by Hugh Howey
“What about your hauls?” she asked.
Conner looked down at her pole and the two buckets. “I’ve carried all I can today,” he said. “They’ll have to understand.”
“You staying at your place tonight? Can I come see you?”
Conner thought of the family in his home. “No,” he said. “I’m camping with my sister on her sarfer.”
“And you leave at first light.”
“Yeah.”
Gloralai took his hand. “Then stay with me tonight.”
52 • A Pillar of Smoke
“I didn’t think you were gonna make it,” Vic said. She stood by the mast, arranging sheets and halyards by the red glow of her dive lamp. Conner loaded his gear into the haul rack.
“You said first light,” he told her.
Vic nodded toward the horizon where a bare glow could be seen. Maybe.
“Aw, c’mon.”
“Man the jib,” she told him. “But first, get your suit plugged in so it can build a charge. You probably drained it yesterday. And make sure that gear is lashed down. It’s gonna be windy today.”
Conner studied the sand hissing softly against the sarfer’s hull. “How can you tell?”
“I just can. Let’s go.”
He pulled the dive suit she’d given him the day before out of the gear bag. There were two power leads trailing down from the wind turbine, which was thwump, thwump, thumping in the morning breeze. Her suit was lashed to the base and plugged in. He did the same with his, double-knotted the arms and legs around the pole. Then he made his way up the sarfer’s starboard hull and across the netting between the two bows. He checked the jib sheets to make sure they wouldn’t get fouled and knocked the sand out of the furling drum. He could see what he was doing without turning his dive light on, so he supposed maybe she was right about the first light.
“You get a good night’s rest?” Vic asked. She worked the main halyard free, and it clanged rhythmically against the tall aluminum mast.
“Yeah,” Conner lied. A smile stole across his lips as he thought—without remorse—of how little sleep he’d gotten.
He helped his sister raise the mainsail, cranking on the winch as she guided the battened canvas up through the jacks. As he muscled the sail up those last few laborious meters, he thought about Gloralai and her lips and her promises and her talk of the future, and he felt an armor form across his skin, some invisible force field like a dive suit puts out, and the sand striking him was no longer a nuisance. It was just a sensation. As was the wind in his hair and the shudder in the sarfer’s deck as his sister moved to the helm and the mainsheet was tightened, the canvas gathering the breeze. The sadness of so much tragedy was still everywhere around him, but Conner felt a new awareness that he would persevere. He felt alive. The sarfer hissed across the dunes, and he felt madly alive.
They sailed downwind to get west of Shantytown before turning south. Conner tidied the lines and then got comfortable in one of the two webbed seats at the aft end of the sarfer. He helped work the sheets while his sister manned the tiller. Watching the sad and flat expanse of sand where Springston used to be, he asked his sister why they didn’t just cut across rather than sailing around.
“Because we’d catch the skids or the rudder on some buried debris,” Vic told him. “This way is longer, but it’s safer.”
Conner understood. He remembered all that was buried out there. He checked that his dive suit was secure, wasn’t going to fly away. It already felt like his, that suit. It smelled like him. Had served him.
It was quiet as they sailed in the direction of the wind. Just the shush of sand on the aluminum hull. It wasn’t until they were beyond the last of the Shantytown hovels and even west of the water pump that they turned south and gathered the sheets. The sun was nearly up. There was already enough light to see by. Conner watched Waterpump Ridge slide by, the sand blowing from its heights, tiny sissyfoots up there dumping their hauls. Vic had left the ridge well to port to keep it from blocking their wind.
“So what’s this nonsense about Father?” she asked. She took a turn on one of the winches, locked down the jib sheet, then sat back with a leg resting on the tiller, steering with her boot. “What was that scene on the stairs last night about?”
Conner remembered his sister barging out of the Honey Hole. He wanted to turn the question around and ask her what that scene had been all about. She’d been the one who’d caused it. He adjusted his goggles, tucked his ker up under the edge to keep it in place. He wasn’t sure how to tell her the same news without getting the same reaction. Their mother had probably dumped too much on her all at once the night before. But he tried. “You know what last weekend was, right? The camping trip?”
