by Hugh Howey
Palmer kept his mind clear as they drifted through one fifty. He hit two hundred meters. This was about as deep as he liked to go. He calmed his mind, ignored the bit of sand getting past his visor and into his ears, the sand at the corner of his mouth as it filled that gap between lips and regulator, the sand crunching between his teeth, and just concentrated on the flow. The batteries on his suit were strong; he’d doubled them up a few dives ago. His gear and mind were good. He felt that serenity that hits him when he’s able to hold his breath for minutes at a time, that complete feeling of peace, the sand cool on his scalp and neck, the world drifting further and farther away.
Two hundred and fifty meters. Palmer felt a surge of pride. He couldn’t wait to tell Vic—
Shit. Shit. Shit.
The words rattled through his teeth—Hap must be shouting in his throat. Palmer looked down at his friend, and then he saw it too. A bright patch. Something hard. Something huge.
Where’s the ground? Palmer asked.
No fucking clue. What is that?
Looks like a cube. Maybe a house? Quicksand got it?
Quick don’t go this deep. Fuck, it goes down and down.
Palmer could see that now. The square of bright red glowed into orange as they got closer, and he could see how the hard edges of the structure faded through to greens and blues as it went down. It was a square shaft of some sort, buried beneath the sand, sitting vertical and massive and deep.
Getting hard to breathe, Hap said.
Palmer felt it as well. He thought it was this strange object in his sandsight making it difficult to breathe, but he could feel how much more packed the sand was, how much harder to make it flow. He could still sink, but rising up would be a test. The weight of all that sand above him could be keenly felt.
We turn back? Palmer asked. His goggles said two fifty. It was another fifty or so down to the structure. With the two hundred meters they’d cheated from the dig, they were technically at four fifty right then. Damn. He had never dreamed of diving so deep. Only two fifty of it was him, he reminded himself. But still, his sister had told him he wasn’t ready to go even that far. He had argued with her, but now he believed. Goddamn, was she ever wrong about anything?
Gotta see what it is, Hap said. Then we go back.
The ground must be a mile deep. Don’t see an end.
I see something. More of these.
Palmer wished he had Hap’s visor. His own was digging into his face, pushing on his forehead and cheekbones like it might smash right through his skull. He worked his jaw to lessen the pain, strained downward, and then he saw something too. Bright blues down there, more square shafts, and another to the side a little deeper, just a purple outline. And was that the ground down there? Maybe another three hundred meters down?
I’m getting a sample, Hap said. His words came in loud. The sand was dense, the visor bands transmitting the words from throat to jawbone louder than usual. Palmer remembered Vic telling him about this. He tried to remember what else he’d heard about the deep sand. He was sucking so hard to get a breath now that it felt like his tank was empty, but the gauge was still in the green. It was just the tightness around his chest, which was growing unbearable. It felt like a rib might snap. He’d seen divers taped up before. Seen them come up with blood trailing from their noses and ears. He concentrated. Told the sand to flow. He followed Hap, when his every impulse was to get out of there, to turn and find his beacon, to push the sand up as hard and as fast as he could, pile of coin be damned.
Hap reached the structure. The walls appeared perfectly smooth. A building. Palmer could see it now—an impossibly tall building with small details on the roof, some so hard and bright that they must be solid metal. A fortune in metal. Machines and gizmos. Something that looked like ducting, like the building used to breathe. This was not built by man, not by any man Palmer knew. This was Danvar of legends. Danvar of old. The mile-deep city, found by a bunch of smelly pirates, Palmer thought. And discovered by him.
6 • Danvar
Hap reached the building before Palmer. It was a sandscraper that put all the sandscrapers of Springston to shame, could swallow all of them at once the way a snake could eat a fistful of worms. The top was studded with goodies, bright blooming flashes of metal untouched by scavengers: threads of pipe and wire and who knew what else. Palmer could feel his skin crawl, even with the sand pressing him so tight.
I’m taking a sample, Hap said.
