their way.

Vic realized the truth of this as she breached the surface and felt the rising sun on her face and the wind against her skin. If a man ever reached six hundred meters, no way he would keep that a secret. And then everyone would be down there, scrounging for what was hers and hers alone.

She flipped up her visor and rested on the warm sand for a deep breath. Another. She amped her suit and flowed the loose sand off her gear and out of her hair. It cascaded around her like a morning mist. Reaching into the sand—flowing the dune around her arm like so much water—she hauled out her buried gear bag. The sand in all directions was clear, none of the abandoned clutter and junk that marked popular dive sites. This was the best part of diving deep: avoiding the crowds, not worrying about some scavenger nabbing one of her finds, not dealing with the cranks and topside pirates who dug noisily through the heaps of rubbish left behind.

With her pack out of the sand, Vic powered off her humming suit and could feel her molars again. Low-Pub clattered noisily in the distance. The thrum of generators, the rap of hammers on nails, the sporadic gunfire, the noise of life.

A fitful wind blew across the dunes, carving the tops of them flat and pushing their mounded bulks ever westward. Vic dug her canteen out of her pack, took a long swig, and wiped her chin. Now for the payout. She hoped for enough to cover the rent and what she owed Yegery for the tanks and air. She’d rather not put in another deep dive this week, not if it could be helped. Her ribs were sore from being down so long, and her left knee felt tweaked. In the deep sand, all it took was losing flow around a leg for a split second for a foot to get twisted. She’d seen divers come up with arms and legs out of joint, screaming and spitting sand. Or those who got the bends, who forgot to keep the weight around them deflected, and surfaced with bubbles of air under their skin like little blisters, the soreness in their joints, if they were lucky. More often, the divers who lost their concentration never came back at all.

She screwed the cap back onto the canteen and reached for one of the metal cases. There was a silver and a black. The latter had much of its paint scratched off from the trip through the sand. The cases themselves would fetch thirty coin apiece. If the locks worked, her friend J-Mac could file up some keys. Cost five coins apiece but would add fifteen to the price, and Vic knew a couple shopkeeps in town who needed better safes. As far as she was concerned, both bags were already sold. Here was coin temporarily trapped in the shape of something else.

She started with the black one, knocked the latches with the butt of her palm and jarred the sand inside the mechanism loose. The latches were stuck. She had a dull metal rod for this, pulled it out of her boot and rested the case on its end. With a swift stab, she slammed the two latches, and both popped open. She put the rod back into her boot and set the case flat, was about to open it, expecting the typical jumble of clothes to pop out, when the sand rumbled beneath her—

Before Vic could slap her suit on, she and the two cases dropped down into the desert floor. The sand hardened all around her, leaving just her head and neck free.

Panic surged in her chest and sand blew into her mouth; it mixed there with the adrenaline taste of metal. She had filled her lungs by reflex—had expanded her chest—so she could still breathe. Her hand had flown toward her suit’s power switch, was nearly there. She strained against the packed earth, wiggled her shoulders and arm, just needed another inch—

In a fountain of sand, Marco emerged beside her. He floated up to his feet with a twirl and a flourish and shook the sand out of his dreadlocks. Vic averted her head as far as she could and squinted against the flying sand. “I’m gonna fucking kill you,” she said.

When she opened her eyes she found Marco lowering himself down beside her as if to do a push-up, until his grizzled face was just a few inches from hers. “Did you say you’re gonna fuck me?” He lifted his thick eyebrows, mocking her.

“I said I’m gonna kill you.” Vic spat sand. “I’m counting to three, Marco. One—”

Marco lowered himself and crushed his lips against hers. Vic bit his tongue and Marco pulled away, laughing.

“Two, motherfucker.”

Marco pointed a finger at her. “Now that’s totally not fair. I haven’t fucked your mother once since you and I started going steady.”

“Three, asshole.”

Vic got her finger to the switch, and the power in her suit surged. The rage of being pinned down exploded through her, that same rage she often felt when Marco got too rough in bed and would laugh and hold her wrists, that feeling of helplessness, of wondering when play became abuse, biting on her lip to keep from crying in front of him, remembering the last men who had held her down.

With her suit humming and teeth shivering, no one could hold her down.

A ram of buried sand flew up from beneath Marco and slammed into his chest, launching him and the two cases into the air. Vic heard an oomph escape from Marco’s lungs. She flowed herself up to the sand’s surface as Marco shot skyward, yelping now, waving his arms fruitlessly, an explosion of clothes around him like a flock of startled birds. Fuck. She’d hoped to send him up three feet. Marco went up thirty. Asshole was gonna break his neck.

Vic knelt and slid one hand into the sand. With her other hand, she adjusted the band around her forehead. She watched Marco plummet back to the earth, screaming like a crow, half a clothing shop raining down around him. He hit the flowing sand with a splash, and Vic had to avert her face from the grit. She flowed him up to the surface, but he was face down. Using the sand, she rolled him over, worried he’d blacked out, but Marco was spitting grit and coughing, his face up toward the sun. She froze him like that, partly submerged, shoulders pinned in hard pack, and crawled across the sand to lean over him.

“Fuck me—” Marco whimpered.

“Wow,” Vic said. “Still in the mood?” She ran her hand across the sand until it was over his crotch. “Maybe a few sand needles will take the edge off?”

“Please—” Marco said. “My ribs—”

Vic put a finger to her lover’s lips. “What I want to hear right now is the most goddamn convincing apology that pretty little mouth of yours has ever uttered. I want to fucking believe you. I want tears in those big brown eyes of yours. I want you to shed water for me. Say something to make my heart flutter. Go.”

A pair of pants struck the sand right by Marco’s face, knocking more sand into his mouth. He spit and sputtered and closed one eye.

“Not very convincing,” she said.

“I’m fucking sorry,” Marco told her. “It was goddamn stupid of me. I wanted to surprise you, just wanted to hold you down and kiss you so fucking hard because I love you. You’re the only one for me. I swear on all that’s holy I’ll never do it again, and I’ll rip the balls off anyone who tries—”

A pair of pink panties, caught in the wind, fluttered down and struck Marco in the face like a bright bird dive-bombing his worm-pink tongue. Marco yelped, the sound muffled by the underwear, and began shaking his head, trying to get it off. He spat and made blowing sounds. The panties fluttered but stayed in place. Vic covered her mouth and howled. She pounded the sand with the flat of her palm and rolled onto her side, doubling over with laughter.

Marco screamed for her to help. He shook his head back and forth, but Vic could barely see. She had a brief panic at the thought of not being able to stop laughing—ever. It was more difficult to breathe right then than it had ever been in the deepest of sand.

“Goddamnit,” Marco shouted through the underwear. “Help me!”

Vic managed to sit up straight. She wiped her eyes and looked down at her fingers. “Holy shit,” she told Marco, laughing and disbelieving. “You fucking made me cry.”

20 • A Scrounger’s Trade

Vic was still laughing fifteen minutes later. It took that long to round up the clothes scattered by the wind. She shook the sand out of every piece of underwear she found and asked Marco if he needed a new ker. While she howled, he ignored her. He seemed morose as they lugged the bags and her dive gear over a dune and to his sarfer. Marco had laid the mast back to make it hard to spot. A mast upright in the middle of nowhere was a homing beacon for other scavengers—or a warning to a girl that her boyfriend was gonna fucking prank her instead of just picking her up at the dive site like she asked. But she had gotten the last laugh. Was still laughing as they reached the sarfer.

“It totally isn’t as funny as you’re making out,” Marco said. He loaded her dive gear into his haul rack. “Maybe if the bag was full of clean clothes. Maybe then.”

“Oh, shit.” Vic grabbed his arm. She hadn’t smelled the clothes to see if they had been worn or not. The seals in those Samsonites were really that good.

“Yeah,” Marco said. “Shit is right.”

After half a minute, Marco had to help Vic up from the sand. Dabbing her eyes and seeing the tears there, she told Marco, “This is the happiest day of my life.”

“Yeah, you suck. Lesson learned and all that. And Jesus, can you please take it easy on who you tell?”

Vic smiled at him.

“Ah, fuck, Vic, I’m gonna hear about this for weeks.”

“Oh, hell no. This is going to last a lot longer than that. And if these clothes fetch a coin less for all the sand you got in them, that’s coin you owe.”

Marco looked like a kicked dog. Vic almost felt sorry for him. Almost. She loaded the black bag into the haul rack, and Marco did the same with the silver. Behind them, twin sets of ruts streaked their way across the dunes. Already, the lines in the distance were fading, filled in by the wind. Vic marveled, not for the first time, on all the wheeled conveyances she’d seen buried beneath the deep sand. To think there was some distant past or place where wheels made any sense—

“Ho, Marco!”

Vic turned. She saw where Marco was looking, hand shielding his eyes in the low morning sun. A figure stood atop a nearby dune, a silhouette with a tall lance in one hand, the other arm raised in salute. The mast of a sarfer could be seen jutting up beyond the dune, the sail tightly furled.

“While you were screwing around, someone spotted your sarfer,” Vic said.

“Shit.”

“Wait, is that Damien? Oh, he’s gonna love this.”

“Please, please, please,” Marco begged. “At least wait until we get to town. Or tonight when everyone’s drunk and no one will remember. Don’t let him be the first to know. Not Damien.”

Vic squeezed Marco’s neck and laughed. “Some freedom fighter you are.”

Marco tensed. “That’s just it. I’m a fighter.” He made a fist, and his great and tan bicep bulged, scars and tattoos straining.

Vic stopped smiling. “I was stressing the freedom part. You forget that, and all you are is fighting. I’ll tell who I want, when I want. Freedom, Marco. Don’t get like these assholes and fall in love with the fighting. Then you’re just setting off bombs because you like the noise they make.”

Marco didn’t say anything as Damien glissaded down the dune toward them, causing a gentle avalanche and using his spear for balance. He stomped over with a grin, and his eyebrows lifted when he spotted the two bags in the haul rack. “Jesus. Nice find, guys.” His eyes went to the trails left in the sand, quickly filling. “How the hell do you two score every time you go out? And way out in the middle of nowhere?”

Vic didn’t say that it was usually her scoring while Marco watched their things on the surface. “Just lucky, I guess.”

“Clothes?”

“Mostly underwear,” she said. And before Marco could respond, she added: “For the ladies.” She fought off a bout of giggles.

“Hey, my wife could use some. Maybe hook me up before you sell to Jimbo or Sandy and they get their squeeze. I’ll pay what they pay.”

“Slow down,” Marco said. “Don’t be in a rush to get our panties off us.” He laughed.

“Maybe they’re for him,” Vic said, teasing Damien.

“Yeah, fuck you two. And here I was getting ready to do you a favor. But I guess you can wait until you get to town to find out the news yourselves. To think I was gonna ask you to tag along—” He turned and marched back toward his sarfer.

“Wait. Tell us what?” Marco asked.

Damien held up his middle finger and kept walking.

“Tell us fucking what?” Marco demanded.

“I’ll trade you,” Vic called.

Damien slowed. He turned and glanced at the bags. “Trade for what?”

“Give me the news, and I’ll tell you the funniest story you’ve ever heard in your entire fucking life.”

Damien waved his hand and spit sand. “News like this don’t go for a joke.”

“Don’t you fucking dare,” Marco hissed, but this only seemed to get Damien’s attention.

“It’s not a joke,” Vic said. “It’s a true story. And I promise you won’t be disappointed. You’ll be getting the good end of this bargain, I swear.”

“I dunno…” Damien said, walking back their way. “There ain’t never been news this big. But fuckit, I’d rather you hear it from me than from someone else.”

“You first,” Vic said. In truth, she didn’t care about his news. She was just rehearsing how best to tell this story, a story that would get many retellings.

Damien took a deep breath and searched their faces. The two sand divers waited. The clatter of Low-Pub spilled over the dunes, and sand rode through the sky above their heads.

“Fucking Danvar,” Damien finally said. “Somebody found it.”

21 • Buried Alive

It was a crypt for a king. His friend Hap had left him to die in a crypt for a goddamn king—this tomb of untold riches. Palmer was going to take his last breath in a manor no Lord of Springston could refuse. A place where a truly great man should be laid to rest.

And it’ll do for me, he thought morosely.

