Neon Sands

by Adam J. Smith

  Neon Sands

  a trilogy

  by

  Adam J Smith

  Neon sands trilogy 1/3

  Neon series 1/9

  Copyright © 2018 Adam J Smith

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, contact the author.

  Thank you for reading. This is the first book in the Neon Sands trilogy, with two further trilogies to come all set within the same world. So settle in.

  Chapters

  Earth

  The Sands

  Sanctum

  Calix

  Annora

  Linwood

  Ziyad

  Calix II

  Now

  Ghosts

  Dig

  Acclimatisation

  Work

  Recall

  Excavation

  Above

  Below

  Six

  Interlude

  ArK

  Truth

  Darkness

  Sun

  Bitch

  Disconnected

  Barrick

  Whirlwind

  Secrets

  Underground

  Earth

  The stars brought life to the planet, and the stars destroyed it.

  The Sands

  It was ash on fingertips, and vast. Stepping upon it gave the impression that it had come not from below, buffed by millions of years of wind slicing against rock, but rather from above; that perhaps it had drifted down and settled here. The layers undulated from an inch to hundreds of feet thick. Red storms swept and swirled, colouring the atmosphere with grains so light it took days until the air became clear again: shifting from bloodshot and murky to a jaundiced yellow, the sepia sun somewhere above the thick cloud-layer.

  When the veins of sand shifted and the hills crumbled into flakes; when tracks were swept clean by the hands at the end of the wind’s embrace; secrets long hidden, landmarks long lived, came and went. A planet torn and sutured. Old wounds healed only to have older scars revealed. Those left behind survived, somehow, within these wounds, something like maggots but not exactly – though they fed from what they found. They learned from the revelations offered by the shifting sands, hoping for enough sustenance to last through the long, red storms to come.

  Retreating upwards as birds once did, the fractals of sand became clearer: they were a web of capillaries. There was a subtle camber to the veins: hidden pipes whose vague shape could only be seen from above – an eight-pronged star. And here, on a very rare occurrence, a visible section where the sand was at a low swell. And something inside, swooshing, almost gushing. Where was this pipe from, and where was it going? What was inside?

  But unmentioned and most obvious from this ghosthead-trip through the sky was the star’s beating heart; the one uninterrupted lightshow; the one sand-free oasis in this miasma of nothing. It stood like a dagger in the flesh of the planet, buried to the hilt, the handle reaching high into the sky. Rumours of its existence were fairy tales to the wanderers; some claimed to have seen it, and some had, though few had lived to tell their story.

  Sanctum

  Calix

  He slipped, exhausted. The sand drew nearer and nearer to his face, and as he fell, he had time to appreciate the sudden give of weight from his shoulders, the stress purged from his thighs as he sang a falsetto. A heavy sigh higher in pitch than it should have been. He had time to ponder this and smile as his goggles, already stained red, filled his vision with darkening sand. His dim shadow relinquished as though saying “Enough is enough. I’ve carried you as far as I can carry you, Calix. We need to rest.” The shadow was aware of its own slim limitations beneath the ever-dense sky, the sun nothing but a celestial mole forever above the surface; one could lie and study the light in the day, watch as it teased the thick unyielding curtain from east to west, never breaking through.

  Calix collapsed and turned his head to the left at the last second. The red nothing swallowed him, shifting and sliding down over him, powdery as the refined corn back at Sanctum. He groaned and spread his limbs to create the greatest possible surface area – a basic survival tactic taught to all the orphans – and rolled over onto his back, digging the baton-heel of his sand shoes deep to prevent sliding down any further.

  “Calix, old friend.”

  He dry swallowed and though the sand wasn’t coarse, he could feel it where the tongue descended down, back there; feel it sucking the saliva from the roof of his mouth and the underside of his tongue. How he hated the sand: its prescience; its hunger for life; how it was always able to find its way in and fuck things up. Fuck up engines. Fuck up filters. Fuck up his throat.

  He let out a groan and then managed a smile. “You’re not real,” he said, and then laughed. “You’re not real, but you’re all I have, old friend,” and his laughter turned maniacal. “You’re all I have.”

  The shadow said nothing.

  “Don’t go M. I. A. on me, now.” Calix lay on the forty-five degree slope and shook his head from side to side, sliding it down into an indentation of its own creation. “Who else...” he started to ask with a croak; deeply, sadly, the dryness scratching his tonsils. He coughed and couldn’t finish his thought, though he was glad, in a way, not to have to say it out loud. His eyes struggled to stay open. Night was still a few hours away though his goggles suggested dusk had arrived. He coughed again, wincing, this time biting into the bandana around his mouth to stop it coming looser than it already was. Damn sand, he thought, feeling it coat his tongue. He pushed his tongue into the roof of his mouth to lock off his throat and took deep breaths through his nostrils.

  It was said you could go crazy breathing this in. “Only shallow breaths,” was Kirillion’s advice. “You’ll go insane with bloodlust otherwise.” Calix coughed out a lungful of air, simultaneously running his tongue along the saliva gland at its base, and eventually his mouth moistened. He hacked and coughed again, offering his chapped lips rare freedom by removing his bandana to spit out as much red phlegm and spittle as possible. The sand drank it hungrily.

