Hugh Howey - Sand

There was a woman above her. A bed. The young girl was lying on a bed beneath sheets as clean and white as a child’s teeth. Her dive suit and her britches were gone, just a shirt like a man wears folded across her and cinched with a white ribbon—sweet-smelling and clean. She moved to touch the shirt, and her side screamed out where she’d been bit.

“Lie still,” the woman said. She placed a hand on the young girl’s shoulder and forced her back against the pillows. There were two boys in the room. They were the boys from one of her dreams. “Can you take another small sip?” the woman asked.

The young girl nodded, and a jar was brought forward, the water inside as clear as glass. She lifted her hands to help, but they were bandaged and useless. The water burned her mouth in the best way.

“What’s your name?” the woman asked.

“Violet,” she said. Her voice was small in that strange room.

The woman smiled at this. “Like the flower.”

The older of the two boys moved closer to the bed, and Violet remembered his face from her dream, but it wasn’t a dream. Conner. He had picked her up and carried her. She knew where she was, that this was real. She turned to the woman with the water, who was asking about her name.

“Father said violet was the color he saw when I was born, that it was like seeing the air from beneath the sand. That’s why he named me Violet.”

The woman smoothed the hair back from the girl’s forehead and frowned like this was the wrong answer.

“Can I have more water?” she whispered. Her mouth was so dry.

“Just a little,” the woman said. “It’s possible to drink too much.”

Violet nodded. “You can drown,” she said. “Like in the river. Or what happens if you drink the bad water from the trough.” She lifted her head and took another sip. The younger of the two boys stood at the foot of the bed and stared at her. She knew who this was. “You’re Rob,” she said.

The boy startled as if someone had stomped on his foot. Regaining his composure, he bobbed his head.

“Father said we were about the same age.”

“Then he wasted no time,” the woman with the jar of water muttered. She sounded upset. “Where is he now? How far away is your village?”

“How did you get across No Man’s Land?” the older boy asked.

“How old are you?” Rob wanted to know.

The woman snapped her fingers at the two boys, and they seemed to know this meant not to talk. And something occurred to Violet. “You’re my second mom,” she said. “You’re Rose.”

The woman’s cheeks twitched at this. She shook her head and opened her mouth to say something—Violet thought maybe to say that she wasn’t her mom—but instead she just wiped at one eye and kept quiet. The two boys seemed to be waiting for Violet to answer all their questions, but she had already forgotten most of them.

“I don’t come from a village,” she said. She rested her head on the pillow and gazed longingly at the jar of water in the woman’s hands. “I came from a camp. It doesn’t have a name, just a number, and we aren’t allowed to leave. There are tents and fences, and we can see the city from the camp. Kids from the city come to the fence—there’s two fences, so if you get through one the other will stop you—and some of the kids from the city throw candy through the fence and some throw rocks—it’s usually the bigger kids with the rocks, which means the rocks come harder than the candy, but we’re told to stay away from the fence anyway—”

“What kind of camp is this?” Rose asked.

“Like camping in a tent—?” Rob said, but he got snapped at again.

“A mining camp,” Violet said. “It’s where they blow up the ground and grab the worthy stuff out with their nets. That’s what the foreman calls them, but Father says they aren’t really nets. They have magnets in them. He knows all about wires and magic and stuff. They make us work the troughs for the heavier bits that drift to the bottom. We work with water up to our elbows all day, cold water. It makes your hands and fingers shrivel. People in the camp who come from the south call it the pruning flesh—”

“Water up to your elbows,” Conner scoffed. “And where’s all this water come from?”

It was clear he didn’t believe her. Father warned Violet this would happen, that no one would believe. “The water comes from the river,” she said. “But you can’t drink it. Some do, and they die. Because of the metals and the mining. The water for drinking comes from way upstream, past all the camps, but they don’t give us much of that. Father says they starve our mouths and drown our arms just to drive us mad. But it didn’t make me mad. Just thirsty.”

Saying this won her another sip from the jar. Violet felt better. It was the sheets and the roof over her head and the jar of water and people to talk to.

“What’s the name of this city?” Rose asked. “Where’s my husband?”

“The city is called Agyl. The people outside the fence call it that, but they talk funny, and Father says I talk too much like them because I was born in the camp. They say it’s a small city, but Father says it’s bigger than where he comes from. I don’t know. It’s the only city I’ve ever seen. Just a mining town. The big cities, they say, are more to the sunrise, all the way to the sea. But that’s—”

“What’s a sea?” Rob asked.

More snapping.

“Tell me about the people in this camp,” Rose said. “How many are there? Where did they come from?”

Violet took a deep breath. She eyed the water. “There are hundreds,” she said. “Five hundreds? More. Most come from the sunset like Father. Some get there by doing something wrong in the cities. A few of these get let out after so long of working, but more are always let in. Our camp had a big number for a name, which Father said must mean there are lots of them. There are people in our camp who came from the north or the south and are already hungry like us. The ones who come from the sunset don’t get let go. Not ever. They have fences and towers where they watch for them and nets to put them in.”

“How is… your father?” Rose asked. Her voice sounded funny. Violet eyed the jar.

“Is it okay to have more water now? It’s been a while.”

Rose let her take a small sip. It reminded Violet of her father, getting a ration like this, and she started crying. She wiped the tears off her cheek with the back of her wrist and drank them too. “Father said you’d ask how he was and to say that he was okay, but Father doesn’t always tell the truth.”

This made Rose laugh, but then she covered her mouth and was crying, too. The boys were quiet without being snapped at. Violet thought of what she wanted to say, some of what she was told to say with some truth mixed in as well.

“They don’t feed us enough,” she said. “That’s what the adults say. And so people come in with muscles and then it goes away. Sometimes the people go away all at once. That’s when their sheets are pulled up over their heads. I always tucked my chin down like this—” She lowered her chin against her chest and pretended to hold sheets tight up against her neck. “—so it wouldn’t happen to me. Father was stronger than most of the men there. Tall. With dark eyes and dark skin like the men from the sunset and dark hair like yours.” She nodded to Conner. “But I could lay a finger between his ribs while he slept, and his ribs would go out and in, and he gave me too much of his bread.”

Violet thought on what else she needed to say. There was a lot. So much that her thoughts were getting jammed like the trough sometimes did when too much metals came.

“Did he tell us how to get to him?” Conner asked. “What did he say we should do?”