The air in the buried sandscraper tasted stale and seemed to be growing thinner. But it had outlasted his water. Palmer had poured himself half-caps for what felt like five days. He had eaten both strips of jerky one tiny nibble at a time, like a mouse trying to win the cheese from a loaded trap. Now all of that was gone, along with fifteen or twenty pounds of himself. He hadn’t been eating that well even before the march north. The stress of a deep dive always messed with his appetite. No… it hadn’t been the dive. It had been the camping trip coming up, the anniversary. He never ate well before that trip. Had bugged out the year before. Damn… maybe he’d already been down there a whole week. Con and Rob would go without him, just like last year. Con and Rob. They would never hear from their big brother again.

Or maybe it hadn’t been so long. He had counted five days—five urges to sleep—but maybe it was four. Hell, it could be ten days or ten hours since Hap abandoned him. His mind was playing tricks. He heard noises and voices. Had a dream about his father that seemed so real, Palmer had truly thought he was dead and in heaven. Ah, a crypt fit for a king, and where was his asshole father buried? His father’s bones had ground to sand in No Man’s Land, that’s where. A pauper burial for a Lord. A place for desperate dying. It was as ironic as Palmer’s lavish crypt.

But Palmer had been old enough to remember a Lord’s life. He had bawled when his mom pulled them away from the wall. Had bawled when he was put in a different school with strange kids who smelled bad. Had bawled harder when he could no longer smell them because he had begun to stink as they did. What he wouldn’t give to have all those tears back. Just a capful.

He licked his cracked and burning lips. The dream about his father made sense now. Some part of him had been dwelling on the anniversary. He’d let Con and Rob down again. He was a shitty brother and a shitty son and did not deserve to die in so fine a place as this.

Such were his wild thoughts as he left the conference room where he’d been imprisoned by his hope of Hap’s return. He staggered out and through the dark building, his dive light as dim as he could make it, its staid old battery down to rations as well. Maybe he’d find a pool of water where a spring had flooded or where trapped moisture had drained down through the impossibly tight pack. But there was little hope of that. He left the conference room to get away from his nightmares and his failures. To let his body wander instead of his mind.

Before he died, he should go out into the sand one last time. Better to perish there and be discovered by another diver as they came to pick over this city. He still had a good charge in his suit, might see how far he could make it before the sand filled his lungs. But some naive part of him kept thinking Hap would come back, that Brock would send others, that he would be a fool to go out and die when there was still air in that building to breathe. At any moment, Hap would burst in with a second set of twin tanks, laughing and saying he’d only been gone two hours and here’s the coin those scroungers paid and all the beer and pussy in Springston would be theirs.

Palmer kept thinking this, but the hope had grown as stale and thin as the oxygen. The hope that had kept him prisoner in that room with the chairs and the great table and the brewing machine had weakened. Gone was the need to be there when the divers came for him. And as that hope waned, he left through the door that had damned him, that heavy door that Hap had slammed shut on his face, and with his dive light barely aglow, he nosed around his crypt for the first time.

He had seen many crumbling office buildings full of sand outside Springston, but never on such a scale as this, never so pristine. The buildings he had seen had been picked over for centuries. Men with mastery over the sand had ripped out great holes and had salvaged almost anything worth taking. But Palmer now strolled through a perfect recreation of that long-dead world. It was a museum for the buried gods and the world they had lived in. His fragile mind tallied stacks and stacks of coin as he felt his way down the hall. There were clocks; pictures framed and behind perfect glass; recessed lights and miles and miles of copper wire; unbroken tile; wood countertops. Coin everywhere.

Other divers would come and claim these things. Probably not Hap, for the guilt would gnaw at him. At least, Palmer hoped it would. No, it would be some other diver who would find his bones. They would remove Palmer’s skeleton from his suit piece by piece and marvel that he still had a charge left, that he had been too scared to make for the surface, and someone would point out that he didn’t have tanks, and some other asshole would say that there was a girl from Low-Pub who could’ve done it, and none of them would know that these bones in their hands belonged to that girl’s brother.

He tried another room. A bathroom. Porcelain fixtures and indoor plumbing. He felt insane for twisting the spigots, but no one was watching.

The next room was a jackpot. A bonanza of riches. A small room no bigger than a bed but full of tools. Brooms and mops and much else. He picked up one of the brooms. Synthetic bristles. Plastic. As good as the day it was made. Palmer kicked some of the scrum from his boots to the marble tile and whisked the sand around with the broom. His mother—the mother of his youth—would’ve loved such a broom. Palmer flashed back to chasing Conner through the house when they were boys, giving him a beating before his sister caught up to them both and dispensed two beatings. Back in the closet, he shook bottles of liquids, cracked the cap on one of them and took a sniff. His nose burned. If he needed an easier way out than the sand, here it was.

He surveyed all the useful things packed into such a small space, enough coin to retire on, and closed the door. Someone else would come and take these things. They would figure out a way to dive deep and bring it all back. Wouldn’t bother with him, though. Palmer thought of the city that would be built above these dunes on all that was stolen from the past. There would be an orgy of excess. A gold rush like the old-timers used to tell of Low-Pub’s founding. No one would remember the first person to set foot in that scraper. He pictured Hap in the Honey Hole at that very moment, blisteringly drunk, delicious golden beer everywhere, telling the gathered that he’d been the first one inside, that he’d discovered Danvar all on his own. Fucking Hap.

The next room was an office. Palmer checked the drawers, hoping for a canteen, even though the ancient peoples seemed rarely to use them. Dry pens. Knick-knacks. A silver key, which Palmer couldn’t help but slip into his belly pocket. Folded paper. He pulled this out and held it close to his dive light. A map. Dark lines and place names. The word “Colorado” caught his eye. Palmer slipped this into his pocket too. When they found his body, they would find something useful. Find that he had been useful.

In the center drawer he found raw riches. Coin. An entire pile of them jumbled together as if they’d been swept inside ages ago. They weren’t even locked up, just left among paper clips and pens and other worthless artifacts as if these trinkets were as dear as money.

Copper and silver, they were unscratched by sand. Palmer studied them one at a time before throwing them into his stomach pocket with the key. There grew a jangle by his belly to go with the grumbles, a two-man band. He would die wealthy. Starving and wealthy. Whoever found him would bury him well and pour a beer into his grave. A note! Palmer would write a note to go with the coin, a note to his pallbearer and one to his sister Vic. He would brag about being brave in the first message and admit to being an idiot in the second. He rummaged for a pencil, found one, pulled out his dive knife and scraped the point sharp. It felt good to have something to do, something as simple as sharpening lead. He slipped the knife back into his boot and found a pad of paper. Eaten through with worms, but it would do. He scratched out instructions for his burial and a quick note to Vic saying he was sorry. He signed his name and started to write a date, was just going to guess, but then wrote the anniversary of his father’s disappearance instead. Probably not right, but it was close enough and there was poetry to it. Poetry was better than truth. He folded both notes and stuffed them in with the heavy sag of coin. Hopefully it wouldn’t be Hap who found him. Hap wouldn’t come back. Unless Hap was arriving right then and he was missing him.

In a panic—despite the days of staring at the drift of sand with no sign of Hap—Palmer imagined his friend coming back right then, seeing that Palmer was gone, and leaving him for a second time. Palmer rushed back to the hall, hands on his belly to keep the coins from sloshing around, and he heard a noise. The creak of an old building with the weight of a world on its head. Coming from across the hall.

“Hap?” He called out his friend’s name, felt a little delirious. How long had he slept the last time he’d lain down? Was he still dreaming? “Father?”

There was a noise on the other side of the door. Palmer looked up and down the hallway, the dim red glow of his dive light barely penetrating a dozen paces. He tried to get his bearings. Was this the room he’d been wasting away inside of? Did he get turned around? The darkness beyond the feeble reach of his dive light made everything seem distant and full of quiet potential. He tried the door and found it unlocked. A single door. A different room. He stepped inside and saw rows of desks, those flat plastic screens on each. Several of the desks were jumbled together; they had been shoved away from a large pile of drift pushing its way into the room.

Palmer’s brain wrestled with possibilities: An old breach, a building giving way from years of the crush. It was on the opposite side of the building from his approach with Hap, so he hadn’t seen it. He might have swum right in if he had.

Perhaps other divers had made this. A new hole. They had come here while he had slept. Brock’s men—with Yegery, the old divemaster, to confirm the find and salvage a few things. Yes, there were signs that others had come. Bootprints of sand. Two desks cleaned off and pushed together, away from the others. Yes. The plundering had begun. Divers must be descending on this place as he stood there. He would be saved.

Or was it Hap? Maybe Hap had come back. Hap had come back for him, hadn’t found the other way in, had made a new way, and had left tanks of air for him so Palmer could save himself. Yes! There were the tanks, a triple set, sitting beyond the reach of the sand like a gift from the gods. Unless he had gone mad. Unless this was an apparition like his father. Unless he was still dreaming as before.

Palmer staggered through the desks and toward the dive tanks, wanting to touch them to see if they were real. All the possibilities for how this drift of sand had breached the building, and the true answer never occurred to him. Never occurred to him even though he should’ve remembered. Should’ve remembered that he and Hap weren’t the first to be sent down to discover Danvar. And they hadn’t found the bodies of the other two divers in the sand. All of this would come too late. It would come to him as the animal shot out from behind a desk, claws out and teeth bared, hellbent and determined to kill him.

22 • A Fight with Madness

The man was naked. He was all bones and ribs and snarling mouth. The front of him was caked in blood, a smear of charcoal black in the dim red glow of Palmer’s dive light. There was just a flash of this grisly image before the man crashed into Palmer, knocking him to the ground, desperate hands clenching around his throat.

Palmer saw pops of bright light as his head hit the floor. He couldn’t breathe. He heard his own gurgles mix with the raspy hisses from the man on top of him. A madman. A thin, half-starved, and full-crazed madman. Palmer fought for a breath. His visor was knocked from his head. Letting go of the man’s wrists, he reached for his dive knife, but his leg was pinned, his boot too far away. He pawed behind himself and felt his visor, had some insane plan of getting it to his temples, getting his suit powered on, overloading the air around him, trying to shake the man off. But as his fingers closed on the hard plastic—and as the darkness squeezed in around his vision—he instead swung the visor at the snarling man’s face, a final act before the door to that king’s crypt sealed shut on him.

A piercing shriek returned Palmer to his senses. Or it was the hands coming off his neck? The naked man howled and lunged again, but Palmer got a boot up, caught the man in the chest, kicked him. He scrambled backward while the man reeled. The other diver. Brock’s diver. Palmer turned and crawled on his hands and knees to get distance, got around a desk, moving as fast as he could, heart pounding. Two divers. There had been two divers. He waited for the man’s partner to jump onto his back, for the two men to beat him to death for his belly full of jangling coin—

—when he bumped into the other diver. And saw by his dive light that he was no threat. And the bib of gore on the man chasing him was given sudden meaning. Palmer crawled away, sickened. He wondered how long the men had been down here, how long one had been eating the other.

Hands fell onto his boots and yanked him, dragging him backward. A reedy voice yelled for him to be still. And then he felt a tug as his dive knife was pulled from its sheath, stolen. Palmer spun onto his back to defend himself. His own knife flashed above him traitorously, was brought down by those bone-thin arms, was meant to skewer him.

There was a crunch against his belly. A painful blow. The air came out of Palmer. The blade was raised to strike him again, but there was no blood. His poor life had been saved by a fistful of coin.

Palmer brought up his knee as the man struck again—and shin met forearm with a crack. A howl, and the knife was dropped. Palmer fumbled for it, his dive light throwing the world into pale reds and deep shadows. Hand on the hilt, his knife reclaimed, he slashed at the air, and the man fell back, hands up, shouting, “Please, please!”

Palmer scooted away, keeping the knife in front of him. He was weak from fitful sleep and lack of food, but this poor creature before him seemed even weaker. Enraged and with the element of surprise, the man had nearly killed him, but it had been like fighting off a homeless dune-sleeper who had jumped him for some morsel of bread. Palmer dared to turn his dive light up so he could see the man better.

“Sorry. I’m sorry,” the man said. “Thought you were a ghost.”

The blood on the man’s chin and down his neck made Palmer’s stomach turn. “Did you think I was your partner come back to get you for what you did to him?”

