by Hugh Howey
Page 16
Vic stepped back toward the cockpit instead. She raised her hand and steadied the boom as it moved in a gust of wind. “I don’t want to find Palmer to take him diving with us,” she said.
“Good. Let’s get going. ”
“We need to find Palmer because …” She wasn’t sure how to say this. “Goddamnit, Marco, I think he might be the one who found Danvar. ”
26 • A Long Way Up
Palmer
Palmer slid easily through the loose bank of drift inside the building, but the hard pack he found outside was a shock. As he pushed his way back into the world, the earth he encountered there pushed back at him. He didn’t quite get a full breath of air before the strain around his chest and neck made another gulp impossible. He could’ve turned and forced his way back into the building to escape the crush, but a slower death beckoned there. And he might never have gotten the courage to go again.
His mortality was suddenly everywhere at once. Never before had it registered with him that this was the moment. Now. Right now. Here was where he would die and where his bones would lie, never to see the stars again.
With half a lungful, he turned skyward in desperation. He only knew which way was up by leaving the tall building behind. Fighting against the squeeze, fighting against all that pressure, he struggled to flow the sand and at the same time to breathe. But still he could not pry the hands of those deep dunes from around his neck. He had a tank of air strapped to his back, but he couldn’t draw on the regulator, couldn’t force his chest to expand, needed to go up in order to win a breath.
Palmer kicked and flowed the miserable sand. He should be around three hundred meters. There was no depth reading in his visor. Go by feel. Move fifty meters. That should be enough to get a breath. Battery in his beacon must be dead. Didn’t matter—just kick. The depth would show when it sensed the surface. Should’ve been able to breathe but couldn’t. Too weak. Too exhausted. Too hungry and thirsty and terrified.
The sun does this every day, he heard his sister say. Palmer felt consciousness slip through his fingers. He was back on a dune with Vic, learning to dive in the loosest of sand, afraid he wouldn’t have the knack, that he wouldn’t have the special talent that made diving possible, was afraid all of his dad’s skill had gone to his sister.
Look at the sun, she told him. The sun was just coming up. He’d been in her too-big dive suit for hours and hadn’t been able to so much as slide a hand into a dune. He was growing frustrated. He didn’t want to hear another lecture from his older sister.
“Every day,” Vic told him. “Every day, the sun rises out of the sand without effort. It glides. It burns. It melts all in its path, and then it shows us how it’s done in the evening as it bores straight down through the jagged peaks. Through solid rock, Palm. And all you’ve gotta to do is move the sand. ”
The sun. His father was calling. His father, who told him he would be a great diver one day. Sitting on his lap, Palmer’s earliest memory, back when his father had been a great man and a ruler, telling his firstborn son that he would be the greatest of divers one day. Nearby, Vic listened, ten years old, sitting in the same room and unmentioned. Unmentioned.
No shadows cast, not from this son. No, this son lived in shadows. Lived in the dark and cool sand. Watched his sister dive and rise up again, basking, radiating glory, a rebel and a pirate and a scrounger and a great diver. But Palmer … who saw Danvar when it was a legend … who spilled the life of a man with his dive knife … who would die with a tank of air on his back and a quarter charge in his suit … his white bones at three hundred meters.
Three hundred meters. The depth reading flashed in Palmer’s awareness like the appearance of a mother’s face in the midst of a burning fever. Like a knock at a door in the middle of a nightmare. A small part of his brain yelled at the rest of him, saying hey, you might want to see this.
But he’d been going up. Should be less than three hundred meters. His lungs were straining. And then he remembered the bowl they’d dug, the deep shaft in the sand they’d made, the extra two hundred meters. Fuck, he’d only gotten started. No way, no way, no way.
Palmer stopped moving. He worried less about the flow and more about breathing. The sand held him, but he was able to draw air through the regulator. A breath. A sip. Life. That surreal feeling taking him right back to the day Vic had taught him how to dive, had told him to breathe while his head was under the sand, his body telling him this was impossible, his brain saying not to do it, his sister yelling at him, her voice distant and muffled, to fucking breathe.
And breathing.