Normally they would grab something loose from the ground, an artifact or scrap of metal, and rise up with it. Palmer pushed deeper and watched Hap scan the vast landscape of the building’s roof. The adrenaline and the sight of such riches made it a little easier to move the sand—the sudden rush of willpower and desire helped as well—but breathing had become an effort.
Nothing loose, Hap complained, exploring the roof. The top of the building had to be as large as four blocks of Springston.
I’ll break something free, Palmer said. He was now as low as Hap. Lower. His competitive spirit had driven him down past the edge of the building, dipping well past three hundred meters. The concept of breaking a personal record was lost in the rush of such a discovery. Such a monumental discovery. He worried no one would believe them, but of course their goggles would record everything. They would store the entire dive, would map the shapes beneath them, those great pillars reaching up like the fingers of a deity long buried.
And now the palm of this great god, the ground between the scrapers, was dimly visible. It was studded with bright metal boulders that Palmer recognized as cars, all preserved in great shape, judging by the signal bounce. But it was hard to read the colors this deep. He was in unfamiliar territory. As if to highlight this, the air indicator in his visor went from green to yellow. One of his tanks had gone dry, a dull click as a valve switched over. Not a problem. They weren’t going any deeper. This was halfway. And he would use less air going up. Fuck, they were going to get out of here. They were going to do this. Just needed to look for something to break loose, a souvenir.
He probed for any sand that might be inside the building, sand he could grab and flow toward himself in order to breach the scraper and grab some small artifact. The flat wall before him had the signal bounce and the wavering shimmer of colors that screamed glass. Hollow, he told Hap. I’m ramming it.
Palmer formed a sandram with his mind, pictured a hardening of the sand in front of him and a loosening of the sand around that. His left hand twisted and turned inward the way it did when he concentrated, and he could feel himself sweating inside his suit despite the coolness of the deep sand. The ram was there. He made himself know the ram was there. And then he threw it forward, flowing the sand around it, losing control of the sand around his body for a moment, feeling it tighten everywhere at once like a coffin, his throat held fast by two great palms on his neck, chest wrapped with a wet and shrinking blanket, arms and legs tingling as the blood was cut off, and then the ram hit the building and dissipated, and Palmer had the sand flowing around him once again.
He took a deep breath. Another. It felt like pulling air through a narrow straw. But the flashes of light in his vision stopped their blinking. Palmer sank a little, but finally he righted himself. The view before him had changed. There was sand inside the building now. He had shattered the glass. A wavering patch of purple told him that there was air in there. A hollow. Artifacts.
I’m going in, he told Hap.
I’m going in, he told himself.
And then the sandscraper swallowed him.
7 • A Burial
For as long Palmer could remember, he’d dreamed of being a diver, dreamed of entering the sand—but he had since learned that it was the exiting that took practice. A diver quickly learns a dozen flashy ways to get into a dune, each more spectacular than the last, from falling face first into the sand and having it softly claim him, to jumping backward with his arms over his head and disappearing with the slightest of splashes, to having
the sand grab his boots and spin him wildly on the way down. Gravity and the welcoming embrace of flowing sand made many a glorious entry possible.
Exiting required finesse. Palmer had seen many a diver come sputtering out of a dune, sand in their mouth and gasping for air, clamoring with their arms as they lost concentration and got stuck up to their hips. He had seen many more come flying out with such velocity that they broke an arm or smashed a nose as they came spinning back to earth. Boys at school tried flipping out of dunes to disastrous and often hilarious results. Palmer, on the other hand, tried always to aim for a calm and unspectacular arrival, just like his sister. She told him the calm looked braver than the boast. Look like a pro. Pretend that one of those ruined sandscraper lifts still worked and was depositing him on the topmost floor. That’s what he aimed for. But that was not how he arrived just now.
This exit was more like being belched out from the sand’s unhappy maw. He was spat sideways through the small avalanche that had slid inside the building and was ejected into the open air.
