Sand

45 • A Quiet Dawn

There was a distant thrum. The sound of drums, of bootfalls, of a god’s mighty pulse. Conner knew that sound. It reminded him of the thunder far east. It was the muffled roar of rebel bombs, a noise that came before chaos and death and red dunes and a mother’s wails. Conner dropped his spoon into his bowl of stew, pushed away from the beer-soaked table in the Honey Hole, and ran toward the stairs to warn his mom.

He took the steps two at a time. His brother Rob chased after him. There were more of the muffled blasts in the distance as they raced down the balcony. Danger outside. Violence. Or maybe it was nothing. Maybe it was cannon fire to celebrate the discovery of Danvar. Conner almost felt silly for running to his mother, a child doing what boys did in a panic, turning to a parent to save them, to tell them what to do.

He threw open her door, knew there were no clients inside, just his half-sister Violet who had emerged from No Man’s Land. And as he stepped into the room, Conner felt a rumble in the earth, felt it through his father’s boots, and he knew what was happening. He knew that this was more than the usual bombs. That great roar and that impossibly loud hiss meant the sands were coming for them all.

And in the brief flutter between two beats of his heart, as the din grew and grew, as his mother yelled for the boys to run, to hold their breath, to move, Conner thought only of diving onto the bed, of protecting the girl he’d spent the last two days looking after. He bolted across the room, Rob on his heels, got halfway there, when the wall of sand slammed into the Honey Hole.

The floor beneath Conner’s feet lurched sideways—a god snatching a rug out from under him. He tumbled. There was a crash of wood and tin, an explosion of glass, a sudden blindness as all light was extinguished by a press of solid dune, a splintering sound, and then the desert sands pouring in around Conner and his family.

He barely heard his mother scream for them to hold their breaths before he was smothered. Sand was in his nose and against his lips. He was frozen, pinned to the floor in a sprawl, the weight of ten bullies on his back, a sense, nearby, right beside him, of his brother Rob. Just a memory of where his brother had been—where his mother had been—before the sand had claimed them.

Pitch black. A residual warmth in the sand from having been outside in the sun. Complete silence. Just his pulse, which he could feel in his neck as it was squeezed by the drift. The pulse in his temples. No room to expand his chest. Couldn’t swallow. Hands around his throat. His brother nearby. And not enough room even to cry. Just a coffin to be terrified in. A place for dying. For panic. For muscles and tendons raging and flexing but not budging an inch—what a paralyzed person must feel. What everyone who has ever been buried alive must feel. This is how they go. This is how they go. This is how they go. Conner couldn’t stop thinking it. The dead had been bodies in the sand before. But now he could feel what they had felt. They had felt just like this, frozen and terrified and not able to move their jaws even to sob for their mothers.

He prayed and listened for the sound of digging—but heard nothing. His pulse. His pulse. Maybe the sand wasn’t so deep. Maybe his mother was okay, pressed there against the wall. Maybe Violet—his half-sister—maybe she would live and her story would be known. He might have a minute of air left. They could dig him out. But that rumble—that rumble—too much sand. It had gone black in the room. The sand had swamped the second story of the Honey Hole. The great wall must’ve gone. Collapsed. Blown up. And the sand on Conner’s back grew deeper and heavier with this thought. In the dark and quiet, he imagined the horror that must be taking place outside. His rapidly approaching death became a pinprick in a wider world of hurt. That grumble of sand he’d heard had been the dune coming at them, the great dune behind that teetering wall on which he’d been born. A life given and then taken away. It had come for him. Had found him. Was now going to claim him.

The struggle against the sand was futile, so Conner relaxed. As he did, it felt as though the bullies on his back grew heavier, like he had sagged within himself and the sand was eager to consume that space, to take whatever he might give. How much longer? The need to breathe grew intense. Like the training games with his brother, when they strained their lungs and counted with fingers. Dizzy. No way to inhale or exhale. Would just black out. And as he felt it coming, his panic surged anew, and there came an intense drive to not die. He didn’t want to die. He wanted to call out to Rob, to his mom, tell them he loved them, get them out of there, somebody please dig me out of here.

As his senses faded, the press of sand all around him softened. It was as if his skin was growing numb to the pressure. Or the blood flow was stopping. Conner had a bright flash of a memory, his father waking him up one morning with a finger pressed over his gray beard, urging Conner to be quiet. Conner, confused, half-asleep, leaving the room he shared with his brothers, his father taking him up the narrow stairs to the top of the great wall. They sat there with their faces to the east and their feet dangling over the ramparts. A windless, noiseless sunrise. The first quiet dawn he’d ever seen, one of those rare moments when the gods stop their thundering and become calm, when the sand isn’t blowing down on them—and Conner sat and watched the morning sun swallow the stars and then Mars, and then a golden dome of light grow and blossom into a perfectly blue sky.

“Why’s it so quiet?” he had whispered to his father. He was young and confused. “Will it always be like this?”

“Another half an hour,” his father had said, studying the sky. “If we’re lucky.”

This placed an enormous pressure on Conner to enjoy the moment. To remember it. To soak it up. The way that crow up there flapped its wings as it took advantage and made for the east. The way the sun warmed the cool morning air. The stillness on his cheeks. His father’s heavy hand on his shoulder. Remember. Remember, he told himself. That intense pressure to make this last forever, to cup his mind tight like hands under a running tap. And then he had glanced up and down the ramparts and realized they were enjoying this moment alone.

“We should wake the others,” he had whispered. “Palmer and Vic—”

His father squeezed his shoulder. “They’ve had theirs. This one is yours.”

And nothing more was said as the sun broke free of the dunes and the wind returned and whatever made that noise that haunted their sleep resumed its infernal grumbling. And it dawned on Conner, sitting there on the great wall with his father, that the world was full of secrets and strangeness. At some point in the past, he had slept while Vic and Palmer had been taken up into the darkness to witness this. They had never told their little brother, had never shared that moment, and Conner knew he never would either.

And it occurred to him there in the Honey Hole, buried under all that sand, that Rob had never been given a windless dawn with their father. Had never been given any kind of morning with him. Had never known him. And the sand loosened even more around his body, and Conner knew it was happening. The last of his breath. The last of sensation. He’d had a minute or two there under the press of dune to consider his life—and now his time was up.

But as the sand grew lighter, he felt his body more keenly, not less so. He swallowed back a sob. Swallowed. The fists around his neck lost some of their grip. There was a hum in the earth. A hiss. That sound of someone diving nearby. He’d heard this sound before, his ear pressed to the hard pack as he listened to his father scavenge beneath him. It was the sound a diver could only hear when his suit was off and another’s was on. And Conner discovered that he could move. Someone was loosening the sand.

He still couldn’t breathe, was still buried and blind, wasn’t sure how many ticking heartbeats he had left in his lungs, but he struggled against the sand to reach for his boot. Couldn’t swim in this. Couldn’t get anywhere. But might be able to bring his knee up, stretch his hand down, reach inside, bring out the band, hit the power, fumble with the wires, the scratch of the rough floor as he wiggled beneath what felt like a thousand heavy blankets, his little brother crushed beside him, his little brother who could never hold his breath quite as long. Got the band plugged in. Sand crunching between the contacts. Wouldn’t work. No way. Band on his head, the sand growing less viscous, and then feeling a connection with the drift, with the sand pressing in all around him.

No visor. No way to see. No way to breathe. But he could move. Not much time. Conner went to where he thought his brother would be and felt a body. He grabbed Rob, didn’t feel anyone grabbing back at him, didn’t feel life there, but he had no time to consider this. No time to think about the miracle of the boots or the nearby diver, only of getting to the bed. He pulled Rob along like some scavenged find. Another body. Someone on the bed. He felt someone on the bed moving.

Conner groped. His mom. Alive. Something in her lap. He didn’t wait, didn’t think, didn’t have a heartbeat of air left in him. He pushed up. Up. Made the sand hard over his head to protect him. Was back in that box Ryder had made, that coffin cube, breaking through, up through the ceiling and into the third floor. Dark. Loose sand. Light. Dim, but there. And then air. Stuffy attic air. A glorious pocket. And Conner, exhausted and choking on grit, passed out.

46 • A Buried People

He couldn’t have been out for long. He woke on top of a shifting pile of sand. His mother was beside him, her lips pressed to Rob’s, his young cheeks puffing out as she blew into his mouth, sand spilling from her hair and coating both their faces.

The sand beneath them was sinking. Swirling and draining out somewhere. A creak and the snap of timbers overhead. A thrumming violence all around. The whole world was moving. The Honey Hole was moving. Slashes and stabs of light lanced through fresh cracks in the wall. Barrels and crates were piled up, having been shoved aside when Conner pushed his family up through the ceiling. They were in the third-floor storerooms. But they were sinking back down, riding the plummeting level of the sand, fighting for purchase and stability, their mother cursing and losing her grip on Rob.

Conner remembered the boots. He hardened the sand beneath them all, made a platform. His mom breathed into Rob’s mouth again. The girl was there. Violet. Eyes open, alive, looking at Conner, taking deep breaths. Father had taught her well. But Rob. Poor Rob, with an affinity for all things diving but never a chance to swim beneath the sand. His first time. Don’t let it be his last. Don’t let it be his last.

Conner watched his mother work, was too tired and numb and afraid to speak. He just concentrated on keeping the sand firm as they floated down. All the sand in the Honey Hole was draining away, vibrating as though someone was making it move. The rigid platform of sand rode back through the hole and into his mother’s room. More light filtering in. Sand coursing through the shattered window and the splintered wall. The Honey Hole was now above the dunes. Conner didn’t understand. He felt a rage and a violence in the sand, could feel it through his boots and his band. A burn like the fabric was on fire, a scorch around his temples, and then that rage and heat were gone. The world fell still. A coat of sand stood on everything in the room, but the drift had poured out. Conner tried to piece the last few minutes together, wondered if maybe the Honey Hole had done a full roll, if he’d been buried for a minute as the world went upside down, had righted itself, and then the sand had drained away.

He went to his mother and Rob. His brother wasn’t moving. Their mom leaned over him, palms on his chest, pressing down violently and counting. She got to five and stopped. Bent down and began blowing into Rob’s mouth again.

“What do I do?” Conner asked.

His mom didn’t respond. She repeated the steps. Like she was reviving a drunk. Or someone choking in the bar. Here was the reason they’d brought the girl to the Honey Hole. His mom could save people. That’s what she did. That’s who she was. And Conner saw this as she bent to her task. He pulled for her. He pulled for Rob. Reached for his brother’s small, limp hand. Saw that Violet was holding the other. Sand coating all of them. They had come back down beside the bed, the four of them on the floor, and then a gasp of air from their mother—

No, a sob. A sob from their mother. The gasp from Rob.

His brother spit sand and heaved for air. Their mother cradled his head, and Conner felt his brother’s hand flex around his own. He realized he was squeezing Rob’s too tightly.

“Water,” their mother said. She turned to Conner to give him some command, but then her gaze drifted beyond him to something on the floor. Her eyes grew wide in alarm. They opened like the empty sky. Conner turned, expecting another wall of sand to come crashing down from behind him, and saw the body lying on the floor just outside the door. A woman. Rivulets of red trickling from her ear. Head turned to the side, facing him, a visor over her eyes. But Conner would recognize her from a thousand dunes away. His sister. Here. This made less sense than the sand.

He scrambled toward her, got his hand tangled up in the wires that trailed from his band to his boots, threw the band off his head and let it drag behind him, finally made it to her side.

“Vic?” He rolled her onto her back. Lifted her visor. There was blood coming from her nose. Conner cried out. He turned to his mom, who was still holding Rob and urging him to breathe. “What do I do?” he asked.

His mother was crying. Dark streaks of sand beneath her eyes like ruined makeup. Conner tore his shirt off and shook the sand out as best he could. He dabbed at Vic’s nose.

“Is she breathing?” his mother asked.

“I don’t know!”

He didn’t know. How did you check? What was going on? Vic and all the sand. The world had gone upside down. Rob was coughing. Violet took over holding him while their mother came to Conner’s side. She seemed unsurprised. Calm. She checked Vic’s neck and then held her cheek to her daughter’s lips. And Conner saw again that this was their mother. Taking the dunes as they came, as the world shifted beneath her feet, all in stride, because the world had always been moving. A shock to Conner, this violence, but his mother was just in motion. Saving them.

