Neon Sands

by Adam J. Smith

  “Forget about that for a second, did you?”

  “Man, that fucking hurt. Sake.”

  “I’ll help you down into the hatch, here,” he said, offering out his hand as he hovered over the open hatch.

  “I’ll be alright.” Calix sat, dangled his legs and gently let himself down, using the few rungs in the wall. The gentle wind ceased nipping at his exposed skin, and instead whistled across the hatch opening.

  The inside was black. “Can’t see a thing in here,” shouted Calix as Barrick landed next to him.

  “Alright, Cal, I’m right here.”

  “Guess the power is completely gone.”

  “Seems that way,” said Barrick as he switched on his torch. “So, you gonna stay here to relay?”

  “Unless you need me?”

  “I’ll shout if I need you. Ardelia?” He pressed a button on his radio. “Ardelia?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Cal’s in the entrance and I’m heading in.”

  “Okay. Stay safe,” she signed off. Calix thought of her, warm and brightly lit up there in the crawler, and then looked around. Maybe she had a point about the darkness. Barrick soon became a silhouette as his light explored deeper and then disappeared as he entered a room, leaving his ghost behind; one that deftly merged to nothing. He strained to hear Barrick’s footsteps, and reminded him to update constantly.

  “Nothing to see. Just an office.”

  Calix flicked on his own torch and leaned against the doorway. Light shimmered on the floor, reflecting from stray sand that had fallen in from above and from boots. A little bit of the outside in this place felt strangely reassuring. As he listened to Barrick’s fading steps he slipped down against the side until he could huddle his arms around his legs. The pull of the dimming light beyond the doorway was strong: somewhere beyond was Annora. What had happened to her?

  He almost stood – almost shot straight for that darkness – but the wince he issued when he moved only inch sat him back down. The side of his ribs burning again.

  Rest. Save your strength for what might come.

  He swore. What could possibly be coming; what the fuck could possibly have happened? Stuck in the middle of the forsaken sands in the middle of nowhere on a dead fucking planet, as lifeless in the skies as in the ground: no life, no action, no meaning. Nothing. The ground between his legs became a dark black canvas as his focus on the present shifted, phasing from one thought to another. Even as his eyelids drooped he thought about the ghost and what it had done to him. Never one for daydreaming. Yet now he couldn’t stop himself.

  This darkness matched the darkness of the corridors back in Sanctum – after keeping still for a few minutes – playing with a teenage Annora and waiting for the lights turn off one by one. Whispering. Mysterious appendages poking sides as they tried to inflict as much pain as they could without setting the lights off again. Something there, something remembered, lying flat against the wall with stomach sucked in, reaching into the darkness for flesh, bracing for a punch on the arm or a wet finger in the ear. The whole world reduced to their breathing, or deeper: their heartbeats. Sometimes someone would wander past and one of them would freeze mid-pinch or mid-strike as the lights returned, and the something would show itself in the way they were suddenly staring at each other, giggling stifled until one of them relented nervously.

  Footfalls would pass over them or around them, or maybe Herm or Delia or one of the other kids would join them, crouching beside them with giggles of their own giving away their position.

  Calix always was the stealthiest. Reaching out into the darkness, often unsure of what his fingers would find. They hadn’t played the game much past thirteen.

  He reached out into the darkness now and imagined what it would be like to find Annora’s hand. It would be like ice, but her fingers would lattice with his and his warmth would heat them. But there was nothing there to grasp. He put his palms to his temples and ran his fingers through his hair. He sighed and closed his eyes. There was a pull on his eyelids, a great weight, and it grew heavier. He opened them once or twice and tried to focus on Barrick’s distant footsteps. He even called out and listened to Barrick’s voice describe his surroundings, but his voice seemed to be reading a lullaby, adding to the weight of his eyelids.

  “Death is an ever-present reality for us,” recalled Calix, conjuring the memory of a campfire-Kirillion. Under the dome but lazing in the firelight, keeping warm, allowing flames to paint their faces and wet their eyes. “Whether we are thinking about it or not. You need to be conscious of it at all times.”

