Hugh Howey - Sand

“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 comfortable 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.