Vic stirred. Groaned.

“What the fuck?” Conner asked, overwhelmed by a flood of confusion and relief. He surveyed the damage, this gasping and sand-covered family all around him. Maybe his mom didn’t hear. She didn’t answer, didn’t tell him to watch his language, just held her daughter as Vic’s eyes fluttered, as her sand-crusted lips parted, a groan and then a gasp.

Vic tried to sit up. She looked around the room, seemed to grasp where she was.

“Easy,” their mother said.

But Vic didn’t seem to hear. Vic didn’t go easy. “There are more,” she said, as though she had never been unconscious, as though she weren’t bleeding, like she was finishing some sentence started a year prior. A year. It’d been that long since Conner had seen her. And her first words were: There are more. And then: “I’ve got to go.”

She staggered to her feet. Wobbled there. Steadied herself on the doorjamb with one hand and raised the other to touch her visor.

“The great wall—” their mother said, turning to what was left of the window.

Vic dabbed at her nose and inspected her finger. “Check the others,” she said, jerking her head down the balcony. She turned to go.

“Wait,” Conner begged.

But his sister was already running toward the stairs. And the word she’d left them with—others—rattled around in his head. The miracle of his own life and the confusion over what in the world had happened dimmed in the bright new awareness of all those who must be in trouble. His mother seemed to understand. There was no shock or complaint. The lid on a jar of water was cracked and passed to Violet, who took it with her bandaged hands, and the ministered-to became the caretaker as she held the jar to Rob’s lips.

Conner was the one left staggering about, the one with the dull ache of a bomb blast ringing in his ears, the one groping after his own life for a minute, for five, before looking to help others. His mother and Vic had sprung into action like they’d been here before. Even Violet seemed to take this awful world in stride. Conner spun and felt bewildered. Lost. He heard his sister racing down the steps outside. There was a band on the ground, a diver’s band, and a trail of wires leading to his father’s boots.

Conner gathered the wires. He pulled the band down over his head. There were buried people outside. His buried people. This he knew. Conner ran out of the room, yelling for his sister to wait up.

47 • Not Enough Buckets

His fear was that Vic would be gone and far beneath the sand by the time he got outside. He navigated the staircase, which swayed beneath his feet, was hanging on by a few sad nails. There were people stirring across the expanse of the bar, helping one another up, piles of drift everywhere, some bodies half-buried, as many alive here as dead, a miracle. By the time he reached the front door, Conner had a vague sense of what his sister had done, why any of them were still alive. He knew, but it wasn’t possible. Lifting a building like this. The blood leaking from her ears and nose. He felt afraid of his sister right then, a feeling remembered from childhood.

He spotted her outside, saw her running across the sand rather than diving into it. A nightmarish world stood all around: folded tin and splintered wood jutting up through a rolling sea of new sand. To the west, the sprawl of Shantytown seemed to have been spared. Those on the eastern edge, however, were gone. Conner saw people rushing in with shovels and buckets. More stood scattered atop the distant dunes, shielding their eyes and staring numbly toward the scene of such awful destruction. Conner chased after his sister. He glanced over his shoulder toward the east and saw the mostly flat expanse of ruin. A ridge of a fallen sandscraper jutted out of the sand like the spine of a half-buried corpse. A high dune stood where the great wall had once been. All the rest of that sand—stored up for generations—was gone. All that misery had been evenly dispersed.

Conner concentrated on keeping up with Vic, tried not to think of the great wall and the sight of empty air where it had once loomed. He could taste the fear in his mouth at the sight of such permanence ended. Don’t think about it. Follow Vic—who for some reason wasn’t diving beneath the dunes to rescue others like he thought she might. She raced instead through structures that became more intact the farther west and north they went. Conner was out of breath, his heart pounding. He chased her around a home, was fighting for the voice to call out to her, when he spotted the sarfer sitting out on the open sand.

The mainsail was still up, the fabric luffing, boom swaying. A rebel sarfer with a red canvas. Some part of Conner knew that his sister being there when the great wall collapsed was no coincidence. The thuds he had heard before the sand had rolled in—he remembered the sounds like distant bombs. Dozens of them. Vic spent time with the sorts of people who might do this. The thought that she might be involved, might have a hand in the death of thousands, might have come there only to rescue their mom—this was a more personal and direct hurt than the toppling of the wall. It was the scratch that burns rather than the blunt trauma that knocks a man numb.

At the sarfer, Vic rummaged for something in the haul rack. No… not something, someone. Conner drew near and realized it was his brother.

“Palm?” he asked, the confusion piling on now. He rested against the sarfer’s hot hull and caught his breath. His older brother gazed at him from the shade of a makeshift bimini. His face was blistered. His lips swollen. He managed a wan smile. Vic was giving orders to them both. She pressed something into Conner’s hands. He looked down. A pair of visors. A band. She pulled a dive suit from a bag in the passenger seat. Palmer was saying that he was okay to dive, to give him the suit. He tried to get up, but Vic shoved him back down.

“You can barely walk,” she said.

Conner wondered what was wrong with his brother. Palmer’s face had shrunk; his cheeks were sharp; there were the beginnings of a beard on his chin. “I can walk,” Palmer insisted.

Vic took all of two beats to consider something. As rarely as she stood still, it felt like a lifetime. She reached some decision. “Head to the Honey Hole, then,” she said. “Help Mom. Wait for us there.”

“What about the sarfer?” Palmer asked.

“Leave it be. Just take the water. And be careful. The sand is loose, and there’s debris everywhere.” She turned to Conner. “What’re you waiting on? Get that suit on and let’s go.”

Conner fell to the sand and kicked his boots off. Stowed the band away. His shirt was already gone, left behind in the Honey Hole with his sister’s blood on it. He pulled the dive suit on. It was big for him and smelled of another man’s sweat. His sister helped him with the zipper, bitched about the sand in it. She gave Conner instructions as she pulled the dive tanks from their racks and cracked the valves.

“It’s been too long to save anyone buried in solid drift,” she told him. “We’re looking for air down there, okay? Any spot of purple, that’s what you aim for. We’ll start here on the edge of town where chances are best. No point in checking every small building, just the intact ones. Anything with an eastward window you can skip. This regulator jams now and then—you have to take it out and knock it against your tank. Can you handle that?”

Conner nodded. He slipped his arms through the tank’s harness as his sister held the worn cylinder aloft.

“Good. Let’s go.”

It was another long run back toward the wasteland of broken homes. Soon the dive suit smelled of Conner’s sweat. And then his sister pointed toward the edge of a roof jutting up from the smooth sand, and she dove forward and was swallowed by a dune. Conner pulled the visor down over his eyes, wrangled the flapping regulator at his hip and shoved it into his mouth. He vibrated the air and the sand so that it slid out of his way as he tumbled forward. The desert claimed him as it had claimed so many others. But he could breathe. And he could help those who couldn’t. There was so much to do and not enough buckets.

48 • A Fortunate Few

He had to ignore the math. There were thousands of bodies scattered and buried beneath the sand, and he and Vic had only found dozens alive in pockets of air. Maybe a hundred survivors in total. He ignored the math and concentrated on these few sputtering and alive that they were able to rescue.

After depositing a man he’d found beneath an upturned tub, he dove back into the sand and raced alongside his sister beneath the dunes. He had a sensation of flight, the suit and band she’d given him more powerful than any he’d ever donned before, a rebel suit turned up to dangerous degrees. Every shimmering flash of purple or dark blue where the visor’s sandsight was broken by a pocket of air stood out as a beacon of hope. Conner drifted past bodies and around shattered homes, bashed his way through walls and intact windows, told the terrified he found there to hold their breath as he gathered them up and lifted them toward the light.

He broke into one house that had remained intact and found a family of four. A shriek as he approached, the red dive light around his neck aglow, drift pouring in through the hole he’d made. “Hold your breath,” he told them, not sure if he could lift four people at once. Two was a strain. But the sand was pouring into their home. A young girl screamed and clutched her mother. Vic had disappeared into another building. Conner needed his sister. The sand wasn’t going to give them time.

He held the regulator out to the young girl. “Can you breathe through this?” The girl’s mother told her to bite down on it and not to breathe through her nose, to stay close to the diver.

Conner nodded toward the window he had smashed. The family crawled across the rising sand with him, the girl tethered to Conner by the air hose. As the sand sought its level, Conner held out his arms and took a boy Rob’s age in one, the young girl in the other. The parents encircled them all in an embrace. One last look at their faces in the pale red light, deep breaths all around, cheeks puffing, eyes wide with fear, the sand tumbling in, and Conner flowed them toward the window. He strained, the pulse in his temples knocking against his skull like a hammer, a feeling of being in thick and heavy sand, the danger of sinking, but a thought of Vic lifting an entire building, and something surged in him, an anger at the world, and though Conner was too far gone in concentration to even know that they were moving, he glimpsed the purple sky overhead, watched it loom closer, and then felt the wind and the pepper of sand on his face, heard the gasps and gratitude of the family as they held one another, covered there in sand.

There was no time to tell them they were welcome. Just a regulator passed back to him, sand and spit of the saved on the mouthpiece. Conner bit down grimly on this before returning to the depths, a boy who had been told he couldn’t be a diver, becoming one now in the most terrible of ways.

“Where are all the others?” he asked his sister, hours later. They shared a canteen atop the sand. The sun was going down, and both their tanks had long run dry, had been shucked off and set aside. They had gone as long as they could with visors and mere lungfuls, but the adrenaline had worn off, and the rescued had become more infrequent, and their exhausted bodies needed a guilty rest.

“What others?” Vic asked. She wiped her mouth and passed him the canteen.

“The other divers. I saw one or two down there looking for people to save. Woulda thought there’d be hundreds helping by now.”

He took a grateful swig while Vic gazed toward the west to keep the sand out of her eyes. “I saw those divers down there,” she said. “But I don’t think they were after people.”

“You think they were scavenging?” Conner didn’t want to believe this. He wiped his mouth with his ker.

“Looting,” she said, stressing the word like there was some great difference. “The rest of the divers are out hunting for a different buried city,” she added.

“Danvar.”

Vic nodded. “The people who did this, who did that—” She pointed to where the wall once stood. “They’re the same ones who found Danvar. Palmer was with them.” She must’ve seen the confused and horrified look on Conner’s face. “Not with them in that sense. He wasn’t a part of the bombing. They hired him for a dive. Palmer was the one who found Danvar.”

Conner didn’t know what to say. He remembered how his brother had looked in the sarfer, like a body fresh from a grave. “Is he okay?”

“He was down there for a week. If he lives, it’ll be a miracle. But he’s got his father’s blood, so who knows.”

Conner couldn’t believe how lackadaisical his sister could be about their brother’s life. But then—all the death he’d seen that day already had him inured to the sight of the buried. “Why would anyone do this?” he asked, though he knew the question was pointless, knew everyone who witnessed the aftermath of a bomb asked the same question and never got a response. Churches were overfull with these unanswered questions.

Vic shrugged. She pulled off her visor and checked something inside the band. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the people who did this were the same ones who spread the word about Danvar. Just to clear out those who might be here to help.”

“The divers,” Conner said. He grabbed his boot and tried to work a kink out of his calf muscle. “So what now?”

“One more run down by the scrapers. There are a few pockets we missed. Then I’ll get you back to the Honey Hole and check on Palm before I head to Low-Pub.”

“Low-Pub?” Conner glanced around at the people staggering across the sand, pulling what they could from the shallows, tending to the exhausted and the wounded. “Aren’t we needed here? What’s in Low-Pub?”

“The people who did this,” Vic said. She put her visor back on. “Palm said they were going to hit Springston first. He overheard them, knew this was going to happen, just didn’t know it would be this… bad. We came here as quickly as we could for some food and to warn someone. But we were too late.”

“You saved us,” Conner said.

Vic’s cheeks tightened as she clenched and unclenched her jaw. She said nothing. Just pulled her ker up over her nose and mouth.

“The people who did this are shacked up in Low-Pub?” he asked. “If you go after them, I want to come with you.”

He thought she would argue. But Vic just nodded. “Yeah. I’ll probably need you. And they aren’t shacked up in Low-Pub. I think they’re gonna strike there next. And that it might be worse than this.”

Conner surveyed the scene around him once more, the wind and sand blowing unfettered where it hadn’t blown for generations. He couldn’t imagine that anything could be worse than this.