  Annora.

  Still the weight on his eyes grew.

  Ghost in his veins.

  “It announces itself in the background. On the films you kids watch. In those stories you watch about the lives of others; in the stories we hear from travellers. In our worries about our own health – well, maybe not so much for you, just wait ‘til you get older.” He smiled. “It announces itself in the attention we pay when we are cleaning our breathing apparatus. If you watch yourself closely, you'll see that you spend a lot of energy each day just trying not to die. It has been said by many that death makes a mockery of almost everything else we spend our lives doing.”

  At this point Kirillion, eyes like fire, had leaned forward, over the fire, seeming to stare into it, to pull from it some elemental energy. “Just take a moment and think about how you've spent your day today. The little things you’ve been focused on. The things that you've been genuinely worried about. Think of the last argument you had with your friend; of the last hour we've spent sitting here singing. Today I’ve been trying to figure out if we can spare the resources to start home improvements: upgrade the beds, chairs, tables, that kind of thing. If you had stopped me at any point in the last twenty-four hours and asked me what I was up to, what really concerned me, the solution which would most likely bring order to the chaos in my corner of the universe, the honest answer would've been whether or not it would be worth trying to make the new chairs look nice.”

  Calix had glanced over to Annora, and she had rolled her eyes and reclined her back. Another speech, those eyes said.

  “Now, I'm not saying everything we do has to be profound; sometimes we must choose form over function, but sometimes we must find joy where we can, such as an ornate carving on an armrest. But – and I know you may think of this as yet another safety talk, but maybe it’s more than that – contemplating the brevity of life itself can bring some perspective to how we use our time. It's not so much what we pay attention to; it's the quality of that attention: how we feel while doing it. If you need to spend the day making armrests, you might as well enjoy it, for the truth is, none of us know how much time we have in this life. And taking that fact to heart can bring a kind of moral and emotional clarity, and energy, to the present.”

  Calix, by this point, had laid his head back and stared up to the roof of the dome. Switched off, he’d thought; dismissing the philosophy as nonsense considering the paucity of life they had on offer, but evidently Kirillion’s words had imprinted upon him. “It can bring a resolve to not suffer over stupid things. Take something like an argument over cutting in line. A simple example of misspent energy. You're standing there and the person in front of you has held a place for their friend, and that friend arrives, and now you’re one step back in the canteen queue. And you find yourself getting angry. I’m telling you now that that kind of thinking is impossible if you're being mindful of the shortness of life. If you're aware that you're going to die, and that the other person is going to die, and that you're both going to lose everyone you love, and you don't know when; that you've got this moment of life – this beautiful moment – this moment where your consciousness is bright and undimmed by ghost in the ward on your last day among the living. And the clouds are particularly bright. Or the wind is gently blowing. Everything is beautiful. And your loved one is alive. You have children and they are alive. And you're standing in a queue. You're
not in some failed settlement where the living are scraping by on dog-meat; you’re not tripping over your feet walking from outpost to outpost; you're just standing in line. And that person in front of you, who is most likely a friend in all other circumstances, but whose hopes and sorrows you may not fully understand, but which you would recognise are eerily similar to your own, is just holding a place for his friend.”

  Calix drifted; the heat of the fire and the pupil of the dome roof black as space, and Kirillion’s voice, dripping like treacle, slipped like lava down his ear canal. Back in the corridor, eyes closed, he could feel the fire’s heat through residual cognisance. Ears full of honey. “This is your life. The only one you've got, and you'll never get this moment back again, and you don't know how many more moments you will have. No matter how many times you do something, there will come a day when you do it for the last time. You've had a thousand chances to tell the people closest to you that you love them. In a way that they feel it. In a way that you feel it. And you've missed most of them. And you don't know how many more you're going to get. You've got this next interaction with another human being to make the world a slightly better place.”