He tried not to make it sound like an accusation for her not being there. Vic nodded. The sarfer glided happily south in a smooth trough.
“So, Rob and I went alone like last year. Palmer didn’t make it… which I guess you already knew. Everything went the same, you know? We set up the tent, made a fire, did the lantern—”
“Told stories about Father,” Vic said.
“Yeah, but that’s not the thing.” He took a deep breath. Adjusted his goggles, which were pinching his hair. “So we went to sleep. And in the middle of the night, a girl stumbled into our campsite. A girl from No Man’s Land.”
“The girl Mom wanted me to meet? The one she said came all the way across. And you believe that?”
“Yeah. I do. I was there, Vic. She collapsed into my fucking arms.”
“Maybe she’s Old Man Joseph’s daughter,” Vic said, laughing.
“It’s not like that,” Conner said. “Vic, she was sent by Dad.”
His sister’s brow furrowed down over her dark goggles. “Bullshit,” she said. She wasn’t laughing anymore.
Conner tugged his ker off. “It’s not bullshit. I’m telling you. She knew who I was. And Rob. She described Dad to a tee.”
“Anyone in town could do that.” The sarfer hit a bump, and Vic glanced toward the bow, adjusted their course. “And even Mom believes her? You sure it’s not just someone looking for a handout? Some kid from the orphanage?”
“Yes, Mom believes her,” Conner said. He rubbed the sand out of the corners of his mouth. “Palmer doesn’t, but he wasn’t there. I don’t know how long he even talked to her.”
“No one comes out of No Man’s Land,” Vic said. She turned from watching the bow to peer at her brother. He wished he could see past her dark goggles. The same hard shells that allowed one person to see, blinded another. “So what’s her story?” Vic asked, her tone one of distrust and suspicion.
“She was born in a mining camp on the other side of No Man’s. Dad helped her escape. He sent her with a warning—”
“And she claims to be our sister? That our father is her father?”
“Yeah. Dad built her a suit, and she dove down under some kind of steep valley and walked like ten days to get to us. But—”
“But what?”
Conner pointed ahead, as they had begun to drift again. Vic took her foot off the tiller and steered by hand.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I believe her, but Palm pulled me aside last night. He seems pretty convinced that something’s wrong. Violet—this girl—our sister—has a… strange accent. Palm says she talks just like the guy who hired him to find Danvar.”
“Who, Brock? That’s the fucker we’re after. What did Palm say?”
Conner shrugged. “Just that they sounded alike. That’s all.”
Vic gazed forward and chewed on the grit in her mouth. Conner could hear it crunching between her teeth. “I don’t like it,” she said. “And I don’t want to hear any of this nonsense about Dad, okay? There’s too much else going on. I don’t need that.”
Conner nodded. He was used to his family telling him that. He had learned a long time ago to shut up about their father, that there was only one night a year in which it was allowed. He tried to get comfo
rtable in the webbed seat, then saw something in the distance. He pointed over the bow. “Hey, what’s that?”
“That’s not good, is what that is.” Vic adjusted the tiller to steer straight for it. Up ahead, a column of smoke rose in a slant before bending sideways and blowing westward in the breeze. Something was on fire.
“We should stop and check,” Vic said. She pointed to the line that furled the jib. Conner gathered this and waited for her to give the word. Ahead, the smoking ruin of a sarfer loomed into view. The mainsail had burned, and the mast had caught as well, had pinched and melted near the base and now drooped over like the wick of a candle. Both hulls were still on fire, the metal aglow, the color of the morning sun. Black smoke billowed up and spiraled away in the wind.
Vic began to let out the mainsheet, and Conner furled the jib. Vic then dialed down the power of the skids and rudder, so the sand stopped flowing as easily and slowly braked the craft. They left the main up, just allowed the boom to swing and point with the wind the way a vane does.
