by Hugh Howey
Vic crossed the room and grabbed the jar of stale beer with its shriveled green lime. She chugged the bitter breakfast down and grabbed her dive bag. Damn, she was tired. But hopefully Marco hadn’t left town without her.
24 • A Mad Dash
Palmer
Dive light and diver were extinguished as one. Palmer felt the wild man sag lifeless to the ground, and the light around his neck threw out one last spurt of red rays before it too gave up the ghost. He was left shaking and terrified in the pitch black. His dive knife felt heavy in his hand.
Palmer wiped the blade on his thigh and placed a hand over his belly, holding the coins there. He remembered that a coin had spilled out, and bent down, patted the floor until he found it. There was a tear in his suit. He felt to see if any of the wires had been severed—couldn’t be positive but didn’t think so. The knife went back into his boot. He arranged the folded map in his belly pocket so it was against the tear, outside of the coins, stanching the costly wound.
Reaching for his dive light, he switched it off, shook it, and tried it again. Popping the battery out and touching its leads to his tongue didn’t resurrect it. He felt for his visor, wanted to check the charge in his suit, then remembered it getting knocked off. Palmer felt around in the darkness and tried to retrace his steps. The air was fucking awful in there. It was the stench of the dead mixed with the stale and too-weak oxygen. His knees were wobbly. He bumped into a desk. Felt around the corner. Went too far and placed a hand in the gore of the other diver.
“Fuck. Fuck.”
Palmer backed up, wiped his hand on the ground, wiped again on an office chair, was bumping into things and making noises, ghosts everywhere. He practically crawled on his belly, swept his arms across the floor, found random knick-knacks, lost a coin from his pocket and chased after it, wasn’t able to find the damn thing, when he bumped into his visor.
Tank of air, the madman had said. Tank of air but no charge. Palmer had some battery left but no air. Fucking Hap. He tried to remember where the tanks had been. Couldn’t see shit. Couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. His fins were back in the other room. Vic always made fun of him for using fins, said only beginners wore them, that once you really learned how to flow sand you could do it in your boots. You could do it barefoot.
Palmer strained with his other senses. He listened for the sound of sand tumbling across sand, little tiny rocks the size of pinpricks whispering in diminutive avalanche. He searched for that noise of his life, of his entire goddamn existence: sand on sand.
He heard a sigh. A hush. Barely more than a rustle, maybe the sound of him breathing or his heart thrumming or the brush of fabric between his trembling knees.
But no—it was sand moving. Sliding toward him.
Palmer slid toward it in return.
He crawled through the desks, straining to remember the layout of the room, where the tanks had been, where in relation to the drift. There were chairs and desks everywhere. There were tangles of wires and a keyboard. Palmer considered trying his visor, using it to navigate, trying to see by the pulsing purples of open air, but the dead dive light around his neck was a reminder to not waste his charge. His suit had held enough juice to get him down to that building and back to the surface, and he was only halfway through that dive. This is what he told himself as he fumbled around in the darkness: he was only halfway through this dive. He had stopped for a few days, a few hours, who knew how long? He had starved at the bottom of his plummet, had scrounged longer than any living soul ever had, and he wasn’t through. Weak and exhausted and terrified, he wasn’t through.
Palmer felt sand beneath his palms. He nearly bent and kissed the stuff, those cool granules that reminded him of home. He turned to the side and kept one hand in touch with the slope of drift, the other waving out in space, shuffled along on his knees, when his fingers hit that cool metal.
The tears came. Palmer cried out in relief. But he dared not hope, dared not hope, not until he knew. He felt around the dive tanks for the valves—everything in a different place, a strange arrangement, a different model, three damn tanks to lug, to flow around. No way he could lift all three. He cracked the valve at the top of one tank and felt down the hose to the regulator. With his heart pounding, unable to breathe or think or swallow, he touched the purge button in the center of the regulator.
Nothing. Empty tank. He tried the next. Prayed. Really fucking prayed to the old gods, the ones he didn’t believe in, but he promised them now that he would. He would. He would believe. Just give him some air.