  And now, sinking back into his hollow, he had the blood-iron flavour of the air burning the back of his tonsils like the sand never had. He supposed he’d never get used to it; the taste of a thousand – a million – who knew how many – scorched and vaporised bodies, and chemistry; from dust to dust, my father, O father; from dust to dust, an organic offering to the sun, to night, to all the other suns and their planets and their moons; this cocktail of dust that tasted and smelled like death. How could anyone ever get used to it?

  I’m lying in it, he thought, and not for the first time. But what was a first came at him not like a red storm – rushing as though suddenly summoned at his side – but like hands in the night. I’m lying in them. All of them. And most penetratingly, and scarily, of all. I’m not alone. “It’s okay,” he whispered, and allowed their arms to take him down into the pit of his waiting dreams.

  ***

  “From ash to blood to ash, we thank you. We remember you. We honour you as you honour us. From death you give us life, and from life we give you life again. Your face in our minds. Your soul resting and nourishing our hearts. Your being a part of us. Rest now in peace, become the earth at our feet once more, become the source from which all things grow. From ash to blood to ash, we thank you and bleed with you.” Kirillion lifted his head and revealed a streak of tears that disappeared into a dense beard. He placed a hand
on the shoulders of two boys flanking him. For such a large man he had a soft touch. The boys looked up at him, waiting for his signal.

  Calix waited.

  The rest of the children waited.

  The silent crowd waited.

  Kirillion tilted his head to the neon strips of white light lining the top of the dome, dense dual-tracks separated by two metres of solarised glass from north to south, and nodded. The lights dimmed. Calix noticed Rafe’s subtle smile. Rafe had been the one to install what he called a low-powered inverter, using a flyback transformer that enabled them to control the light levels. A small success and one they had celebrated – as they did any small success – and Rafe was never shy of reminding them. During the long months of extended daylight, and what felt even longer months of extended night, they were better able to preserve power and keep the rhythm of their internal clocks true. Rafe caught Calix’s glance and straightened his smile, nodding to Calix, an accentuated grimness in his eyes.

  Deven and Jayan, the two flanking boys, were released by Kirillion and stepped forward, towards Ziyad. As one went to the head and the other to the feet, Efa sobbed loudly from the back of the crowd. A few heads turned, and Calix thought he saw anger in some of them. Eyes returned to Ziyad, arms pulling the rag of their grey shawls tight across shoulders and chests. It was cold out here.

  Ziyad lay wrapped from head to toe in a white shroud. His boyish outline was skeletal and naked underneath the accelerant fabric. Elbows jutted sharply from arms crossed over chest. The points of uncut toenails, or else retracted skin, were visible where the shroud fit tight over his feet. The whole of him, Calix thought, was wrapped too tight, like the duck dressed in a straight-jacket in one of those old cartoons. The memory fleeted by. The duck always wriggled free. But Ziyad was dead.

  Dead.

  The word got stuck in his mind as he watched Deven and Jayan lift their friend to the platform. The deadness of him. Calix felt his heart begin to quicken. Suddenly he wanted the dead body to wriggle, to wrench free of the shroud. “Zi,” he uttered, not realising the extent of the tears falling from his eyes and the mucus building up in his nose, suddenly crying. “Zi...” he said. “Zi... get out, get free.”

  “Ssshhh,” calmed Easton, who turned to pick him up and hold him in her arms. “It’s okay, little one, ssshhh, it’s okay.”

  Calix pressed his face into her neck, the rough hemp of her shawl scratching his chin. She smelled like salt and blood mixed together. She smelled like home. She smelled good. Wet-faced, he turned his head, noticing the sheen he’d created beneath her ears and whispering an apology.

  He held tight as the ceremony continued. Ziyad was on the platform now, being raised to the top of the cylindrical decomposition unit. Streaks of light from above reflected in dashes and dented points down the side of its shaft. Tomorrow, Calix thought, it’ll be the leftovers. Today, it’s the dead.

  The platform reached the rim.

  Today it was a tombstone; a grave and living memorial to the dead that rose high in the agricultural sector. The body would tip – there it goes now watched Calix, tears returning – and land with a soft thud. Sometimes it squelched, but not today. If near empty, the body had a way to fall and had, on occasion, rang hollowly off the inside wall before landing hard on whatever organic material was currently rotting away, the bed a shallow one.

  The accelerant worked quickly, activated by the surrounding heat that naturally irradiated, and worked quickly to break down the organic material so that it could be recycled in the Agridome. Given long enough, everything broke down. Only occasionally was a stray bone, a humorous say, stripped of meat and hollow of marrow, drawn out at the base of the unit. Dry and brittle, it minced easily with the rest of the compost material. Life went on.