“That looks like a body.” Conner pointed to a form lying near the smoking ruin of the sarfer. The man wasn’t moving, was lying close to the wreckage.
Vic jumped down from the sarfer, and Conner scrambled after her. They both approached the wreckage warily. The hull of the burning craft creaked and popped from the heat of the fire. The smell was awful. Acidic and biting. Conner was scanning the scene for more bodies when blood frothed up on the lips of the prone man. One of his hands lifted several inches off the sand before his arm collapsed again.
Conner heard his sister curse. She rushed forward and dropped to her knees beside the figure. She yelled for Conner to bring the aid kit, which he ran back and retrieved from the haul rack. The sand was loose beneath his boots as he hurried back to his sister.
“Oh, god. Oh, god,” Vic was saying. Conner placed the kit in the sand and untied the flap. His sister ignored it. The way she was rocking and holding the man’s hand, Conner knew there was nothing they could do for him.
“Damien?” she asked. “Can you hear me?”
The blood stirred on the young man’s lips. Conner looked him over, couldn’t see any obvious wounds, no blood on his chest or stomach or hands. And then Conner noticed the odd way the man’s legs were bent. They were shapeless. The tight dive suit dented in where there should have been protruding knees. He moved to the other side of Vic and gently slid his hands from the man’s thigh toward his calf, looking for any response on the man’s face, feeling for a break. The man’s lips moved—he was trying to say something—and Conner felt the spongy flesh beneath his palms, the absence of bone.
“Say again,” Vic said. She bent close to the man’s lips, sweat dripping from her nose. The heat of the burning sarfer was unbearable. Conner saw that the man wasn’t moving one of his arms, which looked as limp and deformed as his legs.
“We’ve gotta get him away from this fire,” Conner said.
His sister waved him off and listened. Her face was contorted in concentration, rage, grief, some impossible-to-read combination of worry lines and furrowed brow. Conner joined her by the man’s head and tried to help her listen. The man was rambling, his voice a rough and halting whisper. Conner heard him mention a bomb. Something about playing marbles. He was mixing accounts of the dead with talk of a child’s game. And then Conner heard the name “Yegery,” a name he recognized, a man his sister had talked about often, some kind of divemaster. The injured man licked his lips and tried to speak again.
“I’m sorry,” he wheezed. The words came clear, seemed a powerful effort. There were bloody gasps for air between each short sentence. “Tried to stop them. Heard what they were gonna do. From a defector. Made me tell who I heard it from. I told ’em, Vic. I’m sorry—”
He coughed and spit up blood. Conner saw the tattoos on the man’s neck, the marks of the Low-Pub Legion. One of his sister’s friends.
“What’re they planning?” his sister asked.
The man spoke again of making glass marbles, of a bomb, of people in the group who didn’t want to go along, who were dead now. He said Yegery had gone mad. That there was no talking to him. That this guy from the north was in his ear, in his head. The young man lifted his hand a few inches from the sand, and Vic gripped it with her own. “Today,” he said. His eyes drifted away from Vic and toward the heavens. He stopped blinking away the sand. “Today,” he whispered, the blood finally falling still on his lips.
Vic bent her head over the dead man and screamed. More a growl than a scream. Like a cayote cornered between pinched dunes. An inhuman sound that made Conner afraid.
He sat perfectly still and watched as his sister scooped two handfuls of sand and placed them over the man’s eyes. She dropped his hand and patted his stomach, opened a pocket there and pulled something out. She stuffed this away, then seemed to notice something wrong. She turned back to the suit to inspect it more closely, wiped the tears from her cheeks.
“Those sick fucks,” she hissed.
“What is it?” Conner asked. He could barely breathe. The heat from the fire was intolerable, but he knew he would sit there as long as his sister needed.
“His suit,” she said. She pointed to a tear at the man’s waist, a place where wires had been pulled out and twisted together. There was another spot just like it by one shoulder. “They wired his suit inside out. They used his band to torture him. Turned his suit against him to make him talk.” She punched her fist into the sand. Did it again. Then stood and began marching back toward the sarfer.
