by Hugh Howey
With barely more than a large stride, Conner crossed what in youth had required a lunge, and this renewed ritual filled him with courage. It was a symbolic break with all behind him. All that was left was the thunder to march into, as so many others had marched before him without coming back. Behind, nothing but sad wails would be left, wails he would not have to listen to. Despite the dread in his marrow, he told himself that this was not final. Four days’ march out and four back, that was all. Four days to see what was over the horizon. And then he would return. He told himself this just as he was sure all those before him had. Just as his father had. He hiked toward the drums, promising himself he would return, and the wind picked up and cried at him for being so foolish—
But not the wind. That was not the wind crying. Ahead, in the pale moonlight, some different, anguished wail.
Conner crept forward. He pulled his knife from his belt, expected to find a cayote homing in on his scent or warning him away from its lair. And there, on all fours, sure enough—
But the cayote lifted its head into the moonlight, and it was the gaunt face of a human looking up at him. A boy.
Conner put his knife away and hurried forward. Some stupid kid from Springston. Someone there to dare the gash. He scanned the darkness for the other boys he knew would be there, the friends who had to witness who was courageous and who chickened out. Conner was pissed at having his more serious ritual disturbed by this petty one of youth. And so it was with anger that he rushed to the kid, ready to haul him up and toss him over the meaningless crack in the earth and back to his friends—
But Conner drew up as he approached. What had looked like a boy was a gaunt girl, her clothes in rags, crawling on hands and knees, the remains of a shoe dragging behind by its laces. Reaching ahead, she dug her fingers into the sand and pulled herself forward, seeming not to know Conner was there, simply staring ahead as if toward the glow of the distant fire.
“Be still,” Conner said. He dropped to his knees, and the child saw him at last. She clutched at him. Wide eyes and parched lips and skin pale as milk and moon. Conner held the frail child, the anger in him gone, but this was even more intrusion than daring boys. Drums beat in his chest. Where were her friends? He scanned the sands and saw no one. Probably left her out here alone. Or a cayote had nipped her and scared off the others. She trembled against him, senseless and moaning.
Conner lifted her up—found she weighed less than his pack. He’d have to carry her across, back to the tent, and Rob would need to look after her and get her home. She had played at a boy’s game, and look what it had cost her. She was lucky he had been out there. He would get her to the tent, could still vanish while Rob was occupied. This changed nothing. It was simply his first act as a free man. It was a life saved for a life lost. An even trade.
The step across the gap was more treacherous this time with the girl in his arms. It wasn’t just the extra weight, it was being unable to see. He shuffled forward until his lead boot felt the edge, extended his other foot, and leaned forward into blind faith. His boot found the far side. And a story leapt up in his mind as he hurried toward the tent, a reason for him being out in the middle of the night.
“Rob!” he called. “Rob! Wake up!”
There was a glow inside the tent a moment later. Conner started to set the child down outside the tent when the flap parted, his bleary-eyed brother peering out. “What time—?” Rob began.
“Help me get her inside,” Conner said. And Rob did. The girl was unable to move on her own. The two boys got her into the tent, and Rob closed the flap on the wind. The dive light dangling from the tentpole threw light and shadows across the disheveled bedding. Conner laid the girl out, then unbuckled his hip belt and shrugged off his pack. He caught Rob studying the heavy load as he set it aside.
“Don’t just sit there,” Conner said. “Get her some water.”
Rob looked up at him, blinked away the fog of sleep, and then lurched into action. He pawed through his bedroll to find his canteen while Conner got a good look at the girl. And the story he had made up in his head was shattered. Not the story he had prepared for Rob about stealing out for a piss and finding kids braving the gap—but the story he had told himself about where this child had come from.