Palmer managed a gulp. He peered down at the now-faint image of the sandscraper below. Up was the other way. Away from Danvar. He kicked; he grunted with effort, the sounds of his screams trapped in his own head, his own throat. So far to go. Where was he? There were no transponders, no beacons, but his visor was getting his depth now, so the surface was up there somewhere. No beacon to show him the way. And the shaft they’d descended, that Brock’s men had made, that bright yellow needle deep in the earth, was missing. That’s why so deep.
It grew harder to breathe, even as he pierced two hundred meters. Should be getting easier. Air was running out. Fuck. Air running out. Only enough to get back to the bottom of that well. No. Not this close. He wouldn’t die this close. He felt the resistance of the dry tank, that fruitless tug on a bottle sucked dry, and his air was gone. Maybe he could get fifty meters on a lungful. Maybe. Two hundred meters to go. He kicked anyway. He wouldn’t make it. This registered as bright as metal in loose sand. He wouldn’t make it. Could feel himself blacking out. Still another one fifty, as deep as many divers dared to plunge, at the bottom of most dives, and he was down there with a lungful of nothing but toxic exhalations.
An orange spot in the sand above. Thirty meters away. Something to steer for. A dying light. An island in the vastness. His body needed to breathe; his body told him to spit out his regulator and suck down sand; it was that impulse at the end of asphyxiation, the urge to get something into the lungs, anything, even the soil. Whatever it took to breathe. To gasp. Just fucking do it. Clog his lungs with sand and end the pain. He would. He would. But an orange spot. A body.
Palmer ran out of energy. The sand would no longer flow. There was a diver there beside him, and he numbly, distantly, in some corner of his diminishing soul, knew why Hap never came back for him.
Hap had never made it.
Palmer spit out his regulator. He tasted the sand on his tongue. He could see Hap’s face, the way his body was twisted out of shape, something wrong about that. Something wrong. A frozen look on Hap’s face, mouth and eyes wide, regulator dangling. Palmer’s regulator. Palmer’s regulator.
Palmer flowed the sand around the regulator and grabbed it, placed it into his mouth. No hope. No hope. But air cares not for hope. It is or it isn’t. And here it was. Here it was.
Air.
Energy flowed into Palmer’s cells like electricity. He blinked away the tears behind his visor. Vic and his father were yelling at him. His mother was yelling at him. His baby brothers. Hap. All yelling at him. Go. Go. Fucking breathe.
A hundred meters to the surface, to the bottom of that slowly filling bowl of sand. No time to switch tanks. But this was sand he could handle. Even as he could taste the wet metal on his tongue that let him know this other tank was running dry, this tank and regulator he knew so well running dry, he also knew the loose sand. He knew this dead diver. Palmer was a scrounger, a sand diver, one who brought back heavy loads from the past and saw the sun glint off them for the first time in generations. He flowed the sand upward, pulling Hap and his tank with him, rising through the last hundred meters of sand as his air ran out, as his air ran out, but he knew and Vic told him that he could make it. And he believed.
27 • Mother
Vic
Vic and Marco sailed north on a steady breeze, the sa
il taut and full, the lines singing and happy. Marco had found a good trough through a line of dunes, which meant very little tacking. It was the kind of sailing that coaxed a mind into a wander. Just the vibration through a riveted hull of piecemeal steel as the sarfer crossed those patches of sand with the little channels the wind made, those striations like the wrinkled hands of the elderly. There was the shushing sound of metal runners on hard pack, the creak of lines in burdened wooden blocks, the groan of a happy mast bent before a gathering wind.
Vic watched the great wall approach in the distance, the tallest of the cobbled scrapers looming over the far dunes. It was not yet noon. They had made excellent time, hard to believe she had been on a dive before dawn that same day. Her thoughts went to Palmer, the idea that her brother may have been a part of this find of finds. Their father had been right all those years ago when he’d said Palmer would be the one. Vic was the scrounger who made fortunes. Fortunes she spent just as quickly. Spent them chasing the next score, her prospects rising and falling with the moon, always looking for that truly impressive discovery, the one that would mean never gambling again. But Palmer was the one.
