by Hugh Howey
For a long while, she’d only tended to the men at the bar, only slaked that thirst. But there were long hours of thinking how tight the money was, and the joking offers came fast and loose. They were made with a laugh, but there was always the dangle and jangle of coin. “Hey Rose, I give you fifty to go upstairs right now.” “Hey Rose, one hundred. Just scored big-time down in Low-Pub.” “Hey Rose.” “Hey Rose.” “Hey Rose.”
There was one night where a hundred and twenty coin was enough. This was the cost. Enough to pierce some membrane within her, some barrier she would’ve sworn could not be crossed; but it had been worn down over months and months of lean times. Worn so thin the right words could make it through.
The offer came from a customer she knew well enough, might have dated if they’d been sitting on the same side of the bar, if they’d been around any other bar, in any other place, at any other time. She would’ve had sex with him for nothing, the way a respectable woman does. Instead, she let him pay. And it wasn’t bad. He cared. Asked her if that felt okay. Did all the work. Didn’t hit her or spank her or ask if he could choke her a little. Pulled out and even cleaned her up with his shirt. She would’ve done it for free. Nearly told him so as he left stacks of coin on her dresser. Fragile, wobbly things, all that coin. Like the tall scrapers to the east.
And then he went back to the bar, and Rose sat and stared at the towers of coin on that dresser her husband had left her, and it was a different woman who walked out that door. She would survive, she realized. But it would be a different her. It would be someone else who did the surviving, who would drag memories of a former self along, a tiny echo of a woman somewhere deep in her skull, a small voice of who she used to be.
When Palmer had come asking for a little help the next day, it had felt different. He was fourteen back then, and Rose thought he could see. She thought he knew. She sure as hell did, and the same ten coin that he asked for and always got suddenly weighed the same as ten thousand. Palmer pocketed it too easily. Like it was the same coin. But it’d been too hard won for that. Not to slide away so easy. Not to just disappear. And here was when the gulf with her children opened. It opened not the day her legs had, but the day her palms did. It was the only way, she told herself. There was no other. She would earn her keep the only way she could. And the cost of dispensing that keep could only grow.
It was inevitable that her children would find out. Men don’t just talk, they brag. They brag about rented love, even. And children hear everything. They are echo chambers. And they take what they learn from their parents off to school more readily than they haul anything of merit home. A father’s boast becomes a way to torment a peer. And so the boys heard about her new line of work from the worst source possible.
No, not quite. Vic had heard about it from someone even worse than the boys. A client. A young man who made a flippant comparison, who thought it might be taken as a compliment, who had said in the heat of passion that the daughter was more expert than the mother.
Vic had already stopped coming around the Honey Hole, wouldn’t even approach the place. And after this, she wouldn’t agree to see Rose anywhere. Not for three long years. And so her children began to wither like the roof gardens did when showers and beer water took precedence. They began to die to her and she to them. Even as the small voice she carried deep within her soul relented now and then and dispensed with hard-fought coin. Even though some part of her left her pillow wet in the morning as it leaked out in quiet sobs. Leaked out, but never emptied.
All this and more, her husband had taken the day he’d run off. All this and more he had stolen. But she would survive. Rose told herself this as she studied the column of numbers where more was subtracted than added. There was a knock at the door. She checked her watch. It was her six o’clock.
Oh yes, she would survive.
38 • No Place for a Girl
Conner
The sun was up by the time the boys entered Springston and swung around the edge of the great wall. There was still shade in that part of town where people could afford to delay the rising sun and be sheltered from the creep of sand. And though it was early and a Sunday, Conner felt something was amiss. There was that nervous buzz about town like after a bomb had gone off—but bombs rarely went off so early in the day. The young men who caused violence were as lazy as any youth when it came to getting out of bed. And besides, there were no columns of smoke. No wailing mothers. Instead, there were the sails of sarfers spread out to the horizon. There was an empty marina with bare hitching posts jutting out of the ground and only the wind passing through. There were people in front of their homes, talking with neighbors, out and about, even though the markets had not yet opened.
“Head left here,” Conner told his brother. There was a doctor on the edge of Springston that sometimes took people in from Shantytown. He might help them. He might be trusted if he found out where the girl came from.
Where the girl came from. Conner chanced a look over his shoulder. She could be sleeping or dead. She could be someone who wandered into No Man’s Land with her family and turned back after two days of hiking. But she had spoken his name. Had mentioned his father. If she died, would anyone believe their account of things? Or would he become Old Man Joseph, standing at the intersection of the great dunes, holding a sign, screaming to frightened kids about No Man’s Land?
These were the thoughts swirling in his mind long before the sun came up. Conner couldn’t stop thinking of all the girl might know, might say, if she survived. Their father might still be alive. Twelve years of camping on the edge of No Man’s Land, twelve years of listening to the wind moan across the Bull’s gash, twelve years of Shantytown, of their mother selling herself, and their father might still be out there.