49 • Half-Sisters

They arrived back at the Honey Hole to find a broken building where broken people were gathering—and Vic wondered if the place had changed at all. The battered brothel was the tallest structure left standing across all of Springston. What had once sat squat among its peers now towered. And as it sat on the new eastward border of civilization, it was also the new wall. A few tents had already been erected in its lee. Shantytown, spread out to the west, was all that remained whole and intact.

As Vic approached the building, she felt as though she could still see all the bodies beneath her feet, that her sandsight had become permanent. The dead were spots in her vision like you get from staring at the sun too long. They were motes of sand swimming in her eye.

She and Conner dropped their tanks inside the door. The building was still lined with drift. Dunes of it stood in the corners. An even coat covered the floor. Vic had flowed the sand like water as she’d lifted the place, but not all of it had gotten out. It had puddled in places and congealed. Dozens of people were scattered across those piles of drift. Lanterns and candles filled the space in glow and shadow. These small flames beat back the darkness as the sun set outside, and Vic saw people pouring caps of water, ladling beer from barrels. Those few who had survived would flock here. It was the most unlikely of sanctuaries.

She saw her youngest brother Rob tending to a woman laid out on the sand. Her mother was moving from person to person with canteens. There was the smell of alcohol, and Vic saw someone cleaning a wound with a bottle from the bar, tipping it into a dishrag before gingerly dabbing at injured flesh. There were people there that she had pulled out of the sand. Some Conner had as well. They had both told people to seek out the Honey Hole. There were so many and yet not nearly enough.

Her mother Rose was directing the chaos. Several of her girls were still in their balcony getups, but now they moved through the bar tending to the sobbing, the wounded, the thirsty. “There’s Palmer,” Conner said, gesturing toward the stairs. Vic saw her brother hammering nails back into place, wiping the sweat from his forehead between blows. She hung her visor on the top of her dive tank and hurried over to him.

“What’re you doing?” she asked, snatching the hammer away.

Her brother opened his mouth to complain, but then seemed to wobble. Vic steadied him. Conner was there as well. They guided him to a barstool while Palmer croaked about all that needed doing. “The stairs are gonna collapse,” he said.

“You’re gonna collapse,” Vic told him. “Get him some water.” And Conner hurried around the bar. Vic weighed the hammer in her hand. She could barely stand herself, was past the point of exhaustion, but she moved back to the stairs and started driving in the loose heads. Swinging back for another strike, a hand snatched her wrist.

“What do you think you’re doing?” her mother asked. She took the hammer away and placed a steaming mug of stew in Vic’s hands. “Sit. Eat. You’ve been diving for hours.”

Vic studied her mom, saw the creases of age in her face, the features so much like her own, and she saw the woman and not the profession, saw that this would be her in just a few years, exhausted, worn out, doing whatever it took to get by. She started to apologize, she wasn’t sure what for, but couldn’t form the words. And then she found herself fighting the urge to cry, to sob, to hold her mother and smear tears and snot into the crook of her neck, to tell her about Marco, how great a guy he was even if he was caught up with the wrong people, how he was dead along with so many thousands more. But she fought this and won. She allowed herself to be guided to the bar, where she sat and spooned stew between her lips, doing what she was told because she knew she needed the sustenance, because she knew her mother was right.

Palmer drank beer from a jar, probably to save water for someone else. Conner was given his own bowl of stew. Rob joined them, pulled from the crowd by the gravitational tug of so much family all in one place, and Vic tried to remember the last time they’d been together like this. She caught her mom giving her a look like she was having the same thought.

“How bad is it?” her mother asked. And Vic had been wrong. Her mother was thinking on more than just family.

“Pretty much all of Springston,” Vic said. She stirred her stew. “The east wells will have to be re-dug. They’re buried. The pumps with them.”

Conner stiffened. “I need to go see about the pump in Shantytown. And I need to find—”

“The Shantytown pump won’t be enough to water everyone,” Vic told him. “How many people from that side of town came over here to the cisterns?”

“What about Dad’s advice?” Conner asked, turning to their mom. “Maybe we should go west like Father said.”

Vic’s spoon froze halfway to her mouth. Stew dribbled onto the bar. “When did Dad ever say we should go live in the mountains?”

“Not in the mountains,” Rob told her. “Over them.”

Vic turned and studied her little brother, who was perched on a barstool. “You need to stick to water,” she told him, thinking he’d been into the beer.

Rose placed a hand on Vic’s shoulder. Palmer was looking at her funny. “What?” she asked Palmer. “What’s that look about?” It was as though everyone else knew something she didn’t.

“Don’t freak out,” Palmer said. “I just learned a few hours ago.”

“Let her eat,” their mother said. Then, to Vic, “Finish your stew, and then I need you to come upstairs with me.”

“Upstairs?” Vic felt her palms go clammy. Felt that old terror swell up within her. She didn’t think anything would get her up those stairs ever again. She had a sudden compulsion to yank out the few nails she’d driven in, to yank them all out so no one could ever climb those stairs again, not her or her mother or anyone. “Why do you want me to go upstairs?” Vic asked.

“Finish your stew. And then I need you to meet someone.”

Vic couldn’t very well sit there and eat with everyone acting strange, watching her like that. Her appetite was gone, anyway. “Who?” she asked.

It was Rob who blurted out what no one else would say. “Our sister,” he said. And when Vic shot him a look, he showed her his jar. “It’s water, I swear.”

50 • The Backs of Gods

“I don’t have time for games,” Vic told her mom. She stopped at the bottom of those stairs, her hand on the rail, unable to muster the courage to lift her boot. “What I need is to get back to the sarfer and get to Low-Pub. The people who took down the wall are hitting it next.”

There was a hand at her back, urging her up. Just like before. Like when she was sixteen. Vic resisted. Her mother went past her to the bottom step, turned, looked out over the lantern-lit and pathetic crowds, and then lowered her voice.

“I don’t know what the hell is going on,” Rose said, “or what you might be involved in. I don’t know what’s happening out there.” She looked to be on the verge of tears, and Vic forgot her terror for a moment and truly listened. “This is all too much at once. It’s too much.” She shook her head and covered her mouth with her hand. Vic saw that her brothers were watching from the bar.

“Mom, you need to get some rest. What can be done is being done. There’s no one left to save. All of this can wait until morning.”

“Your father is still alive,” her mother blurted out.

Vic gripped the railing. The Honey Hole slid back down into the dunes and spun around her. “What—?” Her mother held her by the waist to keep her from sagging to the ground.

“I don’t know how all of this is happening at once, what games the gods are playing at, but Conner and Rob brought a girl here the day after you came to see me. The morning after I saw you, they came in with a starved and injured girl who made it out of No Man’s Land.”

“What?” Vic whispered again. She didn’t understand. “How long had she been gone? How far did she get?”

“She didn’t wander in from over here,” Rose said. “She crossed all the way. Come upstairs. Please.”

Vic found herself coaxed upward. It felt as though her mind and senses were floating above the ground. “What do you mean, Father is still alive? Why did Rob call her my… ?”

“Your sister. Half-sister. You need to hear what she has to say.” Vic glanced back and saw that Palmer and Conner were following them up the stairs. Rob was climbing down from his barstool.

“And Dad?” She looked to the balcony.

“He’s being held on the other side of No Man’s Land against his will. I’ll explain. But it means you have to put Low-Pub out of your mind. Your brother is right, that going west might be the only way. I think that’s what the gods are trying to tell us.”

Vic felt a flush of rage at the mention of the gods, at the talk of destiny. She’d seen too many dead to think of that bitch, Fate. She found herself standing there on that balcony, high over the scene of so many hurt and wounded, so many sobbing and mourning their loved ones. Listening to their soft wails, smelling the sweat in her dive suit, thinking on all the buried she’d seen that day, all the horrors visited on that already miserable place, the image of Marco shot dead, seeing a man’s face stove in behind Graham’s workbench, all the bombs over the years, the rape, the scars, the buckets of hurt more numerous than the sands.

“No one is watching over us,” she told her mother. She turned to her brothers, who were gathered on the stairs, looking up at the two women. “There isn’t anyone up there looking down on us,” she told them all. “Those constellations you see up there?” She jabbed her finger angrily at the ceiling. “Those are the backs of gods we see. They’ve turned from us. Don’t you understand? Our father is dead. I don’t have a sister. Now I’ve got to get to Low-Pub.”

She pulled away from her mom and forced herself down between her brothers, nearly knocked Rob over. Her mother yelled for her to wait. Vic stopped at the bar and screwed a lid on a jar of beer. She grabbed a heel of bread from Palmer’s plate and hurried toward the door. She started gathering her gear.

Conner rushed to her side. “Vic, don’t go.”

“I’m sleeping on the sarfer so no one steals it. I sail at first light. I’ll come back and check on you all once whatever happens in Low-Pub happens.”

“Low-Pub is nothing,” Conner said. “You’ve got to hear what this girl has to say. There are entire cities out there—”

“Like Danvar?” Vic slung her tank over her shoulder. “Stop dreaming, Con. Start digging. This is the only life we’ve got.”

“Well, if you won’t stay, then I’m coming with you.”

“Suit yourself.” Vic nodded to the other dive tank and the gear.

“Okay. Good. I will. We’re leaving at first light?” Conner rubbed his hands together. He seemed shocked that she would have him along. In truth, she needed him and twenty more like him. “If so, I’m going to see if I can be of use here for a few hours. Let Mom know where we’re headed.”

Vic shrugged. “You know where the sarfer’s parked. You get there after dawn, it won’t be parked there anymore.” She turned and shoved her way out the door. It felt good, fleeing that place again. Here was where she had learned this skill all those years ago, where she had learned how good it felt to run away.

Conner stood by the door and watched his sister go. It was a familiar sight, her leaving. It didn’t seem possible that he would see her later that night. He was used to it being months. A year. He was used to the fear that she would perish on her next dive and he would hear about it from someone at school. That loss would be even greater now that they had soaked the sand with their sweat together, had dived side by side to rescue who they could. His sister, always a bright and distant star in his life, had grown bright as Venus. It left him no space to stay behind while she went off to Low-Pub.

But he couldn’t run out as quickly as she could, didn’t have the years of practice. He turned back to the stairs, where his family was still watching from the balcony. Conner made his way to them through the crowded bar. A woman he passed grabbed his wrist and thanked him with tears in her eyes, and Conner remembered pulling her out of her home. Her little boy squirmed in her lap. Conner fought back tears of his own as he squeezed her shoulder. He wanted to say that she was welcome, but he feared his voice cracking, feared the facade this woman saw on him sloughing off. His brother Rob met him at the bottom of the stairs.

“Where’s Vic going?” Rob asked.

“People out there still need our help,” Conner told his little brother. He stooped down to speak to him. “I’m going to go with her, okay? You’ll stay here with Mom and Palm.”

“I want to go with you.”

“You can’t,” Conner said. He was on the verge of tears, but he had to be firm. “You’re needed here. Take care of Violet. Imagine how scared she must be. How alone she must feel.”

Rob nodded. He scanned the room, perhaps looking for something to do, someone to help. Conner climbed the stairs toward his mom. He dreaded telling her he was leaving, but nothing had ever felt as right as pulling people out of the sand. The moment he carried his mother and Rob and Violet up into the attic and saved them was like that moment a snake sheds its skin or a baby crow pierces its shell. It had been a sort of birth, a discovery of purpose. He no longer felt like a boy. As he reached the top of the stairs, he thought even his mother was looking at him differently. Even Palmer.

“I’m going to help Vic for a few days,” he told them. “You’ll look after Rob and Violet?”

His mother nodded, and Conner saw her throat constrict as she swallowed back some word or sob. She reached out and squeezed his shoulder, and he was about to turn away when she reached into her pocket and brought out a folded piece of paper. “Give this to Vic,” his mother said. “Make sure she reads it. She needs to believe.”

Conner accepted the paper and stuck it into his pocket. “I’ll make sure she gets it,” he promised. “I’m going to let Violet know I’ll be gone for a while. You’ll look after her?”

His mother nodded. Conner thanked her and turned to her room, which no longer had the same repulsive effect it used to. It had been cleansed by the sand that had passed through it; it had been scoured clean. He heard Palmer hurry up behind him and felt his brother grab his arm.

“Hey, Con, we need to talk.”