Springston was not so big that he didn’t recognize most faces, even if he didn’t know their names. But this child was a stranger for other reasons. She was emaciated, her arms like the legs of a bird, one arm folded across her chest, the other bent around her head. Her britches were in tatters and of a strange cloth. The knees of this material were worn through, the flesh beneath torn and bloody and with dark rivulets tracing down her shins. The wounds were black from having dried at least a day ago, but there was fresh wetness on top from where the scabs had ripped and ripped. There was sand in all the wounds.
She moaned. Her lips were cracked and dry, her face burnt like a daywalker’s. The shoulder of her shirt was missing, torn away, the rest of it barely hanging on. She looked as though she’d been dragged across a thousand dunes, and when Conner saw the bloody stumps of her fingers where her nails used to be, he knew that this poor creature had done her own dragging.
She was half-dead and senseless. And Conner knew as a diver does when he raises an unseen relic from the cold sand that this thing at his feet did not come from Springston, nor from any other living world. This child was from No Man’s Land. Someone had wandered out. Had crossed that impassable divide.
“How do I make her drink?” Rob asked. He had the canteen open and was looking to Conner for help.
“Just a cap,” Conner whispered, his mind reeling from what this girl meant. “Give it to me.”
Rob poured a cap, the canteen trembling and spilling, and Conner wondered if his brother knew what he himself knew. Probably. Rob was the smart one.
“Careful,” he said, taking the cap of water. He positioned himself at the girl’s side, folded her other frail arm across her chest, and slid his hand behind her neck. Gingerly, he lifted her head and scooted a knee behind her until she rested on his thigh. Another faint moan escaped her lips, a feeble sign of life. The girl appeared to be eight or nine years old, but it was difficult to tell, as gaunt and frail as she was.
Conner dribbled the water onto her cracked and bloody lips. He imagined he heard a sizzle there, as moisture hit the fire of thirst. Her cheeks twitched, a wince of pain, and he had to steady her head. He tried to drip the water past her wounded lips and directly onto her tongue.
“Easy,” Rob whispered.
“I know,” Conner said. He emptied the cap, watched the child’s throat bob as her body unconsciously swallowed. “Fill it again.” He passed the cap back to Rob, whose hand was steadier now as he poured another ration.
This time, the girl seemed to help with the drinking. A weak hand came up and rested on Conner’s arm, nailless and bloody fingers curling there, tender and thankful. Desperate.
“Drink,” he told the girl, as if she needed any encouragement. She drank that cap and another, whispered for more, but Conner told Rob that was enough. Too much too fast was a bad thing. He had seen the madness of thirst before.
Her eyelids blinked open. Fluttered. She squinted up at the dive light, which shone harshly down onto her face. “Get that away,” Conner told Rob, but his brother was already doing it, was just as keenly aware of the girl’s suffering.
Her face dimmed as Rob held the light by her side and out of her eyes. “Easy,” Conner told the girl. “We’ve got you. Everything’s gonna be okay.” He said this for himself and for Rob as well. He wasn’t sure. “I want you to rest while I look over your wounds, okay? You can have some more water after I clean you up. I’ve gotta get this sand out of you.”
He reached for his pack, was thankful for the extra water, for all the emergency supplies he’d brought along that were meant for him and his trek.
The girl made a sound. “Can … near …” she whispered.
Conner turned back to the ch
ild as she said the words a second time. “What?” he asked.
The girl clutched his shirt with her small and bloodied hand and whispered it again.
“She wants us to come closer so we can hear,” Rob said. His little brother bent his head to better understand the girl’s whispers. “What do you need?” he asked.
But the girl was looking past him and up at Conner. Her eyelids fluttered open, and for a moment, her cloudy eyes grew bright like a break in a sandstorm. They were half-familiar eyes that bored into Conner as the girl summoned the strength to speak, pulling desperately on the air in that stuffy tent.
“Con … ner,” she said again, each syllable an effort, the corners of her mouth curling into the barest of smiles, a smile of some faint recognition and some great relief. “… Father … sent me.”
