Neon Sands

by Adam J. Smith

  “Kirillion is a murderer.”

  Barrick’s head tilted, like a dog cocking its ear. His eyes narrowed.

  Calix nodded. Ardelia appeared at his side, shocking him momentarily.

  “Well... go on... we’re listening.”

  Something itched where the edge of Calix’s collar met his neck, and he scratched it. “You trust him?”

  “No reason not to.”

  “Are we talking about Kirillion or Linwood, here?” asked Ardelia.

  “Kirillion.”

  Should I tell them?

  The three of them were inches apart; while normally this would make Calix feel uncomfortable, there was something right about this set up. Something conspiratorial. If he did tell them, it should be in a whisper, in a huddle, in a light of their own.

  “Kirillion killed Ziyad.” He watched their faces as he told them the story, trying to pick up on cues that they already knew what he was telling them, or already knew what kind of person Kirillion was – something to give up their game. But they just stared unblinking, listening to all he had to say.

  “I don’t know,” said Ardelia. “If... and I mean if, that’s true. I could believe it more if you’d said Linwood.”

  “All I know is Kirillion’s the one who called it in before it actually happened. If Linwood was involved then Kirillion was covering for him.”

  “Shit, kid. That sounds like a lot of two plus two equals five, if you get what I’m saying. Kiri’s as solid as they come. Why would he do such a thing?”

  “Zi found something he shouldn’t have? I don’t know.”

  “It don’t add up.” Barrick sat back down in his chair. “And why now, of all times? Just suddenly remembered?”

  “The ghost,” said Ardelia, and Calix nodded.

  “That fucking stuff,” said Barrick. He reached over and turned the volume dial up on the radio, filling the space with static.

  Calix strained to hear voices within the static. He grabbed his handheld radio and spoke into it, repeating Annora, Walker and Caia’s names.

  “They’re gonna be hungry when they get back,” said Ardelia. “Have you told anyone else what you just told us?”

  “Besides Annora,” said Barrick.

  “No.”

  “I have to say, Cal. Telling us was a dumb stupid move on your part. What if one of us was Kirillion’s pet? You’d have been in deep shit when we got back to Sanctum.”

  “I’m not afraid of him. Or any of you.”

  “Fucking hell; by telling us you’re implementing us in whatever happens in the future. What you gonna do? Confront him? You hoping we’d stand united behind you?”

  Calix felt the beginnings of a headache in his temple and rubbed at it; rubbed as though he could wipe it away.

  “Don’t tell anyone else.” Barrick leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, one fist inside another.

  “Look. I don’t know when or how, but I’m not just gonna sit on this. If...” Calix stood, feeling light-headed momentarily. “I’m telling you because if – when I do – confront him, and something happens to me...” He winced as he massaged his side again. Should something happen to me, he thought, imagining what the reality of standing there before Kirillion and telling him what this story would be like. Kirillion smiling his ever-redolent smile. Laughing. Shaking his head and telling him he’s got it all wrong. Telling him it was only ever an accident and that he shouldn’t get so worked up. His eyes would crinkle and he’d reach out a comforting hand to scruff his hair. Calix couldn’t help it; in this day dream he was a boy again, neck cranking upwards to Kirillion’s full height.

  Back to reality, he stared into the mirrored surface of the lockers. In the darkness and the uneven reflection he barely recognised himself, hid behind a beard that had recently thickened. He rubbed both hands against his cheeks and ran the coarse hair between his fingers. “If anything happens to me you’ll know why.”