But the regulator made no sound. He tried sucking on the mouthpiece to make sure. All he got was dizzy.
Last tank. There was no hope now. No promises to the gods. Nothing but weariness and despair. Anger and fear. And then—a blast of air.
A blast of air, goddamn you. He thought this to Hap, to his friend who had left him for dead, who had promised to come back for him, to save him. Well, Palmer would get out of there and he would find Hap, would return to him like a vengeful ghost. He would kill that motherfucker. That’s what he would do. And this gave him the courage to go. To go. Palmer fumbled for the webbing straps and the buckles that held the tanks in place. He removed the two empties, shoved them aside with clanks and bangs, set them off to roll into invisible furniture and warn away the ghosts.
He slipped his arms through the webbing straps on the harness, the single tank lopsided on his back. His visor wouldn’t be able to interface with the regulator and tell him how much air he had, but that didn’t matter, did it? There was enough or there wasn’t. The dead diver would’ve turned back if he had gotten too low. Palmer told himself this. He told himself this. Pulling his visor down and powering both it and his suit on, he bit down on someone else’s regulator, took a long pull of someone else’s air, and he crawled up that slope of drift. He told his suit to vibrate outward against the world, against the hard pack, shiver it until it moved like water, and then he sank down, was enveloped by the deep dunes, the purples becoming oranges and reds, and he could see again.
25 • The Risk of Believing
Vic
Vic found Marco back at the marina, loading his tanks into the haul rack. His was the last sarfer in sight. There were sails and masts out across the dunes, but all were heading away. Everyone was looking for Danvar. Vic wondered how to explain to Marco that they needed to use his sarfer to look for her brother instead.
“You heading out alone?” she asked.
Marco turned from his sarfer and smiled. He moved his goggles up to his forehead. “Thought you needed a nap.”
“Naw. When I need beauty rest, I just blink.” She batted her eyes to demonstrate.
“Prettier by the moment.” He helped her with her gear bag and lashed it down with the tanks. “So I thought we’d head south. One of the rumors floating around is that Danvar is in a line with Springston and Low-Pub. A lot of people are going west where the sand isn’t so deep. I think that’s a mistake.”
“I think we need to go north,” Vic said.
“You would.” Marco studied the wind generator at the aft end of the sarfer. It howled as it spun in the breeze. He checked the charge on the batteries. “If I’d said north, you would’ve told me we needed to go south.”
“No, I think we need to find my brother.”
“Palm? To cut him in on this? Shouldn’t we find the joint first?”
Vic followed Marco to the boom and helped him tug the slip knots loose. “I didn’t get a nap because a couple of assholes barged into my place as soon as I got there. Paulie and some other guy.”
“Paulie? Is he back in town?”
“Yeah. Looking for Palm.”
Marco shook his head. “You gotta tell your brother to stay away from those guys.”
“I have.”
Marco lowered his goggles and unwrapped the dock lines from the hitching post. The sarfer rocked in the breeze, felt eager to get moving. The wind generator whirred. He lowered the rudder
against the sand and tested the tiller. “How about we shoot south just to see if anyone’s found something, and then we go look for your brother?” He nodded toward the mast. “If you raise the main, I’ll pull us out of here.”
Vic stepped back toward the cockpit instead. She raised her hand and steadied the boom as it moved in a gust of wind. “I don’t want to find Palmer to take him diving with us,” she said.
“Good. Let’s get going.”
“We need to find Palmer because …” She wasn’t sure how to say this. “Goddamnit, Marco, I think he might be the one who found Danvar.”
26 • A Long Way Up
Palmer
Palmer slid easily through the loose bank of drift inside the building, but the hard pack he found outside was a shock. As he pushed his way back into the world, the earth he encountered there pushed back at him. He didn’t quite get a full breath of air before the strain around his chest and neck made another gulp impossible. He could’ve turned and forced his way back into the building to escape the crush, but a slower death beckoned there. And he might never have gotten the courage to go again.