And then the light in her eyes went gray again, wounds and exhaustion claiming her. And this girl out of No Man’s Land fell into the stillness of death and sleep, Conner’s name echoing softly in his ears, certain that he had never seen this girl in all his life, this girl who spoke of his father as if he were her own.
Part 3:
Return to Danvar
19 • The Prodigal Daughter
All of life was like the deep sand, Vic had learned. From birth to death it was a series of violent constrictions, one after the other, an oily fist gripping hapless souls who popped free long enough to gasp half a lungful before they were seized again. This was how Vic had come to see the world. Everywhere she looked, she saw life squeezing people, forcing them from one tight spot to the next, the cruel palms of misfortune wrapped around hapless necks.
The secret to surviving these sufferings, she had found, was to keep perfectly still in its clutches. Learning how not to breathe was the answer. Learning how to find joy in not breathing. The only difference between a choke and a hug was an open pathway. Which was why Vic had taught herself to hold her breath. And then life had become a series of uninterrupted embraces.
At six hundred meters, sand refused to budge. It grew deaf as a selfish lover to her thoughts and wishes. It pinned her and held her helpless. Six hundred meters was well past where divers perished. Long before they reached these depths, most died because they struggled to simultaneously breathe and flow the sand. Wrestling two men at once was futile. Vic knew.
Another two minutes on that lungful of air, and she would pass out. Already, lights popped in her vision, the edges growing dim. It would take her thirty minutes to get to the surface from that depth. Thirty minutes to go on two minutes of air. She would be fine. She spotted two of the hard metal cases near one another, the kind with the good seals. The cases stood out bright orange in her vision among the greens and blues of the softer bags. The oval conveyance device from which the bags had spilled was a brilliant white. All that metal, preserved by the deep pack of sand. It would live there forever, that buried and gleaming steel. Too deep to pull it apart and haul it up. Too risky.
Vic grabbed the two cases, hoped they were the silver kind, the Samsonites, and flowed upward. She left through a gaping hole in what must’ve been a fabric roof at some point, a tent roof, a tent bigger than half of Low-Pub. She surged up and away from the giant metal birds with their outstretched wings and their hundreds of glass eyes in two neat rows, up toward the flashing transponder at four hundred meters, arriving with just enough air left in her starving lungs.
She found the tank she’d left buried and flowed the sand around the regulator. Slipped it into her mouth. A minimal amount of grit hit her tongue. She stopped thinking of moving and only of that column of sand high above her, all that weight pressing down and from all sides. She deflected that weight and took a deep breath. Another. Her suit thrummed with energy and impatience. It lived for the deep sand.
Leaving the tank and the transponder behind, she flowed upward to the next blinking light. Two more stops to the surface. Ignore the need to breathe. It wasn’t the lack of air that made a person panic; it was the urge to exhale. It was the poisonous gas building up in her system that signaled her brain to expel the contents of her lungs. Her father had taught her this, had taught her all the mysteries of breathing. The body was not to be trusted, he had said. It could go for a long time without air. Longer and longer the more one worked the more mental of muscles.
Next stop. Another tank buried in advance. Here, the sand was almost back to normal. As the pack grew less dense, the colors seen through her visor shifted along the spectrum. She had her visor adjusted well beyond spec for the hard pack of near-concrete below. As she rose, the sand around her became like open air, shimmering with purples and unnatural hues. Her suit became similarly amped, even as its batteries ran dangerously low. She could feel a hum there in the looser sand. Her suit was made for the depths; it was revved. Turned up like this, she could feel its energy in her teeth. Here was another secret of the deep dive: you had to be willing to don a suit that felt as though it wanted to kill you. You had to pull on a visor that showed you nonsense. And then you had to dive straight down until the world felt right again.
Vic reached the next buried tank and took a long pull, swallowed some sand in the process. The most important part of diving deep, of course, was convincing everyone else that it was impossible. Part of this was letting people think she never dove on tanks. And mostly, this was true. Other divers had seen her go down to three hundred meters on a single breath. When she started staging tanks to go deeper, she told no one.