  Darkness

  “Annora… Annora…” said a distant voice, ringing, echoing, as though the walls of the cavern themselves were singing her name. Walls she could see, but they were hundreds of metres away and lit from an unnamed source – perhaps her own imagination, she thought. Rock below and rock above and shimmering rockface left and right – it glowed and she floated on her belly, staring down into a darkening abyss. The rockface swirled with lights, spread those lights, until stars sparkled within the abyss, until the stars and the space within surrounded her. Her arms hung limply down. Her fingertips dipped into the abyss as she rose higher, and fell, rose higher, and fell, carried up by some force she didn’t understand, but on each fall, she blackened her fingertips as she circled them in space, touched the light of stars and swirled it into galaxies, getting a little of it on herself. And then she stopped reaching, couldn’t reach any longer, and she found herself straining, pulled downwards but pushed upwards by something stronger, and when she stretched her arms for the stars it tore at her heart.

  “Annora… stay with me,” the darkness said.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” she thought out loud.

  “Stay with me now,” the darkness said.

  “I’m not,” she said in her mind, the shape of the stars transforming now into pairs of eyes; Walker, Ardelia, Barrick and Calix were watching her, soundlessly, and she called out to Calix in an attempt to see his mouth move, so she could see his entire face, but all that remained were their eyes, floating, looking up at her. She was still weightlessly on her belly. Faithlessly rising. Formlessly seeing. Asking where Caia was – did she not care? And then remembering Caia’s brave fight against the sand when it tried to eat her alive. This… this carefree dislocation, she thought, was the opposite to the oppressive burying weight of sand that must’ve pushed on Caia as she battled to see the sky again. Every movement of hers’ a monumental effort compared to the vacuum in which Annora ascended. But wait…

  … wasn’t Walker… his eyes appeared in the darkness, closed, sleeping peacefully. Wasn’t Walker… injected? By Caia? A syringe formed in her hand, but it wasn’t her hand, it was Caia’s with her thumb ready to depress the syringe. And when she did it was like injecting light into the darkness; light that washed away the stars until all was blank. Grey milked onto the canvas, a mist-swarm that coalesced until she realised they were clouds, and this was the sky now; she was in it, risen so high she flew in the density. Caia had brought her here. Injected her! Put her in the chamber and now…

  … the numbness, the lack of sensation, it was beginning to wither, first in her arm and then in her heart. Suddenly, she was aware of her heart again and the weight of the world that pressed on it from all sides.

  “Annora…” it was Caia. The clouds cleared and it was Caia who called out to her. Grey gave way to orange and she realised she was in a clearing in the sky where the clouds could not touch her, and below was the strange settlement; the harbour for the Ark and the grounds for bloodshed, a blackened circle from which she could hear cries. She tried to clamp her hands over her ears but she had no hands or ears, and yet the crying and yelling welled, as yet the scorched target of sand neared, dead bodies formed into dust; her spirit neither fell nor rose, just rushed with tremendous speed.

  “Come on, Annora,” said the voice again.

  Rushed at the smouldering sand. Hit it in a flash of lightning. Fired back into the sky hundreds and thousands of metres high. Shot back to earth in a scintillating flash. And back into the sky again. The dislocated calling of her name. And then pounded into the sand again. Back and forth, back and forth, rocketing, her spirit one of elastic. Each thud a hammer knocking on the empty casing of her heart, a Russian roulette, a hammering jolt and nothing, a hammering jolt and nothing, a hammering jolt and...

  ... Annora gasped, the chains around her heart disintegrated.

  “Annie. Ann. Thank god,” said Caia, whose face swarmed in thick, black fog above Annora.

  She coughed, stung by the burning sensation against her skin in two pl
aces on her ribcage. Before passing out again she felt the red-iron taste of blood in her mouth, and felt Caia’s arm bend around and under her shoulders, lifting her up.

