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Rain froze and gathered. The ice grew so heavy, it made valleys where once there were plains. The rocks used to drive the boy out now covered the old world. Sand and ice took turns burying the clan.
Countless moons and a thousand winds passed. Now a man, Colorado chased a cayote up the mountains, following his tracks, which led him over the peaks and down to his people. He had been absent so long, no one recognized him. Not even the great bull Sand, who had grown old, his hide and eyes gray, the scar on his flank a black and jagged mark. Nor did Colorado recognize his old friend of the hunt. The years had been too many. The world was upside down. Ancient maps had been redrawn and relearned.
The only reminder of what had happened was that black scar on Sand’s hide, and all the old bull knew of the wound was that the spear in Colorado’s hand had made it, and so the bull and the grown boy began to war with one another. Man and Sand were now at odds, could no longer find harmony. A fiction had become truth. Lost was the true story of how Colorado had saved the bull’s life. No one remembered the pack of cayotes clinging to Sand’s hide, how they’d been felled with a mighty blow from Colorado’s spear, a nick made in the bull’s flesh as the point caught him as well. The truth had vanished like the sheets of ice. A hide bore a great gash, just as the plains where Colorado hunted held a jagged line in the crust of the earth that marked the boundary of No Man’s Land.
Conner knew these legends, but he didn’t trust them. He was old enough to know more than one version of these stories. The tales he had learned as a youth had changed, and he imagined they’d been changing for as long as they’d been told. Back when the legends began, the sand that made the dunes had probably been solid rock.
But there stood the valley out of which no man returned. It lay before their campsite as he and Rob staked the tent a dozen paces from its jagged border. It was a hard line, this. The desert floor was cracked, the hide of the bull an open wound. And across this blew the sand. Out of No Man’s Land blew the sand. It blew across an injury that would never heal.
No Man’s Land. Despite the name, Conner didn’t know of a single boy his age who hadn’t ventured out to the rift just to jump across and back. It was a dare undertaken in trembling packs of youth, the taboos whispered on long hikes, the false tales each year of a boy who had slipped and had fallen into the chasm and whose screams could still be heard. “That’s how deep it is,” an older boy would invariably warn with a sinister smile. “You fall in and you fall forever, screaming and screaming, until you grow old and die. ”
Conner had heard these warnings as a boy. Later, he had spoken them to others. When he had gone on his own trek, he had been nine years old and had known that it was the wind that made that noise. And for all the boys who seemed to annually plunge to their deaths, none were ever named. There were never any funerals or sobbing mothers. It was just older kids trying to scare the younger.
The chasm itself was a mere two paces across where boys made brave leaps. Once they crossed, they stood on the other side, trembling and afraid, chests thrust out in defiance of the noisy gods deep in the valley, feeling the wind and sand on their faces, thinking on warnings from fathers who had in their youth done the very same. And then they jumped right back, vastly relieved to have this ritual behind them.
And so it was said that no man returned from this land even though all men dipped a toe in unharmed. But Conner knew, as everyone else did, that legends and law did not have such hard borders as these. They were soft things, probed without bursting, until one pressed the point too far. And the danger in life was that no one knew when the skin would give, just as Colorado had not known how to fight an enemy who wrestled with his friend, how to aim true enough to hit only the one.
They set up the tent and made a fire and warmed bread and stew in silence, and Conner thought on these things. They lit the lamp and sipped caps of water and shared stories of stories about the long dead and long absent, and Conner thought on these things. That night, he lay in his father’s tent while embers throbbed red outside, and he dwelt on the legends, thinking how a boy might leap across that gap and live, but how no boy truly believed he had entered No Man’s Land. Not really. Not for honest. Because this was a place from which no soul returned.
No man, at least.
18 • No Man’s Land
Conner lay in his bedroll, counting down to the moment, feeling in his bones what his old man must’ve felt twelve years ago to the day. His heart thrummed louder than the rolling booms in the distance. He could feel his pulse in his temples. His blood ticked there like one of Graham’s old clocks. And after it had ticked for what felt like days, he rose as quietly as his father once had. Slipping from his bedroll, he could feel not only Rob’s presence in the pitch black but also Palmer’s, Vic’s, and his mother’s too. He was sneaking out on all of them.