Marco tapped her arm. He was in the webbed seat next to her. He motioned to the tiller and then pointed toward the bow, needed to go forward. Vic took over. She enjoyed the way the tiller hummed in her hand. The same technology found in her dive suit allowed the sharp rudder to pierce the sand and flow through it like water. She steered and watched Marco work and realized her mother had been as right about her love life as her father had been about her diving prospects. Her mom had said she would end up with someone dangerous, someone who took too many risks, and that this would be the end of her. “Nothing but brigands and bastards in your future,” her mom had said. Like she knew what she was talking about.
Vic watched Marco wrestle with the hanks on the foresail until a wrinkle was out and the shape of the jib was better. Instead of returning to the cockpit, he stood on the bow and gazed out toward approaching Springston. Whatever he was thinking was hidden behind those dark goggles of his, was lost in that mane of knotted cords, those tattoos and scars and wounds from fighting for some ideal that she didn’t think either of them could even remember. What were they fighting for?
And what would she do differently if she went back and did it all over? If she thought her parents were right, what would she change? Vic couldn’t think of a thing. The ink and the sandscars on her body would never disappear, and she didn’t regret them. She would be proud of Palmer if he went down as the one who found Danvar. Proud of him and his friend Hap. Glad for them and in love with her brigand boyfriend and damn her parents if they’d been right about everything. Damn them. After her big score, when she had kids of her own and sent them out into the world, she’d tell them the things she’d learned and then say that they would have to learn these very same things all on their own. Every generation did. Trying to prevent this was like shouting at the wind and hoping it stopped.
Ahead, the clean northward trough ended. Vic steered around a dune and through a break until she found another trough. She had to adjust the sails as she did so. Marco seemed at peace on the bow and made no effort to come back and help. Probably knew she’d be pissed if he tried. He held the forestay with one hand and continued to gaze toward the horizon, thinking on his own riches, possibly. Or busy naming their kids. Or dreading the day their mother told them about the time their dad was nearly killed by an undergarment.
Shantytown rose at last, after the scrapers and the great wall. A scrabble of low huts with bright steel roofs gleamed in the rising sun. She had to search hard to spot the marina on the south side, for it was nearly bare. Just two sarfers parked, neither of them fitted with masts, otherwise Vic was sure they’d be out among the dunes as well, looking for Danvar.
The traffic they’d seen between Low-Pub and Springston had been unprecedented. She and Marco had passed dozens of parked sarfers among the dunes with their dive flags up. Dozens more had been spotted with their sails billowing as they raced all points but east. Vic eased the sheets to drop some speed and steered into the marina while Marco lowered the jib. It felt good, this ride between Low-Pub and Springston. The anxiety of the chase for treasure had lessened. She just felt an urge to find her brother and share in the excitement with everyone else. Nothing wrong with being second or tenth. Just a pang that her father wasn’t there to be a part of it. To hear that Palmer had maybe been first.
She guided the sarfer into an open flat of sand, loosed the mainsail, and realized this would be her first trip into Springston in almost a year. God, today was the day, wasn’t it? Or was it yesterday? She knew it was coming up. Conner and Rob would be out camping. Maybe that’s where Palmer was as well. Hell, maybe he’d had no part in locating Danvar. He’d just been camping, had done whatever two-tank dive he and Hap had lined up and had gone out to No Man’s for the weekend. Doubt crept in after getting Marco’s hopes up. She may have sailed them in the wrong direction.
“I’ll stay here and watch the sarfer,” Marco said, snapping her from her thoughts. The noise of the wind and the skids was gone, leaving a residual roar. They would both be shouting at each other until it went away.
“No, you’re coming with me. ” She coiled the mainsheet before tugging her gloves off, then nodded to the small shack beyond the mooring posts. “I’ll give the dockmaster a coin to watch our stuff. ”
Marco shrugged. “If you insist. ” He wrapped a line around one of the posts so the sarfer couldn’t break free and run under bare pole. They flaked the mainsail and left the mast up so they could get out of there as soon as they found Palmer. Vic tied back the halyard so it wouldn’t clang a racket, then checked their dive gear in the haul rack to make sure nothing had come loose. She took a long pull on her canteen, dreading the hell out of this, dreading it worse than any deep dive, then led the way toward the Honey Hole, Marco having to jog to catch up with her.