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A crow swooped down and lighted on the sarfer. The mainsail flapped, and the bird flapped back. It pecked the aluminum with its beak, the reaper rapping to be let in. Palmer waved his arm and begged it to go. He wondered what he would do if Vic didn’t come back. How long before the sun slid overhead and his shade dwindled to nothing? How long before another diver or a brigand found the sarfer with its flapping sail? How long?
The crow startled, and with a beat of its black wings, labored into the sky. Palmer heard a deep gasp. He turned to see Vic sliding up out of the ground, sand cascading off her and catching in the breeze. She took deep breaths. Rested on the sand for a moment. And then she flipped up her visor and startled Palmer with the barest of smiles.
36 • A Note from Father
Rob
“We’re gonna put a tear in Father’s tent,” Rob warned. He could see at once what his older brother had planned, could tell by the way he was knotting the ropes. It wasn’t going to be good for the tent.
“This is our tent,” Conner said, correcting him. “Yours and mine. Not Father’s. And we can’t very well carry her all the way to town. ”
Conner went back to his knots, and Rob watched his brother work in the pale light of the starry sky. The horizon was beginning to lighten beyond No Man’s Land, out where the sporadic bootfalls of stomping giants could be heard. The sun would be up within an hour, by his estimate.
He turned back to the girl and watched her sleep. They had moved their bedding and the girl out onto the sand in order to collapse the tent. She lay flat on her back with her head to the east and her feet to the west. Sand gathered in her hair. She might appear to be dead were it not for the imperceptible rise and fall of her chest, which lay partly exposed by the rip in her shirt. Rob reached over and pulled the fabric shut, covering her pale flesh. He had watched as Conner had cleaned her wounds. His brother had two extra canteens of water and all kinds of bandages and supplies in his pack. Rob didn’t ask about these things. He knew what they were for. He didn’t ask why Conner had been out of the tent in the middle of the night. He knew where Conner was going. It scared him to think of being alone, but that’s what Conner had planned. Rob kept all this to himself. He often saw how things worked, how they fit together, and had long given up on explaining these things to those older than him. Adults just looked at him with strange expressions when he spoke his insights, like they didn’t believe him. Or were frightened of him. Or both.
“If you’re done fondling her breasts, you can grab my pack and stop this damn tent from flapping. ”
Rob grabbed Conner’s pack. No point telling him he wasn’t fondling her breasts. It would just sound like he had been. Silence would sound the same way, too. Didn’t matter either way, so he saved his breath. He carried Conner’s pack and set it on the folded tent opposite where his brother was knotting the lines. The fabric stopped flopping around in that pre-dawn breeze.
“Make a pillow for her. Up here where her head will go. ” His brother sounded annoyed. No, something worse than that. Conner wasn’t being himself. He sounded scared and unsure. Rob didn’t like that.
“We should put her head back here and drag her feet-first,” Rob told his older brother. “To keep the wind and sand out of her face. ”
Conner studied him a moment. That look. “Whatever,” he said. It’s what adults said instead of: You’re right.
The girl was moved onto the sand for a moment. The bedding went onto the tent, and then the girl went back onto the bedding. All their gear was arranged on the flat canvas, which was now like a sarfer with no skids and no sail. Just two sets of lines to shoulder. It was a long way back into town, but neither Rob nor his brother complained as they adjusted their kers, draped the ropes over their shoulders, and leaned into the task.
“What if she dies before we get there?” Rob asked.
“She won’t. ”
“But how do you know?”
“I just do, okay? Now shut up and do your share or we’ll go in circles. ”
Rob pulled. He counted his steps. Whenever he could, he counted anything that could be counted. A few years back, he and Conner’s camping trip had come on a windless night, and when the fire had died down to coals and the stars had burst bright, he had counted five thousand two hundred and fifty-eight stars before he couldn’t be sure if he was counting the same ones over again. Numbers calmed him in a way that words couldn’t. If he thought with words, they went around in circles and crashed into each other and grew more dire and terrifying, just like they were right then as he forgot to count steps and remembered that camping trip and worried they were dragging a dead girl across the sand.
