He loosened the sand above him and kicked off the hard pack below. It was almost impossible to move his arms. He let the sandflow do most of the work, tried to remember all the older divers who laughed at noobs for using fins in the first place. It wasn’t kicking, it was thinking that moved a man. That’s what they said. He’d never believed them. He tried to now. He tried to breathe. So damn hard to breathe. Like a tourniquet across his chest, like his ribs were knitted together, like the whole world was sitting on top of him.
Up. He made the mistake of looking down, could feel the pull of gravity, the sucking of those purples and blues, that hard earth far below, fading now, becoming invisible, just a handful of buildings until there was only one, and then he kept his visor pointed up, looking for the blinking transponders, watching the gauge drop back to under three hundred meters. Two fifty. Hell yeah, a breath. He sucked on the tanks, was damn glad for Palmer’s lungs for once, wasn’t jealous in the slightest, and as he rose up and up he felt that distance between him and his friend grow, that crushing depth, and some part of him knew, some dark sliver, that there was no going back. He had discovered Danvar. Him. It would be for some other asshole to risk his neck exploring it, pulling up all those artifacts. Hell, he hadn’t even grabbed that brewer. Hadn’t been any time. Breathing deeply now, sucking the tank down from yellow to red, he got under a hundred meters and no longer cared how much air was in the tank. He could get there. He could make it. The transponders above were blindingly bright. The orange and yellow glow of the shaft walls could be seen. Hap kicked straight for the white beacons and the soft bottom of the shaft, his legs sore, his ribs bruised from the effort, a joy in his throat—
Hap!
He heard the faint murmur in his jawbones. Palmer. Probably got his head in the sand, his visor on, holding his breath and yelling after him. Hap didn’t answer, didn’t raise the voice that happens in a man’s throat when he whispers in his mouth, when he thinks aloud. He kept those thoughts to himself.
Hap, you fucker, get back here! Hap–!
Hap didn’t hear the rest. His head broke through the bottom of that well. He lifted himself up clumsily, dragging his legs out of sand softened by the vibrations of his suit, until he was sputtering and balled up in the open air once more.
He spit out his regulator. The tanks were empty. Hap moved the visor up to his forehead and took a few deep breaths in the pitch black. He fought the temptation to whoop for joy, to whoop for surviving. The others would be waiting up on that metal hatch and might hear him. Act cool. Act like you’ve done this before. A fucking hero, that’s what he was. A legend. He’d never pay for a drink in any dive bar for the rest of his life. He flashed forward to himself in old age, in his forties, weathered and gray, sitting in the Honey Hole with two girls on his lap, telling people about the day he discovered Danvar. Palmer would have some heroic role to play. He’d see to that. He’d have the bartender buy him another round so he could toast Palmer’s name. And the girls …
With his dive light on and his suit off, he fumbled for one of the dangling ropes, knotted it securely under his arms, gave it three sharp tugs. Oh, the girls. He thought of the girls as the slack went out of the rope. Almost too late, he remembered the beacons, which weren’t cheap, and reached for his. The rope caught and started lifting him. Hap yelled for them to wait and scrambled after Palmer’s beacon, which was worth a good twenty coin. He got his fingers on it as the rope began to haul him up, clutched the small device in his palm. While they hauled him through the shaft, he kept his one flipper on the wall to keep him from bouncing around and tucked the two transponders into the belly pocket on his suit. Fuck. He’d made it.
••••
The disc of light above grew larger and brighter as Hap was pulled skyward. He could see the sun shining down from directly overhead, so it must already be noon. Damn. Had they been down there that long? Someone above him barked orders to the men handling the rope. He could hear men grunting as they took up the line hand over hand, lifting him in swaying jerks. When he got to the lip, Hap helped, grabbing the hot edge of the metal platform, feeling the burn through his gloves as he pulled himself up on weary arms, kicking with his feet.
Two of the pirates grabbed him by his dive suit and tanks and hauled him out.
“Where’s your friend?” someone asked, peering over the lip.