Conner stopped. Over Palmer’s shoulder, he saw their mother heading back down the stairs to tend to the stricken. “What is it?” Conner asked.

Palmer glanced at their mother’s door like there was still something to fear there, like one of her drunk clients might lumber out at any moment and crash into them and send them over the edge of the balcony with its missing rail. “This way,” Palmer said. He guided Conner past the room where Violet lay, his voice a conspiratorial whisper.

“You okay?” Conner asked. His brother looked better than he had in the sarfer earlier that day, had salve on his blistered lips and food in his belly. But something seemed off.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. It’s just that… this girl who claims to be our sister—”

“Violet,” Conner reminded him.

“Yeah, Violet. It’s just that… Mom took me in there and told me her story, let me talk to her. She and Rob told me about the other night—the night you went camping—and about where she came from.”

“No Man’s Land.”

“Well, maybe.” Palmer glanced at the door again and pulled Conner even farther down the balcony. “It’s just a little unbelievable, don’t you think? I mean, you really buy her story? Because—”

“I was there,” Conner told his brother. “I’m telling you she speaks the truth. She knew who I was.”

“I know, I know. But here’s the thing. The guy who did this to me…” Palmer pointed to his face. “This guy Brock who hired us to find Danvar, who killed Hap, he’s got this strange accent. Everyone says it comes from the north. And this girl sounds just like him.”

“You think Violet is some cannibal?” Conner didn’t have time for this, but his brother really seemed concerned. Vic had told him that their brother was pretty rattled from his experience, that he’d been through a serious ordeal. It was strange, this, to pity an older brother.

“I’m not saying anything, Con. I just know what I hear. And her showing up and then the wall coming down at the same time? And Danvar? Everything happening at once like this? You buyin’ that?”

Conner squeezed his brother’s shoulder. “I don’t know what’s going on,” he said truthfully. “But I believe that girl in there is our sister, and I think Dad is still out there somewhere.”

Palmer nodded. There were tears in his eyes. “Yeah,” he said. “You’ve always believed that.” And there was nothing accusing in his brother’s voice. Something more like envy.

“I’ve got to go,” Conner said.

“Yeah.”

“Good to see you,” he told his brother. And the two of them embraced. They exchanged hearty slaps on each other’s backs that loosened the sand in their hair. And Conner remembered how angry he’d been at Palmer the last few days, at the betrayal of his not being there to go camping with them, and such concerns seemed petty. Beneath his worry.

“I love you, Brother,” Palmer whispered in his ear.

And Conner had to turn and go quickly away before his great facade crumbled.

51 • Waterpump Ridge

Conner moved through the darkened dunes with an empty dive tank on his back and a regulator swinging by his hip. He didn’t head straight for the sarfer. There was one other person he needed to see before he left. He had to know she was okay. Had to see Shantytown and his home and some place where he could imagine life clinging and continuing on when he got back.

There were a few torches and lamps burning out across the dunes. Occasional voices could be heard as people shouted into the wind, calling for one another. The sand in the air was mild, the stars overhead bright. The glow of illumination in Springston that normally drowned out the constellations had been smothered. Extinguished. Conner thought of all the diving that would need to be done to reclaim what the sands had taken.

As he headed toward Gloralai’s place, Conner became aware of some guilty and latent thrill at his being alive. He felt a raw power for having survived being completely buried in drift. There was also some strange pang of guilt for having been present and on the earth for so momentous a disaster as the fall of the great wall. It wasn’t enjoyment—was nothing like enjoyment. There was too much a darkness over everything, too much a longing, a deep ache; but behind it all there was a tiny voice telling him how good it felt to be breathing, how great it felt to be above the sand, and could he believe what he’d just witnessed?

Conner hated this voice. There was no excitement in this. Nothing but tragedy and loss and now an uncertain and terrifying tomorrow. The wind-blown dunes would swamp Shantytown as never before. Another chaotic Low-Pub awaited here. A lesson was coming for his people, a lesson that there is always a new and greater misery to fall back upon. And thinking this caused the endless days to stretch out before him—days when hauling buckets away from the water pump would be remembered with the same blissful nostalgia as hot baths and flushing toilets. Always more room to fall. The sand went down and down and didn’t stop.

He veered slightly out of his way as he thought these things; he wanted to swing by his house. There was nothing there for him—he’d carried everything out of there for his trek across No Man’s Land, a decision and deed that seemed so very far away now—he just wanted to make sure the front door was unburied, that he and Rob would have a place to go to, that the sand around their home hadn’t collapsed shut from the grumbling of the earth.

The door was still there. The scaffolding was still webbed atop his home. And it looked like there might be a lantern burning inside. Light squeezed around the crooked door.

Conner approached slowly. He didn’t knock, just tried the handle, found it sticky as usual but not locked. He pushed it open.

A man turned toward the door, his eyes growing wide over his neatly cropped beard. He and two boys sat around Conner’s kitchen table. There was the smell of food cooking. The man got up, the chair tipping backward and crashing to the floor, both of his hands out in front of him.

“I’m sorry,” the man said. He reached for his children, who had stopped eating their soup, who sat with frozen expressions on their faces. They all had on such nice clothes. “We’re going. We’ll leave. We meant no harm.”

“No,” Conner said. He waved the man back. “Stay. This is my place. It’s okay.”

The man glanced toward the dark bedroom. Conner couldn’t tell if there was anyone in there, thought maybe the man was thinking that there wasn’t room enough for him and his children to stay.

“Are you from Springston?” Conner asked.

The man nodded. He righted the chair and rested his hand on its back. The children went back to slurping. “I took the boys out on the sarfer this morning. We saw it happen, saw all of it. My wife—” He shook his head and looked away.

“I’m sorry,” Conner said. He adjusted the empty dive tank on his back. “Stay here as long as you like. I was just checking on the place.”

“What about—?”

“I’ve got somewhere to stay tonight,” Conner assured him, thinking of the sarfer and a night beneath the stars. “I’m sorry for your loss.” He turned to go, but the man was across the room, clasping him on the shoulders.

“Thank you,” he whispered.

Conner nodded. Both men had tears in their eyes. And then the man hugged him, and Conner thought how this would’ve seemed a strange thing a day ago.

Gloralai wasn’t at her house. Conner knocked and waited, but the windows were dark, and there was no sound within. He tried the schoolhouse next, thinking that this was where his friends would gather. He spotted Manuel’s mother hurrying between the dunes, her face partly lit from the spitting torch in her hand. Manuel was a classmate. Conner stopped her and asked how he was. She squeezed Conner and said that he was at the well with the others. She asked about Rob.

“Rob’s fine,” Conner said. He asked if she knew where Gloralai might be.

“I think all the sissyfoots are at the well.”

Conner considered the hour and realized he was probably supposed to be there as well. It had been a school day, a fact forgotten not just from looking after Violet at the Honey Hole but from leaving class on Friday expecting never to come back. It was after dark, and he would normally have hauled his quota by now. He thanked Manuel’s mom and hurried toward the well. The sudden awareness that the sand would never stop hit him. Not even for the collapse of the wall. Not even that night, for them to rest and regain their senses, to count and properly bury their dead. Buckets still had to be hauled or they would go thirsty. The gods were merciless. Vic was right. This was the sort of cruelty that only came from turned backs, from being ignored. Well-aimed lashes and direct blows were more easily understood. At least then the stricken knew their anguished cries were being heard.

He aimed for the dancing torches atop Waterpump Ridge. A lot of activity. He could imagine the haul shifts starting late, a period of chaos as the schoolhouse emptied and the sand washed out Springston, nobody knowing what was going on. It was strange, the separation he felt from his peers, thinking on where he’d been all day and what he’d been doing. But here they were, his classmates, keeping the water flowing, saving far more lives than he. There was perspective in this. The man who had broken into his home and had stolen what little Conner had left in his cupboard—that man couldn’t be blamed. The larger rules of the world were broken, the Lords’ rules. But the simpler rules that guided the heart of each man were intact. These were the rules that never changed. Knowing right from wrong. Surviving and letting others be. Maybe even lending a fucking hand.

“Conner?” someone asked, as he approached the outhaul tunnel. It was Ashek. He must’ve been on his way down from dumping his buckets, as his pole was held casually across one shoulder. “Where you been, man?”

The two boys clasped hands, and Conner lowered his ker. They had to strain to see each other in the flicker of torchlight. The moon would not be up for hours yet.

“Been helping my mom,” Conner said, not wanting to explain any further. “Hey, have you seen… is everyone else here? Everyone okay?”

“Yeah, except for the kids who didn’t show up for class. But most of them weren’t around yesterday either. Off diving for Danvar. So I’m sure they’re fine. I just passed Gloralai on the way down. She was taking a haul up to the ridge.”

“Uh… yeah… thanks.” Conner tripped over his words. He hadn’t mentioned looking for her, didn’t think anyone knew he liked her, not even Gloralai herself. He thanked Ashek again and headed up the ridge. Dark shapes blotted the stars on the path up, and Conner felt naked without his haulpole and buckets. A large figure ahead, a familiar voice. Conner saw Ryder huffing his way down the sand path. The two boys stopped and looked at each other. Ryder tugged his ker off his mouth.

“You okay?” he asked.

Conner nodded. “You?”

“Fuck no. I should be out diving, not doing this shit.”

“This is just as important,” Conner said. He kept himself square to Ryder and hoped the boy didn’t see the tank on his back.

“Yeah, whatever.”

But there was something different as Ryder went past him and strode down the sloping sand. More of what had seemed significant falling away from yesterday’s cares. The things at the center of Conner’s universe no longer were. The world had wobbled; its axis had shifted; the core was now at the periphery and vice versa. But there, higher up the ridge, a slimmer hole stood out in the dense constellations, a familiar form, the memory of a beer and a bowl of stew, of thinking that running away might not be the answer. Conner joined Gloralai on the top of the ridge just as she dumped the last of her sand into the wind. When she turned and saw him, there was a gasp. She dropped her pole. Arms around his neck, nearly knocking him over, the feel of her sweat on his skin and not caring. Enjoying it. A sign of her toil. The embrace letting him know she cared. That he wasn’t alone.

“I’ve been so worried,” she said. And Conner realized why Ashek had told him where she was. She had been looking for him. She pulled away and brushed the hair off her face. Everywhere she had pressed against him cooled in the breeze. The sand in the air stuck to the sweat she’d left on his skin, and Conner didn’t mind. “Someone said you pulled Daisy’s kids out of the courthouse. Is that true?”

Conner wasn’t sure. There’d been dozens of people. They’d all looked the same in his red dive light. “I remember the courthouse,” he said.

Gloralai placed a hand on his arm and turned him, looked at the dive gear on his back. “You went camping. You didn’t come back. I thought—”

Conner reached out and placed a hand on the back of Gloralai’s neck. He pulled her close and kissed her, staunching her worry and his as well. She kissed him back. The tank fell to the sand, arms snaking around one another, her lips on his neck, a classmate dumping his buckets in the nearby dark and saying, “Get a fucking room.”

Laughter against his neck. Her exhalations. Conner kissed her cheek and tasted salt. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here,” he said. But what he wanted to apologize for was thinking of leaving. For taking the wrong chance. The wrong chance. “And now I’ve gotta leave town for a while. My sister needs me.”

“Your sister.” Gloralai studied his face in the starlight. Buckets rattled on a haulpole as a silhouette left them alone again on the ridge.

“Yeah. The same people who attacked here might be heading to Low-Pub. I don’t want her going alone.”

“You’re gonna sail there? Tonight?”

“We go at first light.”

“When will you be back?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then I’ll come with you. I have a brother in Low-Pub—”

“No,” Conner said. “I’m sorry. But no.”

Her hands fell away from his arms. “I understand.”

“I’ll find you when I get back,” he promised. And it suddenly became very important that he got back.

“What about your hauls?” she asked.

Conner looked down at her pole and the two buckets. “I’ve carried all I can today,” he said. “They’ll have to understand.”

“You staying at your place tonight? Can I come see you?”

Conner thought of the family in his home. “No,” he said. “I’m camping with my sister on her sarfer.”

“And you leave at first light.”

“Yeah.”

Gloralai took his hand. “Then stay with me tonight.”

52 • A Pillar of Smoke

“I didn’t think you were gonna make it,” Vic said. She stood by the mast, arranging sheets and halyards by the red glow of her dive lamp. Conner loaded his gear into the haul rack.

