Hugh Howey - Sand

“Everyone’s heard of Danvar,” Hap whispered, and Palmer noted the awe in his friend’s voice. “Will this lead us there?”

Palmer turned and surveyed his friend, then followed Hap’s gaze down to the table. The four corners of a large piece of parchment were pinned down by meaty fists, sweating mugs, and a smoking ashtray. Palmer touched the edge of the parchment closest to him and saw that the mottled brown material was thicker than normal parchment. It looked like the stretched and tanned hide of a cayote, and felt brittle as though it were very old.

One of the men laughed at Hap’s question. “You already are here,” he roared.

An exhalation of smoke drifted across the old drawing like a sandstorm seen from up high. One of Brock’s sausage fingers traced the very constellation Palmer had been staring at dizzily just moments before.

“The belt of the great warrior, Colorado.” The men around the table stopped their chattering and drinking. Their boss was speaking. His finger found a star every boy knew. “Low-Pub,” he said, his voice as rough as the sand-studded wind. But that wasn’t the name of the star, as Palmer could tell him. Low-Pub was a lawless town to the south of Springston, an upstart town recently in conflict with its neighbor, as the two wrestled over wells of water and oil. Palmer watched as Brock traced a line up the belt, his fingertip like a sarfer sailing the winds between the two towns and across all that contested land. It was a drawn-out gesture, as though he was trying to show them some hidden meaning.

“Springston,” he announced, pausing at the middle star. Palmer’s thought was Home . His gaze drifted over the rest of the map, this maze of lines and familiar clusters of stars, of arrows and hatch marks, of meticulous writing built up over the years in various fades of ink, countless voices marked down, arguing in the margins.

The fat finger resumed its passage due north—if those stars really might be taken to represent Low-Pub and Springston.

“Danvar,” Brock announced, thumping the table with his finger. He indicated the third star in the belt of great Colorado. The map seemed to suggest that that the buried world of the gods was laid out in accordance with their heavenly stars. As if man were trapped between mirrored worlds above and below. The tent swayed as Palmer considered this.

“You’ve found it?” Hap asked.

“Aye,” someone said, and the drinking and smoking resumed. The curled hide of a map threatened to roll shut with the rise of a mug.

“We have a good guess,” Brock said in that strange accent of his. “You boys will tell us for sure.”

“Danvar is said to be a mile down,” Palmer muttered. When the table fell silent, he glanced up. “Nobody’s ever dove half of that.”

“Nobody?” someone asked. “Not even your sister?”

Laughter tumbled out of beards. Palmer had been waiting for her to come up.

“It’s no mile down,” Brock told them, waving his thick hand. “Forget the legends. Danvar is here. More plunder than in all of Springston. Here lies the ancient metropolis. The three buried towns of this land are laid out according to the stars of Colorado’s belt.” He narrowed his eyes at Hap and then Palmer. “We just need you boys to confirm it. We need a real map, not this skin.”

“How deep are we talking?” Hap asked.

Palmer turned to his friend. He had assumed this had already been discussed. He wondered if the wage he’d been promised had been arrived at, or if his friend had just been blowing smoke. They weren’t here for a big scavenge; they were here to dive for ghosts, to dig for legends.

“Eight hundred meters.”

The answer quieted all but the moaning wind.

Palmer shook his head. “I think you vastly overestimate what a diver can—”

“We dug the first two hundred meters,” Brock said. He tapped the map again. “And it says here on this map that the tallest structures rise up another two hundred fifty.”

“That leaves…” Hap hesitated, waiting no doubt for someone else to do the math.

The swinging lamp seemed to dim, and the edges of the map went out of focus as Palmer arrived at the answer. “Three hundred fifty meters,” he said, feeling dizzy. He’d been down to two fifty a few times on twin bottles. He knew people who’d gone down to three. His sister, a few others, could do four—some claimed five. Palmer hadn’t been warned they were diving so deep, nor that they were helping more gold-diggers waste their time looking for Danvar. He had feared for a moment there that they were working for rebels, but this was worse. This was a delusion of wealth rather than power.

“Three fifty is no problem,” Hap said. He spread his hands out on the map and leaned over the table, making like he was studying the notes. Palmer reckoned his friend was feeling dizzy as well. It would be a record for them both.

“I just wanna know it’s here,” Brock said, thumping the map. “We need exact coordinates before we dig any more. The damn hole we have here is a bitch to maintain.”

There were grumbles of agreement from the men that Palmer figured were doing the actual digging. One of them smiled at Palmer. “Your mum would know something about maintaining holes,” he said, and the grumbles turned into laughter.

Palmer felt his face burn. “When do we go?” he shouted over this sudden eruption.

And the laughter died down. His friend Hap turned from the dizzying map, his eyes wide and full of fear, Palmer saw. Full of fear and with a hint of an apology for bringing them this far north for such madness, a glimmer in those eyes of all the bad that was soon to come.

Palmer lay awake in a crowded tent that night and listened to the snores and coughs of strangers. The wind howled late and brought in the whisper of sand, then abated. The gradual glow of morning was welcome, the tent moving from dark to gray to cream, and when he could no longer lie still and hold his bladder, Palmer squeezed out from between Hap and the canvas wall, collected his bag and boots, and slipped outside.

The air was still crisp from a cloudless night, the sand having shucked off the heat soaked up the day before. Only a few stars clung to the darkness in the west. Venus stood alone above the opposite dunes. The sun was up somewhere, but it wouldn’t show itself above the local dunes for another hour.

Before it could beat down between the high sands, Palmer hoped to be diving. He relished the coolness of the deep earth, even the pockets of moist sand that made for difficult flow. Sitting down, he upturned his boots and clopped the heels together, little pyramids of scoop [1] Sand that collects in boots. spilling out. Slapping the bottoms of his socks, he pulled the boots back on and laced them up securely, doubling the knot. He was eager to attach his fins and get going.

He checked his dive pack and went over his gear. One of the prospectors emerged from the tent, cleared his throat, then spat in the sand near enough to Palmer for it to register but far enough away that he couldn’t be certain if it was directed at him. After some consideration, and while the man urinated on the wall of a dune, Palmer decided this ephemeral range of questionable intent was between four and five feet. It felt scientific.

A wiry man with charcoal skin emerged from Brock’s tent: Moguhn, who looked less fearsome in the wan daylight. He had to be Brock’s second-in-command, judging by the way the two men conferred the night before. Moguhn lifted his eyebrows at Palmer as if to ask whether the young man was up to the day’s challenge. Palmer dipped his chin in both greeting and reply. He felt great. He was ready for a deep dive. He checked the two large air bottles strapped to the back of his dive pack and took a series of deep and rapid breaths, prepping his lungs. There was no pressure to get all the way down to the depths Brock was asking. His dive visor could see through a couple hundred meters of sand. All he had to do was go as deep as he could, maybe clip three hundred for the first time, record whatever they could see, and then come back up. They couldn’t ask more of him than that.