He crawled first toward a stack of crates, some part of him aware of the tracks he was leaving in the sand. The lamp overhead swayed, the shadows in the tent stirring menacingly. Burlap covered one crate. Palmer could only think about food, so when he lifted the burlap, he saw loaves of bread sitting there. Bright white loaves. He retrieved one, caught a whiff of something like chalk and rubber, and realized these loaves were too small, too heavy, not bread at all.
His mind was playing tricks on him. Palmer held the object into the light. Explosives. He’d seen bombs like these once before, when a sandscraper in Springston had to be demolished before a dune pushed it into its neighbor. He checked the crate and saw that it was full of white loaves like that. He had seen the aftereffects of rebel bombs. Everyone who grew up in Springston had. The red stains on the sand, the trails of gore, the boots with bloody stumps, men and women and children unrecognizable. He felt the same fear holding that loaf, that tingling up the back of his neck, that he felt at any funeral or wedding or celebration where there might be reprisals, where a loud roar was the last thing you’d ever hear.
Palmer scanned the tent. Brock and his men were losing the look of scroungers and pirates out for a score. Something else was going on.
His belly told him to focus. Food, it said. The loaf went back with the others and the burlap was put back as he found it. There were barrels on the other side of the table. The metal hook of a ladle gleamed over the lip of one barrel. Palmer’s mouth ached for a drink. He shuffled toward the barrel, shaking the sand loose from his canteen, and peered over the side to see a dim, murky, but glorious reflection at the bottom. His gaunt face wavered in the inky puddle. Palmer uncapped the canteen and leaned over the lip, plunging the vessel beneath the surface, the water on his arm cool and invigorating. The canteen gurgled twice, pockets of air bursting through the surface, and then a shout erupted just outside the tent. Laughter. Voices approaching.
Palmer yanked his hand out and whirled around. His limbs and organs desired to go all directions at once, which left him rooted to the spot. The laughter grew near. He fell to the ground as the tent flapped open. Wiggling on his belly, he got under the table, dribbling water, pairs of boots kicking their way inside.
“Fucking hell!” someone roared. “This thing’s heavy.”
There was the thud of a palm slapping someone’s back. The smell of cooked meat, a hot meal in someone’s hand. Palmer powered his suit on and sank his knees and feet into the earth, pivoting his legs down while keeping his shoulders and arms clear. He worked the cap back onto the canteen, didn’t risk taking a sip, could feel water dripping off his right hand. He pressed his wet palm to his mouth and sucked what moisture he could without making a sound. Seeing the tracks he had left behind from crawling under the table, he used his suit to flow the ground level, careful as a man tucking in a sleeping baby. Something heavy thudded down right beside the table, a large metal cylinder, and there was a shout to be careful. Packs and other gear knocked overhead. Someone brushed the sand off the surface of the table, and it rained down around Palmer, a veil in the lamplight.
Palmer started to sink himself beneath the sand to get out of there, to wait and come back later when everyone was asleep, but a fragment of a sentence caught his ear.
“—any sign of the other diver?”
The laughter and noise died down. Palmer held his breath, certain that his heartbeat could be heard.
“No, sir.” It was Moguhn speaking. Palmer recognized his quiet but commanding voice. “We scanned down two hundred meters, as far as we could, and there’s no body but the one.”
“And no chance he surfaced?” This was Brock again, the one who had asked about the diver. There was no mistaking his strange accent. He must’ve been away from camp. Just returned with the hiking party. But from where? Palmer listened.
“No chance at all.” This time it was Yegery, Palmer was sure of it. “One diver out of four can go that deep, and that’s what we’ve got. One in four of them made it. The sand down there makes it impossible to breathe and move at the same time. Besides, it’s been four days. He’s gone.”
Four days, Palmer thought.
I tried to tell you, his belly said.
“So is this heavy-ass thing what we were after?” someone asked. They sounded doubtful. Disappointed. Palmer couldn’t see what it was they were referencing.
“This is it,” Brock said.
“Does that mean we can break camp?” someone else asked.
“Yes. First light, and then we head south. We leave no trace.”