The thin man pointed a bony finger at Palmer. “You’re a diver. Did the others send you? Oh, thank the heavens. Thank the heavens!” He glanced down at his naked form. His eyes shot between the desks where the corpse lay. “No, no. I didn’t kill him. He died out in the sand. I brought him in here. I was… I was starving. Oh, god. Food. Do you have food? Water?” He staggered forward.

“Stay back,” Palmer said.

The man hesitated. “Juice,” he said. “I used up all my juice on the way down. Did you bring a charge? I’ve got a tank of air, but no juice. Help me.”

“You tried to kill me.”

“I thought you were a ghost.” He took another step forward, wild eyes on Palmer’s dive light. “Give me my knife back,” he said, baring bloody teeth. “I found that. Found it in your boot. In my boots.”

The man screamed and lunged, a bloodthirsty cry, naked limbs all bone and sinew, a mad and desperate creature in the red throb of Palmer’s flickering, dying light. The two men crashed together. A clatter as metal fell to tile, a single coin spilling out of the gash in Palmer’s suit, a sound two scroungers knew well, the price of one life saved and another taken as bare flesh impaled itself on a dive knife and a belly opened like a purse, a cost far graver than coin spilling to the floor.

23 • Missing Treasure

Vic and Marco sailed back into a Low-Pub that had transformed into chaos. It was not the sleepy town they usually found after their pre-dawn dives; this was a town startled into frenzy, a transformation jolted by the electricity of rumor. The tale of Danvar’s discovery had sent the diving community into a tizzy, and along with that community the rest of the small southern town. Those who rummaged scrapheaps, the welders who reshaped old steel, the women who catered to men’s lust, the shopkeeps and barkeeps and everyone with a love of coin, all seemed to be out in the streets gossiping or packing their sarfers or checking their gear before they ventured out to find the great and untouched city said to be buried a mile deep.

But confirming a legend may have heightened its allure without any promise of bounty in return. Damien had warned them that no one knew exactly where the city was, only that a couple of divers were said to have found it. Some brigand had flapped his inebriated gums in a crowded bar, claimed to have been there to witness the discovery, and now that same brigand was said to be dead. It had sounded to Vic like the sort of unsubstantiated nonsense that scavengers and conspiracy theorists were drawn to. And even as she and Marco pulled into the marina and began to voice doubts about the veracity of these Danvar claims, other sarfers were flying out in all directions at once. They could hear rumors being shouted from one deck to the other over the whistling winds, each diver seizing on the location that made the most sense to them. It was clear from the chaos around the marina that no one knew where Danvar was, but that wasn’t going to stop anyone from being there when it was uncovered. It was madness. Vic was about to tell Marco this, when he voiced madness of his own.

“So where should we start?” he asked.

Vic moved to the foot of the mast and helped him flake the sail against the boom. “What do you mean start?” she asked. “You don’t believe this nonsense, do you?” She lashed the sail to the boom and saw that Marco was tying slip knots while she was using reefs. As if he planned on heading right back out and she was looking to stay.

“It’s probably a load of shit, but what if? You’d rather sit here and miss the find of the century?”

“No, I’d rather sit here than chase my tail around the thousand dunes. If there was a find of the century, I’d go. But we both know there isn’t.” She rolled her eyes as Marco undid one of her reef knots and looped in a slip. “You do whatever. I’ve been up and diving since four while you’ve been napping in your sarfer. I’m gonna shake the sand out of these clothes, see what’s in this other case, and then get some sleep.”

Marco looked hurt.

“If you find Danvar,” she added, “come and wake me.”

“Well, I need to run to my place and grab my tanks. But yeah, I’ll catch you later.” He leaned over the boom for a kiss, and Vic obliged.

“Later,” she said. She hopped down to the sand, her knee still a little sore, and slung her gear bag over her shoulder. She grabbed the two cases from the sarfer’s haul rack and extended the handles. Dragging them to her house on those small and useless wheels, she cursed the madness the old world’s allure made in men. The promise of buried treasure warped their minds. Vic liked to think she was more rational than that.

But of course, her mind was prone to dreams of sudden riches too. And she had her own guesses about the location of Danvar. She wasn’t immune to the idea of seeing a city untouched by time and scavenge. Even with the craziness around her, the hysteria, the fun she might poke at Marco and these people off their rockers, she knew her own rocker was prone to tipping, too. It tipped right back, that feeling of vertigo as some momentous event loomed underfoot, until she was the one asking herself: What if it’s real? What if?

But only a fool runs around shouting “A find! A find!” when they haven’t seen it in their own visor. Right? She tried to convince herself. Because the greater fool sits in a bar alone, nursing a warm beer, while hauls of coin start coming into town and the stories that will one day be legend fill the pub. It’s a fool either way, so it’s all about cost. Which fool would she more loathe to be?

She dragged her two bags across the sand. It was early morning, but so many people were out and about. Divers who would’ve normally asked where she’d found the cases rushed right by in a hurry. Shopkeeps who would’ve begged her to come pop those latches on their counters were too busy haggling over the rising price of a fuel cell or the use of a generator or the purchase of a haul net. Vic slid through the throngs to her house. She set the cases down outside her shack and fumbled in her pocket for the key. Out of habit, she tapped her toes on the kickplate along the bottom of the door to knock the scrum from her boots loose. The gentle raps caused the door to swing open, hinges squealing. Vic pulled her hand out of her pocket. She was damn sure she’d latched it when she’d left.

“Palm?” she called.

Her brother often treated the place like it was his, had started spending as much time in Low-Pub as Springston and liked to take advantage of the fact that Vic spent most of her nights over at Marco’s. He was the only other person with a key. There was no answer from inside. She studied the door, saw the scratch marks from someone jimmying the thing open with a screwdriver, which brought back memories of the dozens of times she’d jimmied the damn thing open with a screwdriver. She hesitated before going in, wondered if maybe the latch just hadn’t caught that morning. It’d been dark and she’d been groggy when she’d left.

“Hey Palm? You asleep?”

Vic reached into her boot and pulled her latch-break out. She used the metal rod to push the door all the way open. It was dark inside, the west-facing windows getting little of the morning sun. She didn’t hear anyone. Must’ve not pulled the door shut when she left. That was it. She lit a candle and checked the bedroom and bathroom, was satisfied with her theory. She went back for the two bags, brought them inside, and kicked the door shut.

Two days, max. That’s how long before they’d know if Danvar had been discovered. No harm in waiting and getting in on the action late. No harm in that. She had plenty of places she could dive that no one else could. Hell, it might get nice and quiet around Low-Pub for a couple days once everyone cleared out. That would be a pleasant change.

Vic stood under the beam she used for pull-ups and jumped up and grabbed the palm-worn wood. She held herself with one hand while she patted for the key. Securing it, she dropped back down and removed the padlock from the hatch in the living room floor. Grabbing the black case full of clothes, she lowered it down to the slope of drift below. The silver case she left out; Vic wanted to take a peek before she got some rest.

Opening her icebox, she grabbed half a shriveled lime and a jar of homebrew, squeezed the former into the latter, and sipped on her breakfast. She set the Samsonite up on its edge and tried the latches. Stuck. Both of them. She took another swig of the beer, stale but cold, and was wiping her mouth when there was a knock at the door.

“Begging won’t make me change my mind—” she started to tell Marco, when the door opened and two men barged into the room. Brigands, by the smell and look of them. Vic recognized one of the men. Paulie. He used to run with the Low-Pub Legion. Couldn’t hack it as a diver and took to muscling people. The red Legion ker was gone, though. Both men sported the golden kers of the northern wastes. Vic wondered what the hell these guys were doing this far south. And then she saw that the bigger man had a gun on his belt. Probably didn’t work—as most of them didn’t—but the problem was in the probably.

“Hey, wrong house, assholes.” Vic stood up and blocked the view of the Samsonite. “If you’re looking for Danvar, it’s not in my cellar—”

“Save it, Vic,” Paulie said. “Where the fuck is Palm?”

“How the hell should I know? And you guys are tracking sand in.”

The larger man with the gun stomped toward the bedroom and peered inside.

“He’s not here,” Vic said. “You’ve got the wrong fucking house.”

“Well, we hear he spends time all over the place.”

“He’s probably in Springston,” Vic said, trying to throw them off.

“We already checked Springston,” Paulie told her.

“Yeah? Look, I don’t care what he owes you. Dusting up my place is gonna get you in my debt—”

“Chill with the tough act,” the big guy said. He pointed a finger at her. “Where the fuck is he?”

“Even if I knew, I wouldn’t tell you.”

The large brigand made a move in her direction, but Paulie held the man back. “She don’t know. She’s just fucking with you.”

The brigand spat at Vic’s boots.

“Lovely,” she said. “I’ll tell my brother you boys are wanting him to come out and play.”

“Do that,” Paulie said. “Seriously. Your brother is tied up in shit beyond your comprehension. If you see him, tell him to come in. It’ll go easier on him this way.”

“Shut the door behind you,” Vic said.

The large brigand took one last look around the room. His eyes fell to the locked hatch. But Paulie guided him back toward the front door, and the large man relented. They left the door open. Vic crossed the room and shut it. She spun the latch and rested against the hammered tin. What the fuck was her brother into this time? It was that asshole, Happy. Gonna get her brother killed, running around with that group, trying to impress people. She’d talked to Palmer about that, about needing to find a different dive partner. And what the hell could he have gotten into that would have brought a couple of scavengers this far south? That would have them running all over Springston and Low-Pub when everyone else was out looking for Danvar—?

“No way,” Vic said. She paced a small circle around her living room. “No fucking way. Palmer, you didn’t.”

She glanced at her dive bag. Damn, she was tired. Too tired for this. But her brother had come to her a week ago asking if he could borrow her visor. She’d laughed and told him to fuck off. He’d then asked her about a two-tank valve, which she’d given him. She remembered the conversation like it was yesterday. Remembered the way he’d hugged her before he left. He never did that. Couldn’t remember the last time he’d done that.

“What’ve you done, Palm? What the fuck have you done?”

Vic crossed the room and grabbed the jar of stale beer with its shriveled green lime. She chugged the bitter breakfast down and grabbed her dive bag. Damn, she was tired. But hopefully Marco hadn’t left town without her.

24 • A Mad Dash

Palmer

Dive light and diver were extinguished as one. Palmer felt the wild man sag lifeless to the ground, and the light around his neck threw out one last spurt of red rays before it too gave up the ghost. He was left shaking and terrified in the pitch black. His dive knife felt heavy in his hand.

Palmer wiped the blade on his thigh and placed a hand over his belly, holding the coins there. He remembered that a coin had spilled out, and bent down, patted the floor until he found it. There was a tear in his suit. He felt to see if any of the wires had been severed—couldn’t be positive but didn’t think so. The knife went back into his boot. He arranged the folded map in his belly pocket so it was against the tear, outside of the coins, stanching the costly wound.

Reaching for his dive light, he switched it off, shook it, and tried it again. Popping the battery out and touching its leads to his tongue didn’t resurrect it. He felt for his visor, wanted to check the charge in his suit, then remembered it getting knocked off. Palmer felt around in the darkness and tried to retrace his steps. The air was fucking awful in there. It was the stench of the dead mixed with the stale and too-weak oxygen. His knees were wobbly. He bumped into a desk. Felt around the corner. Went too far and placed a hand in the gore of the other diver.

“Fuck. Fuck.”

Palmer backed up, wiped his hand on the ground, wiped again on an office chair, was bumping into things and making noises, ghosts everywhere. He practically crawled on his belly, swept his arms across the floor, found random knick-knacks, lost a coin from his pocket and chased after it, wasn’t able to find the damn thing, when he bumped into his visor.

Tank of air, the madman had said. Tank of air but no charge. Palmer had some battery left but no air. Fucking Hap. He tried to remember where the tanks had been. Couldn’t see shit. Couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. His fins were back in the other room. Vic always made fun of him for using fins, said only beginners wore them, that once you really learned how to flow sand you could do it in your boots. You could do it barefoot.

Palmer strained with his other senses. He listened for the sound of sand tumbling across sand, little tiny rocks the size of pinpricks whispering in diminutive avalanche. He searched for that noise of his life, of his entire goddamn existence: sand on sand.

He heard a sigh. A hush. Barely more than a rustle, maybe the sound of him breathing or his heart thrumming or the brush of fabric between his trembling knees.

But no—it was sand moving. Sliding toward him.

Palmer slid toward it in return.