“You said first light,” he told her.

Vic nodded toward the horizon where a bare glow could be seen. Maybe.

“Aw, c’mon.”

“Man the jib,” she told him. “But first, get your suit plugged in so it can build a charge. You probably drained it yesterday. And make sure that gear is lashed down. It’s gonna be windy today.”

Conner studied the sand hissing softly against the sarfer’s hull. “How can you tell?”

“I just can. Let’s go.”

He pulled the dive suit she’d given him the day before out of the gear bag. There were two power leads trailing down from the wind turbine, which was thwump, thwump, thumping in the morning breeze. Her suit was lashed to the base and plugged in. He did the same with his, double-knotted the arms and legs around the pole. Then he made his way up the sarfer’s starboard hull and across the netting between the two bows. He checked the jib sheets to make sure they wouldn’t get fouled and knocked the sand out of the furling drum. He could see what he was doing without turning his dive light on, so he supposed maybe she was right about the first light.

“You get a good night’s rest?” Vic asked. She worked the main halyard free, and it clanged rhythmically against the tall aluminum mast.

“Yeah,” Conner lied. A smile stole across his lips as he thought—without remorse—of how little sleep he’d gotten.

He helped his sister raise the mainsail, cranking on the winch as she guided the battened canvas up through the jacks. As he muscled the sail up those last few laborious meters, he thought about Gloralai and her lips and her promises and her talk of the future, and he felt an armor form across his skin, some invisible force field like a dive suit puts out, and the sand striking him was no longer a nuisance. It was just a sensation. As was the wind in his hair and the shudder in the sarfer’s deck as his sister moved to the helm and the mainsheet was tightened, the canvas gathering the breeze. The sadness of so much tragedy was still everywhere around him, but Conner felt a new awareness that he would persevere. He felt alive. The sarfer hissed across the dunes, and he felt madly alive.

They sailed downwind to get west of Shantytown before turning south. Conner tidied the lines and then got comfortable in one of the two webbed seats at the aft end of the sarfer. He helped work the sheets while his sister manned the tiller. Watching the sad and flat expanse of sand where Springston used to be, he asked his sister why they didn’t just cut across rather than sailing around.

“Because we’d catch the skids or the rudder on some buried debris,” Vic told him. “This way is longer, but it’s safer.”

Conner understood. He remembered all that was buried out there. He checked that his dive suit was secure, wasn’t going to fly away. It already felt like his, that suit. It smelled like him. Had served him.

It was quiet as they sailed in the direction of the wind. Just the shush of sand on the aluminum hull. It wasn’t until they were beyond the last of the Shantytown hovels and even west of the water pump that they turned south and gathered the sheets. The sun was nearly up. There was already enough light to see by. Conner watched Waterpump Ridge slide by, the sand blowing from its heights, tiny sissyfoots up there dumping their hauls. Vic had left the ridge well to port to keep it from blocking their wind.

“So what’s this nonsense about Father?” she asked. She took a turn on one of the winches, locked down the jib sheet, then sat back with a leg resting on the tiller, steering with her boot. “What was that scene on the stairs last night about?”

Conner remembered his sister barging out of the Honey Hole. He wanted to turn the question around and ask her what that scene had been all about. She’d been the one who’d caused it. He adjusted his goggles, tucked his ker up under the edge to keep it in place. He wasn’t sure how to tell her the same news without getting the same reaction. Their mother had probably dumped too much on her all at once the night before. But he tried. “You know what last weekend was, right? The camping trip?”

He tried not to make it sound like an accusation for her not being there. Vic nodded. The sarfer glided happily south in a smooth trough.

“So, Rob and I went alone like last year. Palmer didn’t make it… which I guess you already knew. Everything went the same, you know? We set up the tent, made a fire, did the lantern—”

“Told stories about Father,” Vic said.

“Yeah, but that’s not the thing.” He took a deep breath. Adjusted his goggles, which were pinching his hair. “So we went to sleep. And in the middle of the night, a girl stumbled into our campsite. A girl from No Man’s Land.”

“The girl Mom wanted me to meet? The one she said came all the way across. And you believe that?”

“Yeah. I do. I was there, Vic. She collapsed into my fucking arms.”

“Maybe she’s Old Man Joseph’s daughter,” Vic said, laughing.

“It’s not like that,” Conner said. “Vic, she was sent by Dad.”

His sister’s brow furrowed down over her dark goggles. “Bullshit,” she said. She wasn’t laughing anymore.

Conner tugged his ker off. “It’s not bullshit. I’m telling you. She knew who I was. And Rob. She described Dad to a tee.”

“Anyone in town could do that.” The sarfer hit a bump, and Vic glanced toward the bow, adjusted their course. “And even Mom believes her? You sure it’s not just someone looking for a handout? Some kid from the orphanage?”

“Yes, Mom believes her,” Conner said. He rubbed the sand out of the corners of his mouth. “Palmer doesn’t, but he wasn’t there. I don’t know how long he even talked to her.”

“No one comes out of No Man’s Land,” Vic said. She turned from watching the bow to peer at her brother. He wished he could see past her dark goggles. The same hard shells that allowed one person to see, blinded another. “So what’s her story?” Vic asked, her tone one of distrust and suspicion.

“She was born in a mining camp on the other side of No Man’s. Dad helped her escape. He sent her with a warning—”

“And she claims to be our sister? That our father is her father?”

“Yeah. Dad built her a suit, and she dove down under some kind of steep valley and walked like ten days to get to us. But—”

“But what?”

Conner pointed ahead, as they had begun to drift again. Vic took her foot off the tiller and steered by hand.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I believe her, but Palm pulled me aside last night. He seems pretty convinced that something’s wrong. Violet—this girl—our sister—has a… strange accent. Palm says she talks just like the guy who hired him to find Danvar.”

“Who, Brock? That’s the fucker we’re after. What did Palm say?”

Conner shrugged. “Just that they sounded alike. That’s all.”

Vic gazed forward and chewed on the grit in her mouth. Conner could hear it crunching between her teeth. “I don’t like it,” she said. “And I don’t want to hear any of this nonsense about Dad, okay? There’s too much else going on. I don’t need that.”

Conner nodded. He was used to his family telling him that. He had learned a long time ago to shut up about their father, that there was only one night a year in which it was allowed. He tried to get comfortable in the webbed seat, then saw something in the distance. He pointed over the bow. “Hey, what’s that?”

“That’s not good, is what that is.” Vic adjusted the tiller to steer straight for it. Up ahead, a column of smoke rose in a slant before bending sideways and blowing westward in the breeze. Something was on fire.

“We should stop and check,” Vic said. She pointed to the line that furled the jib. Conner gathered this and waited for her to give the word. Ahead, the smoking ruin of a sarfer loomed into view. The mainsail had burned, and the mast had caught as well, had pinched and melted near the base and now drooped over like the wick of a candle. Both hulls were still on fire, the metal aglow, the color of the morning sun. Black smoke billowed up and spiraled away in the wind.

Vic began to let out the mainsheet, and Conner furled the jib. Vic then dialed down the power of the skids and rudder, so the sand stopped flowing as easily and slowly braked the craft. They left the main up, just allowed the boom to swing and point with the wind the way a vane does.

“That looks like a body.” Conner pointed to a form lying near the smoking ruin of the sarfer. The man wasn’t moving, was lying close to the wreckage.

Vic jumped down from the sarfer, and Conner scrambled after her. They both approached the wreckage warily. The hull of the burning craft creaked and popped from the heat of the fire. The smell was awful. Acidic and biting. Conner was scanning the scene for more bodies when blood frothed up on the lips of the prone man. One of his hands lifted several inches off the sand before his arm collapsed again.

Conner heard his sister curse. She rushed forward and dropped to her knees beside the figure. She yelled for Conner to bring the aid kit, which he ran back and retrieved from the haul rack. The sand was loose beneath his boots as he hurried back to his sister.

“Oh, god. Oh, god,” Vic was saying. Conner placed the kit in the sand and untied the flap. His sister ignored it. The way she was rocking and holding the man’s hand, Conner knew there was nothing they could do for him.

“Damien?” she asked. “Can you hear me?”

The blood stirred on the young man’s lips. Conner looked him over, couldn’t see any obvious wounds, no blood on his chest or stomach or hands. And then Conner noticed the odd way the man’s legs were bent. They were shapeless. The tight dive suit dented in where there should have been protruding knees. He moved to the other side of Vic and gently slid his hands from the man’s thigh toward his calf, looking for any response on the man’s face, feeling for a break. The man’s lips moved—he was trying to say something—and Conner felt the spongy flesh beneath his palms, the absence of bone.

“Say again,” Vic said. She bent close to the man’s lips, sweat dripping from her nose. The heat of the burning sarfer was unbearable. Conner saw that the man wasn’t moving one of his arms, which looked as limp and deformed as his legs.

“We’ve gotta get him away from this fire,” Conner said.

His sister waved him off and listened. Her face was contorted in concentration, rage, grief, some impossible-to-read combination of worry lines and furrowed brow. Conner joined her by the man’s head and tried to help her listen. The man was rambling, his voice a rough and halting whisper. Conner heard him mention a bomb. Something about playing marbles. He was mixing accounts of the dead with talk of a child’s game. And then Conner heard the name “Yegery,” a name he recognized, a man his sister had talked about often, some kind of divemaster. The injured man licked his lips and tried to speak again.

“I’m sorry,” he wheezed. The words came clear, seemed a powerful effort. There were bloody gasps for air between each short sentence. “Tried to stop them. Heard what they were gonna do. From a defector. Made me tell who I heard it from. I told ’em, Vic. I’m sorry—”

He coughed and spit up blood. Conner saw the tattoos on the man’s neck, the marks of the Low-Pub Legion. One of his sister’s friends.

“What’re they planning?” his sister asked.

The man spoke again of making glass marbles, of a bomb, of people in the group who didn’t want to go along, who were dead now. He said Yegery had gone mad. That there was no talking to him. That this guy from the north was in his ear, in his head. The young man lifted his hand a few inches from the sand, and Vic gripped it with her own. “Today,” he said. His eyes drifted away from Vic and toward the heavens. He stopped blinking away the sand. “Today,” he whispered, the blood finally falling still on his lips.

Vic bent her head over the dead man and screamed. More a growl than a scream. Like a cayote cornered between pinched dunes. An inhuman sound that made Conner afraid.

He sat perfectly still and watched as his sister scooped two handfuls of sand and placed them over the man’s eyes. She dropped his hand and patted his stomach, opened a pocket there and pulled something out. She stuffed this away, then seemed to notice something wrong. She turned back to the suit to inspect it more closely, wiped the tears from her cheeks.

“Those sick fucks,” she hissed.

“What is it?” Conner asked. He could barely breathe. The heat from the fire was intolerable, but he knew he would sit there as long as his sister needed.

“His suit,” she said. She pointed to a tear at the man’s waist, a place where wires had been pulled out and twisted together. There was another spot just like it by one shoulder. “They wired his suit inside out. They used his band to torture him. Turned his suit against him to make him talk.” She punched her fist into the sand. Did it again. Then stood and began marching back toward the sarfer.

“What did he say?” Conner asked, getting up and chasing after her. “What’re they planning to do? Did he say where the bomb would be?”

“No,” Vic said. “But they’re doing it today. They’re gonna end everything. And we’re gonna be too late again.” She jumped back into the helm seat and began taking in the lines. Conner adjusted himself in the other chair and unfurled the jib.

“We’ve got plenty of wind,” he said. “We’ll get there in time.”

Vic didn’t respond. The sarfer lurched into motion and began to build speed. She had been right about the weather that day.

53 • Father’s Last Rites

They sailed in silence for an hour. They passed other sarfers heading north, crossed tracks that led east to west, saw half a dozen craft out with their masts laid back, dive flags flapping from the rails to warn away others. Conner’s thoughts whirled. He gave his sister as much time as he could, but he had to know. When she returned from a trip to the bow to check the lines for chafing, he finally asked.

“So who was that guy? Someone you knew?”

“A friend,” Vic said, taking the tiller back from him. “He used to run with Marco. Some of the Legion guys left a while back to join up with another outfit. I think a few had a change of heart, maybe said some shit they shouldn’t. Damien was unfortunate enough to hear.” She shook her head. “Bastard could never keep a secret.”