His mortality was suddenly everywhere at once. Never before had it registered with him that this was the moment. Now. Right now. Here was where he would die and where his bones would lie, never to see the stars again.
With half a lungful, he turned skyward in desperation. He only knew which way was up by leaving the tall building behind. Fighting against the squeeze, fighting against all that pressure, he struggled to flow the sand and at the same time to breathe. But still he could not pry the hands of those deep dunes from around his neck. He had a tank of air strapped to his back, but he couldn’t draw on the regulator, couldn’t force his chest to expand, needed to go up in order to win a breath.
Palmer kicked and flowed the miserable sand. He should be around three hundred meters. There was no depth reading in his visor. Go by feel. Move fifty meters. That should be enough to get a breath. Battery in his beacon must be dead. Didn’t matter—just kick. The depth would show when it sensed the surface. Should’ve been able to breathe but couldn’t. Too weak. Too exhausted. Too hungry and thirsty and terrified.
The sun does this every day, he heard his sister say. Palmer felt consciousness slip through his fingers. He was back on a dune with Vic, learning to dive in the loosest of sand, afraid he wouldn’t have the knack, that he wouldn’t have the special talent that made diving possible, was afraid all of his dad’s skill had gone to his sister.
Look at the sun, she told him. The sun was just coming up. He’d been in her too-big dive suit for hours and hadn’t been able to so much as slide a hand into a dune. He was growing frustrated. He didn’t want to hear another lecture from his older sister.
“Every day,” Vic told him. “Every day, the sun rises out of the sand without effort. It glides. It burns. It melts all in its path, and then it shows us how it’s done in the evening as it bores straight down through the jagged peaks. Through solid rock, Palm. And all you’ve gotta to do is move the sand.”
The sun. His father was calling. His father, who told him he would be a great diver one day. Sitting on his lap, Palmer’s earliest memory, back when his father had been a great man and a ruler, telling his firstborn son that he would be the greatest of divers one day. Nearby, Vic listened, ten years old, sitting in the same room and unmentioned. Unmentioned.
No shadows cast, not from this son. No, this son lived in shadows. Lived in the dark and cool sand. Watched his sister dive and rise up again, basking, radiating glory, a rebel and a pirate and a scrounger and a great diver. But Palmer … who saw Danvar when it was a legend … who spilled the life of a man with his dive knife … who would die with a tank of air on his back and a quarter charge in his suit … his white bones at three hundred meters.
Three hundred meters. The depth reading flashed in Palmer’s awareness like the appearance of a mother’s face in the midst of a burning fever. Like a knock at a door in the middle of a nightmare. A small part of his brain yelled at the rest of him, saying hey, you might want to see this.
But he’d been going up. Should be less than three hundred meters. His lungs were straining. And then he remembered the bowl they’d dug, the deep shaft in the sand they’d made, the extra two hundred meters. Fuck, he’d only gotten started. No way, no way, no way.
Palmer stopped moving. He worried less about the flow and more about breathing. The sand held him, but he was able to draw air through the regulator. A breath. A sip. Life. That surreal feeling taking him right back to the day Vic had taught him how to dive, had told him to breathe while his head was under the sand, his body telling him this was impossible, his brain saying not to do it, his sister yelling at him, her voice distant and muffled, to fucking breathe.
And breathing.
Palmer managed a gulp. He peered down at the now-faint image of the sandscraper below. Up was the other way. Away from Danvar. He kicked; he grunted with effort, the sounds of his screams trapped in his own head, his own throat. So far to go. Where was he? There were no transponders, no beacons, but his visor was getting his depth now, so the surface was up there somewhere. No beacon to show him the way. And the shaft they’d descended, that Brock’s men had made, that bright yellow needle deep in the earth, was missing. That’s why so deep.