“She made it out of No Man’s Land,” Conner finally said, as if he could sense Rob’s worry. “She’ll make it to town. ”
Rob didn’t argue. He dug his boots into the sand and tried to do as much work as his brother. He could feel a blister forming on the back of his heel. He was tired. They’d only gone to sleep what felt like a few hours ago.
“What’re the chances someone would show up on this night?” Rob asked his brother. “This night of all nights?”
“Not good,” Conner said. “The same as dropping a grain of sand and then finding it again. Those are the chances. ”
Rob thought so too. “She said she had a … a message from Father. ” He grunted between words from the effort of the haul.
“She was delirious. Keep quiet and pull. Let’s head to the right a little and around that next dune. Get in the lee. ”
Rob obeyed. He kept his thoughts to himself. Which meant he couldn’t know if Conner was piecing together all that he was piecing together. Coincidences didn’t make sense, but if they did happen, they could get you thinking really strange thoughts. He knew a boy in Shantytown—a kid in his class—whose roof had caved in twice, both times on his birthday, six years apart. It had buried him in drift both times, but they had dug him out. Now he sleeps under the stars every birthday and won’t listen to sense about it. He also hates the number six. And as much as Rob found this silly, he was pretty sure he’d be the same way if that had happened to him.
And now his brain was whirling with all kinds of new facts. People came out from No Man’s Land. That wasn’t supposed to be a thing. So maybe Old Man Joseph wasn’t so crazy after all. Old Man Joseph claimed to have been to the other end of No Man’s Land and returned, but no one believed him. But maybe. And maybe Father was alive out there somewhere. Maybe he had sent this girl to them. And if so, he had sent her to arrive on the night he and his brother would be there. But there was something else about what she had said—
“Hey, Conner?”
“Jesus, Rob, what the fuck is it?”
“She didn’t say ‘your’ father. She just said Father. ”
“Save it, Rob. I’m thinking. ”
Rob felt the blister on his heel go. Raw flesh began to rub. Sand would get in, and then the real hurting would begin.
“I’m thinking too, you know. ” He bit his lip and tried not to limp, tried to be strong. His brother took a deep breath beside him.
“I know. I’m sorry. What’re you thinking, little brother?”
“I’m thinking the way she said Father, it was like hers and ours are the same one. ”
They reached the lee of a great dune, and the whispering wind fell quiet and the rushing sand was no longer at their ankles but high above their heads. Conner eventually answered.
“I’ve been thinking the same thing,” he finally said.
37 • The Sand-Filled Screams of the Dying
Rose
A pad of paper spelled out the bad news in a single column of numbers. There was more subtraction than addition taking place. Rose would’ve been happy to break even, for every dollar earned to be a dollar spent. But rarely were such balances kept. If there was a zero-sum game, it was played among a host of winners and losers. Businesses like hers
going under—literally, more often than not—while riches piled elsewhere to the heavens. Coin was like sand in this way: it only flowed in one direction. And to compound the misery of those to the west, these two currents of woe ran counter to one another. The poor shipped off their coin to the east and got buckets of sand in return.
It was the damn water prices. The cost per liter had nearly doubled that year, which meant a near doubling in the price of beer. And the Ladies of the Balcony still needed their showers. Not so much for their clients to stand them—clients who could hardly be expected to nose their wares over their own stench—but so the ladies could stand themselves. Rose had put it off longer than she should have. She’d have to jack up the price of a pint and hike the room rates again. There would be bitching and moaning when she announced the both; people would act as though she were gouging for the fun of it. Truth was, the whole place would shut down if they had another month like this.