Conner outpulled Rob, his legs pumping as his thoughts raced. They rounded the corner and stopped outside Doc Welsh’s place—
“Closed,” Rob said.
There was a sign on the door. Half the stalls they had passed were closed, but a glance at the sun told him it was after nine. They’d been hiking for almost five hours. “What in the world is going on?” he asked. He dropped the line and went back to the girl on the tent. Rob was right about the wear on the canvas. Conner could see where it was tearing. He pulled his canteen out of his pack and knelt by the girl to give her more water.
“Is it a special Sunday?” Rob asked.
“Not that I know of.” Conner poured a capful there in the shade of the doctor’s office. “Bang on the door,” he said.
His brother did. A woman with a load balanced on her head hurried past. “Hey,” Conner called to her.
She slowed. The load wobbled as she turned her head.
“You know if Doc is out on a call?”
The lady looked at them both like they were from the northern wastes. She gave the girl lying still on the folded canvas a brief glance. “Probably out looking for Danvar,” she said. “Haven’t you heard?”
“Danvar?” Conner asked, quite certain he’d heard wrong.
The lady didn’t dare nod. “They found it,” she said. “Half the town’s out there now. The other half is scrambling for their coin. I’ve gotta go.”
She and her load turned and headed off.
“Wait!” Conner called out. “This girl needs help!”
“Good luck,” the lady called.
Conner turned and beseeched the next couple who hurried past, two men with dive tanks on their backs who made a concerted effort not to look his way, not to even glance at him for fear of the guilt they might suffer. Rob looked like he was on the verge of tears. The cap of water disappeared into the girl’s mouth, but she didn’t swallow. Conner tried to feel for a pulse, but he didn’t really know how. Maybe that was his own pulse in his thumb he was sensing.
“What the hell?” he asked. He studied his hands, which were raw from the haul. His legs ached from the long hike with the weight of the girl and the tent. There were doctors deeper into Springston he could
n’t afford, but he could tell them what the girl promised. What she might mean. Or he could go door to door in Shantytown and beg for help. Hope someone might know more to do than give her water and clean the sand out of her wounds.
“What about Mother?” Rob asked.
Conner’s hands shook as he twisted the cap back onto the canteen. He peered up at his brother, who had tears streaking down both cheeks. It was the worst idea either of them could possibly have. But it was also likely that their mother was the only person who would take the girl in, who might know what to do for her.
“Goddamn you,” Conner told his brother. He cursed him for being right.
39 • A Rose on the Pillow
Rose
The leak in the pipes had not been fixed like the plumber said. Rose could see that the brown stain had spread across the white painted ceiling, had grown. It was a stain within a stain within a stain, three concentric brown patches of varying hue, one patch each for the three times the plumber had ripped her off, one patch each for the three times the plumbing to the upstairs basins had leaked precious water. Drip, drip, drip goes the coin.
The crack up there was getting worse as well. Widening. A zig at the end that used to be a zag, moving its way back and forth across that warped surface. The sands were shifting, the walls twisting, a house out of shape.
And the springs. The springs of the bed needed oiling. They sounded like the mad call of some crazed bird, some animal that chirped over and over, waiting for a response, for some hint of life, for awareness from some other, but only getting a rhythmic silence. A pause for every squeak. Week, week, week, week. Years piling up.
Her husband had brought her the bed triumphantly, had raised it from nearly four hundred meters, or so he’d bragged. And it was heavy. She could attest to that. Rose had moved it with a friend when the palace had fallen. It was all she had left in the world: the bed, that dresser, this brothel. It was fitting how her husband had left her prepared for her new life. Other men concerned themselves with getting their family up on their feet. Rose had fallen for a man who had left her on her back.
“How was that for you?” the man asked. He had evidently finished. Was now looking down at her expectantly, sweat dripping from his nose to splash between her breasts. His arms—muscled but layered with fat—trembled. There was more hair on his shoulders than his head, and his beard was full of sand.
“Oh, you’re the best,” Rose told him.
“Ah, you’re just saying that.” He grunted and fell to the side, a flock of startled springs chirping.
“I’m not,” Rose said. “You know you’re my favorite.” She prayed to the gods he wouldn’t ask her what his name was. Please, please, please don’t ask. They always wanted to hear it, to make it personal, to own more than just her time. But he didn’t ask. Worse: he started snoring.
Rose groaned and moved gingerly to the washbasin. She pulled the sewn intestine out from between her legs and washed it in the shallow puddle of water. The milky swimmers swirled on the surface with the others before slowly settling to the bottom. Rose draped the intestine over the lip of the basin with two others to dry. With a towel, she wiped off what had leaked out and had dribbled down her inner thigh to her knee. She dressed while the man snored. She would charge him rent for the bed if he stayed more than an hour. Serve him right.