“Didn’t make it,” Hap said. He tried to take deep breaths. The old man who had checked over Palmer’s gear searched Hap’s face for a beat, and then waved his arms toward the high dune where the generator could be heard and a plume of sand filled the sky. But Brock pushed the old man’s arms down and glared up in the same direction, waving some command off. Soon everyone was looking at Hap. The dive master studied the deep shaft as if hoping Palmer would appear.
“How far’d you get?” Moguhn asked, his dark eyes flashing. “What’d you see?”
Hap realized he was still out of breath from the excitement, the adrenaline. “Danvar,” he wheezed, beaming with triumph. “Sandscrapers like nobody’s ever seen.” He looked to Brock, whose eyes shined bright. “Sandscrapers everywhere, hundreds of meters tall, like twenty or thirty Springstons put together. Artifacts all over the place—”
“You were down a long time on two tanks,” the dive master said. “We’d almost given you up.”
“We found a pocket of air in one of the tallest scrapers, so we looked around a bit.” He tried to make it sound matter-of-course. “We wanted to get you your money’s worth.” Hap beamed up at Brock. All of this would go in his stories, all would be embellished over the years.
“Did you record it all?” Brock asked in that deep and guttural accent of his. “Did you get a map of the area? Precise coordinates? Everything has to be precise.”
“It’s all stored in my visor.” Hap tapped the band pushed up on his head.
“Let’s have it,” Brock said, holding out his hand. Two of the other men were behind Hap, holding that large metal hatch open. Hap was about to say that he’d want to see the coin first when he felt his visor tugged off his head and handed over. It took him a pause to realize that Brock’s command hadn’t been directed at him at all.
“Thank you,” Brock said. He smiled at Hap. “And now, I trust you can keep a secret.”
Hap was about to answer, to tell him that he damn sure could, but he quickly realized that this wasn’t directed at him either. This flash of understanding came right before Moguhn shoved him in the chest and Hap felt himself go backwards. He windmilled his arms, stirring the air, a grunt and a helpless squeak escaping his lungs, his heels rocking back dangerously, before he tumbled into the dark.
He hit the hard wall of that deep shaft and spun down, the air whistling past his ears, his stomach up in his throat and choking off his screams. He fell swiftly. Felt a dangling rope, and the wild swinging of his arms caught a wrap. A wrap on his wrist, catching tight, and then the sting, the burn, as it caught his weight and he slid down and down, the rope whistling as it rubbed his flesh, biting, on fire, cutting through his skin and sinking to the bone, tumbling and tumbling until he hit in an explosion of agony.
His leg, his back, the tanks, and then his head, so fast it was almost at once. He couldn’t feel his body. He couldn’t feel his body. His arm was in the air, hung up in the rope. By his dive light, he could see the rope buried deep in his flesh, squeezing bone, blood racing down to his elbow.
Hap tried to move, but he couldn’t. Turning his head, he saw his boot near his shoulder. His boot was near his shoulder. And Hap realized, numbly and sickeningly, that his foot was still in it.
Oh fuck, oh fuck. His body was ruined. His mind was still aware, could see what had happened to him, and he knew it wasn’t something he would ever recover from. He was an unnatural heap, but still alive.
Far above, shadows bent over the small disk of light. Hap tried to scream up at them, yell for help, yell a curse on them for all their days, but all that leaked out of him was a whimper, a rattle. One of the shadows moved, an arm waving, and some receding part of Hap’s mind thought they were waving down at him. But they were waving beyond the rise of that great crater at whoever was holding the walls of that shaft open—because the power was killed, a connection severed, and those walls collapsed suddenly and all at once. And Hap’s mouth, locked open in quiet agony, filled with sand. And the earth sat upon his broken chest.
Part 2:
A Visitor
9 • The Brief Hiss of Life
“You’re letting the sand in,” Conner warned, as Rob returned from his piss.
His little brother fell into the tent and onto his ass, remembered to knock his boots together before swinging his feet inside, then wrestled with the canvas flap. “If we aimed the door to the west, the wind wouldn’t get in,” Rob complained.
“We always do it this way. Just don’t dally when you go in and out.”
Rob sulked while Conner readied the lantern. Outside, the world pulsed red from the dying fire. The wind rocked the tent and sand hissed against the canvas. “Did you go?” Conner asked.