The wind was his noisy accomplice. Conner waited until a gust shook and flapped the canvas, and just as the breeze passed and would not blow sand inside, he added to its nocturnal noise by parting the tent and stealing into the night.
The stars were bright outside, the sky clear, the air cool. There was a half-moon low to the west, giving the sand an even whiteness. That same moon had been high in the night when he’d left the tent to pee and used this commotion to remove his pack. He found the bag now by the light of the firepit’s glowing coals. He dumped the scoop out of his father’s boots and sat on the cool sand to pull them on. Conner shivered and his teeth chattered, as much from nerves as from the temperature. He felt the urge to pee again but knew he didn’t really need to. There was no water in him, only fear.
A wailing lament blew across the Bull’s gash, and the coals in the fire throbbed with life as they inhaled the breeze. There was a great and mysterious rumble in the distant earth that filled Conner’s chest and throat, a sound of beating drums, that echo eternal. He rose and slung the pack over his shoulders, cinched the truss around his waist to carry the load on his hips, and turned to look back one last time. He studied the dark form of the tent, barely aglow from the coals, his brother sleeping inside, all alone. And he felt a final tug of guilt and doubt before steeling himself and heading off into the noisy beyond.
The moonlight showed him the break in the earth, that dark crack as real as a line on any map. Conner watched sand tumble in and blow past. How many millennia had it done this without filling that hole to the brim? Here was a wound incapable of healing, a slice in need of a stitch. People age day by day, he used to think. Minute by minute, much as a dune is built one grain at a time, much as one region of the desert overlaps and fades gradually into another. But here was a truth keenly felt: that some moments were like great rifts in the earth; some moments as discrete as a young boy’s leap. Life was divided into these ages. Here one moment, in the great beyond the next. An eyeblink, and a boy becomes his father.
With barely more than a large stride, Conner crossed what in youth had required a lunge, and this renewed ritual filled him with courage. It was a symbolic break with all behind him. All that was left was the thunder to march into, as so many others had marched before him without coming back. Behind, nothing but sad wails would be left, wails he would not have to listen to. Despite the dread in his marrow, he told himself that this was not final. Four days’ march out and four back, that was all. Four days to see what was over the horizon. And then he would return. He told himself this just as he was sure all those before him had. Just as his father had. He hiked toward the drums, promising himself he would return, and the wind picked up and cried at him for being so foolish—
But not the wind. That was not the wind crying. Ahead, in the pale moonlight, some different, anguished wail.
Conner crept forward. He pulled his knife from his belt, expected to find a cayote homing in on his scent or warning him away from its lair. And there, on all fours, sure enough—
But the cayote lifted its head into the moonlight, and it was t
he gaunt face of a human looking up at him. A boy.
Conner put his knife away and hurried forward. Some stupid kid from Springston. Someone there to dare the gash. He scanned the darkness for the other boys he knew would be there, the friends who had to witness who was courageous and who chickened out. Conner was pissed at having his more serious ritual disturbed by this petty one of youth. And so it was with anger that he rushed to the kid, ready to haul him up and toss him over the meaningless crack in the earth and back to his friends—
But Conner drew up as he approached. What had looked like a boy was a gaunt girl, her clothes in rags, crawling on hands and knees, the remains of a shoe dragging behind by its laces. Reaching ahead, she dug her fingers into the sand and pulled herself forward, seeming not to know Conner was there, simply staring ahead as if toward the glow of the distant fire.
“Be still,” Conner said. He dropped to his knees, and the child saw him at last. She clutched at him. Wide eyes and parched lips and skin pale as milk and moon. Conner held the frail child, the anger in him gone, but this was even more intrusion than daring boys. Drums beat in his chest. Where were her friends? He scanned the sands and saw no one. Probably left her out here alone. Or a cayote had nipped her and scared off the others. She trembled against him, senseless and moaning.