He crawled through the desks, straining to remember the layout of the room, where the tanks had been, where in relation to the drift. There were chairs and desks everywhere. There were tangles of wires and a keyboard. Palmer considered trying his visor, using it to navigate, trying to see by the pulsing purples of open air, but the dead dive light around his neck was a reminder to not waste his charge. His suit had held enough juice to get him down to that building and back to the surface, and he was only halfway through that dive. This is what he told himself as he fumbled around in the darkness: he was only halfway through this dive. He had stopped for a few days, a few hours, who knew how long? He had starved at the bottom of his plummet, had scrounged longer than any living soul ever had, and he wasn’t through. Weak and exhausted and terrified, he wasn’t through.

Palmer felt sand beneath his palms. He nearly bent and kissed the stuff, those cool granules that reminded him of home. He turned to the side and kept one hand in touch with the slope of drift, the other waving out in space, shuffled along on his knees, when his fingers hit that cool metal.

The tears came. Palmer cried out in relief. But he dared not hope, dared not hope, not until he knew. He felt around the dive tanks for the valves—everything in a different place, a strange arrangement, a different model, three damn tanks to lug, to flow around. No way he could lift all three. He cracked the valve at the top of one tank and felt down the hose to the regulator. With his heart pounding, unable to breathe or think or swallow, he touched the purge button in the center of the regulator.

Nothing. Empty tank. He tried the next. Prayed. Really fucking prayed to the old gods, the ones he didn’t believe in, but he promised them now that he would. He would. He would believe. Just give him some air.

But the regulator made no sound. He tried sucking on the mouthpiece to make sure. All he got was dizzy.

Last tank. There was no hope now. No promises to the gods. Nothing but weariness and despair. Anger and fear. And then—a blast of air.

A blast of air, goddamn you. He thought this to Hap, to his friend who had left him for dead, who had promised to come back for him, to save him. Well, Palmer would get out of there and he would find Hap, would return to him like a vengeful ghost. He would kill that motherfucker. That’s what he would do. And this gave him the courage to go. To go. Palmer fumbled for the webbing straps and the buckles that held the tanks in place. He removed the two empties, shoved them aside with clanks and bangs, set them off to roll into invisible furniture and warn away the ghosts.

He slipped his arms through the webbing straps on the harness, the single tank lopsided on his back. His visor wouldn’t be able to interface with the regulator and tell him how much air he had, but that didn’t matter, did it? There was enough or there wasn’t. The dead diver would’ve turned back if he had gotten too low. Palmer told himself this. He told himself this. Pulling his visor down and powering both it and his suit on, he bit down on someone else’s regulator, took a long pull of someone else’s air, and he crawled up that slope of drift. He told his suit to vibrate outward against the world, against the hard pack, shiver it until it moved like water, and then he sank down, was enveloped by the deep dunes, the purples becoming oranges and reds, and he could see again.

25 • The Risk of Believing

Vic found Marco back at the marina, loading his tanks into the haul rack. His was the last sarfer in sight. There were sails and masts out across the dunes, but all were heading away. Everyone was looking for Danvar. Vic wondered how to explain to Marco that they needed to use his sarfer to look for her brother instead.

“You heading out alone?” she asked.

Marco turned from his sarfer and smiled. He moved his goggles up to his forehead. “Thought you needed a nap.”

“Naw. When I need beauty rest, I just blink.” She batted her eyes to demonstrate.

“Prettier by the moment.” He helped her with her gear bag and lashed it down with the tanks. “So I thought we’d head south. One of the rumors floating around is that Danvar is in a line with Springston and Low-Pub. A lot of people are going west where the sand isn’t so deep. I think that’s a mistake.”

“I think we need to go north,” Vic said.

“You would.” Marco studied the wind generator at the aft end of the sarfer. It howled as it spun in the breeze. He checked the charge on the batteries. “If I’d said north, you would’ve told me we needed to go south.”

“No, I think we need to find my brother.”

“Palm? To cut him in on this? Shouldn’t we find the joint first?”

Vic followed Marco to the boom and helped him tug the slip knots loose. “I didn’t get a nap because a couple of assholes barged into my place as soon as I got there. Paulie and some other guy.”

“Paulie? Is he back in town?”

“Yeah. Looking for Palm.”

Marco shook his head. “You gotta tell your brother to stay away from those guys.”

“I have.”

Marco lowered his goggles and unwrapped the dock lines from the hitching post. The sarfer rocked in the breeze, felt eager to get moving. The wind generator whirred. He lowered the rudder against the sand and tested the tiller. “How about we shoot south just to see if anyone’s found something, and then we go look for your brother?” He nodded toward the mast. “If you raise the main, I’ll pull us out of here.”

Vic stepped back toward the cockpit instead. She raised her hand and steadied the boom as it moved in a gust of wind. “I don’t want to find Palmer to take him diving with us,” she said.

“Good. Let’s get going.”

“We need to find Palmer because…” She wasn’t sure how to say this. “Goddamnit, Marco, I think he might be the one who found Danvar.”

26 • A Long Way Up

Palmer slid easily through the loose bank of drift inside the building, but the hard pack he found outside was a shock. As he pushed his way back into the world, the earth he encountered there pushed back at him. He didn’t quite get a full breath of air before the strain around his chest and neck made another gulp impossible. He could’ve turned and forced his way back into the building to escape the crush, but a slower death beckoned there. And he might never have gotten the courage to go again.

His mortality was suddenly everywhere at once. Never before had it registered with him that this was the moment. Now. Right now. Here was where he would die and where his bones would lie, never to see the stars again.

With half a lungful, he turned skyward in desperation. He only knew which way was up by leaving the tall building behind. Fighting against the squeeze, fighting against all that pressure, he struggled to flow the sand and at the same time to breathe. But still he could not pry the hands of those deep dunes from around his neck. He had a tank of air strapped to his back, but he couldn’t draw on the regulator, couldn’t force his chest to expand, needed to go up in order to win a breath.

Palmer kicked and flowed the miserable sand. He should be around three hundred meters. There was no depth reading in his visor. Go by feel. Move fifty meters. That should be enough to get a breath. Battery in his beacon must be dead. Didn’t matter—just kick. The depth would show when it sensed the surface. Should’ve been able to breathe but couldn’t. Too weak. Too exhausted. Too hungry and thirsty and terrified.

The sun does this every day, he heard his sister say. Palmer felt consciousness slip through his fingers. He was back on a dune with Vic, learning to dive in the loosest of sand, afraid he wouldn’t have the knack, that he wouldn’t have the special talent that made diving possible, was afraid all of his dad’s skill had gone to his sister.

Look at the sun, she told him. The sun was just coming up. He’d been in her too-big dive suit for hours and hadn’t been able to so much as slide a hand into a dune. He was growing frustrated. He didn’t want to hear another lecture from his older sister.

“Every day,” Vic told him. “Every day, the sun rises out of the sand without effort. It glides. It burns. It melts all in its path, and then it shows us how it’s done in the evening as it bores straight down through the jagged peaks. Through solid rock, Palm. And all you’ve gotta to do is move the sand.”

The sun. His father was calling. His father, who told him he would be a great diver one day. Sitting on his lap, Palmer’s earliest memory, back when his father had been a great man and a ruler, telling his firstborn son that he would be the greatest of divers one day. Nearby, Vic listened, ten years old, sitting in the same room and unmentioned. Unmentioned.

No shadows cast, not from this son. No, this son lived in shadows. Lived in the dark and cool sand. Watched his sister dive and rise up again, basking, radiating glory, a rebel and a pirate and a scrounger and a great diver. But Palmer… who saw Danvar when it was a legend… who spilled the life of a man with his dive knife… who would die with a tank of air on his back and a quarter charge in his suit… his white bones at three hundred meters.

Three hundred meters. The depth reading flashed in Palmer’s awareness like the appearance of a mother’s face in the midst of a burning fever. Like a knock at a door in the middle of a nightmare. A small part of his brain yelled at the rest of him, saying hey, you might want to see this.

But he’d been going up. Should be less than three hundred meters. His lungs were straining. And then he remembered the bowl they’d dug, the deep shaft in the sand they’d made, the extra two hundred meters. Fuck, he’d only gotten started. No way, no way, no way.

Palmer stopped moving. He worried less about the flow and more about breathing. The sand held him, but he was able to draw air through the regulator. A breath. A sip. Life. That surreal feeling taking him right back to the day Vic had taught him how to dive, had told him to breathe while his head was under the sand, his body telling him this was impossible, his brain saying not to do it, his sister yelling at him, her voice distant and muffled, to fucking breathe.

And breathing.

Palmer managed a gulp. He peered down at the now-faint image of the sandscraper below. Up was the other way. Away from Danvar. He kicked; he grunted with effort, the sounds of his screams trapped in his own head, his own throat. So far to go. Where was he? There were no transponders, no beacons, but his visor was getting his depth now, so the surface was up there somewhere. No beacon to show him the way. And the shaft they’d descended, that Brock’s men had made, that bright yellow needle deep in the earth, was missing. That’s why so deep.

It grew harder to breathe, even as he pierced two hundred meters. Should be getting easier. Air was running out. Fuck. Air running out. Only enough to get back to the bottom of that well. No. Not this close. He wouldn’t die this close. He felt the resistance of the dry tank, that fruitless tug on a bottle sucked dry, and his air was gone. Maybe he could get fifty meters on a lungful. Maybe. Two hundred meters to go. He kicked anyway. He wouldn’t make it. This registered as bright as metal in loose sand. He wouldn’t make it. Could feel himself blacking out. Still another one fifty, as deep as many divers dared to plunge, at the bottom of most dives, and he was down there with a lungful of nothing but toxic exhalations.

An orange spot in the sand above. Thirty meters away. Something to steer for. A dying light. An island in the vastness. His body needed to breathe; his body told him to spit out his regulator and suck down sand; it was that impulse at the end of asphyxiation, the urge to get something into the lungs, anything, even the soil. Whatever it took to breathe. To gasp. Just fucking do it. Clog his lungs with sand and end the pain. He would. He would. But an orange spot. A body.

Palmer ran out of energy. The sand would no longer flow. There was a diver there beside him, and he numbly, distantly, in some corner of his diminishing soul, knew why Hap never came back for him.

Hap had never made it.

Palmer spit out his regulator. He tasted the sand on his tongue. He could see Hap’s face, the way his body was twisted out of shape, something wrong about that. Something wrong. A frozen look on Hap’s face, mouth and eyes wide, regulator dangling. Palmer’s regulator. Palmer’s regulator.

Palmer flowed the sand around the regulator and grabbed it, placed it into his mouth. No hope. No hope. But air cares not for hope. It is or it isn’t. And here it was. Here it was.

Air.

Energy flowed into Palmer’s cells like electricity. He blinked away the tears behind his visor. Vic and his father were yelling at him. His mother was yelling at him. His baby brothers. Hap. All yelling at him. Go. Go. Fucking breathe.

A hundred meters to the surface, to the bottom of that slowly filling bowl of sand. No time to switch tanks. But this was sand he could handle. Even as he could taste the wet metal on his tongue that let him know this other tank was running dry, this tank and regulator he knew so well running dry, he also knew the loose sand. He knew this dead diver. Palmer was a scrounger, a sand diver, one who brought back heavy loads from the past and saw the sun glint off them for the first time in generations. He flowed the sand upward, pulling Hap and his tank with him, rising through the last hundred meters of sand as his air ran out, as his air ran out, but he knew and Vic told him that he could make it. And he believed.

27 • Mother

Vic and Marco sailed north on a steady breeze, the sail taut and full, the lines singing and happy. Marco had found a good trough through a line of dunes, which meant very little tacking. It was the kind of sailing that coaxed a mind into a wander. Just the vibration through a riveted hull of piecemeal steel as the sarfer crossed those patches of sand with the little channels the wind made, those striations like the wrinkled hands of the elderly. There was the shushing sound of metal runners on hard pack, the creak of lines in burdened wooden blocks, the groan of a happy mast bent before a gathering wind.

Vic watched the great wall approach in the distance, the tallest of the cobbled scrapers looming over the far dunes. It was not yet noon. They had made excellent time, hard to believe she had been on a dive before dawn that same day. Her thoughts went to Palmer, the idea that her brother may have been a part of this find of finds. Their father had been right all those years ago when he’d said Palmer would be the one. Vic was the scrounger who made fortunes. Fortunes she spent just as quickly. Spent them chasing the next score, her prospects rising and falling with the moon, always looking for that truly impressive discovery, the one that would mean never gambling again. But Palmer was the one.