“You sure this thing does what you say it does?”
“Let’s see it,” someone said.
“Set it on the table,” Brock ordered.
Two sets of hands drifted down right in front of Palmer to grasp the large metal cylinder. Palmer took a deep breath to expand the sand around his chest, then powered his suit down. He couldn’t have more than a trickle of a charge left. He was buried up to his armpits, but he could still breathe.
“You sure the table will hold it?”
“It’ll hold.”
Above Palmer, the metal table creaked and strained from the weight of the thing. He had only gotten a glimpse of the object in the lamplight, but it looked like old tech, something scavenged, a cylinder with wires and small pipes, made with precision and expensive-looking. Expensive and old.
“Damn thing’s heavy,” someone said, as the table somehow didn’t buckle. Palmer kept a hand on his chest, ready to dive at any moment. He could feel that object overhead like a dark thought.
“Looks busted to me. Wiring’s fucked. And look at this here. Ain’t no fixing that.”
“Ignore that,” Brock said. “It’s what’s inside that matters. The rest of this is for setting it off, but we don’t need that.”
The men grew quiet as they studied the object. The scavenger in Palmer grew intensely curious.
“It’s a thing of beauty,” Yegery whispered.
“But how does it work?” Moguhn asked.
“I don’t know,” Yegery admitted.
There was an uncomfortable shuffling of heavy boots.
“I mean, I don’t understand the principle, the science. But the book says one of these can level an entire town—”
“An entire town,” someone scoffed.
“Shaddup,” Brock ordered. He told Yegery to go on.
“It’s just a little sphere in there. That’s all the stuff on the inside is. It’s inert enough. The book says it stays good for hundreds of thousands of years. All you do is tighten that little ball real quick, like turning a fistful of sand into a child’s marble, and everything goes boom. This thing will send dunes to the heavens and turn the desert to glass.”
“And you’re sure about that?” someone asked.
“Yeah, but it’s fucked,” another said.
“It’ll work,” Brock said. “Trust me. We could level all of Low-Pub with one of these.”
“What about Springston?” someone asked.
“We stick with the original plan for Springston,” Brock said. “We blow the wall, and then we hit Low-Pub. If there’s anything left of either of them, we’ll go back for another of these. Now that we’ve got a reference point for the map, we can grab as many as we like. Before long, there won’t be a structure standing south of our dunes, and the Lords can rule over the flat sand we leave behind.”
There was chuckling at this, which grew into laughter. Someone bumped into the table, and there was the clink of a jar tipping on its side. “Fucking idiot,” someone grumbled. There was a rush to remove gear, the scrape and slide of bags and swords and guns. “Get the map,” Moguhn said. A rustle of paper and boots stomping into action. Palmer wondered when the fuck they were going to get out of there so he could grab something to eat, and then an object hit the sand in front of him, a dagger, plunging blade-first. A hand dropped down to retrieve it and gripped the hilt. And then a stooped head. Eyes flashed in the darkness.
“What the fuck?” the man said.
And then an angry roar as the pirate pounced toward Palmer.
32 • Run
Palmer barely got his suit powered on as the man scrambled under the table after him. There was a blow to his head, the swipe of a hand and sharp nails, and his visor was knocked off. He reached for it, got a hold of the headband, felt the visor snap off, lost. Dazed, he took a quick breath and pulled the band on, flowed the sand in order to sink down, and got his eyes closed just in time. He was blind and weak and on a sliver of a charge and barely a lungful of breath. In a burst of inspiration, he dropped the sand in the tent a meter and hardened it. It was a killing offense to use the sand against men, but these men wanted him dead anyway.
He went sideways as fast as he could to clear the tent walls before rising toward the surface. There was drag in the sand, like something was wrapped around his feet, was wrapped around his entire body. The sand grew thick. Dense. His fucking suit was dying. Or the band had been damaged when the visor was ripped free.
He went up as fast as he could, blind, half a breath in his lungs, and came up flat, was partway out, his head clear, when the sand froze around him. No more charge. Palmer grunted and worked his shoulders back and forth until he got an arm free. He began digging himself out of the sand, the stars twinkling serenely above, while two meters away, men were hurling insults and curses and shouting for help as they tried to dig themselves out as well.