Leaving the room, she stood on the narrow balcony walkway that circled the inside of the Honey Hole. It was dead quiet below, early in the morning, but the remnants of a noisy evening were scattered everywhere. Drunks sleeping on the floor, curled around barstool legs like lovers. Spent as much time on them as on any woman, Rose thought. A card game had been abandoned, the pot and players missing but the empty jars and cans and glasses standing in a crowd around the discard pile and folded hands. There were two puddles in the middle of the floor to clean up—piss or spilled beer. Idiots wasting their coin on fluids they couldn’t get in them, or on fluids that would pass right through.
Another of the doors opened down the catwalk—or the Esplanade of Pussy, as one of her regulars called it. Doria stood in her doorway and suffered a deep kiss goodbye, and then her client waddled down the stairs toward the bar, fumbling with the laces on his fly as he went.
Doria and Rose exchanged weary and knowing glances. They peered over the railing at all that needed cleaning before happy hour that night. Weekend hell. No sleep for the dreary.
Rose tried to remember a time before this routine. She felt like a speck of sand in an alien land, confused as to how it had gotten there. Carried on the wind from one dune to the next, each getting her closer to a destination she never would’ve chosen if there had been some way to make the wind listen.
There was no one behind the bar. Off to a piss or gone home. That bar had been the first dune, Rose thought. She remembered standing there, drying empty jars, letting the men leer before they went up to give one of her girls five minutes of displeasure. That was the first dune. And it led to all the others. A woman not for sale until the Honey Hole was. But no takers for the latter. Only a few years from being duned over, they said. The books didn’t shine too bright, they said. Not enough coin in it, they said. Can’t mix business with pleasure, they laughed.
Rose had come dangerously close to simply walking away. The only thing that stopped her was not wanting to be like her husband. He had taken even this luxury away from her. Had made her so angry at his abandonment that running away had become a power removed. And so she was trapped.
The door to her prison opened with a squeak, letting some light in. It was her children, Conner and Rob. Just the sort of hour at which she would expect them to burst in, needing something, palms open. She nearly yelled at them, let the mood her client had put her in rain down on their heads, but then she saw what Conner was carrying. Not this. She didn’t need this. She rushed down the stairs to send them away, to tell them to find a damn doctor, not to bring their mistakes to her. But Conner’s mouth opened before hers could—and out spilled the impossible.
40 • Ticking Bombs
Vic
Vic emerged from the moist and heavy sand and took great gulps of glorious air. She rested as long as she dared, the sun beating down on her, before joining her brother in the shade of the sarfer’s hull. Palmer had been watching her with obvious relief, a grimace-like smile on his face. But as she handed him her canteen, which sloshed now with spring water, Palmer seemed to catch sight of his blurry reflection in the shiny metal. His pained smile melted into a pained frown. He reached up to touch his cheek.
“I don’t look so good,” he whispered. There were tears in his eyes as Vic took the canteen back from him and worked the cap off. Palmer met her gaze. He reached to his swollen lips. “How do I look?”
“You look like someone who should be dead but isn’t. It’s a good look.”
“I feel like a blister that’s about to pop.”
“Yeah, I was going to say that.”
They shared something like laughter, and Vic handed him the open canteen. Palmer took a sip, his cheeks billowing and contracting as he swished the water around. He labored to swallow. “You were gone so long…”
“Sorry. Not much of a spring here. Had to go down quite a ways to fill the canteens. There’s grit in there, so don’t tip it too much—”
“It’s okay. I could eat a dune.” Palmer’s hands shook as he lifted the canteen to his lips again.
Vic helped him steady the vessel. While he worked the water down, she took a small sip from Marco’s canteen, her lips pressed where her lover’s once had. “We’ll get you some food in town,” she said, trying to think on other things. “But we should probably stay here the night.”
Her brother looked past her toward the horizon. “Are we safe? No one followed us here?”
Vic smoothed the hair off his forehead. She remembered Palmer when he was much younger. He seemed much younger right then. Her brother was terrified. “What happened?” she asked. She had yet to ask him about
the dive or the discovery, about the people looking for him in Springston. She had been too worried about losing him, too concerned about finding water and food and nursing him back to health.
Her brother took another swig from the canteen, his blistered hands shaking. He dabbed gently at his cracked lips with the sleeve of his dive suit. Winced. Stared up at the bands of sand swirling on the wind.
“They were never going to let us go,” he said. “We were there to find Danvar and then to die.”
“But you did find it.”
Palmer nodded. “Five hundred meters down.”
“No,” Vic said. She situated herself against the hull of the sarfer, blocking the wind for Palmer. “You didn’t go that deep.”
“They’d made a pit and a hole, had the first two hundred clear for us. I don’t know how. Hundreds of dive suits wired up together. It was amazing. And the scrapers down there, Vic. You should see them. Hundreds of meters tall. We hit the tops of the largest of them at five hundred. Was another five hundred or so to the street.”
Palmer must’ve seen the look of disbelief on her face. “They’d dug a pit,” he said. “Did I mention that? But we were down three hundred true. Maybe close to three-fifty.”
“You went down three hundred meters,” Vic said. “Are you out of your fucking mind?”