  ***

  If you don’t move with the sand it’ll swallow you alive, was one of Kirillion’s favourite quotes. Drop your guard for even one instant and you’ll find yourself at the peak of a dune with only one way down, or else surrounded by hillocks with no way out. You could go crazy just trying to remember which way was which; north like south like east and west. The sky won’t help you. Keep an eye on the distant horizon for landmarks; Bulldock’s Rise jutting from the sand like an embedded hammer whose handle had slowly dribbled stone and rock until stalagmite and stalactite forged and met; the Cliff of Faces whose surface wind-etchings sometimes looked like a thousand eyes staring out over the desert, and into which caves had been hollowed, a labyrinthine maze of tunnels stretching deep into the rock with a succession of sand traps dug into the floor to stop the sands’ encroachment; the Fortress standing strong on one side, its feet dug deep into the ground as its flat face bore the brunt of any wind, while its rear sloped gradually for walking and crawling access, only to fall deep into a coliseum, a valley free of sand with grandstanding cliffs all around. Or maybe the Mountain rests on your horizon, the tallest of all and seemingly an insubstantial object. Just a dune that never shifted; insurmountable and impossible to tunnel. An ever-present looming tsunami by which to navigate should you ever need it; sometimes to your east, sometimes to your west, and from Sanctum, always slightly southerly.

  Of course, all these things, hidden at night, were fairytale structures, existing only in Annora’s fevered mind. She could sometimes open her eyes but all she could make out was Caia’s back, and the flapping curtain of her jacket. The back of Caia’s head had the strap of an oxygen mask, and sometimes Annora was aware of her own, clamped tightly across her mouth: usually when she was jolted. They were moving – fast – across the sand and sometimes she felt as though she would have been thrown if she hadn’t been tied down. But so much of that was a dream, a fiction, better to close her eyes and return to the reality of corn crackers eaten by battery light on top of the silent crawler, sharing this picnic with Calix and talking about ways to escape this life; the freedom of wandering: could they cope? Could they sustain a life living between one settlement and the next, all for the hope of finding some other cause, a better way? “No matter what,” said Calix, “there’ll always be sand on the other side.” His face had looked stern, for an instant no longer the face of the boy, and she had wondered if there was anything the sand didn’t take from you.

  “We’ll build a flying machine, and never stop looking until we find a place free of sand,” she’d said. And that stern look in his eyes had disappeared. She’d smiled, drawn into the fantasy.

  “How hard could a crash landing really be?” he’d said. “Let’s do it.” They’d ‘clinked’ crackers and polished them off with some water.

  This was the reality. Living the day to day in search of Pandora and never opening the box. We never opened the box. It was never meant to go down like this. Nothing ever happened and nothing will ever happen. This was life. This other thing, drugged and…

  … almost dead.

  This was a nightmare.

  Sun

  Bitch

  “It’s been at least a couple hours now.” Calix stood at the forward window staring at the poorly lit area in front of the crawler. Beyond what little light there was, the shadows were pale, gently darkening under the strangely luminous night clouds. He could almost see the horizon out there.

  “I’ll check the monitoring station,” said Barrick. “If it’s clear, one of us can go down and check.”

  “Keep your radio on at all times,” said Ardelia, keeping lookout herself.

  “Yeah, yeah,” muttered Barrick as he checked.

  Calix turned to Ardelia. “What about if two went, with one to remain at the entrance to act as a relay? We may not be able to pick up a signal in here, but maybe someone at the entrance might.”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  “Or if we didn’t have to conserve power so much these things would be built to cross barriers.” Barrick moaned, but then confirmed that the weather should be clear. “I’ll head down then. Up to you if one of you want to wait it out at the entrance. First sign of trouble I’ll double back to let you guys know anyway, if I’m out of range.” He headed out towards the locker room.

  “You heading down?” asked Calix.

  Ardelia shifted her gaze downwards and rubbed her forearm.

  “I’ll go. Keep listening.”

  “Cal?”

  He grunted.

  “I’m sorry, I...” she took a deep breath. “I’ll go if you need to rest still.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I said it’s fine. What you even sorry for?”

  She smiled. Maybe he’d been a little harsh earlier, he thought. Ardelia could light the room with her smile, and okay... he didn’t exactly baulk at the opportunity to get changed with her. The changing room was a safe place, and most of the time it was all just meat to him, but sometimes thoughts went where thoughts went. “I know it’s stupid but the dark... I don’t really like the dark.”