  “Is this what happens when you get old?” said a young Calix. “You start talking shit.”

  “Cal. Language. Whether old or young, it’s the same for everyone. You've got this one opportunity to fall in love with existence, so why not relax and enjoy your life. Really relax. Even in the midst of struggle. Even while doing hard work. Even under uncertainty. You are in a game, and you can't see the clock, so you don't know how much time you have left. Yet you're free to make the game as interesting as possible, you can even change the rules, you can discover new games that no-one has thought of yet. You can make games that used to be impossible, suddenly possible, and get others to play them with you. Once, we could literally build a rocket to go to the moon, so that we could start a colony there. There may be some people right now, somewhere on this planet, dreaming that same dream. But whatever you do, however seemingly ordinary, you can feel the preciousness of life, and an awareness of death is a doorway into that way of thinking.”

  Under the watchful eye of the dome, Calix had fallen asleep, giving little thought to life and death, mouth dry and throat parsed. In the draught of ice moving swiftly through the corridor, the tips of his ears were red, and when he opened his eyes the chill had spread across his cheeks. He rubbed at his nascent beard, vaguely thankful for the protection it offered. He rubbed it some more, felt the coarse fibres in his fingertips and welded some hairs together with the help of a film of damp sweat suddenly materialising on his skin.

  You've had a thousand chances to tell the people closest to you that you love them.

  Kirillion’s words rattled around his mind. Sweet words; words of a philosopher, not the mad ravings of a murderer. Was he wrong about him? One slip, one mistake, one irregularity in a childhood of support? He was a father figure to so many: had been and still was.

  His head began to ache, and when he lifted it the ache intensified, and a blinding light flashed momentarily. The light faded, but from the darkness there was shuffling; a real sound with form and stereo which he slowly recognised as real. “Hey,” he said, standing. He shone his torch towards the entrance.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Cal. Who’s that?”

  “Walker,” said the disembodied voice. As Calix walked towards the room, Walker appeared, hair dishevelled.

  “Walker…” he quickened his pace. “Who else is with you?”

  Walker leaned against the doorway. “Who else is with me?”

  “Annora. Caia.”

  “You mean you haven’t seen them?”

  “Seen them? No. What the fuck is going on? Where have you been?” Calix tried to force his way past, but Walker stood firm.

  “I thought I heard voices,” said Barrick, appearing suddenly. “I’ve been looking for you.”

  Calix took a step back, Walker’s silence only adding to his headache.

  “You’ve seen neither Caia or Annora?” Walker’s eyes – his whole face – seemed to sag under some unseen weight. Maybe it was the shadows in his wrinkles in the torchlight.

  Calix shook his head while Barrick, voice stern, asked “What exactly happened?”

  “I… don’t know, exactly. Something to do with Caia, the double-crossing bitch. She has to have come to the surface. No way she’s still in here somewhere.”

  Calix grabbed Walker’s sleeve. “What happened to Annora?”

  “Sorry, Cal. She… she has to be with Caia, wherever she is.”

  “Explain,” said Barrick, taking a step closer.

  Walker sighed. “She blindsided me. Caia, injected me with something, presumably something she found in the pharmacy. The three of us, we went down, right down to level six. The power was fading fast and we figured we could get it going again. Switch to the back-up, you know. When I say level six, really, I should say level one-hundred-and-six; first the steps, then the ladder, it just kept going down. Right before I was blindsided, we found a control room, and there was a dead guy in there, and he’d left his life story on tape for us to listen.” Walker looked at the both of them, and Calix knew he was trying to decide how much to tell them. Before he could make a move, Barrick took another step, until the three of them were but an arms’ length apart.

  “Damn, give me some space, guys,” said Walker, turning to sit in one of the chairs. Calix and Barrick positioned themselves on the edge of one desk. Barrick pulled a canteen of water from somewhere, offered it, and Walker drank gratefully. “Thanks,” he said.