It was a race. Palmer got his other arm out. He kicked with his weak legs, twisted at the waist until his hips were free, was only in ten or so inches of sand, fucking close. A meter down, and he would’ve been buried. A few inches deeper, and he would’ve been trapped. He heard the stomp and crunch of sand in the distance as men were summoned from their tents. Palmer got up and ran, keeping the large tent between him and the rest of the camp as the men inside yelled at the others to fucking dig them out, to get out there and find that diver, to kill him fucking dead.
With his heart in his throat, a canteen sloshing a quarter full, his visor with the proof of his dive and discovery of Danvar gone, and hardly anything for his efforts but the life in the marrow of his bones, Palmer ran. He kicked sand in the darkness, keeping to the well-trod valleys where the shuffle of feet would make it hard to follow, and he fucking ran.
33 • Not Happening
Vic
Vic burst through the back door of Graham’s shop and ran across the hot sand. Gunshots rang out behind her. It sounded like both men had their weapons working now. Fountains of sand erupted from the face of the dune ahead of her; there was a zing off a metal roof, an explosion of sand near her feet, and then some wild animal took a bite out of her calf.
Vic sprawled forward in the sand, her leg on fire. Someone yelled that that was his sister goddamnit, don’t fucking kill her. Feet stomped her direction. Vic could feel them coming, could feel a thrumming in the sand. But the thrum wasn’t from the boots chasing her down.
The sand opened and swallowed her. Vic was too startled to take a breath, only just got her eyes closed in time. A regulator was pressed to her lips. She accepted it and took a deep gulp of air, felt the sand around her stay soft so she could breathe, could feel movement through the earth as she was hauled sideways like so much scavenge.
The regulator was taken away for a moment. She was left with only blackness and motion. The regulator was returned. Someone was sharing their tank with her. Vic clutched this person, knowing they had saved her, hoping it was Palmer. The agony in her leg faded to a dull throb, and the sight of Marco’s head erupting filled the back of her eyelids and played over and over again—a bang and a fountain of what she loved best about him, a profound hollow in the pit of her soul, so that when she was brought up through the sand and into the open air, she was unaware of this, didn’t know she was out of the sand, couldn’t feel the hot sun on her flesh, wasn’t aware that there was air to breathe even as it filled her lungs, wasn’t aware of anything but that Marco was dead.
There was just fact like an all-encompassing blackness. A cool pit in the center of her chest. Her cheeks were dry and dusted with sand, Graham holding her, calling her name, asking if she was okay, her leg coloring a dune like a sunrise.
Graham worked on the wound while Vic sat there numbly. She gradually realized that they were on the back of a low dune in the training grounds, where at least it was legal to use a dive suit. Though they were long past legality. People were trying to kill them. No find was worth this. Danvar wasn’t worth this. Vic could feel the senseless violence of retribution attacks, that blank stagger when people mill about the dunes after a bomb has interrupted a funeral or a wedding or a queue at the cistern. Bang, and the world stops making sense. Bang, and mothers are wailing. Bang, and body parts mingle. Bang. Bang. Bang. The lucky make it out to mourn. For the lucky there is a click, a misfiring of fate, a dud of doom. Vic is there on that slope of sand, and Marco is dead. Life is capricious and cruel and totally fucking random and there is no hope of finding meaning in a nightmare. In a nightmare at least her enraged screams would come out a hoarse whisper, but Vic could not manage even that. Could not manage even a whimper.
“You’re lucky,” Graham said. He was winded. Was tying off her calf with a strip of her own bloody pant-leg, had torn it without her realizing. “Missed the bone. Damn lucky.”
She just stared at him. She could taste blood in her mouth. She hoped it was hers and not Marco’s. Hers from falling face first into the sand, from biting her tongue. Don’t let it be his.
“I don’t have air enough for both of us,” Graham said. “Not for long. And my suit’s not on a full charge. But we need to get you out of here. They’re after me.”