“What did he say?” Conner asked, getting up and chasing after her. “What’re they planning to do? Did he say where the bomb would be?”
“No,” Vic said. “But they’re doing it today. They’re gonna end everything. And we’re gonna be too late again.” She jumped back into the helm seat and began taking in the lines. Conner adjusted himself in the other chair and unfurled the jib.
“We’ve got plenty of wind,” he said. “We’ll get there in time.”
Vic didn’t respond. The sarfer lurched into motion and began to build speed. She had been right about the weather that day.
53 • Father’s Last Rites
They sailed in silence for an hour. They passed other sarfers heading north, crossed tracks that led east to west, saw half a dozen craft out with their masts laid back, dive flags flapping from the rails to warn away others. Conner’s thoughts whirled. He gave his sister as much time as he could, but he had to know. When she returned from a trip to the bow to check the lines for chafing, he finally asked.
“So who was that guy? Someone you knew?”
“A friend,” Vic said, taking the tiller back from him. “He used to run with Marco. Some of the Legion guys left a while back to join up with another outfit. I think a few had a change of heart, maybe said some shit they shouldn’t. Damien was unfortunate enough to hear.” She shook her head. “Bastard could never keep a secret.”
“They… what they did to him.” Conner didn’t really have a question, was just trying to process the level of fucked-up they were dealing with. He couldn’t believe there were people who would kill so many, even those amongst themselves, and all for what? What was there to gain when everything was gone? “What was that you took off him? His last rites?”
Vic nodded. Conner knew about this tradition, but he also knew you weren’t supposed to ask divers what they carried in their bellies. And then he felt like an idiot. He remembered the note his mother had given him to pass along to Vic. He hadn’t seen Vic later that night, had spent that time with Gloralai, so he’d forgotten. This didn’t seem like the appropriate time, but he was scared he would forget again. “I’ve got something for you,” he said, digging into his own pocket. Vic tried to wave him off. She was obviously lost in thought, but Conner took over the tiller and forced the letter into her hand. “Mom gave it to me last night. She said to give it to you. I forgot about it until just now.”
Vic started to put the letter away
with the other one. But then she hesitated. While Conner manned the tiller, she opened the letter. She kept it down in her lap and behind her knees so the wind wouldn’t tear it from her grip. Conner adjusted his ker and concentrated on where he was steering.
“Who is this from?” she asked, turning and shouting over the noise of the wind and the shush of the sarfer as it tore across the sand.
“Mom,” he said.
Vic bent forward and read some more, then flipped the letter over, studied the back, studied the front again, seemed to read it a second time. Conner glanced repeatedly from the bow to his sister, watching her head swing across the lines on the page. She turned and looked at Conner for a long time; whatever was spinning in that head of hers was lost behind her goggles.
“Dad wrote this,” she said.
Conner’s hand nearly slipped off the tiller. “What?” Maybe he didn’t hear right.
“What the fuck is this?” Vic asked. “Where did this come from?” She tucked the letter under one leg and eased the main, let out the jib. They lost some speed, and it got easier to hear, easier to talk. She pulled the letter out from underneath her and showed it to Conner. “Dad signed this,” she said. “Is this why you said we should go west? This letter?”
“I didn’t read it,” Conner said. He gave his sister the tiller and took the letter. He read it. It was the note Violet had mentioned, the one that got lost. He turned to his sister. “Violet told us some of this. She’d read some of it when Dad wrote it out. She said she lost the letter. Mom must’ve found it. I had no idea. But yeah, this is what we were trying to tell you. Screw rebuilding, Dad wants us to move on.”
“But Palm says he doesn’t believe this story—”
“Palm is fried. He said this girl talks like someone else. That doesn’t mean anything.”
“This girl who’s our sister.”
“Yes.”
The sarfer sailed on. Vic took in the main a little.
“So what’s she like, this supposed sister of ours?”