“They… what they did to him.” Conner didn’t really have a question, was just trying to process the level of fucked-up they were dealing with. He couldn’t believe there were people who would kill so many, even those amongst themselves, and all for what? What was there to gain when everything was gone? “What was that you took off him? His last rites?”

Vic nodded. Conner knew about this tradition, but he also knew you weren’t supposed to ask divers what they carried in their bellies. And then he felt like an idiot. He remembered the note his mother had given him to pass along to Vic. He hadn’t seen Vic later that night, had spent that time with Gloralai, so he’d forgotten. This didn’t seem like the appropriate time, but he was scared he would forget again. “I’ve got something for you,” he said, digging into his own pocket. Vic tried to wave him off. She was obviously lost in thought, but Conner took over the tiller and forced the letter into her hand. “Mom gave it to me last night. She said to give it to you. I forgot about it until just now.”

Vic started to put the letter away with the other one. But then she hesitated. While Conner manned the tiller, she opened the letter. She kept it down in her lap and behind her knees so the wind wouldn’t tear it from her grip. Conner adjusted his ker and concentrated on where he was steering.

“Who is this from?” she asked, turning and shouting over the noise of the wind and the shush of the sarfer as it tore across the sand.

“Mom,” he said.

Vic bent forward and read some more, then flipped the letter over, studied the back, studied the front again, seemed to read it a second time. Conner glanced repeatedly from the bow to his sister, watching her head swing across the lines on the page. She turned and looked at Conner for a long time; whatever was spinning in that head of hers was lost behind her goggles.

“Dad wrote this,” she said.

Conner’s hand nearly slipped off the tiller. “What?” Maybe he didn’t hear right.

“What the fuck is this?” Vic asked. “Where did this come from?” She tucked the letter under one leg and eased the main, let out the jib. They lost some speed, and it got easier to hear, easier to talk. She pulled the letter out from underneath her and showed it to Conner. “Dad signed this,” she said. “Is this why you said we should go west? This letter?”

“I didn’t read it,” Conner said. He gave his sister the tiller and took the letter. He read it. It was the note Violet had mentioned, the one that got lost. He turned to his sister. “Violet told us some of this. She’d read some of it when Dad wrote it out. She said she lost the letter. Mom must’ve found it. I had no idea. But yeah, this is what we were trying to tell you. Screw rebuilding, Dad wants us to move on.”

“But Palm says he doesn’t believe this story—”

“Palm is fried. He said this girl talks like someone else. That doesn’t mean anything.”

“This girl who’s our sister.”

“Yes.”

The sarfer sailed on. Vic took in the main a little.

“So what’s she like, this supposed sister of ours?”

Conner laughed. “Headstrong. She sounds a lot older than she looks. Has all of our more annoying traits.”

Vic laughed. “A half-sister as half-crazy as the rest of us? That means Mom’s right about where all that comes from.”

“Heh. I guess. You’d like her. She’s a diver, too. Dad taught her. But she does talk funny—”

Vic stiffened. She turned and stared at Conner, pulled her goggles down around her neck. Her eyes were wild. “But what if Palmer’s right?”

“Vic, I’m telling you—”

“No, what if this girl and Brock are from the same place?”

“I don’t think—” But then Conner realized what she was getting at. That her conclusion was the opposite of Palmer’s. “Oh, fuck,” he said. “Yeah. God, yeah.”

“Why would anyone want to level Springston?” Vic asked. “Why would they want to level Low-Pub? And Palmer said these people found Danvar but didn’t seem interested in scavenging from it, that they were just using it to fine-tune some map, to locate this bomb of theirs—”

“They don’t give a shit about what’s left out here,” Conner said, “because he’s not from here.” He nodded, remembering something else. “Violet said there were more and more of our people appearing in their camp, that we’re becoming a nuisance to them, like rats—”

“Because there’s been more people jumping the gash,” Vic said.

“So how do they turn that dribble off?”

“It’s not by making us want to stay here.” Vic clenched and unclenched her jaw. “It’s by getting rid of us.”

“How many do you think there are? The guy back there, your friend, was he—?”

“No,” Vic said. “He grew up in Low-Pub. I’ve known him forever. I know a lot of the guys running around with this crew, and they didn’t just pop up out of nowhere. They were recruited.”

“But why would any of our people help them do something like this?”

Vic didn’t answer right away. She tightened the jib and got the sarfer back up to full speed. Finally, she turned to Conner. “One crazy fuck could do this,” she said. “One crazy fuck with a pocket of coin who knows how to say the right things. That’s all it would take. He could find enough people to kill for the thrill of it, for some bullshit cause, for bread and water and copper and a chance to blow shit up.” She slapped the tiller. Shook her head. “Fucking Marco,” she said. And she must’ve gotten sand in her eyes, because she had to pull her goggles back up over them.

Conner slumped in his seat. He wondered if all they were thinking was possible. He suspected he and his sister were being crazier than Palmer with all of this speculation and nonsense. It didn’t seem like any of what they were positing could be true. But which was more likely? That the girl who’d crawled half-dead into his campsite was a cannibal from the north? Or that the crazed assholes who had leveled Springston were working for someone who’d brought his thunder clear across No Man’s Land?

“What’re you thinking?” Vic asked. She turned and studied him, could tell he was mulling it all over.

“I think you’re fucking crazy,” Conner said. “And I think you’re probably right.”

54 • Low-Pub

They parked the sarfer on the north side of Low-Pub. Conner and his sister had debated where to start as they approached town. There were no obvious targets in Low-Pub; not like Springston and its great wall. They still didn’t have a course of action, but as they lowered the mainsail, the pop of its canvas in the wind was replaced by the pop, pop of distant gunfire. They both turned toward town. Finding trouble might not be as hard as they’d feared. And there were no columns of black smoke to indicate that they were too late. They sat on the sarfer’s hull and pulled their freshly charged dive suits on. Vic suggested they go without bottles so they could move more easily. “And don’t hesitate to bury these guys,” she told him. “Send them straight down.”

Conner nodded. It was a dangerous heresy for a diver to mutter, using a suit against another. But they were dealing with people who killed others by turning their own suits against them. They were dealing with people who leveled towns. He wouldn’t hesitate. Yesterday, he had saved lives. Today, he steeled himself for the more gruesome task of taking them. He pulled his band down over his head and followed his sister into town. The two of them moved in a crouch. Low-Pub felt dead. Like everyone was gone or locked up in their homes. It was a hand past noon, the wind and sand whistling through town. The gunfire had stopped, which left them moving toward the area they thought they’d heard it emanate from. Vic turned and pointed down toward the sand. Conner nodded and lowered his visor. His sister disappeared, and he powered up his suit, pulled his ker over his mouth, and followed.

They moved beneath the town where it was forbidden to dive. There was a purple roof of open air overhead, dots of buried garbage and scraps here and there, a few iron cages around basements, erected by the paranoid, but they were blind to what was going on above the dunes. This was a safe and quick way to move, but they couldn’t see where they were moving to or if anyone was up there. Conner just trusted his sister and kept close to her boots. He noticed that she kept studying the mass of magentas and deep purples above them as if there was information in that great bruise.

She slowed and began to rise. Conner followed. He saw the bubble and swell of sand they were entering and realized they were coming up inside a mounded dune. Vic pierced the top, just her head, and Conner did the same. They flicked their visors up. Shifting the sand around her, Vic slid forward, away from Conner, just her head moving across the surface of the dune’s ridge like a ball in a game of kick. His sister could move the sand in ways he’d never thought of; he had to learn on the fly how to adjust and mimic her. It was difficult, keeping the same level as he pushed the sand against his back. He took deep gulps of air through his ker, reminded once again that he couldn’t stay down as long as she could.

She lifted a hand out of the sand and pointed down into the middle of a large square that was ringed with makeshift shacks. It was the market at the center of Low-Pub. There were goods and wares hanging in the shacks, smoke rising from food stalls, the smell of meat burning, but no one shopping or tending the stalls. A dozen or so bodies were strewn throughout the market. Bloodstains. People had been shot, everyone else running for cover. Explained why it was so quiet. Conner spotted a small group of men working in the dead center of the market. Someone, somewhere, screamed in agony. Not all of the shot were dead. Not yet.

“Wait here,” Vic said. She flipped her visor down and slid beneath the sand.

“No fucking way,” Conner told the empty air. He flipped down his visor and dove after her. She was already a receding green form beneath the sand. She glided down the face of the dune and toward the wide flat space where the market square lay. Conner strained to catch up. He joined Vic as she slowed and slid through the earth on her back, gazing up at the waves of purple, looking for the boots of those above, was probably planning on pulling them down into the sand to immobilize them, to smother them.

Conner felt the need to breathe. He wondered if he should turn back. He couldn’t hold his breath like Vic could. Would need to surface. He should’ve stayed and watched from the dune like she’d said. He’d been too impulsive, too eager.

When she saw him following along behind, he knew the same thoughts were occurring to her, could almost see the anger in the orange and red shape of her, the way the bright yellow of her visor trained on him. He lifted his palms in apology, to tell her he was going back, when the sand around him ceased to flow.

He thought it was Vic at first, that she was pushing him back, had put the brakes on him, but then she flew violently up through the sand. A moment later, with a sickening lurch, Conner shot up as well. He broke the surface and went into the air several feet, came down with a grunt as the air was knocked out of him.

He tried to flow the sand beneath him, but it was stonesand, locked tight. A gunshot exploded nearby, and Conner heard his sister cry out. Something was pressed against his back. His band and visor were torn from his head, the blinding world of purples returning to the orange sand and the bright sunlight. Someone patted him down roughly, two sets of hands running across his suit. They told him to sit up and patted along his chest, under and down both arms.

“No guns,” someone said.

“She’s clean,” said another.

Conner blinked and looked around. He found himself among a gathering of legs and boots, those men at the center of the square. His sister was lying on the ground ahead of him, her visor gone as well. A man was pointing a gun up in the air. Conner tried to tell if his sister had been shot. He thought maybe she’d been punched or had cried out in alarm. An older man with a beard approached her. He had a crazy patchwork dive suit on—strips of varying cloth sewn together, wires trailing up along the outside in tangles and coils. He jangled as he walked.

“What the hell’re you doin’ here?” the man asked. When Vic tried to get up, he made a fist. She sank a foot down into the sand and cried out as the ground pinched her. “Trying to sneak up on me?” It was a question soaked in disbelief more than anger.

Vic grimaced, but stopped fighting the sand. “Don’t do this, Yegery. You don’t have to do this.”

Behind the man, Conner saw a solid column of sand sticking up from the desert floor. A smooth metal sphere stood atop this, gleaming in the high sun. Vic was looking at it too.

“Oh, but I do.” Yegery knelt down beside her. The man by Conner kept a hand on his shoulder. There was a gun in his hand. Conner knew sorta how to use one if he could wrestle it away. He was pretty sure.

“You see,” Yegery said, “we’ve been fed a lie. We’ve been told to feast on the sand and be happy. But there’s a bigger and better world out there, and I’ve been promised a piece of it. All it takes is learning to let go of this—” He waved his hands around at the market, then stood up. “We’ve been digging for something better all this time. I’ve spent my entire life digging. Your father spent his life digging. And then he wised up. He knew where to look.”

“I have a note from him,” Vic said. “You wanna read it? He says it’s hell over there!”

“Ah, that’s because he’s on the wrong side.”

Several of the men laughed. Conner pulled his feet up underneath him and was told not to fucking move. “Sit on your hands,” the man standing over him said.

Gladly, Conner thought. He tucked his hands and boots beneath him. His sister strained against the clutches of the stonesand.

“What is that thing?” she asked, staring at the strange column.

“This is an atomic bomb.” Yegery walked over to it. “Don’t ask me how it works. All I know is how to work it. Easy as making marbles,” he said. “Easy as pinching it down.” He stared at the column, and the sand rose up and surrounded the sphere.

Conner could feel the hum in the sand beneath him. He wiggled his foot half out of his boot and toggled the power switch Rob had wired up. He got his hand around the band. Worked it out slowly. The man with the gun was watching Yegery as the divemaster continued to talk.

“Now, if you’ll excuse me, the rest of us are going to strap on some tanks and get down where it’s safe. You and your friend here can see how far you can run before this goes off, but I should warn you, if this does what I’ve been told it can do, you won’t get far enough. And I really do hate that for you, Vic. I like you. But this is bigger than us.” Yegery looked at the men. “Get your tanks on. And bring their bands with us.”

