by Hugh Howey
“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 learni
ng 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 sid
e 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.