Marco tapped her arm. He was in the webbed seat next to her. He motioned to the tiller and then pointed toward the bow, needed to go forward. Vic took over. She enjoyed the way the tiller hummed in her hand. The same technology found in her dive suit allowed the sharp rudder to pierce the sand and flow through it like water. She steered and watched Marco work and realized her mother had been as right about her love life as her father had been about her diving prospects. Her mom had said she would end up with someone dangerous, someone who took too many risks, and that this would be the end of her. “Nothing but brigands and bastards in your future,” her mom had said. Like she knew what she was talking about.

Vic watched Marco wrestle with the hanks on the foresail until a wrinkle was out and the shape of the jib was better. Instead of returning to the cockpit, he stood on the bow and gazed out toward approaching Springston. Whatever he was thinking was hidden behind those dark goggles of his, was lost in that mane of knotted cords, those tattoos and scars and wounds from fighting for some ideal that she didn’t think either of them could even remember. What were they fighting for?

And what would she do differently if she went back and did it all over? If she thought her parents were right, what would she change? Vic couldn’t think of a thing. The ink and the sandscars on her body would never disappear, and she didn’t regret them. She would be proud of Palmer if he went down as the one who found Danvar. Proud of him and his friend Hap. Glad for them and in love with her brigand boyfriend and damn her parents if they’d been right about everything. Damn them. After her big score, when she had kids of her own and sent them out into the world, she’d tell them the things she’d learned and then say that they would have to learn these very same things all on their own. Every generation did. Trying to prevent this was like shouting at the wind and hoping it stopped.

Ahead, the clean northward trough ended. Vic steered around a dune and through a break until she found another trough. She had to adjust the sails as she did so. Marco seemed at peace on the bow and made no effort to come back and help. Probably knew she’d be pissed if he tried. He held the forestay with one hand and continued to gaze toward the horizon, thinking on his own riches, possibly. Or busy naming their kids. Or dreading the day their mother told them about the time their dad was nearly killed by an undergarment.

Shantytown rose at last, after the scrapers and the great wall. A scrabble of low huts with bright steel roofs gleamed in the rising sun. She had to search hard to spot the marina on the south side, for it was nearly bare. Just two sarfers parked, neither of them fitted with masts, otherwise Vic was sure they’d be out among the dunes as well, looking for Danvar.

The traffic they’d seen between Low-Pub and Springston had been unprecedented. She and Marco had passed dozens of parked sarfers among the dunes with their dive flags up. Dozens more had been spotted with their sails billowing as they raced all points but east. Vic eased the sheets to drop some speed and steered into the marina while Marco lowered the jib. It felt good, this ride between Low-Pub and Springston. The anxiety of the chase for treasure had lessened. She just felt an urge to find her brother and share in the excitement with everyone else. Nothing wrong with being second or tenth. Just a pang that her father wasn’t there to be a part of it. To hear that Palmer had maybe been first.

She guided the sarfer into an open flat of sand, loosed the mainsail, and realized this would be her first trip into Springston in almost a year. God, today was the day, wasn’t it? Or was it yesterday? She knew it was coming up. Conner and Rob would be out camping. Maybe that’s where Palmer was as well. Hell, maybe he’d had no part in locating Danvar. He’d just been camping, had done whatever two-tank dive he and Hap had lined up and had gone out to No Man’s for the weekend. Doubt crept in after getting Marco’s hopes up. She may have sailed them in the wrong direction.

“I’ll stay here and watch the sarfer,” Marco said, snapping her from her thoughts. The noise of the wind and the skids was gone, leaving a residual roar. They would both be shouting at each other until it went away.

“No, you’re coming with me.” She coiled the mainsheet before tugging her gloves off, then nodded to the small shack beyond the mooring posts. “I’ll give the dockmaster a coin to watch our stuff.”

Marco shrugged. “If you insist.” He wrapped a line around one of the posts so the sarfer couldn’t break free and run under bare pole. They flaked the mainsail and left the mast up so they could get out of there as soon as they found Palmer. Vic tied back the halyard so it wouldn’t clang a racket, then checked their dive gear in the haul rack to make sure nothing had come loose. She took a long pull on her canteen, dreading the hell out of this, dreading it worse than any deep dive, then led the way toward the Honey Hole, Marco having to jog to catch up with her.

28 • No Room for Breathing

The brothel, with its noisy generator and bright lights and balconies hunkered under juts of corrugated tin, stood between two shoveled dunes in that neverwhere between Shantytown and Springston. Vic couldn’t decide which town the building belonged to. It was as if neither side wanted it but neither wanted to lose it. It was that last piece of rotten snakemeat begrudgingly fought over by two starving but half-hearted men, each secretly hoping the other might win the struggle.

The sun pounded the back of the brothel by day, baking it until noon, then allowed it to revel in all its lurid glory as it slowly set to the west. This was when the idle women left their idle beds and leaned over railings from their balconies, their breasts drooping seductively in fire-red lace and midnight-black straps as they smiled down at the men who went twelve dunes out of their way home from work to ogle what they could not afford. Or as they shoved their way inside and paid anyway for what they could not afford.

Vic avoided the place like no other spot in the high desert. She would just as soon venture into No Man’s Land after her father or swim through a viper’s nest as set foot in the place. This distaste was an inconvenience when in Springston, for quite a bit of a diver’s business was conducted around the mismatched tables of the downstairs bar, men leaning heads together over smoldering ashtrays to consult expert maps scratched in charcoal on the faces of napkins. It was a blessing, in a way, that her mother owned the place and worked there. It gave Vic an excuse to shun the joint. Otherwise she would have to explain herself, would have to admit that it had nothing to do with her mom. Without this excuse, the men who dominated the world of diving would think her unbrave and unworthy.

“You go in,” she told Marco, holding up outside the front door. “Ask for Rose and tell her to meet me out back.”

“Why don’t you just come in with me?” Marco asked, wagging his eyebrows, mocking her. “You really have such a problem with what your mom does?”

Vic hesitated. “It’s bad for business,” she finally said. “When I walk in there, all those drunks take one look at me and they decide they don’t want nothing else for a week. Bad for business, and it’s my mom’s business.”

Marco laughed. “Jesus, whatever. I’ll go book an hour with your mom for you.”

“Yeah, fuck you—”

But Marco was already through the door. The Honey Hole belched a blast of noise as it swung open for a moment, the early-morning crowd unusually alive, probably because of the news of Danvar, or still going strong from the night before. Vic took advantage of the lee of the two-story building to pull out her tobacco pouch and roll a smoke. Getting low. Would need to ride out to the gardens at some point and hit up her supplier—

“Why don’t you smoke that in bed after we’re done, Honey?” A face and two breasts leaned out over the rail above. “Twenty coin for you. Special rate. Whaddya say?”

Vic clicked her lighter, fired up her cigarette, and blew smoke toward the balcony. “Fuck off,” she muttered. She left the shelter from the wind and stepped around the building between the dunes daily carved away from this most sacred and protected of buildings. She thought of her little brother Conner as she considered how the sand here was eternally dug away just as it was from other wells of nourishment.

At the back of the building, there stood a low wall around a service door where drunks and garbage were dragged out. Vic enjoyed her smoke, the deep inhalations calming nerves jangled from being near the place. Rusted hinges full of sand screamed as her mother stepped out, an unlit cigarette in her mouth, the white robe Vic’s father had brought up from beneath Low-Pub fluttering around her knees.

“Got a light?” her mom asked.

First words exchanged in a year, and Vic was pretty sure they were the same words she had last heard from her mother, standing there in that very place. She cupped her hand tight around her silver lighter, and her mom dipped her cigarette into the flame. It came out aglow and smoking.

“New tattoo?” her mom asked. She pointed the lit cigarette at Vic’s arm.

“Yeah,” Vic said, resisting the urge to look down at her arm and see which one she was talking about. The sun was just breaking over the highest scrapers. She could already tell it was going to be a hot one. “Look, I’d love to chat, but I just need to find Palmer. Have you seen him?”

Her mom inhaled, nodded, turned to the side and blew smoke against the sandblasted door. “Saw your brother last week. Needed money for a pair of visors. Said he would really pay me back this time.”

“You know where he was heading?”

Her mom shook her head. “Nope. Didn’t care. Don’t you wanna ask if I gave him the money?”

“No, I don’t. Did he say anything about the job he was taking?”

Her mom shrugged. “He said he would stop back by on his way down to pay me back. That’s all. He was supposed to go camping with your brothers last night, but Conner came by yesterday looking for him, so there’s another broken promise.”

“Did Conner say why he was looking for him?”

Her mom’s eyes narrowed into slits. “Because he was supposed to go camping. Why? Is Palmer in trouble?”

“No. I think he’s in the opposite of trouble. All the commotion around here this morning, it’s because someone found Danvar.”

Her mom exhaled noisily. “Someone’s always finding Danvar. And it always turns out to be some no-name town full of half-rotten debris that was already known about. More people will go broke than make anything, you watch. Good for our business for a few days, and then a ghost town after that.”

“I think this time is different,” Vic said.

“It’s always different. And look, unless you want to come in and talk, I’ve gotta get out of the sand. I can’t afford to take an extra shower today just because you don’t like what I do here.”

“Okay. Whatever. Good to see you.”

“Same.” She flicked the cigarette into the sand. A crow dove down to take a look and peeled away, screaming at being fooled.

“Hey,” Vic said, as her mom opened the door. “Did he get the visor?”

Her mom looked sad for a moment, a frown of wrinkles around her mouth. “I gave him the money, yeah.”

“Who was he buying it from? Graham?”

“Go ask Graham,” her mom said. She stepped back inside, and the wind and sand helped slam the door.

29 • A Soul’s Weight

“Well?” Marco asked. He was waiting for Vic out front.

“Danvar is north of here,” she said. “I think.”

“You think? Did your mom say that? She know where your brother went?”

“Not exactly. But Palmer told her he would stop back by on his way down. Plus, I don’t think he would’ve come this way just to head south or west. They were passing through Springston from Low-Pub, and he stopped to hit her up for money. We need to run to a dive shop real quick. I’ve got one more person to ask.” She grabbed Marco by the shirt and pulled him close for a deep kiss. One of the women on the balcony whistled.

“What the fuck was that for?” Marco asked, smiling.

Vic wiped her lips. “Making sure you didn’t have any lipstick on you. You’re clean.”

“Oh, is that right?” He followed her as she set off toward the dive school. “I’m clean, huh?”

“Yeah, but your breath tastes like panties. That could mean anything, though.”

“That joke’s gonna get real old real fast,” Marco said. He ran to catch up. “So what dive shop are we going to? You’ve got a lead?”

“Yeah. Family friend. A guy my dad used to scavenge with. Name’s Graham—”

“Graham Siler?”

“Yeah, you know him?”

“I know of him. If it weighs a Graham, he gives a damn. A hoarder, right? I know a guy who came across one of his buried caches once. Said there was a hundred thousand coin worth of artifacts two hundred meters down out in the middle of nowhere.”

“Bullshit. Those are legend.”

“No, he was for real. But he wouldn’t touch any of it. Said he’d heard Graham booby-traps the caches. I’m not kidding. This guy still goes out there sometimes, dives down, and just looks at it. I’ve tried to get him to take me.”

“He won’t take you because they don’t exist. He’s just a junker like my dad was. Hey, did that sand up there just settle? Like it was moving?”

Marco peered at the dune she was pointing to. There was still a small cascade of sand sliding down the face. “The wind,” Marco said.

“Felt like someone was watching us. C’mon, there’s a back way to his shop through here. We can stay out of the market. It sounds nuts over there.”

“Yeah—” Marco lagged behind, was still studying the dune. Vic turned down a narrow path and into a tight alley where shacks jutted out of the high sand and roofs met overhead to form a dark tunnel. Cracks in the tin allowed thin lines of sift to fall in golden veils. Vic ducked her head as she passed through one. She found Graham’s by looking for the shack with the billiard ball for a door handle. A perfunctory knock, and she pushed her way inside, bells overhead ringing.

“Graham?”