“Down to two hundred?” one of the men asked, slinging a tank of air over his back.

“Two hundred,” Yegery said. They were right back to business, not worried about Vic, who was still pinned by the stonesand, and not worried about Conner, who didn’t have his band or visor, didn’t have a gun.

But he had his father’s boots. He had spent enough time in them to be comfortable there, to know what they could do, what he could do. He held the band Rob had made in his hand, his palm sweaty, and he remembered what he’d told his brother beneath their house, about not shorting the wires. He loosened his grip on the strip of fabric and wire. There wasn’t much time. The men were testing their regulators with sporadic hisses, getting the sand out of the mouthpieces, cranking valves and cinching up their harnesses. They would disappear beneath the sand, and Conner and Vic would have to run as fast and as far as they could. But only if they released his sister. Only if he could free her with his boots. Or he could take her straight down while the bomb went off. But then what? Would they let them go free after? The man in charge said this wasn’t about him and his sister. They didn’t seem too angry. But they were about to blow up the square. Conner didn’t know what to do as he prepared to throw the band on and act. He had to do something. Had to stop them.

“Where’s Brock?” Vic asked the old divemaster. “Why can’t he do his own dirty work?”

She was stalling. But she was also getting their attention, which Conner didn’t want. Yegery pulled his regulator out of his mouth and walked back to her. “If he could do this himself, why would he need me? You’re a diver. You know not everyone can do what we do. It’s a good thing he needs me, or I’d be in your situation right now.”

“What about when he doesn’t need you anymore?”

Yegery hesitated. Eventually, he smiled. “He’ll always need me. I’m taking the secrets of diving to his people. For all the magic they possess over there, it turns out some of our tricks are known only to us. Don’t you worry about me.”

“I think he’ll betray you,” Vic said.

“We’ll see,” Yegery told her. He stared down at Vic, made a gesture, and she slowly rose to the surface. She flexed her arms, was free of the stonesand. “You might want to run,” he told her. He reached up for his visor, and Conner knew the time was now. He kept the band close to his body and slid his hands into his lap, then up to his chest. He tried to pre-visualize what he wanted the sand to do, just like his sister had taught him to prep the dunes before diving into them.

“You sure about leaving them up here?” one of the guys asked. “I feel like we should shoot them. Just to make sure.”

Vic turned and glanced at Conner. He had both hands around the band, was making sure he had it lined up right. The wires trailing out from the boot were visible, but there was nothing he could do about that.

“No. Don’t shoot them,” Yegery said. “It’s not my fault they came here. Their death is on their hands, not mine.” He looked down at Vic, who was still in a crouch. “Think of it as a favor on behalf of your father. A gift.” He flipped down his visor and smiled.

“I’ve got a gift from our father,” Conner said. The men turned in his direction. He had the band down over his forehead, could feel the sand beneath him, humming with some terrible power. “Here.”

The world erupted into violence. For a moment, Conner thought the bomb had gone off, that Yegery had triggered it with his band, that this was what it felt like to die in a blast, a split second of noise and a jolt of pain and a flash of light. He had told the sand what he wanted, had built up the vision in his mind, pictured it like a coiled spring, ready to unleash. But he had to go and say something as the connection hit. He saw a gun come up, the flash of light and a loud noise, so fucking stupid, a burst of agony in his chest, shot, falling backward into the sand, but the sand wound tight in his head and exploding out in the shape he’d imagined, inspired by that column with the bomb on it.

That column of sand with the sphere inside collapsed. The silver ball rolled across the blood-soaked sand toward Vic. Five other columns had shot up, sharp points of stonesand beneath each of the men, impaling them, one of them screaming and writhing before falling silent, all of them quickly dead.

Conner groaned and held his chest, cursing himself. Beneath him, the sand slipped and swirled as he lost his concentration, his connection with his father’s boots. He ripped the band off, and the world was mostly still. Just the thrumming of his pulse and the agony of the wound.

“Easy,” Vic said. She was beside him. She ripped the dive suit along a seam, opened it up to inspect the wound.

“I’m gonna fucking die,” Conner whimpered.

Vic swept his hair off his forehead. “You’re not gonna die,” she said. “It’s not that bad.”

Conner kicked the sand in pain. “It feels fucking bad,” he said. He watched as his sister surveyed the mess all around them, the towers of gore that her brother had made.

“I’ve seen worse,” she said.

55 • A Deep Discomfort

The brigands were still staining the sand with their blood as the people of Low-Pub began to brave the market. Soon Vic wasn’t the only person kneeling and tending to a loved one. A mother wailed and clutched what must’ve been her son. Someone shouted Vic’s name, a young man with short dreadlocks and tattoos on his dark skin. Conner tried not to yelp as the two of them tended to his wound. Every time he cried out about his chest hurting, Vic assured him it was his shoulder, that he’d be fine. He couldn’t feel his hand, but his sister was saying he’d be fine.

The dive suit was cut away from him with a knife, the wires in the fabric popping as they were severed. That suit would never move the sand again. Vic stood and left his side and ran over to shoo someone away from the metal sphere, telling them not to touch it. She didn’t dare touch it either. Instead, she searched one of the impaled men and found her visor and band. Conner watched as she loosened the sand and sent their bodies beneath the market floor. She buried the bomb in the sand so no one could move it.

“Thank you,” Conner said, as the man with dreadlocks finished wrapping his chest and his arm with scraps torn from a t-shirt. Conner managed to wiggle his fingers, which comforted him somewhat. But it still felt like he’d been kicked by a goat. One whole side of his body ached. His feet grew warm, and he realized the boots were still on. As he kicked them off and reached in for the power switch, he caught Vic eyeing them.

“Rob,” Conner said, as if that would explain everything. He remembered yelling at his brother for fooling around with their dad’s boots. The shoes had been nothing more than a memento for years and years, just sitting in a corner or shoved under a bed. Now they had saved Conner’s life. Several times. Instead of yelling at his brother, he should’ve thanked him. He would thank him. And he would have his brother wire up the fucking power switch where it was easier to reach.

Vic clasped her dreadlocked friend on the arm. The man used his teeth to tear more of a shirt into strips of cloth, then surveyed the market, looking for someone else who needed tending to.

“Can you stand?” Vic asked.

Conner nodded, but he wasn’t sure. He got his boots back on, and Vic helped him up. He swayed there. The sight of his blood on the sand made him feel sick. His mind went to Gloralai, the sudden panic of how close he’d come to never seeing her again. And then a flush of guilt that he’d think of a classmate before thinking of his mother and his family. “What now?” he asked. “None of these guys was the one we were looking for, was he?”

“I’m guessing he’s long gone,” Vic said. “The guys who give the orders never get what’s coming to them. They’re the Lords in their towers, the brigands back in their tents while someone else blows themselves to pieces.”

“And that was the bomb?” He nodded to the spot in the sand where she’d buried it. Vic guided him toward the spot, an arm around his waist, letting him lean on her.

“How long before it goes off?”

“I don’t think it will,” Vic said. “Damien said it has to be squeezed to go off. Like making marbles for a child.”

Conner thought of how some divers could force sand together so fast that a tiny perfect sphere of glass would be formed. “Seems like a weird way to set off a bomb,” he said.

“Yeah,” Vic agreed.

“We can’t just leave it here.”

“No,” she said. “We’ll have to take it with us.”

“And bury it as deep as we possibly can,” Conner suggested.

His sister shook her head. She looked at the people coming out from their stalls and homes to see what the commotion had been about. She turned and squinted into the wind, gazing out toward the east.

“We’ve got to do something with it,” she said. “We’ve got to do something.”

56 • A Place to Rest

The heavy sphere sat in the depression it made up there in the sarfer’s trampoline. Vic had lashed it down with seizings of rope to that great net that spanned the sarfer’s twin bows. Conner lost himself in that bomb from his helm seat. He held his tender arm in his lap, his shoulder throbbing, feeling the gentle sway of his body side to side as gusts puffed variably between the dunes to the east.

There were things that could not be contemplated, he realized. There were potential truths too costly to bear. It wasn’t until after the body was scarred by a brush with danger that it learned fear. Conner thought of all the untouched places on his soul yet to teach him something. All the unblemished parts of him waiting for that razor of truth.

Sons of whores had existed before him. This was a fact, just not one he’d ever lived with. And so it wasn’t a pain he felt for others. Not until it was his mom coming home with bruises lurking beneath her makeup. Not until it was his mom that the fathers of friends boasted of. There had been others like him before. He’d just never thought of them.

The same was true for the leveling of a town. Witnessing Springston in the aftermath of its destruction made the danger to Low-Pub real. Fear required precedents. The newborn reaches for the hot poker— look how red and bright!

That silver sphere might’ve been a harmless thing in his mind, resting gently there in that trampoline, were it not for Springston. And the threat Vic had made after lashing the bomb down—this idea that she would deliver Brock’s gift to him—might be a joke to ignore, had Conner’s father not disappeared across the Bull’s gash all those years ago.

“What about Mom?” Conner asked. He tore his eyes away from the bomb and gazed off to the west, toward the tall peaks and the setting sun.

“What about her?” Vic asked. “You think she cares if I disappear? You know how many years we went without talking?”

Conner thought he knew. But he also saw their mother differently now. Had seen her tend to Violet, had seen her save Rob’s life. She wasn’t defined by what she had to do in order to survive. None of them were.

“It’s a damn miracle,” Vic said, “that I didn’t leave years ago.”

Conner turned toward his sister. Sand hissed against his goggles. He adjusted his ker to keep the sand out of his mouth. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.

His sister stared over the bow for a long while. When her ker flapped up, he could see that she was biting her lower lip.

“You want to know why I don’t go camping with you boys?” she asked.

Fuck yeah, he did. “Why?” Conner asked.

“Because any step in that direction, and I’m not turning back.” She turned toward him, unreadable behind dark goggles and ker. “I feel what Dad must’ve felt. There’s something bigger than us out there, stomping around. It’s either better than this place or it’s an end to me. I contemplate both.”

“If you go, I’m going with you.”

Vic laughed. “No. You’re not.”

“That’s bullshit.” Conner felt tears of anger well up in his eyes. “You can dive, but I can’t. You can move off to Low-Pub, but it’s too dangerous for me. You can date whoever you want, but Palmer is an idiot for hanging out with Hap.” Conner pointed up the mast with his good arm. “Flying over the dunes with red sails and a Legion ker and you’re gonna tell me what I can’t do because it’s too dangerous? But it’s okay for you? You’re a fucking hypocrite, Vic!”

His sister raised a hand in defeat, and Conner calmed himself. Vic turned toward him and lowered her ker so she could be heard without shouting. “I’m not a hypocrite,” she said. “I’d be a hypocrite if I cared about myself as much as I care about you. But I don’t. I think parents know this. Older siblings know it as well.”

Conner scratched where his bandage was itching his neck. He thought of things he’d said to Rob that he’d be angry to hear himself. “I just don’t want you to go,” he said. The sarfer went over a smooth rise and sank back down, making his queasy stomach feel worse. “You can say all you want that you’ll come back, but we both know you won’t. Nobody ever does.”

“Nobody?” She pulled her ker back over the bridge of her nose. They sailed in silence for a dune, only the slithering taunt of vipers against those red sails.

“I lied about the night she came into camp,” Conner said. “Violet didn’t make it to our tent. I was out there.”

Vic was adjusting a line, but she stopped and stared at him. “Out where?” she asked.

“Across the gash. With three canteens and a pack of supplies.”

“Bullshit.”

But he could tell she believed him. That she knew. Conner fixated again on that silver sphere.

“Palmer didn’t show up, so I was going to leave Rob there by himself. I did leave Rob there. I snuck out in the middle of the night, was across the gash and a hundred paces on when I found her.” He turned and lowered his own ker, didn’t care about the grit getting into his mouth. “So when you tell me, or you tell Palmer, or you tell Rob that you’re gonna go out there and give ’em hell or get Dad back or that you’re gonna return with him, just know that I’ve been where you are, making that decision, and I know what it’s like to lie to myself and know that I’m never coming back.”

Vic turned away from him and lifted her goggles. Wiped at her eyes.

“I know you think you’ll try, but so did Dad. If you do this, you’re leaving us for good. And I’m gonna hate you for it.”