“Yeah.”
“Will you need to go again?”
“Not until morning.”
“Good. Let’s begin.”
Rob situated himself on the other side of the tent. Conner adjusted the wick. He pinched the top to feel that it was wet with oil, held his flint and striker above it and scraped them together until the fuel caught. He turned off his dive light, and the tent was filled with the more primitive and inconsistent glow of a beating flame. It was the light of childhood and nostalgia. The ephemeral light. That which does not last.
Both boys stared at the living flame for a long while, drawn back in time to simpler days, family days, when the concern for light meant another jar of rendered fat and not some rechargeable battery.
“This was Dad’s lantern,” Conner said. “He left it for us the night he departed so that we could find our way home.”
This was how Conner began the yearly ritual. It was how he always began it. His older brother Palmer had said these lines before him and their eldest sister Vic had spoken them before that.
Conner looked up from the lantern, breaking the spell, and realized suddenly that Rob would never have a reason to speak these words. There would be no one to listen. No one to care. Rob coughed into his tiny fist, almost as if to say Let’s get on with it.
“Dad left us … twelve years ago today. We will never know why. All that remains is our memory of him, and that is what we honor. This tent … our father’s tent … was the last place we saw him. It was less crowded in the morning when we woke. You were sleeping in mother’s womb. Palmer used to say that I kicked him all night and stole the blankets. Vic says she awoke as Father made ready to go, saw him in the moonlight when he flapped the tent, and that his face told her everything. In the morning, we all knew. I was six. Palmer was little older than you are now. Mother was young and beautiful. And breaking down the tent that morning was the first thing we ever did without him.”
Conner fumbled with the canteen. His hands were shaking. His convictions, too. He poured water from the vessel and into the lid, rationing as was proper. He handed the cap across to his brother, who drank it down in a gulp. Conner poured a cap for himself. “The last night we were together, Father shared his canteen, and he told us stories. Mom was given two caps that night, one for you.” Conner tipped the water into his mouth and swallowed. He poured another.
“The first time Father brought Palmer and Vic here, it was before I was born. He and Mother spoke of their parents, their past, the need to remember. After he left us, we made a vow to come back once a year so that we wouldn’t forget.”
Conner caught Rob looking to the side where Palmer would normally be. Gone, just like Vic. So much for promises. Conner dipped a finger into the cap and held it over the open flame, ashamed of his plans, of growing up to be like his dad. “This is the hiss of life,” he said. The flame ducked and sputtered as the water hit, and then it leapt back up. “Our lives are the sweat on the desert floor. We go to the sky, over the jagged ridge, and we fall in the heavens where it rains and floods.”
He passed the cap to Rob, who repeated the ritual and the old saying that went with it. They were, the both of them, religious for one day of the year. There was no pastor to finish the cap, so Conner told Rob to drink it. And he did. The cap went back on the canteen.
Rob studied the flame for a long while. His eyes shone in the beating light. And then he looked up at Conner. “Tell me about Father,” he said.
In that instant, Conner was peering at his old self. He was young again, and his older brother was telling him stories of Father back when he was Lord of Springston, before the land was corrupt, before the wall took its lean, before Low-Pub took its independence, back when their dad walked the streets and clasped hands and clapped backs and privately wept while his hair fell out, back before the office of Lordship and the suffering of his people drove him to No Man’s Land with all the others who leave and never return.
Across the recovered lamp-flame sat a younger Conner, eyes aglow. He could see himself huddled there beside his older brother while Vic told them both about Father when he was younger still, the great sand diver who shunned tanks of air for the sickness they caused, who could go down for ten minutes at a time and bring back wonders from impossible depths, who saved the water pump of Low-Pub and discovered the hills that became the western gardens. Father when he was young and reckless and bold.
But Conner remembered a different man. His last memory of their dad was of a man gray and weathered, like a piece of wood exposed to the wind and sun. He remembered his father that night in the tent, kissing them all on their foreheads, whispering that he loved them and to be safe. He remembered that terrible year as they were forced to leave the great wall and began a slow drift westward, with the wind, through the best and then the worst parts of Springston and out to Shantytown. He remembered thinking they would never use the family tent again.