There was no one at the counter. A lantern flickered with the breeze swirling through the door. Marco kicked his boots on the doorjamb and joined her inside, closed the door, which upset the bells again but stilled the shadows. “Look at those bikes,” Marco whispered.

Vic ignored him. She ducked under the handlebars of the suspended bicycles and peered into the back. The workshop was empty. “Graham? You still in bed?” She had gone up two rungs toward his loft to check his mattress when she saw the body behind his workbench. Graham’s stool lay on its side. “Marco!” she called. She scrambled down from the ladder and hurried around the workbench. An electric light on the bench was still on. She swiveled it toward the floor so she could see better.

“You okay?” Marco asked.

“Fuck,” Vic said. She moved the stool, which lay across the body.

“Is that Graham?”

“No. Never seen this guy before.” She reached up and adjusted the light better. “Damn. Look at this.”

There was something wrong with the man’s face. It was stove in, like he’d been hit with something, perhaps a bat, but there was almost no damage to the skin, just rivulets of blood streaking from his nose. “What the hell?”

“Hey, I know that guy.” Marco knelt down beside the man. He lifted his hand and bent his arm around, studied a tattoo and a knot of sandscars on his wrist. “Danger,” he said. He looked up at Vic, saw the confusion on her face. “His name. That’s what he went by, anyway. Used to be in the Low-Pub Legion. Muscle. Blew shit up. Whatever you needed, he did it for a price. Went north when the price got better.”

“Cannibals?” Vic stayed away from the wastes as much as she could; there was a grove of trees up there and a couple sources of water, some nice dive sites, but the dunes were generally unsafe.

“No, a new outfit. One of our bomb guys hooked up with them as well. Word is they’re fast and loose with their coin. Haven’t taken credit for any attacks, but that don’t mean they aren’t trying. What happened to his face?”

“Looks like he was hit with something.”

Marco reached down and touched the dead man’s cheek. The flesh moved like rotten fruit.

“Fuck,” Marco said. “It’s like a sponge.”

Vic held her hand over the man’s face, careful not to touch it. She just lined her palm up over the damage. “Graham must’ve had his dive gloves on. He powered his suit up and shoved your friend here in the face, probably when he came back around the bench to threaten him.”

“You think he hit him with his suit?”

Vic nodded. “Would’ve powdered his skull. Turned it into sand. I think that’s his brains leaking out his nose.”

“Aw, fuck.” Marco stood up. “And he just left him here?”

“Well, either Graham took off in a hurry or Danger here wasn’t alone and Graham was hauled off. Weird of him to leave the place unlocked and unmanned like this. He’s weird about his shit.”

“Yeah, well it was weird of whoever took him to leave that kick-ass visor just sitting there on the workbench.”

Vic turned to see what he was talking about. “Don’t even think it,” she said, watching him reach for the set.

“Just want to see them.”

“A friend of mine might be in trouble.”

“So what’re we supposed to do? And what do you think Danger wanted? Your guy owe him money, maybe?”

“What do you think, you goon? You think maybe we’re not the only two trying to track down Danvar by following leads rather than bumping over the dunes with our sails flapping in all directions? Someone else thinks Graham knows where Danvar is. Or shit—” Vic stood up. “Maybe someone else knows that Graham knew where Palmer went. Maybe we’re two steps behind…”

“No, no, no.” Marco paced up and down behind the workbench, shaking his finger at the dead man on the ground. “I’ve got it. Oh, fuck, I’ve got it. You were right. It’s north of here. There’s this guy Brock, the one I told you about, the one who’s been hiring up talent and throwing coin around. I bet that’s who financed all of this. Yeah.” Marco stuck the end of one of his long dreadlocks into his mouth and chewed, lost in thought. Vic gave him time. For all the grief she gave Marco, she had fallen for his brains before his good looks. “What if your brother didn’t discover Danvar?” he asked, reasoning something out.

“I’m listening.”

“What if they think he’s the one who leaked the news?”

“Damien said that guy was dead.”

“Well, maybe he ain’t. Maybe it was your brother, and now they’re after him to shut him up. Maybe they thought your family friend here could track him down. I think they just want him dead.”

“I don’t like where you’re going with this.”

“But it makes sense, right? Otherwise, where’s your brother? No one’s seen him or his friend, right? I bet they’re both in trouble.”

“Or they’re over Danvar right now, diving and hoarding. Or they’re both shit-faced drunk. Either way, we should check with this guy you know. The two assholes who barged into my place were wearing kers from the north—”

“Who, Brock? I don’t know him. Only heard about him.”

“What’ve you heard?”

“Conflicting stuff. I heard he grew up in Springston and came from money. But a friend of mine says his accent ain’t like the Lords, that he had to be from up north. Supposedly he has a camp up there in the middle of the wastes. I know a guy, Gerard, who quit their group. Came back saying he couldn’t live that far from an adequate supply of pussy—”

“Lovely.”

“In fact… shit, Gerard disappeared on a dive a week or so after he got back. And nobody found his body.”

“We need to go talk to this guy.”

“To Gerard? I’m pretty sure he’s buried.”

“No, idiot, to Brock. His camp, you say it’s in the middle of the wastes? You know where?”

“Not really.” Marco chewed on a dreadlock. “It’s near the grove, I think. I remember Gerard talking about lavish campfires. West of the grove but south of some big spring. I only remember ’cause he was bitchin’ about having to haul barrels of water down from—”

An explosion of bells rang out as the front door was thrown in. Thrown in with violence. There was a shout, and then the stomp of heavy boots. Vic turned and looked for some place to hide, started to yell for Marco to c’mon, to get out the back door, but then two men with guns joined them in the workshop, silver weapons gleaming, one swinging at her and the other at Marco.

“Hey, whoa—” Marco said. He held up his hands, and Vic found herself staring down the barrel of one of those ancient and unreliable killing machines.

The two men looked down where a pool of light spilled on a dead man. The guy training a gun on Vic, a bald man with tats on his face, snarled at her, rage in his eyes, as he pulled the trigger. There was a click and a curse. She and Marco still hadn’t moved, were both rooted in fear and surprise. And then the other gun went off. And Marco moved for the very last time. One side of his skull erupted, his body sagging downward. There was another click, but Vic was moving now. Moving and screaming, staying in a crouch with her arms over her head, unable to breathe or think straight as she dove for the back door, another gunshot ringing out behind her.

30 • Into the Starry Night

There was no sun waiting on Palmer’s arrival. No people or encampments. Just the vast and jeweled clear desert sky.

Small gulps of that sky passed through Palmer’s sand-specked lips and filled his desperate lungs. He lay on his back, gasping, the sand collecting against his side and filling his windward ear and his hair as he breathed in the loud, laborious, grateful way a newborn does.

His friend Hap lay lifeless beside him, partly submerged in the sand. Somewhere, a cayote howled at this sudden scent, and the wind skittered across the dunes with the sound of a thousand snakes flicking their tongues.

Palmer scraped the sand off his tongue using his teeth. He spat out the grit and with it precious fluid. He turned to Hap, whose shoulder and knee were out of the dune. A boot as well, but not in the right place. Hap’s canteen strap could be seen on his shoulder. Exhausted but mad with thirst, Palmer slid his hand into the sand and floated Hap up the rest of the way. His visor beeped with a battery alarm. His suit was nearly dead.

He reached for the canteen, saw that it was tangled, and pulled out his bloodstained dive knife. He cut the strap. A quarter full. He was too weak to ration and took great gulps. The water burned his parched lips. His stomach churned, was startled to have something to do. Palmer twisted the cap on and sat with his back to the wind, studying his dead friend.

It wasn’t the canteen strap that’d been tangled, he saw. It was Hap’s body. Palmer covered his mouth. The grumbling in his stomach grew worse, and he feared he might lose what little fluid he had just taken in. Hap’s leg was twisted beneath him. Where the thigh meets the pelvis was torn the wrong way. An arm was shattered, white bone pointing up at the stars. Palmer tried to make sense of this. He had seen bodies snared in the sand before, had seen them trapped in silent and peaceful repose. This was not that. This was a life that had met a violent end. His brain whirled as the clues fell together. His homing beacon was in a mesh pouch on Hap’s thigh. Palmer had found his friend a hundred meters down, right beneath the dip in that great bowl Brock’s men had dug, right where their dive had begun. Hap had made it back after all.

Maybe the walls of that strange shaft had crushed him. Maybe Hap had gotten back too late, right as they’d given up on them both, and when they released the held-back sand, the walls had pushed in violently around him. But no, there would be damage everywhere. It would be even. Hap had been hit on that side, there. A fall. A great fall.

It was the visor that told the story. Hap’s visor was gone. The visor would have a recording of his dive. Of Danvar. Of the location of every building, maybe even the streets below, every block of that buried legend.

Sand blew across Hap’s body and ramped up against his side. His mouth was packed with grit, his nostrils clogged, his lifeless eyes dusted. Palmer saw now that there was never any coin in this for either of them. This had been the plan all along. Get a layout of the land, see where to dig, where to put their efforts, and keep the location of all those vast spoils to themselves. He saw in Hap’s open and horrified eyes what had happened, imagined him pulled up by the ropes, maybe saying that his friend was still down there, that there was a pocket of air in the building, that they needed to go back. Or maybe Hap telling them that it was no use, that his friend was dead.

Palmer scooped a handful of loose sand and placed it over Hap’s eyes, duning them shut. It was no wonder they were never told what they were looking for when they took this job. If Palmer and Hap had known they were diving for Danvar, they would’ve wondered why they weren’t blindfolded for the hike north. Hell, they would’ve known right then and there that this was a one-way trip. Of course. Otherwise, they would’ve begged to have been blindfolded. They had marched north from Springston as dead men.

“You saved my fucking life,” Palmer told his dead friend. “You betrayed me, and you saved my fucking life.”

And who knows, maybe Hap would’ve come back for him. Who was to say what decision he’d made, what was going through that mind of his, what he had told Brock and the others. Yes, he would’ve come back for him. Palmer was sure of it.

He was also sure that his life was now in danger. Not just because he was in the middle of the desert and starving, but because he knew what Brock didn’t want anyone else knowing. Palmer reached up and touched the visor on his forehead, needed to make sure it was still there, that his dive was still there, that it had happened.

As exhausted and weak as he was, he needed to do something about Hap. Not relishing the task, he patted his old friend’s pockets, pulled the two transponders out of his hip pouch, then reached into Hap’s belly pocket for his death note and the few coins there. With his suit’s charge dangerously low, he flowed the sand beneath Hap and sent his body straight down. No way of getting the distance exact, but Palmer planned on being long gone before anyone realized the body had moved.

He took off the tank he’d stolen from the other diver and stretched his limbs, pulled his hiking goggles out and adjusted them around his eyes, stowed his visor away. He would have to carry the tank a few dunes away and bury it. Couldn’t leave anything behind, couldn’t flow it down with Hap where it might be discovered, where Brock’s next foray into the sand would reveal that they had a problem.

Rising on unsure legs, he peered up that slope of sand from the bottom of the great pit Brock’s men had dug. There was no generator running; the sand was no longer loose; the metal platform had been taken away. He could see the sand rolling down in the darkness to fill that great dip in the desert floor. Dreading the climb, he took one step at a time. The night wind would mask his departure. His bootprints would be erased by morning. He could put the breeze on his left cheek, keep the pole star at his back, and head due south until he reached Springston. But he knew he would never make it that far. He was starving—only had a few swallows of water sloshing around in his dead friend’s canteen—he wouldn’t make it two days’ march, much less five.

At the top of the arduous hike out of the bowl, he faced the wind. Palmer tried to remember the route he’d taken to get to the dive site from the brigand encampment. And oddly, strangely, crazily, he prayed that Brock’s men were right where he’d last seen them. They would be the only ones with food and water for miles around. On weary legs and with little conviction, he marched off toward the men who in all likelihood wanted him very much dead.

31 • A Bounty

There was a glow beyond the dunes. Voices mixed and carried on the wind. Palmer used the tall sand for cover and worked his way toward the light. When the voices seemed too near to dare march any farther, he snuck up a sloping dune, crouching as he got higher, then crawling on his hands and knees before finally squirming on his belly to the wind-blown peak. He peered over the lip and down into the camp where he’d spent his last night above the sand.