  ***

  Life had a way. Archival film showed things that were unbelievable. People outside in fields of green with blue skies above. Oceans in which the strangest alien things not only swam, but breathed. That anything could live under water; that water itself had covered so much of Earth: it was nothing but another one of the fairy tales told to them at bedtime. Even on film they had a dreamlike quality; vast, concrete cities, grids of grey with motorcars and people, so many millions, shoulder to shoulder as they marched leg to leg and thigh to thigh, hand in hand, fingers laced in a billion embraces. Why did the films lie? What was the point of it? All Calix had to do was press his face against the inside of the dome, look out, and know the films had no more truth to them than Bluebeard or Rumpelstiltskin. The way Kirillion talked about these films as though they were the most important things to remember; our history, our heritage. What heritage? Look out there, thought Calix. There’s no heritage here. “Your truth is a lie,” he said. “There’s no sand in any of those films.”

  Kirillion laughed. He had a way of cutting you.

  “Don’t laugh at me,” Calix growled and hammered the glass with a balled hand. He felt Kirillion’s hand on his shoulder.

  “I’m not laughing at you, Calix.”

  Calix turned. There was no mockery behind Kirillion’s eyes, bedded deep into his wrinkles. Kirillion’s beard had flecks of grey to match his trousers and jacket, and his shirt was black.

  “You’re just unintentionally funny sometimes, my little man. It’s a good thing,” he smiled. “Come on, it’s time to get inside.”

  “How can you say those films are real?” He saw his reflection like a mirage against the wasteland of sand beyond; grim-faced even as a young boy, with too-long black hair and rags with holes for limbs. “Those people don’t live in domes. There’s no sand, uncle.”

  “You’re right, of course.” Kirillion stepped forward and bent down on his knees to meet Calix’s eyes. “But what’s more likely? That someone created those fake films? How? And for what purpose? Is it not good to believe in a better time and place, and that a better future is possible? Should we live like pigs in a desert forever?”

  “I guess not.”

  “There was a time when all those things in those films were real.” He put an arm around the boy and pulled him in close, saying with enthusiasm, “We have to believe, Cal. Believe in more. Believe in something or else we may as well just open the vents now and let the sand in and bury us like one of those snow domes in the films. This is real.” He took Calix’s hand and pressed its palm against the glass, putting his own hand above. “It’s real, as real as those films. As real as the hope that one day the sand will all blow away and we’ll find those cities, even if the concrete towers have all turned to dust themselves, like Ziyad in the D. C. Unit – we’ll see their footprints in the stone and we’ll know where to step again. Whatever annihilated us, it didn’t finish us off. Do you get it, Calix? We are still here. If this glass is still here, then there could be more out there.”

  “It must’ve been a bad thing.”

  “Terrible. But it didn’t win. And what do you think we do when we go out there?”

  “Look for things.”

  “Why?”

  “To use them. Reuse them. Like Zi.” Calix swallowed.

  “Yes. But also to reclaim what was taken from us.” Kirillion stood and Calix removed his hand from the glass. His sweated palm print remained. “Even on a day like today you’re learning, eh, Cal? Let’s get back inside.”

  ***

  The day Ziyad lost his life he’d been looking for a new pair of glasses. They had a rack in the store room dedicated to lenses and frames – they were mix and match, and without an ophthalmologist in Sanctum it was a case of finding the lens that worked for you. Only Ziyad and Tansy, one of the chefs, actually needed glasses, a consequence perhaps of too much exposure to windswept sand, or just plain bad genetics.

  It was here, down on level five, where Ziyad died. As he departed the lift he bumped into Calix who had been taking a stock count in the refrigerated section – six full pigs, one half-pig, two shoulders and a few off-cuts he didn’t know the name of.

  “You on chore duty too?�
� asked Calix.

  “Nah, broke my glasses. Had ‘em in my pocket while outside and forgot. Took off my mask and sat on ‘em at the same time.” Ziyad was five years older than Calix and short, even for a twelve-year-old.

  “Shoot. Okay, well I gotta go see Linwood now.”

  “Okay, Cal.”

  The last Calix saw of Ziyad was his back retreating to the end of the storeroom where the lights had not yet activated. The lift doors clunked shut and the storeroom light became an extinguishing exclamation mark as it rose. As always, cool air from the ventilation system that ran adjacent to the lift shaft pumped inside the cage.

  Rising, level five became four and the ventilation system could do nothing to dampen the mildly damp, dank scent of the fungi plantation. There in the darkness grew a variety of mushrooms, most of which still looked like they did inside the torn and tattered guidebook Calix had once flicked through – oysters and wine caps mostly, those were the best, but also ones near-translucent that had no official name in the book, Essa just called them ghost shrooms. These dried bitter, she said, but ground up (and she winked at him as she said this), “Well, a little of that in your flask and you won’t know which way the wind is blowing from.” He’d left pretty quickly. He didn’t much like the musty darkness, but he wasn’t sure he liked Essa with her greased skin and earth-smelling clothes much either.

  He’d see her in the traders market sometimes with little cloth packets of the stuff. Whenever a wanderer came to trade she always seemed to be the first person they went to. They probably smelled worse – no, not worse, just stranger – than she did, and so didn’t notice, or care.