It grew harder to breathe, even as he pierced two hundred meters. Should be getting easier. Air was running out. Fuck. Air running out. Only enough to get back to the bottom of that well. No. Not this close. He wouldn’t die this close. He felt the resistance of the dry tank, that fruitless tug on a bottle sucked dry, and his air was gone. Maybe he could get fifty meters on a lungful. Maybe. Two hundred meters to go. He kicked anyway. He wouldn’t make it. This registered as bright as metal in loose sand. He wouldn’t make it. Could feel himself blacking out. Still another one fifty, as deep as many divers dared to plunge, at the bottom of most dives, and he was down there with a lungful of nothing but toxic exhalations.
An orange spot in the sand above. Thirty meters away. Something to steer for. A dying light. An island in the vastness. His body needed to breathe; his body told him to spit out his regulator and suck down sand; it was that impulse at the end of asphyxiation, the urge to get something into the lungs, anything, even the soil. Whatever it took to breathe. To gasp. Just fucking do it. Clog his lungs with sand and end the pain. He would. He would. But an orange spot. A body.
Palmer ran out of energy. The sand would no longer flow. There was a diver there beside him, and he numbly, distantly, in some corner of his diminishing soul, knew why Hap never came back for him.
Hap had never made it.
Palmer spit out his regulator. He tasted the sand on his tongue. He could see Hap’s face, the way his body was twisted out of shape, something wrong about that. Something wrong. A frozen look on Hap’s face, mouth and eyes wide, regulator dangling. Palmer’s regulator. Palmer’s regulator.
Palmer flowed the sand around the regulator and grabbed it, placed it into his mouth. No hope. No hope. But air cares not for hope. It is or it isn’t. And here it was. Here it was.
Air.
Energy flowed into Palmer’s cells like electricity. He blinked away the tears behind his visor. Vic and his father were yelling at him. His mother was yelling at him. His baby brothers. Hap. All yelling at him. Go. Go. Fucking breathe.
A hundred meters to the surface, to the bottom of that slowly filling bowl of sand. No time to switch tanks. But this was sand he could handle. Even as he could taste the wet metal on his tongue that let him know this other tank was running dry, this tank and regulator he knew so well running dry, he also knew the loose sand. He knew this dead diver. Palmer was a scrounger, a sand diver, one who brought back heavy loads from the past and saw the sun glint off them for the first time in generations. He flowed the sand upward, pulling Hap and his tank with him, rising through the last hundred meters of sand as his air ran out, as his air ran out, but he knew and Vic told him that he could make
it. And he believed.
27 • Mother
Vic
Vic and Marco sailed north on a steady breeze, the sail taut and full, the lines singing and happy. Marco had found a good trough through a line of dunes, which meant very little tacking. It was the kind of sailing that coaxed a mind into a wander. Just the vibration through a riveted hull of piecemeal steel as the sarfer crossed those patches of sand with the little channels the wind made, those striations like the wrinkled hands of the elderly. There was the shushing sound of metal runners on hard pack, the creak of lines in burdened wooden blocks, the groan of a happy mast bent before a gathering wind.
Vic watched the great wall approach in the distance, the tallest of the cobbled scrapers looming over the far dunes. It was not yet noon. They had made excellent time, hard to believe she had been on a dive before dawn that same day. Her thoughts went to Palmer, the idea that her brother may have been a part of this find of finds. Their father had been right all those years ago when he’d said Palmer would be the one. Vic was the scrounger who made fortunes. Fortunes she spent just as quickly. Spent them chasing the next score, her prospects rising and falling with the moon, always looking for that truly impressive discovery, the one that would mean never gambling again. But Palmer was the one.
Marco tapped her arm. He was in the webbed seat next to her. He motioned to the tiller and then pointed toward the bow, needed to go forward. Vic took over. She enjoyed the way the tiller hummed in her hand. The same technology found in her dive suit allowed the sharp rudder to pierce the sand and flow through it like water. She steered and watched Marco work and realized her mother had been as right about her love life as her father had been about her diving prospects. Her mom had said she would end up with someone dangerous, someone who took too many risks, and that this would be the end of her. “Nothing but brigands and bastards in your future,” her mom had said. Like she knew what she was talking about.
