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Conner concentrated on keeping up with Vic, tried not to think of the great wall and the sight of empty air where it had once loomed. He could taste the fear in his mouth at the sight of such permanence ended. Don’t think about it. Follow Vic—who for some reason wasn’t diving beneath the dunes to rescue others like he thought she might. She raced instead through structures that became more intact the farther west and north they went. Conner was out of breath, his heart pounding. He chased her around a home, was fighting for the voice to call out to her, when he spotted the sarfer sitting out on the open sand.
The mainsail was still up, the fabric luffing, boom swaying. A rebel sarfer with a red canvas. Some part of Conner knew that his sister being there when the great wall collapsed was no coincidence. The thuds he had heard before the sand had rolled in—he remembered the sounds like distant bombs. Dozens of them. Vic spent time with the sorts of people who might do this. The thought that she might be involved, might have a hand in the death of thousands, might have come there only to rescue their mom—this was a more personal and direct hurt than the toppling of the wall. It was the scratch that burns rather than the blunt trauma that knocks a man numb.
At the sarfer, Vic rummaged for something in the haul rack. No … not something, someone. Conner drew near and realized it was his brother.
“Palm?” he asked, the confusion piling on now. He rested against the sarfer’s hot hull and caught his breath. His older brother gazed at him from the shade of a makeshift bimini. His face was blistered. His lips swollen. He managed a wan smile. Vic was giving orders to them both. She pressed something into Conner’s hands. He looked down. A pair of visors. A band. She pulled a dive suit from a bag in the passenger seat. Palmer was saying that he was okay to dive, to give him the suit. He tried to get up, but Vic shoved him back down.
“You can barely walk,” she said.
Conner wondered what was wrong with his brother. Palmer’s face had shrunk; his cheeks were sharp; there were the beginnings of a beard on his chin. “I can walk,” Palmer insisted.
Vic took all of two beats to consider something. As rarely as she stood still, it felt like a lifetime. She reached some decision. “Head to the Honey Hole, then,” she said. “Help Mom. Wait for us there. ”
“What about the sarfer?” Palmer asked.
“Leave it be. Just take the water. And be careful. The sand is loose, and there’s debris everywhere. ” She turned to Conner. “What’re you waiting on? Get that suit on and let’s go. ”
Conner fell to the sand and kicked his boots off. Stowed the band away. His shirt was already gone, left behind in the Honey Hole with his sister’s blood on it. He pulled the dive suit on. It was big for him and smelled of another man’s sweat. His sister helped him with the zipper, bitched about the sand in it. She gave Conner instructions as she pulled the dive tanks from their racks and cracked the valves.
“It’s been too long to save anyone buried in solid drift,” she told him. “We’re looking for air down there, okay? Any spot of purple, that’s what you aim for. We’ll start here on the edge of town where chances are best. No point in checking every small building, just the intact ones. Anything with an eastward window you can skip. This regulator jams now and then—you have to take it out and knock it against your tank. Can you handle that?”
Conner nodded. He slipped his arms through the tank’s harness as his sister held the worn cylinder aloft.
“Good. Let’s go. ”
It was another long run back toward the wasteland of broken homes. Soon the dive suit smelled of Conner’s sweat. And then his sister pointed toward the edge of a roof jutting up from the smooth sand, and she dove forward and was swallowed by a dune. Conner pulled the visor down over his eyes, wrangled the flapping regulator at his hip and shoved it into his mouth. He vibrated the air and the sand so that it slid out of his way as he tumbled forward. The desert claimed him as it had claimed so many others. But he could breathe. And he could help those who couldn’t. There was so much to do and not enough buckets.
48 • A Fortunate Few
He had to ignore the math. There were thousands of bodies scattered and buried beneath the sand, and he and Vic had only found dozens alive in pockets of air. Maybe a hundred survivors in total. He ignored the math and concentrated on these few sputtering and alive that they were able to rescue.