The encampment had shrunk. Palmer had expected an explosion of activity—the rest of Brock’s men descending on the site of the find—but many of the tents from earlier were gone. The large tent where he and Hap had been shown the map was still there, throbbing with the light of a lantern inside. Beyond this tent, the embers of a fire glowed and sparked, a column of smoke dulling a patch of stars. There were two men around the fire, animated silhouettes. The smell of food cooking made Palmer’s empty stomach knot up. His belly tried to convince his brain that these people didn’t want him dead, that Hap’s mangled body was an accident, that he could just stroll into camp and be hailed a hero, the discoverer of a lost land, with coin and a feast for his efforts.

There was laughter in the darkness—one of the men around the fire—but it was almost as if someone were mocking his belly’s wild thoughts, someone daring him to come down and announce himself.

Palmer lay still behind the crest of that dune, his ker over his nose and mouth, his goggles pelted with sand, just watching and thinking. The sun would come up soon. The stars were already dim over the horizon. He was wasting time. He needed to eat. There were several dark tents he might try to surface inside of, to scrounge for food or water, but the danger of waking someone was too great.

An hour passed, the stars marching the width of a hand, the horizon faintly glowing, Palmer unsure. He finally chose a tent to raid. He removed his hiking goggles and fumbled for his dive visor, got the band around his forehead, when a commotion erupted in the distance—and Palmer thought he’d been spotted.

He ducked down and began to scoot back, then watched as the two men by the fire rushed off, casting long shadows. There were voices, shouts. Palmer looked in the direction the men were running and saw swinging flashlights between the dunes. A marching party. A nearby tent filled with a brightening glow as someone woke. Several silhouettes left the larger tent where the lantern was burning. Everyone was moving away from Palmer and toward this arriving party.

Now, his belly commanded. Now, goddamn you.

Palmer obeyed. He scampered over the crest of the dune and glissaded down the other side on his back, the loose sand following him. He found himself half in the lee of a smaller dune, the sand no longer pelting his face. The large tent stood nearby, the fabric flapping noisily. Palmer remembered the barrels of supplies in this tent. There had been a table in the middle. He could go down and pop up under the table, have a look around.

Hurry, his belly told him. The marching party was approaching. How long would they sit around the fire and swig liquor and smoke tobacco before returning to their tents?

Palmer took a chance by creeping around the dune and hurrying in a crouch toward the back of the large tent. He needed to get close. There was danger in entering the sand with the charge in his suit low. The only thing a diver feared more than running out of air was running out of charge and feeling the sand stiffen around their body. Movement was life in a way no lungful of air could match. If you could move, you could get to the surface and win a breath. A full lung and an empty cell were what nightmares were made of. This gave a diver time to die and space to do it in. And so Palmer ran in a crouch as far as he could, hoping he had enough juice for a quick dip.

He reached the back of the tent without being noticed. All attention was on the people returning to camp. Listening over the wind and the flap of canvas, he heard nothing inside. Palmer powered up his visor and his suit and lay flat on his belly to minimize the drain. Damn, he was weak. Hungry. Limbs quivering. He flipped his visor down, eyed the red blinking light in the corner of his vision, his suit telling him that it was nearly done. You and me both, Palmer thought to himself.

The sand accepted him. Palmer held his breath and slid down a full meter in case the floor inside dipped. He slid to where the center of the tent should be and peered up at the wavering purple overhead. Open space. Nobody standing there. A few patches to the side that might be his barrels of food and water. He came up slowly with his head tilted back, breaching just his visor and ears, ready to flee if anyone spotted him. Bringing one hand out into the air, he flipped his visor up and took a deep and quiet breath. The table overhead blocked the lamp, keeping him in shadow. He flowed the sand so that it spun him around slowly and silently, giving him a scan of the entire tent. No boots. No lumpy bedrolls. No voices approaching. He rose out of the sand in a crouch and powered his suit down quickly, conserving whatever he had left so he could get out again without going through the flap.

He crawled first toward a stack of crates, some part of him aware of the tracks he was leaving in the sand. The lamp overhead swayed, the shadows in the tent stirring menacingly. Burlap covered one crate. Palmer could only think about food, so when he lifted the burlap, he saw loaves of bread sitting there. Bright white loaves. He retrieved one, caught a whiff of something like chalk and rubber, and realized these loaves were too small, too heavy, not bread at all.

His mind was playing tricks on him. Palmer held the object into the light. Explosives. He’d seen bombs like these once before, when a sandscraper in Springston had to be demolished before a dune pushed it into its neighbor. He checked the crate and saw that it was full of white loaves like that. He had seen the aftereffects of rebel bombs. Everyone who grew up in Springston had. The red stains on the sand, the trails of gore, the boots with bloody stumps, men and women and children unrecognizable. He felt the same fear holding that loaf, that tingling up the back of his neck, that he felt at any funeral or wedding or celebration where there might be reprisals, where a loud roar was the last thing you’d ever hear.

Palmer scanned the tent. Brock and his men were losing the look of scroungers and pirates out for a score. Something else was going on.

His belly told him to focus. Food, it said. The loaf went back with the others and the burlap was put back as he found it. There were barrels on the other side of the table. The metal hook of a ladle gleamed over the lip of one barrel. Palmer’s mouth ached for a drink. He shuffled toward the barrel, shaking the sand loose from his canteen, and peered over the side to see a dim, murky, but glorious reflection at the bottom. His gaunt face wavered in the inky puddle. Palmer uncapped the canteen and leaned over the lip, plunging the vessel beneath the surface, the water on his arm cool and invigorating. The canteen gurgled twice, pockets of air bursting through the surface, and then a shout erupted just outside the tent. Laughter. Voices approaching.

Palmer yanked his hand out and whirled around. His limbs and organs desired to go all directions at once, which left him rooted to the spot. The laughter grew near. He fell to the ground as the tent flapped open. Wiggling on his belly, he got under the table, dribbling water, pairs of boots kicking their way inside.

“Fucking hell!” someone roared. “This thing’s heavy.”

There was the thud of a palm slapping someone’s back. The smell of cooked meat, a hot meal in someone’s hand. Palmer powered his suit on and sank his knees and feet into the earth, pivoting his legs down while keeping his shoulders and arms clear. He worked the cap back onto the canteen, didn’t risk taking a sip, could feel water dripping off his right hand. He pressed his wet palm to his mouth and sucked what moisture he could without making a sound. Seeing the tracks he had left behind from crawling under the table, he used his suit to flow the ground level, careful as a man tucking in a sleeping baby. Something heavy thudded down right beside the table, a large metal cylinder, and there was a shout to be careful. Packs and other gear knocked overhead. Someone brushed the sand off the surface of the table, and it rained down around Palmer, a veil in the lamplight.

Palmer started to sink himself beneath the sand to get out of there, to wait and come back later when everyone was asleep, but a fragment of a sentence caught his ear.

“—any sign of the other diver?”

The laughter and noise died down. Palmer held his breath, certain that his heartbeat could be heard.

“No, sir.” It was Moguhn speaking. Palmer recognized his quiet but commanding voice. “We scanned down two hundred meters, as far as we could, and there’s no body but the one.”

“And no chance he surfaced?” This was Brock again, the one who had asked about the diver. There was no mistaking his strange accent. He must’ve been away from camp. Just returned with the hiking party. But from where? Palmer listened.

“No chance at all.” This time it was Yegery, Palmer was sure of it. “One diver out of four can go that deep, and that’s what we’ve got. One in four of them made it. The sand down there makes it impossible to breathe and move at the same time. Besides, it’s been four days. He’s gone.”

Four days, Palmer thought.

I tried to tell you, his belly said.

“So is this heavy-ass thing what we were after?” someone asked. They sounded doubtful. Disappointed. Palmer couldn’t see what it was they were referencing.

“This is it,” Brock said.

“Does that mean we can break camp?” someone else asked.

“Yes. First light, and then we head south. We leave no trace.”

“You sure this thing does what you say it does?”

“Let’s see it,” someone said.

“Set it on the table,” Brock ordered.

Two sets of hands drifted down right in front of Palmer to grasp the large metal cylinder. Palmer took a deep breath to expand the sand around his chest, then powered his suit down. He couldn’t have more than a trickle of a charge left. He was buried up to his armpits, but he could still breathe.

“You sure the table will hold it?”

“It’ll hold.”

Above Palmer, the metal table creaked and strained from the weight of the thing. He had only gotten a glimpse of the object in the lamplight, but it looked like old tech, something scavenged, a cylinder with wires and small pipes, made with precision and expensive-looking. Expensive and old.

“Damn thing’s heavy,” someone said, as the table somehow didn’t buckle. Palmer kept a hand on his chest, ready to dive at any moment. He could feel that object overhead like a dark thought.

“Looks busted to me. Wiring’s fucked. And look at this here. Ain’t no fixing that.”

“Ignore that,” Brock said. “It’s what’s inside that matters. The rest of this is for setting it off, but we don’t need that.”

The men grew quiet as they studied the object. The scavenger in Palmer grew intensely curious.

“It’s a thing of beauty,” Yegery whispered.

“But how does it work?” Moguhn asked.

“I don’t know,” Yegery admitted.

There was an uncomfortable shuffling of heavy boots.

“I mean, I don’t understand the principle, the science. But the book says one of these can level an entire town—”

“An entire town,” someone scoffed.

“Shaddup,” Brock ordered. He told Yegery to go on.

“It’s just a little sphere in there. That’s all the stuff on the inside is. It’s inert enough. The book says it stays good for hundreds of thousands of years. All you do is tighten that little ball real quick, like turning a fistful of sand into a child’s marble, and everything goes boom. This thing will send dunes to the heavens and turn the desert to glass.”

“And you’re sure about that?” someone asked.

“Yeah, but it’s fucked,” another said.

“It’ll work,” Brock said. “Trust me. We could level all of Low-Pub with one of these.”

“What about Springston?” someone asked.

“We stick with the original plan for Springston,” Brock said. “We blow the wall, and then we hit Low-Pub. If there’s anything left of either of them, we’ll go back for another of these. Now that we’ve got a reference point for the map, we can grab as many as we like. Before long, there won’t be a structure standing south of our dunes, and the Lords can rule over the flat sand we leave behind.”

There was chuckling at this, which grew into laughter. Someone bumped into the table, and there was the clink of a jar tipping on its side. “Fucking idiot,” someone grumbled. There was a rush to remove gear, the scrape and slide of bags and swords and guns. “Get the map,” Moguhn said. A rustle of paper and boots stomping into action. Palmer wondered when the fuck they were going to get out of there so he could grab something to eat, and then an object hit the sand in front of him, a dagger, plunging blade-first. A hand dropped down to retrieve it and gripped the hilt. And then a stooped head. Eyes flashed in the darkness.

“What the fuck?” the man said.

And then an angry roar as the pirate pounced toward Palmer.

32 • Run

Palmer barely got his suit powered on as the man scrambled under the table after him. There was a blow to his head, the swipe of a hand and sharp nails, and his visor was knocked off. He reached for it, got a hold of the headband, felt the visor snap off, lost. Dazed, he took a quick breath and pulled the band on, flowed the sand in order to sink down, and got his eyes closed just in time. He was blind and weak and on a sliver of a charge and barely a lungful of breath. In a burst of inspiration, he dropped the sand in the tent a meter and hardened it. It was a killing offense to use the sand against men, but these men wanted him dead anyway.

He went sideways as fast as he could to clear the tent walls before rising toward the surface. There was drag in the sand, like something was wrapped around his feet, was wrapped around his entire body. The sand grew thick. Dense. His fucking suit was dying. Or the band had been damaged when the visor was ripped free.

He went up as fast as he could, blind, half a breath in his lungs, and came up flat, was partway out, his head clear, when the sand froze around him. No more charge. Palmer grunted and worked his shoulders back and forth until he got an arm free. He began digging himself out of the sand, the stars twinkling serenely above, while two meters away, men were hurling insults and curses and shouting for help as they tried to dig themselves out as well.

It was a race. Palmer got his other arm out. He kicked with his weak legs, twisted at the waist until his hips were free, was only in ten or so inches of sand, fucking close. A meter down, and he would’ve been buried. A few inches deeper, and he would’ve been trapped. He heard the stomp and crunch of sand in the distance as men were summoned from their tents. Palmer got up and ran, keeping the large tent between him and the rest of the camp as the men inside yelled at the others to fucking dig them out, to get out there and find that diver, to kill him fucking dead.

