Hugh Howey - Sand

But the girl was looking past him and up at Conner. Her eyelids fluttered open, and for a moment, her cloudy eyes grew bright like a break in a sandstorm. They were half-familiar eyes that bored into Conner as the girl summoned the strength to speak, pulling desperately on the air in that stuffy tent.

“Con… ner,” she said again, each syllable an effort, the corners of her mouth curling into the barest of smiles, a smile of some faint recognition and some great relief. “… Father… sent me.”

And then the light in her eyes went gray again, wounds and exhaustion claiming her. And this girl out of No Man’s Land fell into the stillness of death and sleep, Conner’s name echoing softly in his ears, certain that he had never seen this girl in all his life, this girl who spoke of his father as if he were her own.

All of life was like the deep sand, Vic had learned. From birth to death it was a series of violent constrictions, one after the other, an oily fist gripping hapless souls who popped free long enough to gasp half a lungful before they were seized again. This was how Vic had come to see the world. Everywhere she looked, she saw life squeezing people, forcing them from one tight spot to the next, the cruel palms of misfortune wrapped around hapless necks.

The secret to surviving these sufferings, she had found, was to keep perfectly still in its clutches. Learning how not to breathe was the answer. Learning how to find joy in not breathing. The only difference between a choke and a hug was an open pathway. Which was why Vic had taught herself to hold her breath. And then life had become a series of uninterrupted embraces.

At six hundred meters, sand refused to budge. It grew deaf as a selfish lover to her thoughts and wishes. It pinned her and held her helpless. Six hundred meters was well past where divers perished. Long before they reached these depths, most died because they struggled to simultaneously breathe and flow the sand. Wrestling two men at once was futile. Vic knew.

Another two minutes on that lungful of air, and she would pass out. Already, lights popped in her vision, the edges growing dim. It would take her thirty minutes to get to the surface from that depth. Thirty minutes to go on two minutes of air. She would be fine. She spotted two of the hard metal cases near one another, the kind with the good seals. The cases stood out bright orange in her vision among the greens and blues of the softer bags. The oval conveyance device from which the bags had spilled was a brilliant white. All that metal, preserved by the deep pack of sand. It would live there forever, that buried and gleaming steel. Too deep to pull it apart and haul it up. Too risky.

Vic grabbed the two cases, hoped they were the silver kind, the Samsonites, and flowed upward. She left through a gaping hole in what must’ve been a fabric roof at some point, a tent roof, a tent bigger than half of Low-Pub. She surged up and away from the giant metal birds with their outstretched wings and their hundreds of glass eyes in two neat rows, up toward the flashing transponder at four hundred meters, arriving with just enough air left in her starving lungs.

She found the tank she’d left buried and flowed the sand around the regulator. Slipped it into her mouth. A minimal amount of grit hit her tongue. She stopped thinking of moving and only of that column of sand high above her, all that weight pressing down and from all sides. She deflected that weight and took a deep breath. Another. Her suit thrummed with energy and impatience. It lived for the deep sand.

Leaving the tank and the transponder behind, she flowed upward to the next blinking light. Two more stops to the surface. Ignore the need to breathe. It wasn’t the lack of air that made a person panic; it was the urge to exhale . It was the poisonous gas building up in her system that signaled her brain to expel the contents of her lungs. Her father had taught her this, had taught her all the mysteries of breathing. The body was not to be trusted, he had said. It could go for a long time without air. Longer and longer the more one worked the more mental of muscles.

Next stop. Another tank buried in advance. Here, the sand was almost back to normal. As the pack grew less dense, the colors seen through her visor shifted along the spectrum. She had her visor adjusted well beyond spec for the hard pack of near-concrete below. As she rose, the sand around her became like open air, shimmering with purples and unnatural hues. Her suit became similarly amped, even as its batteries ran dangerously low. She could feel a hum there in the looser sand. Her suit was made for the depths; it was revved. Turned up like this, she could feel its energy in her teeth. Here was another secret of the deep dive: you had to be willing to don a suit that felt as though it wanted to kill you. You had to pull on a visor that showed you nonsense. And then you had to dive straight down until the world felt right again.

Vic reached the next buried tank and took a long pull, swallowed some sand in the process. The most important part of diving deep, of course, was convincing everyone else that it was impossible. Part of this was letting people think she never dove on tanks. And mostly, this was true. Other divers had seen her go down to three hundred meters on a single breath. When she started staging tanks to go deeper, she told no one.

The secrecy was important, because if anyone knew it was possible, they would strive until they found a way. All great discoveries were like this. It was the rare souls full of hope who showed the world what could be done; and then came the thundering herds, those doubters and naysayers who had once put up barriers, now shoving everyone out of their way.

Vic realized the truth of this as she breached the surface and felt the rising sun on her face and the wind against her skin. If a man ever reached six hundred meters, no way he would keep that a secret. And then everyone would be down there, scrounging for what was hers and hers alone.

She flipped up her visor and rested on the warm sand for a deep breath. Another. She amped her suit and flowed the loose sand off her gear and out of her hair. It cascaded around her like a morning mist. Reaching into the sand—flowing the dune around her arm like so much water—she hauled out her buried gear bag. The sand in all directions was clear, none of the abandoned clutter and junk that marked popular dive sites. This was the best part of diving deep: avoiding the crowds, not worrying about some scavenger nabbing one of her finds, not dealing with the cranks and topside pirates who dug noisily through the heaps of rubbish left behind.

With her pack out of the sand, Vic powered off her humming suit and could feel her molars again. Low-Pub clattered noisily in the distance. The thrum of generators, the rap of hammers on nails, the sporadic gunfire, the noise of life.

A fitful wind blew across the dunes, carving the tops of them flat and pushing their mounded bulks ever westward. Vic dug her canteen out of her pack, took a long swig, and wiped her chin. Now for the payout. She hoped for enough to cover the rent and what she owed Yegery for the tanks and air. She’d rather not put in another deep dive this week, not if it could be helped. Her ribs were sore from being down so long, and her left knee felt tweaked. In the deep sand, all it took was losing flow around a leg for a split second for a foot to get twisted. She’d seen divers come up with arms and legs out of joint, screaming and spitting sand. Or those who got the bends, who forgot to keep the weight around them deflected, and surfaced with bubbles of air under their skin like little blisters, the soreness in their joints, if they were lucky. More often, the divers who lost their concentration never came back at all.