The secrecy was important, because if anyone knew it was possible, they would strive until they found a way. All great discoveries were like this. It was the rare souls full of hope who showed the world what could be done; and then came the thundering herds, those doubters and naysayers who had once put up barriers, now shoving everyone out of their way.
Vic realized the truth of this as she breached the surface and felt the rising sun on her face and the wind against her skin. If a man ever reached six hundred meters, no way he would keep that a secret. And then everyone would be down there, scrounging for what was hers and hers alone.
She flipped up her visor and rested on the warm sand for a deep breath. Another. She amped her suit and flowed the loose sand off her gear and out of her hair. It cascaded around her like a morning mist. Reaching into the sand—flowing the dune around her arm like so much water—she hauled out her buried gear bag. The sand in all directions was clear, none of the abandoned clutter and junk that marked popular dive sites. This was the best part of diving deep: avoiding the crowds, not worrying about some scavenger nabbing one of her finds, not dealing with the cranks and topside pirates who dug noisily through the heaps of rubbish left behind.
With her pack out of the sand, Vic powered off her humming suit and could feel her molars again. Low-Pub clattered noisily in the distance. The thrum of generators, the rap of hammers on nails, the sporadic gunfire, the noise of life.
A fitful wind blew across the dunes, carving the tops of them flat and pushing their mounded bulks ever westward. Vic dug her canteen out of her pack, took a long swig, and wiped her chin. Now for the payout. She hoped for enough to cover the rent and what she owed Yegery for the tanks and air. She’d rather not put in another deep dive this week, not if it could be helped. Her ribs were sore from being down so long, and her left knee felt tweaked. In the deep sand, all it took was losing flow around a leg for a split second for a foot to get twisted. She’d seen divers come up with arms and legs out of joint, screaming and spitting sand. Or those who got the bends, who forgot to keep the weight around them deflected, and surfaced with bubbles of air under their skin like little blisters, the soreness in their joints, if they were lucky. More often, the divers who lost their concentration never came back at all.
She screwed the cap back onto the canteen and reached for one of the metal cases. There was a silver and a black. The latter had much of its paint scratched off from the trip through the sand. The cases themselves would fetch thirty coin apiece. If the locks worked, her friend J
-Mac could file up some keys. Cost five coins apiece but would add fifteen to the price, and Vic knew a couple shopkeeps in town who needed better safes. As far as she was concerned, both bags were already sold. Here was coin temporarily trapped in the shape of something else.
She started with the black one, knocked the latches with the butt of her palm and jarred the sand inside the mechanism loose. The latches were stuck. She had a dull metal rod for this, pulled it out of her boot and rested the case on its end. With a swift stab, she slammed the two latches, and both popped open. She put the rod back into her boot and set the case flat, was about to open it, expecting the typical jumble of clothes to pop out, when the sand rumbled beneath her—
Before Vic could slap her suit on, she and the two cases dropped down into the desert floor. The sand hardened all around her, leaving just her head and neck free.
Panic surged in her chest and sand blew into her mouth; it mixed there with the adrenaline taste of metal. She had filled her lungs by reflex—had expanded her chest—so she could still breathe. Her hand had flown toward her suit’s power switch, was nearly there. She strained against the packed earth, wiggled her shoulders and arm, just needed another inch—
In a fountain of sand, Marco emerged beside her. He floated up to his feet with a twirl and a flourish and shook the sand out of his dreadlocks. Vic averted her head as far as she could and squinted against the flying sand. “I’m gonna fucking kill you,” she said.
When she opened her eyes she found Marco lowering himself down beside her as if to do a push-up, until his grizzled face was just a few inches from hers. “Did you say you’re gonna fuck me?” He lifted his thick eyebrows, mocking her.
