Sand Omnibus

by Hugh Howey

Page 23

 

  “They were never going to let us go,” he said. “We were there to find Danvar and then to die. ”

  “But you did find it. ”

  Palmer nodded. “Five hundred meters down. ”

  “No,” Vic said. She situated herself against the hull of the sarfer, blocking the wind for Palmer. “You didn’t go that deep. ”

  “They’d made a pit and a hole, had the first two hundred clear for us. I don’t know how. Hundreds of dive suits wired up together. It was amazing. And the scrapers down there, Vic. You should see them. Hundreds of meters tall. We hit the tops of the largest of them at five hundred. Was another five hundred or so to the street. ”

  Palmer must’ve seen the look of disbelief on her face. “They’d dug a pit,” he said. “Did I mention that? But we were down three hundred true. Maybe close to three-fifty. ”

  “You went down three hundred meters,” Vic said. “Are you out of your fucking mind?”

  “You can but I can’t?”

  She didn’t have an answer for that. Not without sounding like their mother. “Was it untouched?”

  Something flashed across her brother’s face. “Not quite,” he said. “Two other divers had gone down before us, but they didn’t make it back. ”

  “So you were the first to get down and back up? You discovered Danvar. ” Vic heard the awe and disbelief in her own voice.

  Palmer looked away. “Hap made it back before me. And Hap saw it first. He’s the one. ”

  “But you said Hap was dead—”

  Her brother reached up and patted his forehead as if looking for something. “My visor,” he said. “They got both our visors. ” He seemed to deflate even further with this, seemed to sink down within that too-big dive suit, like the last juice of life had been squeezed from him.

  “Do you think you could find Danvar again?” Vic asked.

  Palmer hesitated. “I don’t know. Maybe. If we found their camp, or the remnants of their fire, then maybe. But without the hole they made, it’d be too deep to reach those buildings again. ”

  “I could get down there,” she told him.

  Her brother searched her face, almost as if seeing if she was kidding.

  “Do you know how they found it?” she asked. “How did they know to dig there?”

  Conner nodded up toward the sky. “The stars,” he said. “Colorado’s belt. They had a map that showed Low-Pub and Springston and another town in a line, just like the constellation. The third star was Danvar. They knew where it was. ”

  “A map …”

  Her brother flinched. A jolt of life and energy. He patted excitedly at his stomach, fumbled for the zipper on his pouch, and out spilled coin after coin—

  “Shit,” Vic said, plucking one out of the sand. It was a copper. Untarnished. Beautiful. Thirty or more pieces spilled out and were quickly covered by the rush12. Her brother seemed uninterested in these as she gathered them up. He pulled out a folded piece of paper.

  “A map,” he said. The paper trembled as he struggled to get it unfolded. Vic helped. She took over. It was a large sheet. It popped in the wind, sand collecting in the folds with a hiss and sliding down into her lap. Vic had seen corners and scraps of maps like this, paper rotted by the sand, by time, by moisture, by being passed from hand to hand. But this was whole and untouched and a beauty to behold.

  “You got their map,” Vic said. “Fuck, Palm, you got their map. ”

  “No. I found it in the scraper. It was with the coin. ”

  Vic bent over to protect the paper from the wind. She folded the map in half and then in half again, had to wrestle with the creases, was worried she or the wind might rip it. There were lines and place-names and numbers everywhere. Every scrap of a map she’d ever seen or heard about could fit together and not equal even a fraction of this massive, undisturbed sheet.

  “Do you know what this means?” Vic studied the square she’d left exposed after her folds. There was a bright yellow collection of squiggles with the word Pueblo written above. But it was a series of rectangles that had caught her eye and had drawn her attention to this part of the map. It was the crooked letter Y the rectangles made at one point, the other part like the letter H. There was a curved structure that stood along the side of them, which she knew had once been covered with a tent but now was full of sand.