  “There’s nothing there. What’s to be afraid of?”

  She shrugged. “Just gives me the shivers.”

  Confused, he turned and went to gear up. A cool draught whipped around the hull, a regular evening occurrence as the temperature plummeted outside and encroached on the void at the bottom of the crawler; the difference caused a convection current that was noticeable on skin. This evening it decided to tickle inside his collar, raise goosebumps. He couldn’t tell if this caused his anxiety or simply added to it. Something definitely felt off about the whole situation they found themselves in. They’d already found technology that they never expected to find, who knew what else could be on the lower levels.

  Could be simple, of course; maybe they’d found a lift and it had faulted or the power gone out, just as they were using it. Stupid of them, but not beyond the realm of possibility. But that didn’t seem right… Walker and Caia would be more cautious, and Annora; maybe she’d have tried it – sorry – but not without the others being on board.

  Calix slipped on his boots and then his jacket, a couple minutes behind Barrick who was ready to go. Barrick looked like he wanted to say something but held it in for now.

  The best explanation was that they’d become trapped somehow; an automated door that had stuck perhaps, or a door that auto-locked behind them. Calix wracked his brain for other scenarios but it was difficult to come up with anything. With all three of them watching each others’ backs there should not have been anything they couldn’t overcome.

  So they’ve either lost track of time and are still happily searching the levels, or something dire has happened to them.

  He closed his locker with a clank. It had a lock but they never bothered locking them. His was dented by countless previous owners. This distracted him briefly, and he glanced at all the lockers, thinking about the fact they had all had previous owners. Going back how many generations? he thought. And someone else would have it after him. Annora’s locker was half open, as she would say. Half closed, he would say. Neatly folded clothes were stacked on one shelf, and peeking from the bottom was a large talc duster. She somehow had a knack of creating the biggest talc cloud of them all, patting and rubbing it vigorously over her body. Calix had never said anything, had in fact barely even thought about it; but there was something almost unconscious, an admiration for the modesty which this massive talc cloud could potentially represent.

  Or she was just being her normal self, carefree, and slightly messy.

  And so what?

  The image of her behind, or within, that cloud of talc entered his mind, and for a second he was mentally wiping at that cloud, swiping a hand across it. But the more he swiped, the denser it became, unt
il Annora had gone altogether.

  This was followed by the very real physical breaking out of sweat. Suddenly his palms were damp and his shirt plastered to his spine. His heart beat quickened, a tunnel vision of darkness seemed to pervade his peripheral vision until all was dark, and he was in the lift cage in Sanctum heading up through the Agridome, its generators loud and vibrating and, as a kid, so frightening to him. Loud palpitations in near darkness. Sanctum breathing.

  This was the place his childhood nightmares brought him to.

  “Ready to go, Cal?” Barrick’s voice broke the spell.

  “I’m set,” he said, mouth so dry the words barely made it out.

  “Don’t strain that side of yours too much.” And for once, Barrick looked serious. Calix was grateful.

  Back in the corridor, the draught cooled the sweat on his palms, but his face felt hot. He hadn’t rested at all today and probably shouldn’t be about to head out onto the sand. But he had no choice. Barrick watched as he descended the rungs, trying not to favour his left arm with too much weight.

  They tightened the scarves around their necks as they left the protection of the crawler. The wind was mild but strong enough to need goggles, and the chill it carried made Calix wish he too was going to descend into the opening. Maybe he should, if only to cover Barrick’s back. Maybe they got the whole situation wrong and there was something living down there: he’d seen enough horror films from the archives to know this could easily be true.

  “You don’t think something… attacked them, do you?”

  “Unlikely,” said Barrick, sounding muffled. “But we can’t rule anything out ‘til we have answers.” He jumped down to the gangway. “Because some of us don’t know everything,” he added.

  Calix landed next to him and reconsidered his whole plan to descend. “Fuck,” he cried, holding his side.