Vic turned back to him. She was smiling and crying at the same time. “But you can leave Rob in that tent? Fucking hypocrite,” she said.

And in that way that often happens between siblings, cruel words were followed by laughter. Tears dripped into smiles. A flaming sun dipped behind cool mountains, and a harmless-looking silver sphere rode serenely at the bow.

57 • Swinging the Gaze of God

They thought they were making it easy on her, that they were supporting her, but accompanying her to the gash just made it worse. As did the sight of her family erecting a tent together, just like olden times. All the water and food and supplies they’d hauled, every backbreaking ounce of their hope over her return, but Conner had been right. She could lie to each and every one of them and promise that she’d be back, but she knew. Her father had known. Everyone who crosses that gash knows.

She unpacked and checked her pack, made sure she had everything. Water and jerky. Two loaves of bread. Spare ker. Her band and visor. A portable shade for sleeping during the day. The large knife Graham had given her when she’d broken the news to him. Bandages and salve. The three notes the boys had written. The five pairs of underwear that made her think of Marco and had her suppressing the urge to laugh or cry. She would wear her dive suit under the patchwork tunic cinched around her waist. The heavy sphere she left in the bottom of the pack. It seemed to let off heat, even though she’d kept it out of the sun. She felt ready. Far to the east, the grumbles and roars called to her.

“You know I’m the one who should be going,” Palmer said, as he watched her repack her bag.

“Why?” she asked. “Because you’re the oldest son?” It was a jab meant in jest, but none of her brothers seemed interested in sparring with her.

“No,” he said. “Because I owe this asshole. Because of Hap. Because I started all of this.”

“More reason then for you to be here and see it through.” Vic pulled two folded pieces of paper from her belly pouch and handed them to her brother.

“Fuck you,” Palmer said. He held up his hands and showed her his palms. “I’m not taking your rites. You’re coming back alive, damn you.”

Vic grabbed his wrist and jammed the papers into his hand. “These aren’t my last rites, asshole. It’s your map.”

Palmer looked at the papers in his hand. He inspected the map he had pulled out of Danvar, then shook the other piece of paper. “What’s this note, then?”

“That’s everything I know about diving deep. How to dive down to a thousand meters.”

“Bullshit,” Palmer said.

Vic grabbed him by the shoulders and waited for him to look up at her. “Even with the right suit and visors, those depths will kill you without batting an eye. There’s no breathing down there. And your suit will feel like it’s gonna rip you apart until you get below three hundred. But it can be done. I’ve marked some of my favorite sites on your map there. Also some others that I think look promising. I made a key on the back so you can understand my notes. My advice to you right now is to send divers dumb as me down there. Don’t take that chance yourself. You’ve got nothing to prove.” She tapped him on the shoulder. “You stay alive,” she said. “You were the one.”

Palmer lifted his goggles and wiped tears away from his eyes. He lowered them back down and studied the map and the notes. “How’re these not your last rites?” he asked. He looked up at her. “You’re not coming back, are you?”

Vic hugged her brother, and Palmer returned the embrace. “Take care of yourself,” she said.

“I will.” His voice was a whisper.

“And Rob and Conner.”

“I will,” he said.

She let him go and turned away before lifting her own goggles and wiping her own eyes. Rob ran toward her from the tent and crashed into her legs, throwing his arms around her. “Not yet,” he told Vic. “Don’t go yet.”

Vic knelt down and hugged her little brother. “I’ll be back soon,” she told him. Rob frowned. There was sand on his lips. Vic lifted his ker from around his neck and adjusted it snug across his nose. He was the hardest one to lie to because he was the smartest. “Take care of your new sister,” she said.

Rob nodded. Conner came to her side with her canteens. He lifted her heavy pack and held it for her the way a diver held another’s tank. She stood and slipped her arms through the backpack straps, cinched the belt down snug over her hips, then took the canteens one at a time.

“Damn thing’s heavy,” Conner said, referring to the pack but probably more directly referring to the bomb. He stood and rubbed his shoulder. Something unspoken passed between the two of them, the sort of communication that happens beneath the sand when throat whispers become another’s thoughts. The two of them had dived together, had salvaged lives together, and they had salvaged something between them by doing so.

Vic gave her brother a hug. He slapped her pack and whispered something lost to the wind. And then Vic turned toward the gash and saw her mother waiting out there, just like she’d found her mom the night their dad had disappeared. Vic left her siblings behind, waved one more time toward the tent where Violet was standing alone, then strode out to meet her mom, dreading this goodbye the most.

“I can’t talk you out of this,” her mother said.

Vic laughed, thinking on how hard so many people had tried. “When’s the last time you talked me out of anything?” she asked. She meant it to be fun, to keep that goodbye from being so serious that she couldn’t leave, but most of all to lift her mother’s hopes that she might return.

“I lost you once. I don’t want to lose my daughter again.”

Vic glanced back at the tent. “You’ve got a new daughter to watch over,” she said. “Think of it as an even trade—”

“Don’t you give me that bulls—” her mother started.

“I’m not giving shit,” Vic said. She felt the blood in her veins grow cold, the chance at humor lost. “I’m not giving, Mom. I’m taking. That’s what I’m doing. I’m taking my father back from them. I’m going to take their city and make them pay for the one we lost. Tit for tat, Mother. They owe us, and I’m gonna make them pay.”

“No. You’ll cross that gash and you’ll die for nothing.” Her mother was crying. It was the hardest thing Vic ever bore seeing, her mother vulnerable and weak and… human. Her mom didn’t even wipe away the tears, just let them gather sand from the wind.

“You did your best by us, Mom. You weren’t given packed sand to walk across. I know that. I wouldn’t have done half as good as you did.”

With that, Vic hitched up the heavy pack and turned away from the campsite. It was the highest compliment she could’ve paid. She could’ve told her mom that she loved her, but neither of them would’ve believed that. Love was earned and hard-fought and cherished. It was Marco’s face and his rough palm on her cheek. It wasn’t something a family got just for being a family. But her mom had done more with a shitty hand and honest play than a bluffer with an ace up his sleeve. Vic knew this was true as she crossed that hard break in the desert sand, that jagged divide between the then and the now—like a row between lovers or between family members, a wound that permanently mars a relationship, that moves it from courtship and passion to resigned cohabitation, that turns a daughter into an enemy, so that the best one can hope for is that she becomes a friend.

Vic wiped the mud off her cheek, hating herself as she left the gash behind. And then she stopped and lowered her heavy pack there in No Man’s Land. She turned, pulled her ker down around her neck, and ran back, felt near to her youth again, was crying like the little girl she never wanted to be, never wanted to be. And her mom’s arms were wide. No questions. Just tears streaking down her face. A line in the sand that was nothing, not even there, taken in stride.

“Thank you,” Vic muttered into her mother’s neck. “Thank you, Mom. Thank you.”

Which was more than love. And it sustained her as she went back to her burden—that crack in the sand a thing that could be crossed and re-crossed—and she headed dead into the wind and toward the horizon, her mother’s reply echoing in her ear, accompanying her on that long march, whispered there at the edge of No Man’s Land and over the insolent flap of that untamable tent:

“My sweet girl. My sweetest Victoria.”

58 • A Rap Upon Heaven’s Gate

Conner was the one who spotted it. On the seventh night, stoking the fire with a metal rod left over from incorrectly assembling the tent, he lifted his eyes to a sudden white glow on the horizon. It was a burst of daylight like the sun had forgotten the time and had leapt out of bed, rushing, late to work.

Conner shouted for the others, and his mother and Rob and Violet poured from the tent. Palmer rushed over from the other side of the campsite, buttoning his trousers, having gone downwind for a piss. Together, they watched the glow. It bloomed like a radiant flower. It was so bright it required turning away, required looking at it askance, required giving it the same quarter as the noonday sun.

“Jesus,” Palmer whispered.

There was no doubting that a city had just vanished. Conner had seen bombs go off before. Spotting the blast of a normal bomb was a chore from two dunes away. This came to life from over the horizon.

“Vic,” Rob said, sniffing.

Their mother put a hand on his shoulder. “She’ll be fine,” she said, but Conner didn’t think she sounded sure. She couldn’t know. None of them could know.

And then the noise hit after some long consideration. A rumble in their chests and bones. A deep growl of the earth and a howl in the heavens. The wind seemed to shift a moment later, and the sand startled into chaos and turbulence. They held on to one another. Violet took Conner’s hand and squeezed it, and he realized that their little sister was the only one who had ever been there, that she was the only one who had any sense of what had just been harmed. Conner could practically feel her longing to rush that way and see for herself.

“They’ll know we’re here now,” Palmer said.

“They’ve known,” their mother told them. “They’ve always known we’re here. They know we suffer. Now, they’ll give a shit.”

The uncharacteristic language brought silence. A heavy stillness. It took several heartbeats for Conner to realize what was wrong. It would’ve been easy to not notice at all, to go on not noticing for days and days, so steady had been that backdrop of infernal noise that its absence could almost not register. But he heard it, somehow. He heard that quiet far over the horizon.

“Listen,” he whispered. “The drums. They’ve stopped beating.”

There was food and water for five more days, but they made it last eight. Vic had told them not to wait, but they waited. Their mother told them not to hope, but they hoped. Eight more days of camping, of the tent hot at noon and chilly at night, of a quiet shared, a story to pierce the silence, the relief of occasional laughter, the most time ever spent together, time spent talking and thinking. There were stories of Vic to go along with stories of Father. A long wait for some return. If not a person strolling over the horizon, then at least an apparition. If not an apparition, then some word. If not a word, at least a sign.

Palmer spoke of Danvar. A finger in a rip by his belly, he confessed to a murder and their mother held him like he was a boy again. And Conner saw a man in his elder brother’s sobs. It was all life would ever be, as the days and nights drew out and half-caps of water were sipped. No one would ever go back to Springston, for there was no town. They would live in the tent until the food and water was gone, such was the drawing out of night and interminable day as dreams and stories mixed and a week felt like a summer, and the moon went from a sliver to a pregnant disc, and even the rhythms and howls of the wind could be sensed and foreseen, like an old man who has watched the sands with such burning intensity for a wrinkle of years that he could paint a picture of a landscape that is not yet but will be.

This was how keenly the moments were felt. Especially by the crack in the earth, the Bull’s gash, where a haunting depth opened in the soul of any who stood there, where toes were daringly dangled just to feel the cool air rush up between them, just to pretend that the howl was for the delicately poised, just to imagine a lovely visage down in the darkness screaming Don’t do it. Step back. You are too bold and lovely and singular to look down in here and upon me.

Conner sat there anyway and swung his legs in the gash, so intimate had the two become the past weeks, so hollow the threat and weak the pull. He dribbled sand through his hand and down toward the center of the earth. Nearby, marbles of glass were flicked to the far side, those small beads formed by Palmer, who spent much of his time showing that he could, no doubt thinking that it would’ve been better had he gone, the eldest son.

And on the eighth day, when the hike back should have ended, when they could wait no more, as the last of the water splashed Rob’s tongue and even the moldy heel of the bread was divided among their family, they gathered by the gash in the earth, crossed and re-crossed like a thread leaps and forms stitches, and surveyed that boom-less and quiet horizon.

It was early. The sun a mere hint. A pink ghost lurking. An unusual heaviness to the sky, the lingering night sky, as the stars disappeared. But it was not the light of coming day that swallowed them; it was something in the air. Conner dropped his ker, the sand that normally stirred on the winds succumbing to some mystery, alerted to some presence, a sound like marching in the far sand, and the cool morning grew cooler, the ice in the desert night clung piteously to dawn, fearful of the pink ghost, and Conner heard footsteps. He heard a grumbling. A noise. Something approaching.

“Something’s coming,” Rob said, scrambling to his feet. “Something’s coming!” he shouted.

Palmer and Violet and their mother paused in the dismantling of the tent and ran to the gash to join the two boys, eyes and ears straining in the heavy darkness, tent canvas flapping in a gathering wind, the rhythmic sound of a steady advance, an approach, not of the dead or their long-gone sibling or their father—but of the even more impossible. It struck Rob first and then their mother, pattering across the desert floor, coming with a whoosh of cold wind and a blotting of the stars, a wetness from the heavens, an answer to the long silence, a sign that someone far away was listening.

Their mother fell to her knees and burst into tears.

And the sky wept for its people.