  “Puh…Eh…Blow. Enter…National. Air…Port. ” She sounded it out, stumbling over the words, reading them phonetically. She traced her finger from the collection of long rectangles that she had seen in her own visor, that she knew as cracked concrete slabs beneath the sand, to where she knew the ruins of Low-Pub lay. It was the same place. No doubting it.

  “What is that?” Palmer asked. His eyes were wide. “Can you read it?”

  “I know this place. I’ve been here. This is Old Low-Pub, the buried ruins just west of town. Fuck, Palm, this is a gold mine. ”

  “Old Low-Pub is picked over to hell and back,” Palmer reminded her.

  “I know. But this is a map of the old world. This thing is ancient. And if it’s to scale—” She held three fingers together and placed them between Low-Pub and the dive site where she’d been picking over a cache of bags for months. Flipping the map around, she refolded it to reveal something else. She measured her way north three fingers at a time. There was an even larger squiggle of lines and place-names right where she expected them to be. “Colorado Springs,” she said. She felt a chill, reading these words, realizing it was Springston. Visors were suddenly pulled down over her eyes that allowed her to see through all the sand that choked the old world. She was a god watching from on high. “This is Twin Rock Path,” she said. She showed her brother the dark set of double lines that ran between Low-Pub and Springston. It was the path their great-grandfather had followed in order to discover Low-Pub. Or so legend had it.

  “Enter…State…Twenty-five,” Palmer sounded out. “The path has a number. ” He tried to sit up to see better.

  “There are a thousand dive sites here,” Vic said. She felt dizzy, looking at the map. Dizzy and excited. The danger her brother was in dimmed for a moment. But only a moment.

  “The people who want me dead,” Palmer said. “I don’t … I don’t think they were looking for Danvar to scavenge, Vic. I’m not even sure it was Danvar they were after. ”

  She tore her eyes away from the map. “Then why would they have you dive down there to find it?”

  Palmer situated himself against the hull of the sarfer. He stared out over that dark, damp patch of sand. “When I got back up, the pit they had dug was already filling back in. And they’d broken down a few of their tents, like locating the old city was all they were after. Like they were moving on. And there was a party that came back, that had gone somewhere. They returned the night I was there, looking for water. They’d gone off to find something. ”

  Vic didn’t understand. But she didn’t interrupt. Her brother was reasoning something out.

  “I remember them saying something about us needing to be precise. They just wanted us to locate those scrapers, down to the last meter. I think they were using their map the way you’re talking about, to find other dive sites. That’s how they knew where to look for Danvar. They were homing in on some other spot. Getting it down precise so they’d know where to dig. ”

  “What makes you say that?” Vic asked.

  Her brother turned to her. “Because they found whatever it was they were looking for. I think it was a bomb. I went into one of the tents, looking for water and food. There was a crate of smaller bombs. And then I hid and I heard them talking about this one device—I saw it, a strange-looking thing—and they said this one bomb could level all of Low-Pub. And I believe them. They were serious. Organized. They laughed about leaving the desert flat. I think they mean to do it. ”

  Vic studied her brother. She glanced at the map. “When?” she asked.

  “I do
n’t know. It’s been three days. They saw me under the table. They probably assume I heard everything. I remember them saying they were going to hit Springston first. ”

  “Maybe they’ll change their plans because you heard them,” Vic said. “Maybe they’ll call it off. ” She was trying to be hopeful.

  “Or they’ll do it sooner. Vic, we’ve gotta get to Springston. We’ve gotta get Conner and Rob out of there. We’ve gotta warn everyone. ”

  “There are people in Springston who want us dead,” she reminded him.

  “Brock and his men are heading to Springston, and they want everyone dead,” Palmer said.

  The words stung like a gust of sand. Vic shook her canteen and listened to the contents splash around. Her brother looked away from her and toward the sky where crows circled and the tops of dunes blew in gray sheets. She knew her brother was right. She folded away the map of a thousand undiscovered treasures and slipped it into her pocket. She knew he was right and that they had to go back to Springston. And she didn’t like it.