  “The tape; on it he called this place the Ark. I don’t know if it means anything to you, but it seems that basically this place was a bastion of knowledge. Something down in the depths, the Ark, was retaining knowledge. But it was eating the power. With the power gone, it would start deteriorating, attacked by radiation. Radiation left behind by an explosion. This place, it was destroyed by a static build-up in the atmosphere, how this settlement got its power, electrical transference from transformers in the clouds drawing power from the atmosphere. It built up, and built up, and then discharged on the dome, shattering it. By then, everyone but the dead guy were on the surface, afraid that the generator below was going to explode. The surface, he says, was black ash, dark cinders, burning flesh.” He paused, licked his lips – wanting something stronger than water no doubt. “Caia injected me and I passed out, just after he finished speaking. When I woke, the power was gone, everything was pitch black, and Caia and Annora had disappeared. I searched everywhere in the control room but there was nothing there. The only way was up.”

  “There’s no way Annora’s in on whatever this is,” said Calix.

  “I know, Cal. Caia... whatever the Ark is, however you access the data; she had to have it and we couldn’t be trusted to handle it. She’s working for someone–.”

  “Kirillion.”

  “–and... maybe, or Linwood, or fuck knows who. She’s been about, could be anyone.”

  “Point is,” said Barrick, “she’s betrayed us. Do you think she got, whatever it was she was after, before the power went?”

  “If I understood correctly, there was just enough power to retrieve the data. So yes. With Annora gone, kidnapped perhaps, I would have to say she got what she wanted. But where did she go? She must’ve come up this way. Both of them.”

  “It’s been dark awhile,” said Barrick, turning slowly, hand rubbing the back of his head.

  Walker suddenly drooped, shoulders sagging; he looked exhausted, his pressure valve deflated as he recalled the events and now he looked half his normal self. Calix wanted to grab both shoulders and shake him until every last drop of information was shred – but it would do no good. Look at him – he knew nothing more than this. “Walker, did you pass any sign of them on the way up?”

  Beneath the tiredness, Calix caught the sympathy in Walker’s eyes as he looked at him, shook his head, and said “No.”
He moved as though to shrug.

  “Whatever she did to you really took it out of you,” said Barrick.

  “It was a long way up.”

  “There’s only two places they could be,” Calix said as he moved to the threshold of darkness looking down the corridor. “In there, or up above.”

  If the lock on the door, or the hour hand on the clock on the wall, could have fallen into place right then with a loud, audible clunk – it would have. Calix sensed it fall for all three of them, at the same time, and shared glances proved it.

  “She couldn’t have been in the crawler, we’d have seen her,” said Calix.

  “And there’s no way she’s taken a fugitive out on the sand,” said Barrick.

  “There’s technology here,” said Walker. “Technology we don’t know anything about. Something she may have been able to utilise.”

  “Technology, alright,” said Calix. “The bike.”

  “Probably had a full charge,” said Barrick, with a smirk. “Damn, I wanted to go first.”

  Calix’s legs were moving ahead of him, and he winced as he twisted his upper body around.

  “Catch,” said Walker. “Painkillers.”

  Calix plucked them from the air. Looked at the white bottle and listened to the rattle of pills inside. “I can’t take these now,” he said, visions of him crashing the hoverbike flashing through his mind.

  “It’s just aspirin. Not ghost. It’ll dull the pain.”

  “Crunch a couple and come on,” said Barrick, walking ahead.

  Calix followed, popping the lid and ‘crunching’ a couple of the bitter, white pills.

  Walker wasn’t too far behind them.

  “Was there any sign? Some... indication of what Caia was up to?” asked Calix.

  “No,” said a weary voice.

  Gritting his teeth, Calix took a deep breath and swallowed to force the gritty bits down. Ahead, the dim light of night cast its square in the ceiling entrance, then darkened as Barrick climbed out.

  As Calix climbed, trying to ignore the pain, the punch of cold air hit him anew and he couldn’t help but wonder how Caia and Annora could be out in this, if indeed they were.