After depositing a man he’d found beneath an upturned tub, he dove back into the sand and raced alongside his sister beneath the dunes. He had a sensation of flight, the suit and band she’d given him more powerful than any he’d ever donned before, a rebel suit turned up to dangerous degrees. Every shimmering flash of purple or dark blue where the visor’s sandsight was broken by a pocket of air stood out as a beacon of hope. Conner drifted past bodies and around shattered homes, bashed his way through walls and intact windows, told the terrified he found there to hold their breath as he gathered them up and lifted them toward the light.
He broke into one house that had remained intact and found a family of four. A shriek as he approached, the red dive light around his neck aglow, drift pouring in through the hole he’d made. “Hold your breath,” he told them, not sure if he could lift four people at once. Two was a strain. But the sand was pouring into their home. A young girl screamed and clutched her mother. Vic had disappeared into another building. Conner needed his sister. The sand wasn’t going to give them time.
He held the regulator out to the young girl. “Can you breathe through this?” The girl’s mother told her to bite down on it and not to breathe through her nose, to stay close to the diver.
Conner nodded toward the window he had smashed. The family crawled across the rising sand with him, the girl tethered to Conner by the air hose. As the sand sought its level, Conner held out his arms and took a boy Rob’s age in one, the young girl in the other. The parents encircled them all in an embrace. One last look at their faces in the pale red light, deep breaths all around, cheeks puffing, eyes wide with fear, the sand tumbling in, and Conner flowed them toward the window. He strained, the pulse in his temples knocking against his skull like a hammer, a feeling of being in thick and heavy sand, the danger of sinking, but a thought of Vic lifting an entire building, and something surged in him, an anger at the world, and though Conner was too far gone in concentration to even know that they were moving, he glimpsed the purple sky overhead, watched it loom closer, and then felt the wind and the pepper of sand on his face, heard the gasps and gratitude of the family as they held one another, covered there in sand.
There was no time to tell them they were welcome. Just a regulator passed back to him, sand and spit of the saved on the mouthpiece. Conner bit down grimly on this before returning to the depths, a boy who had been told he couldn’t be a diver, becoming one now in the most terrible of ways.
••••
“Where are all the others?” he asked his sister, hours later. They shared a canteen atop the sand. The sun was going down, and both their tanks had long run dry, had been shucked off and set aside. They had gone as long as they could with visors and mere lungfuls, but the adrenaline had worn off, and the rescued had become more infrequent, and their exhausted bodies needed a guilty rest.
“What others?” Vic asked. She wiped her mouth and passed him the canteen.
“The other divers. I saw one or two down there looking for people to save. Woulda thought there’d be hundreds helping by now. ”
He took a grateful swig while Vic gazed toward the west to keep the sand out of her eyes. “I saw those divers down there,” she said. “But I don’t think they were after people. ”
“You think they were scavenging?” Conner didn’t want to believe this. He wiped his mouth with his ker.
“Looting,” she said, stressing the word like there was some great difference. “The rest of the divers are out hunting for a different buried city,” she added.
“Danvar. ?
??
Vic nodded. “The people who did this, who did that—” She pointed to where the wall once stood. “They’re the same ones who found Danvar. Palmer was with them. ” She must’ve seen the confused and horrified look on Conner’s face. “Not with them in that sense. He wasn’t a part of the bombing. They hired him for a dive. Palmer was the one who found Danvar. ”
Conner didn’t know what to say. He remembered how his brother had looked in the sarfer, like a body fresh from a grave. “Is he okay?”
“He was down there for a week. If he lives, it’ll be a miracle. But he’s got his father’s blood, so who knows. ”
Conner couldn’t believe how lackadaisical his sister could be about their brother’s life. But then—all the death he’d seen that day already had him inured to the sight of the buried. “Why would anyone do this?” he asked, though he knew the question was pointless, knew everyone who witnessed the aftermath of a bomb asked the same question and never got a response. Churches were overfull with these unanswered questions.