Palmer landed with a thud and a crunch, first on his shoulder, then sprawling painfully to his back, his tanks jolting his spine. The swimming purples vanished as his visor was knocked from his eyes. There was sand in his mouth, his regulator half out, his lungs emptied by the impact.
Palmer removed the mouthpiece and coughed and spat until he could breathe again.
Breathe again.
The air was foul and musty. It smelled like dirty laundry and rotting wood. But Palmer sat in the utter and complete dark of eyelids squeezed tight on moonless nights, and he took another cautious sip. There’s air in here, he told Hap, speaking with throat whispers, but of course his friend couldn’t hear him. His visor band had been knocked askew, and anyway he was no longer buried in sand, had no way of projecting his voice.
Shouting wouldn’t do, either. Palmer fumbled for his dive light and flicked it on. A world of the gods unfolded dimly before him. He turned away from the avalanche of sand, which seemed to writhe and creep ever inward as the deep dunes snuck inside to seek solace from their own crushing weight.
The objects in the room were recognizable. Artifacts just like those found beneath Springston and Low-Pub. Chairs, dozens of them, all identical. A table larger than any he had ever seen, big as an apartment. Palmer tugged off his fins and set them aside. He lowered his air tanks to the floor and killed the valve, made sure he saved his oxygen. Powering down his suit and visor, he relished the chance to gather himself, to give his diaphragm a rest from the struggle of breathing against the press of sand, a chance for his ribs to feel whole again.
On a side table, his expert salvaging eyes spotted a brewing machine. The pipes were rusted and the rubber appeared brittle, but it would fetch fifty coin at market. Double that, if his brother Rob could get it working first. The brewer was still plugged into the wall as if someone expected to use it still. The fit and finish of everything in the room felt eerily advanced and ancient at the same time. It was a feeling Palmer got from all the relics and spoils of a dive, but here the feeling overwhelmed, here it hit him on an inconceivable scale—
There was a crash and the hiss of advancing sand behind him. Palmer startled, expecting the drift to crush the rest of the weakened glass and consume him with his visor up on his head and his suit powered down. Instead, there was a thump and a grunt as Hap tumbled into the room.
“Fuck—” Hap groaned, and Palmer hurried to help him up. Sand slid around their feet as it found its equilibrium. It was wet and packed enough that it wasn’t free to flow inside and fill the room. Not immediately, anyway. Palmer had swum through enough smaller buildings in shallower sand and had seen what sand would do if given the time.
“There’s air,” Palmer told Hap. “A bit foul. You can take your visor off.”
Hap stumbled around in his fins a moment as he regained his balance. He was breathing heavily. Wheezing and gasping. Palmer gave him a chance to catch his breath.
Once he got his goggles off, Hap blinked and scanned the room. He rubbed the sand out of the corners of his eyes. His gaze seemed to flit across all the coin stacked here and there in the shapes of ancient things. And then he found his friend’s face, and the two of them beamed at one another.
“Danvar,” Hap said, wheezing. “Can you fucking believe it?”
“Did you see the other buildings?” Palmer asked. He was out of breath as well. “And I spotted the ground another three hundred meters or so further down.”
Hap nodded. “I saw. I couldn’t have gone another meter, though. Fuck, that was tight.” He held his goggles to his face for a moment, checking his readouts most likely, and frowned. Hap shrugged his tanks off.
“Don’t forget to kill your valve,” Palmer said.
“Right.” Hap reached to spin the knob. There was sand stuck to his face and neck where he’d been sweating. Palmer watched his friend shake a veritable dune out of his hair. “What now?” he asked. “Do we poke around? You got dibs on the brewer?”
“Yeah, I already spotted the brewer. I say we check a few doors, catch our breath, and then get the fuck out of here. If we stay longer than two bottles should last, our friends up top might think we only made it as far as the last assholes, and then they’ll close that tunnel on our asses. I don’t think I have enough air to get all the way back to the surface without that shaft.”