  41 • A Smuggled Tale

  Violet

  There was the sting of a wolf biting her lips. A nightmare of burning desert sand and freezing windy nights and a pack of wild beasts tearing at her flesh—all broken by a splash of water against her mouth. And the young girl awoke in a strange room.

  There was a woman above her. A bed. The young girl was lying on a bed beneath sheets as clean and white as a child’s teeth. Her dive suit and her britches were gone, just a shirt like a man wears folded across her and cinched with a white ribbon—sweet-smelling and clean. She moved to touch the shirt, and her side screamed out where she’d been bit.

  “Lie still,” the woman said. She placed a hand on the young girl’s shoulder and forced her back against the pillows. There were two boys in the room. They were the boys from one of her dreams. “Can you take another small sip?” the woman asked.

  The young girl nodded, and a jar was brought forward, the water inside as clear as glass. She lifted her hands to help, but they were bandaged and useless. The water burned her mouth in the best way.

  “What’s your name?” the woman asked.

  “Violet,” she said. Her voice was small in that strange room.

  The woman smiled at this. “Like the flower. ”

  The older of the two boys moved closer to the bed, and Violet remembered his face from her dream, but it wasn’t a dream. Conner. He had picked her up and carried her. She knew where she was, that this was real. She turned to the woman with the water, who was asking about her name.

  “Father said violet was the color he saw when I was born, that it was like seeing the air from beneath the sand. That’s why he named me Violet. ”

  The woman smoothed the hair back from the girl’s forehead and frowned like this was the wrong answer.

  “Can I have more water?” she whispered. Her mouth was so dry.

  “Just a little,” the woman said. “It’s possible to drink too much. ”

  Violet nodded. “You can drown,” she said. “Like in the river. Or what happens if you drink the bad water from the trough. ” She lifted her head and took another sip. The younger of the two boys stood at the foot of the bed and stared at her. She knew who this was. “You’re Rob,” she said.

  The boy startled as if someone had stomped on his foot. Regaining his composure, he bobbed his head.

  “Father said we were about the same age. ”

  “Then he wasted no time,” the woman with the jar of water muttered. She sounded upset. “Where is he now? How far away is your village?”

  “How did you get across No Man’s Land?” the older boy asked.

  “How old are you?” Rob wanted to know.

  The woman snapped her fingers at the two boys, and they seemed to know this meant not to talk. And something occurred to Violet. “You’re my second mom,” she said. “You’re Rose. ”

  The woman’s cheeks twitched at this. She shook her head and opened her mouth to say something—Violet thought maybe to say that she wasn’t her mom—but instead she just wiped at one eye and kept quiet. The two boys seemed to be waiting for Violet to answer all their questions, but she had already forgotten most of them.

  “I don’t come from a village,” she said. She rested her head on the pillow and gazed longingly at the jar of water in the woman’s hands. “I came from a camp. It doesn’t have a name, just a number, and we aren’t allowed to leave. There are tents and fences, and we can see the city from the camp. Kids from the city come to the fence—there’s two fences, so if you get through one the other will stop you—and some of the kids from the city throw candy through the fence and some throw rocks—it’s usually the bigger kids with the rocks, which means the rocks come harder than the candy, but we’re told to stay away from the fence anyway—”

  “What kind of camp is this?” Rose asked.

  “Like camping in a tent—?” Rob said, but he got snapped at again.

  “A mining camp,” Violet said. “It’s where they blow up the ground and grab the worthy stuff out with their nets. That’s what the foreman calls them, but Father says they aren’t really nets. They have magnets in them. He knows all about wires and magic and stuff. They make us work the troughs for the heavier bits that drift to the bottom. We work with water up to our elbows all day, cold water. It makes your hands and fingers shrivel. People in the camp who come from the south call it the pruning flesh—”