Vic shrugged. She pulled off her visor and checked something inside the band. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the people who did this were the same ones who spread the word about Danvar. Just to clear out those who might be here to help. ”
“The divers,” Conner said. He grabbed his boot and tried to work a kink out of his calf muscle. “So what now?”
“One more run down by the scrapers. There are a few pockets we missed. Then I’ll get you back to the Honey Hole and check on Palm before I head to Low-Pub. ”
“Low-Pub?” Conner glanced around at the people staggering across the sand, pulling what they could from the shallows, tending to the exhausted and the wounded. “Aren’t we needed here? What’s in Low-Pub?”
“The people who did this,” Vic said. She put her visor back on. “Palm said they were going to hit Springston first. He overheard them, knew this was going to happen, just didn’t know it would be this … bad. We came here as quickly as we could for some food and to warn someone. But we were too late. ”
“You saved us,” Conner said.
Vic’s cheeks tightened as she clenched and unclenched her jaw. She said nothing. Just pulled her ker up over her nose and mouth.
“The people who did this are shacked up in Low-Pub?” he asked. “If you go after them, I want to come with you. ”
He thought she would argue. But Vic just nodded. “Yeah. I’ll probably need you. And they aren’t shacked up in Low-Pub. I think they’re gonna strike there next. And that it might be worse than this. ”
Conner surveyed the scene around him once more, the wind and sand blowing unfettered where it hadn’t blown for generations. He couldn’t imagine that anything could be worse than this.
49 • Half-Sisters
Vic
They arrived back at the Honey Hole to find a broken building where broken people were gathering—and Vic wondered if the place had changed at all. The battered brothel was the tallest structure left standing across all of Springston. What had once sat squat among its peers now towered. And as it sat on the new eastward border of civilization, it was also the new wall. A few tents had already been erected in its lee. Shantytown, spread out to the west, was all that remained whole and intact.
As Vic approached the building, she felt as though she could still see all the bodies beneath her feet, that her sandsight had become permanent. The dead were spots in her vision like you get from staring at the sun too long. They were motes of sand swimming in her eye.
She and Conner dropped their tanks inside the door. The building was still lined with drift. Dunes of it stood in the corners. An even coat covered the floor. Vic had flowed the sand like water as she’d lifted the place, but not all of it had gotten out. It had puddled in places and congealed. Dozens of people were scattered across those piles of drift. Lanterns and candles filled the space in glow and shadow. These small flames beat back the darkness as the sun set outside, and Vic saw people pouring caps of water, ladling beer from barrels. Those few who had survived would flock here. It was the most unlikely of sanctuaries.
She saw her youngest brother Rob tending to a woman laid out on the sand. Her mother was moving from person to person with canteens. There was the smell of alcohol, and Vic saw someone cleaning a wound with a bottle from the bar, tipping it into a dishrag before gingerly dabbing at injured flesh. There were people there that she had pulled out of the sand. Some Conner had as well. They had both told people to seek out the Honey Hole. There were so many and yet not nearly enough.
Her mother Rose was directing the chaos. Several of her girls were still in their balcony getups, but now they moved through the bar tending to the sobbing, the wounded, the thirsty. “There’s Palmer,” Conner said, gesturing toward the stairs. Vic saw her brother hammering nails back into place, wiping the sweat from his forehead between blows. She hung her visor on the top of her dive tank and hurried over to him.
“What’re you doing?” she asked, snatching the hammer away.
Her brother opened his mouth to complain, but then seemed to wobble. Vic steadied him. Conner was there as well. They guided him to a barstool while Palmer croaked about all that needed doing. “The stairs are gonna collapse,” he said.
“You’re gonna collapse,” Vic told him. “Get him some water. ” And Conner hurried around the bar. Vic weighed the hammer in her hand. She could barely stand herself, was past the point of exhaustion, but she moved back to the stairs and started driving in the loose heads. Swinging back for another strike, a hand snatched her wrist.