“Yeah …” Hap appeared distracted. He popped off his fins, shook the scoop out of them, and dragged his gear away from the drift invading through the busted window. “Good move popping through the glass like that,” he said. “I just saw you disappear, but I couldn’t see inside.”
“Thanks. And this is good, catching our breath. It would’ve been tight getting back up. We can get our strength.”
“Amen. Hey, did you happen to spot the other divers on the way down?”
Palmer shook his head. “No, did you?”
“Naw. I was hoping they’d stand out.”
Palmer agreed. There was almost nothing more valuable to salvage than another diver. It wasn’t just their gear—which could run a pretty coin—it was getting cut in on any bounties they had or wills they’d left. Every diver was afraid to some degree of being buried without a tombstone, and so the bone-bounties, as they were called, made every diver a comrade of the dead.
“Let’s try those doors,” Hap said, pointing at the double set at the far end of the room.
Palmer agreed. He got there first and ran his hands across the smooth wood. “Fuck me, I’d love to get these out of here.”
“You get those out of here and you could fuck someone prettier than me.”
Palmer laughed. He gripped the handle, and the metal knob turned, but the door was stuck. The two of them tugged, grunting. Hap braced his foot on the other door, and when it finally gave way, the both of them went tumbling back into the table and chairs.
Hap laughed, catching his breath. The door creaked on its hinges. And there was some other sound, a popping like a dripping faucet, like a great beam settling under some weight. Palmer watched the ceiling closely. It sounded like the scraper was adjusting itself, like its belly was grumbling around these new morsels in its gut.
“We shouldn’t stay long,” Palmer said.
Hap studied him a long while. Palmer could sense that his friend was just as afraid as he was. “We won’t,” he agreed. “Why don’t you go first. I’ll save my dive light in case yours burns out.”
Palmer nodded. Sound thinking. He stepped through the door and into the hallway. Across from him, there was a glass partition with another door set in it, a spider web of cracks decorating the glass, the effect of the building settling or being crushed by the sand. There appeared to be a lift lobby on the other side of the partition. Palmer had been in a few lifts in smaller buildings, found them a good way to get up and down if a building was full of sand. The hallway he stood in extended off in both directions, was studded with doors. To his right, there was a high desk like some kind
of reception area, but everything was so damn nice. He coughed into his fist. Hopefully the air here wasn’t—
Behind him, the door slammed. Palmer whirled in panic, thinking the drift must’ve flowed into the room and pinned the door shut, burying their gear. But he was alone in the hallway. Hap was gone.
Palmer tried the door. The handle turned, but the door wouldn’t push open. He could hear the rattle on the other side as something was pressed against the door.
“Hap? What the fuck?”
“I’m sorry, Palmer. I’ll come back for you.”
Palmer slapped the door. “Stop fucking around, man.”
“I’ll come back. I’m sorry, man.”
Palmer realized he was serious. Lowering his shoulder, he slammed against the door, could feel it budge a little. Hap must’ve shoved a chair under the knob. “Open the goddamn door,” he yelled.
“Listen,” Hap said. His voice was distant. He was across the room. “I burned my air getting down here. One of us needs to go up and tell the others what we found. I’ll get more bottles and come back, I swear. But it’s gotta be me.”
“I’ll go!” Palmer shouted. “That’s my air, man. I can make it back up!”
“I’ll be back,” Hap called out. Palmer could hear a faint hiss as valves were opened and a regulator was tested. His valves. His regulator.
“You motherfucker!” Palmer shouted. He tried the adjacent door, but it wouldn’t budge. He went back to ramming himself against the first door. He jerked the handle toward him as tight as he could, then threw his shoulder into the wood, thought he felt the chair budge a little. Again and again. The door opened a crack. And then a gap. Enough to get his arm through. He reached inside and felt the rim of the chair, held it while he pulled the door shut tight against his arm, and the chair popped off the knob and went tumbling. Palmer shoved his way inside, banging his elbows on the two doors, swimming between those priceless walls of wood, tripping over the upturned chair, to see Hap still on the floor, tugging on a flipper.