Conner lifted her up—found she weighed less than his pack. He’d have to carry her across, back to the tent, and Rob would need to look after her and get her home. She had played at a boy’s game, and look what it had cost her. She was lucky he had been out there. He would get her to the tent, could still vanish while Rob was occupied. This changed nothing. It was simply his first act as a free man. It was a life saved for a life lost. An even trade.
The step across the gap was more treacherous this time with the girl in his arms. It wasn’t just the extra weight, it was being unable to see. He shuffled forward until his lead boot felt the edge, extended his other foot, and leaned forward into blind faith. His boot found the far side. And a story leapt up in his mind as he hurried toward the tent, a reason for him being out in the middle of the night.
“Rob!” he called. “Rob! Wake up!”
There was a glow inside the tent a moment later. Conner started to set the child down outside the tent when the flap parted, his bleary-eyed brother peering out. “What time—?” Rob began.
“Help me get her inside,” Conner said. And Rob did. The girl was unable to move on her own. The two boys got her into the tent, and Rob closed the flap on the wind. The dive light dangling from the tentpole threw light and shadows across the disheveled bedding. Conner laid the girl out, then unbuckled his hip belt and shrugged off his pack. He caught Rob studying the heavy load as he set it aside.
“Don’t just sit there,” Conner said. “Get her some water. ”
Rob looked up at him, blinked away the fog of sleep, and then lurched into action. He pawed through his bedroll to find his canteen while Conner got a good look at the girl. And the story he had made up in his head was shattered. Not the story he had prepared for Rob about stealing out for a piss and finding kids braving the gap—but the story he had told himself about where this child had come from.
Springston was not so big that he didn’t recognize most faces, even if he didn’t know their names. But this child was a stranger for other reasons. She was emaciated, her arms like the legs of a bird, one arm folded across her chest, the other bent around her head. Her britches were in tatters and of a strange cloth. The knees of this material were worn through, the flesh beneath torn and bloody and with dark rivulets tracing down her shins. The wounds were black from having dried at least a day ago, but there was fresh wetness on top from where the scabs had ripped and ripped. There was sand in all the wounds.
She moaned. Her lips were cracked and dry, her face burnt like a daywalker’s. The shoulder of her shirt was missing, torn away, the rest of it barely hanging on. She looked as though she’d been dragged across a thousand dunes, and when Conner saw the bloody stumps of her fingers where her nails used to be, he knew that this poor creature had done her own dragging.
She was half-dead and senseless. And Conner knew as a diver does when he raises an unseen relic from the cold sand that this thing at his feet did not come from Springston, nor from any other living world. This child was from No Man’s Land. Someone had wandered out. Had crossed that impassable divide.
“How do I make her drink?” Rob asked. He had the canteen open and was looking to Conner for help.
“Just a cap,” Conner whispered, his mind reeling from what this girl meant. “Give it to me. ”
Rob poured a cap, the canteen trembling and spilling, and Conner wondered if his brother knew what he himself knew. Probably. Rob was the smart one.
“Careful,” he said, taking the cap of water. He positioned himself at the girl’s side, folded her other frail arm across her chest, and slid his hand behind her neck. Gingerly, he lifted her head and scooted a knee behind her until she rested on his thigh. Another faint moan escaped her lips, a feeble sign of life. The girl appeared to be eight or nine years old, but it was difficult to tell, as gaunt and frail as she was.
Conner dribbled the water onto her cracked and bloody lips. He imagined he heard a sizzle there, as moisture hit the fire of thirst. Her cheeks twitched, a wince of pain, and he had to steady her head. He tried to drip the water past her wounded lips and directly onto her tongue.
“Easy,” Rob whispered.
“I know,” Conner said. He emptied the cap, watched the child’s throat bob as her body unconsciously swallowed. “Fill it again. ” He passed the cap back to Rob, whose hand was steadier now as he poured another ration.
This time, the girl seemed to help with the drinking. A weak hand came up and rested on Conner’s arm, nailless and bloody fingers curling there, tender and thankful. Desperate.