With his heart in his throat, a canteen sloshing a quarter full, his visor with the proof of his dive and discovery of Danvar gone, and hardly anything for his efforts but the life in the marrow of his bones, Palmer ran. He kicked sand in the darkness, keeping to the well-trod valleys where the shuffle of feet would make it hard to follow, and he fucking ran.

33 • Not Happening

Vic burst through the back door of Graham’s shop and ran across the hot sand. Gunshots rang out behind her. It sounded like both men had their weapons working now. Fountains of sand erupted from the face of the dune ahead of her; there was a zing off a metal roof, an explosion of sand near her feet, and then some wild animal took a bite out of her calf.

Vic sprawled forward in the sand, her leg on fire. Someone yelled that that was his sister goddamnit, don’t fucking kill her. Feet stomped her direction. Vic could feel them coming, could feel a thrumming in the sand. But the thrum wasn’t from the boots chasing her down.

The sand opened and swallowed her. Vic was too startled to take a breath, only just got her eyes closed in time. A regulator was pressed to her lips. She accepted it and took a deep gulp of air, felt the sand around her stay soft so she could breathe, could feel movement through the earth as she was hauled sideways like so much scavenge.

The regulator was taken away for a moment. She was left with only blackness and motion. The regulator was returned. Someone was sharing their tank with her. Vic clutched this person, knowing they had saved her, hoping it was Palmer. The agony in her leg faded to a dull throb, and the sight of Marco’s head erupting filled the back of her eyelids and played over and over again—a bang and a fountain of what she loved best about him, a profound hollow in the pit of her soul, so that when she was brought up through the sand and into the open air, she was unaware of this, didn’t know she was out of the sand, couldn’t feel the hot sun on her flesh, wasn’t aware that there was air to breathe even as it filled her lungs, wasn’t aware of anything but that Marco was dead.

There was just fact like an all-encompassing blackness. A cool pit in the center of her chest. Her cheeks were dry and dusted with sand, Graham holding her, calling her name, asking if she was okay, her leg coloring a dune like a sunrise.

Graham worked on the wound while Vic sat there numbly. She gradually realized that they were on the back of a low dune in the training grounds, where at least it was legal to use a dive suit. Though they were long past legality. People were trying to kill them. No find was worth this. Danvar wasn’t worth this. Vic could feel the senseless violence of retribution attacks, that blank stagger when people mill about the dunes after a bomb has interrupted a funeral or a wedding or a queue at the cistern. Bang, and the world stops making sense. Bang, and mothers are wailing. Bang, and body parts mingle. Bang. Bang. Bang. The lucky make it out to mourn. For the lucky there is a click, a misfiring of fate, a dud of doom. Vic is there on that slope of sand, and Marco is dead. Life is capricious and cruel and totally fucking random and there is no hope of finding meaning in a nightmare. In a nightmare at least her enraged screams would come out a hoarse whisper, but Vic could not manage even that. Could not manage even a whimper.

“You’re lucky,” Graham said. He was winded. Was tying off her calf with a strip of her own bloody pant-leg, had torn it without her realizing. “Missed the bone. Damn lucky.”

She just stared at him. She could taste blood in her mouth. She hoped it was hers and not Marco’s. Hers from falling face first into the sand, from biting her tongue. Don’t let it be his.

“I don’t have air enough for both of us,” Graham said. “Not for long. And my suit’s not on a full charge. But we need to get you out of here. They’re after me.”

“They’re after Palmer,” Vic said, thinking out loud. Her voice had returned, but it was distant, like it was being carried to her on the wind from some faraway place.

“Yes,” Graham said. “Do you think you can walk? I haven’t taken us far. You should get out of here if your leg is okay.”

“What about you?”

“I’m going to bury those two.” He said it like a man announces his intention to take a piss. “And I can live in these dunes longer than they can search for me. If you want to stay here, I can try to snag a tank from the market. I know where there’s an extra suit—”

“The marina,” Vic said. “My suit’s there.”

Graham nodded. “I can get you partway. They’ll never catch you if you can stay moving. You should lay low for a few days. Get way out of town for a while.”

Vic thought of her two brothers out camping. She wondered where Palmer was. Life had been simple and good an hour ago. Click. Boom. It can’t happen like that. It can’t.

“Hey Vic, are you with me? You’re not going into shock are you? You’ve lost some blood—”

“Marco,” she said. She focused on Graham’s face for the first time. He was the nearest thing she had left to a father. “I loved him. He’s dead. Marco’s dead.”

“Well, let’s worry about you, then. You’ve got a sarfer in the marina?”

She nodded.

“I’ll get you there. You just need to figure out where you’re going once I do.”

“Brock,” she said. She remembered Marco’s words. Remembered his voice. His face. “The northern wastes. West of the grove, south of a spring. That’s where I’m going.”

And Vic became aware of the sun on her cheek, the grit in her mouth, the wind in her hair. She came alive as one returns from sleep. Alive but different. An empty husk capable of thought, of hearing, of processing. Of wanting men dead.

34 • That Final Embrace

Palmer kept the wind on his left cheek and pressed south. He’d never felt so weak, so tired, so ready to lie down and succumb. Three nights of staggering in the dark, a lengthening furrow of sand trailing behind his shuffling feet. Three nights of marching and three mornings of sleeping in dwindling dune-shade. Three days of high noon spent roasting, trying to cover himself in sand to protect his skin. Three afternoons of watching the shade slowly form again, giving him someplace to starve in peace.

His black dive suit was too hot to wear in the day, so he kept it draped over his head to cast a little shade. At night, the same thin suit couldn’t keep him from shivering. Whenever he stripped it off, he wept at the sight of his emaciated frame, his ribs jutting out like rolling dunes, his pelvis that of a dead man’s, his legs too frail to carry him one step further. It’d been a week or more since he’d had a meal, but he would thirst to death before he starved. Wouldn’t be long. Wouldn’t be long.

And yet—knowing this—he took another step. Didn’t know why. Just did. His left foot dragged and left a furrow behind. The sun was coming up, the stars fading one by one until it was only Mars up there, ready to war with him another day. Have to peel his suit off soon. Last time. Palmer wouldn’t make it through this day, could no longer feel the hunger. The gnawing had become distant. He would die on the hot sand. This day—he was sure of it. Another two or three nights to Springston at that limping rate. The crows would get him. He could see them circling. They knew.

“Caw,” he whispered, the word choked back by his swollen tongue. “Caw.”

The sun topped the hill to his left and its naked rays struck his cheek like an open palm. A lucid memory of his father. Palmer remembered the only time his father had ever struck him. It was a joke. Just a joke. Second day with a dive suit on, wanted to show what Vic had taught him, was gonna do a full submerge, thought he was getting the hang of loosening the sand, making it flow. He opened a soft patch beneath his father’s boot and closed the sand around it, thought he’d be proud for the trick, thought he’d laugh.

Palmer remembered the bright flash of light and the crack like wood splitting. The fire on his face. A thousand sunburns. He’d been knocked to the sand, had lain there with the taste of blood in his mouth. His father standing over him, yelling at him, telling him to remember the code, the code he’d learned just the day before, what happens to any diver who makes a weapon of the sand. What the other divers would do to him.

It was the only time he’d ever hit him. And it was the last time Palmer had tried to make his father laugh. He’d been ten years old. Just about Rob’s age. Rob. Kid was too damn curious. Mom said he got it from their father. If it led to danger, whatever it was, it came from their father. What little good they had in them came from her. Her side of the story. Only left with her side, her version of events. That’s what Dad gets. His doing. His fault for leaving. Poor Rob. Too curious, that boy. Causing trouble. With only Conner to look after him.

And Conner… who just wants to be like his older brother, who wants to starve like his older brother and stagger along, a sack of skin draped on bones, shuffling across that hot sand before he was eaten by the crows. A diver. A dream of being buried without a marker. Lost in the sand. Chasing his misfortune. No… camping. His brother wasn’t a diver. He was camping. Four days under the sand. Three nights marching. A week. He would die the day his father had. The note by his belly was truth. Poetry and truth.

“Caw,” Palmer whispered to the circling crows. He reached down and shook the canteen as if it might have filled itself. Still the chance he might come upon a spring. An oasis. He marched for hours and hours, thinking on his brothers, on his life ending, amounting to nothing, watching for an oasis. The sun cooked the sand, and this day he didn’t stop. Didn’t pull his dive suit off. Didn’t bury himself in the sand. Wouldn’t make it to evening. Wouldn’t make it another step. But then he did. He doubted every step and took another. The crows cried in disbelief. Palmer tried to laugh, but his throat was closed tight, was swollen shut, lips cracked and bleeding and bonded together. When there, on the horizon, in the wavering heat of the afternoon sun, a tree. A solitary tree. A sign of water. Another mirage to stumble through, to kick up dry sand right through the middle of, but maybe this would be the one.

He veered toward the tree. Hoping. Moving with what vigor his bones had left. The tree was getting closer. Faster than his stagger ought to make it. The tree was rounding a dune. The mast of a sarfer. The crimson sail of rebels. Brock and his men.

Palmer tried to run, his brain remembering back to when that was possible. But his damnable body reminded him of more recent events by collapsing onto the sand. Palmer spit grit. He coughed—his swollen tongue in the way. Peering to the side, he saw the sarfer speeding toward him. Maybe they didn’t see him. But the damn crows, circling and diving, a cloud of swooping arrows, betraying him. Here, here, they cried. And the sarfer came.

Maybe to save him. The rebels would save him. Palmer nearly stood and waved his arms, and then he saw Hap’s gaping mouth full of sand, his body twisted out of shape, heard the shouts inside that tent to catch him and kill him dead. Two more nights of walking and he would’ve made it to the outskirts of Springston. This is what his fevered brain thought as he began scooping sand over his head. On his knees, his forehead against a dune, ass in the air, the wind offering little help, he scooped handfuls of sand and dumped them on the back of his neck, sobbed for help, sobbed beneath the gyring crows, trying to bury himself before someone else did.

There came the approaching crunch of a sarfer’s foils carving the desert floor, and then a spray of fine sand as the wind-powered craft slewed to a halt. Palmer kept his forehead to the ground and bit down on his whimpers. His back remained arched up into the sky, his dive suit hanging loose around him, sand spilling through his hair and down the cuff of his neck.

He heard the whir and zip of a line passing through gloves and wooden blocks. The creak of boom and mast and the noise of a sail depowered and left to flap in the wind. Boots landed on the sand and crunched toward him. A sword to spill him or a canteen to fill him, he didn’t have the courage or energy to look. Palmer had left his wits and senses a thousand dunes behind.

Someone asked him to show his hands, wanted to see his palms. They asked again. He tried to raise his hands but couldn’t. It was the sword. The sword was coming for him.

Strong hands fell on his shoulders and rolled him over. Sand fell from his hair and across his face. “Palm,” the voice said again. “Palm.”

The mirage of his sister. A hallucination. His sister, the red flapping sail of a rebel sarfer behind her. His sister, tugging her gloves off, wiping the sand from his cheek, the mud from his crying. She was crying as well. Fumbling with her canteen, hands shaking, a mask of horror on her face from the sight of him, Palmer unable to speak.

She lifted his chin, crying, “Palm. Oh, Palm.” Precious water was tipped over blistered lips and around his fat tongue. Palmer’s throat was a clenched fist. There was no swallowing. No swallowing. He felt the water evaporate in his mouth, slip inside his tongue, become absorbed. Vic poured more. Her hand shook, canteen and eyes leaking, whispered his name. Had come looking for him.

The water sat in his mouth until it disappeared. Another cap, and something like a swallow, a loud and painful gulp, a body remembering how.

“Danvar,” he croaked. “I found it.”

“I know you did,” Vic said. She rocked him back and forth. “I know you did.”

“Might be trouble,” Palmer hissed. He needed to tell her about Brock, about the bombs, about getting out of there.

“Save your strength,” Vic said. “Everything’s gonna be okay.”

She wiped her cheeks, and Palmer watched as more tears spilled from her eyes. The loose sail flapped nearby, the crows watching to see what would happen, Vic telling him over and over that everything would be okay, even as she started sobbing. Even as she clutched him in her arms, whispering it would all be all right, but Palmer knew this was just a story, just a story told over a sputtering lantern in a family tent, and that it wasn’t true.