The din of activity beyond her door, of people spending money, served as temporary comfort. News of Danvar’s discovery had the divers in a mood. Even the Lords seemed interested. They were already scrambling for who might have title based on mineral claims, arguing and spilling beer on ancient maps. Rose had seen this play out before. There would be a frenzy of spending all the spoils one hoped to make. This would be followed by the lean times of those same gamblers asking for loans and handouts. People hardly took a breath between these extremes. It was the stagger home of a drunk who could hit every dune on either side as he lurched a thousand paces in what he might’ve crossed in ten.
But Rose knew a slow rise could lead to just as precipitous a fall. She had married a man who’d decried such fits of gluttonous frenzy. Her husband had made his gradual fortune, had climbed a slope of infamy up that peaceful dune to the heights of the great wall, and had stepped right off just as neatly. All he might have left her was snapped up by villainous thugs who gave themselves title and who thought a bath and a clean robe made them natural born princes. She had been left with nothing but the Honey Hole, which her husband had won in a game of dice.
It had only been a place to stay the night she was tossed out with her children. But then it had been a business to manage, her only source of income. She took care of the girls and tended the bar, grew some vegetables on the roof, whatever it took to keep the water flowing. But each passing week drew the noose tighter and tighter around her neck. She looked for a buyer, but who would buy a place that barely broke even? Everyone else got their pay, she made sure of that. The drunks who swept up in the mornings for a pint made more profit than she. There was nothing left for Rose after the school fees for the kids, after the dive gear Palmer and Vic needed in order to not lose their spots. There was nothing left to help them start a life of their own, help them open a business, rent a stall in the market, anything. Nothing but mounting costs. Piles of coin transmuted into piles of resentment. Resentment that left her bitter toward her husband for bolting in the night, for leaving her a tent and a whorehouse to choose between.
For a long while, she’d only tended to the men at the bar, only slaked that thirst. But there were long hours of thinking how tight the money was, and the joking offers came fast and loose. They were made with a laugh, but there was always the dangle and jangle of coin. “Hey Rose, I give you fifty to go upstairs right now. ” “Hey Rose, one hundred. Just scored big-time down in Low-Pub. ” “Hey Rose. ” “Hey Rose. ” “Hey Rose. ”
There was one night where a hundred and twenty coin was enough. This was the cost. Enough to pierce some membrane within her, some barrier she would’ve sworn could not be crossed; but it had been worn down over months and months of lean times. Worn so thin the right words could make it through.
The offer came from a customer she knew well enough, might have dated if they’d been sitting on the same side of the bar, if they’d been around any other bar, in any other place, at any other time. She would’ve had sex with him for nothing, the way a respectable woman does. Instead, she let him pay. And it wasn’t bad. He cared. Asked her if that felt okay. Did all the work. Didn’t hit her or spank her or ask if he could choke her a little. Pulled out and even cleaned her up with his shirt. She would’ve done it for free. Nearly told him so as he left stacks of coin on her dresser. Fragile, wobbly things, all that coin. Like the tall scrapers to the east.
And then he went back to the bar, and Rose sat and stared at the towers of coin on that dresser her husband had left her, and it was a different woman who walked out that door. She would survive, she realized. But it would be a different her. It would be someone else who did the surviving, who would drag memories of a former self along, a tiny echo of a woman somewhere deep in her skull, a small voice of who she used to be.
When Palmer had come asking for a little help the next day, it had felt different. He was fourteen back then, and Rose thought he could see. She thought he knew. She sure as hell did, and the same ten coin that he asked for and always got suddenly weighed the same as ten thousand. Palmer pocketed it too easily. Like it was the same coin. But it’d been too hard won for that. Not to slide away so easy. Not to just disappear. And here was when the gulf with her children opened. It opened not the day her legs had, but the day her palms did. It was the only way, she told herself. There was no other. She would earn her keep the only way she could. And the cost of dispensing that keep could only grow.
It was inevitable that her children would find out. Men don’t just talk, they brag. They brag about rented love, even. And children hear everything. They are echo chambers. And they take what they learn from their parents off to school more readily than they haul anything of merit home. A father’s boast becomes a way to torment a peer. And so the boys heard about her new line of work from the worst source possible.