25 • The Risk of Believing
Vic found Marco back at the marina, loading his tanks into the haul rack. His was the last sarfer in sight. There were sails and masts out across the dunes, but all were heading away. Everyone was looking for Danvar. Vic wondered how to explain to Marco that they needed to use his sarfer to look for her brother instead.
“You heading out alone?” she asked.
Marco turned from his sarfer and smiled. He moved his goggles up to his forehead. “Thought you needed a nap.”
“Naw. When I need beauty rest, I just blink.” She batted her eyes to demonstrate.
“Prettier by the moment.” He helped her with her gear bag and lashed it down with the tanks. “So I thought we’d head south. One of the rumors floating around is that Danvar is in a line with Springston and Low-Pub. A lot of people are going west where the sand isn’t so deep. I think that’s a mistake.”
“I think we need to go north,” Vic said.
“You would.” Marco studied the wind generator at the aft end of the sarfer. It howled as it spun in the breeze. He checked the charge on the batteries. “If I’d said north, you would’ve told me we needed to go south.”
“No, I think we need to find my brother.”
“Palm? To cut him in on this? Shouldn’t we find the joint first?”
Vic followed Marco to the boom and helped him tug the slip knots loose. “I didn’t get a nap because a couple of assholes barged into my place as soon as I got there. Paulie and some other guy.”
“Paulie? Is he back in town?”
“Yeah. Looking for Palm.”
Marco shook his head. “You gotta tell your brother to stay away from those guys.”
“I have.”
Marco lowered his goggles and unwrapped the dock lines from the hitching post. The sarfer rocked in the breeze, felt eager to get moving. The wind generator whirred. He lowered the rudder against the sand and tested the tiller. “How about we shoot south just to see if anyone’s found something, and then we go look for your brother?” He nodded toward the mast. “If you raise the main, I’ll pull us out of here.”
Vic stepped back toward the cockpit instead. She raised her hand and steadied the boom as it moved in a gust of wind. “I don’t want to find Palmer to take him diving with us,” she said.
“Good. Let’s get going.”
“We need to find Palmer because…” She wasn’t sure how to say this. “Goddamnit, Marco, I think he might be the one who found Danvar.”
26 • A Long Way Up
Palmer slid easily through the loose bank of drift inside the building, but the hard pack he found outside was a shock. As he pushed his way back into the world, the earth he encountered there pushed back at him. He didn’t quite get a full breath of air before the strain around his chest and neck made another gulp impossible. He could’ve turned and forced his way back into the building to escape the crush, but a slower death beckoned there. And he might never have gotten the courage to go again.
His mortality was suddenly everywhere at once. Never before had it registered with him that this was the moment. Now. Right now. Here was where he would die and where his bones would lie, never to see the stars again.
With half a lungful, he turned skyward in desperation. He only knew which way was up by leaving the tall building behind. Fighting against the squeeze, fighting against all that pressure, he struggled to flow the sand and at the same time to breathe. But still he could not pry the hands of those deep dunes from around his neck. He had a tank of air strapped to his back, but he couldn’t draw on the regulator, couldn’t force his chest to expand, needed to go up in order to win a breath.
Palmer kicked and flowed the miserable sand. He should be around three hundred meters. There was no depth reading in his visor. Go by feel. Move fifty meters. That should be enough to get a breath. Battery in his beacon must be dead. Didn’t matter—just kick. The depth would show when it sensed the surface. Should’ve been able to breathe but couldn’t. Too weak. Too exhausted. Too hungry and thirsty and terrified.
The sun does this every day, he heard his sister say. Palmer felt consciousness slip through his fingers. He was back on a dune with Vic, learning to dive in the loosest of sand, afraid he wouldn’t have the knack, that he wouldn’t have the special talent that made diving possible, was afraid all of his dad’s skill had gone to his sister.
Look at the sun, she told him. The sun was just coming up. He’d been in her too-big dive suit for hours and hadn’t been able to so much as slide a hand into a dune. He was growing frustrated. He didn’t want to hear another lecture from his older sister.
“Every day,” Vic told him. “Every day, the sun rises out of the sand without effort. It glides. It burns. It melts all in its path, and then it shows us how it’s done in the evening as it bores straight down through the jagged peaks. Through solid rock, Palm. And all you’ve gotta to do is move the sand.”
The sun. His father was calling. His father, who told him he would be a great diver one day. Sitting on his lap, Palmer’s earliest memory, back when his father had been a great man and a ruler, telling his firstborn son that he would be the greatest of divers one day. Nearby, Vic listened, ten years old, sitting in the same room and unmentioned. Unmentioned.
No shadows cast, not from this son. No, this son lived in shadows. Lived in the dark and cool sand. Watched his sister dive and rise up again, basking, radiating glory, a rebel and a pirate and a scrounger and a great diver. But Palmer… who saw Danvar when it was a legend… who spilled the life of a man with his dive knife… who would die with a tank of air on his back and a quarter charge in his suit… his white bones at three hundred meters.
Three hundred meters. The depth reading flashed in Palmer’s awareness like the appearance of a mother’s face in the midst of a burning fever. Like a knock at a door in the middle of a nightmare. A small part of his brain yelled at the rest of him, saying hey, you might want to see this.
But he’d been going up. Should be less than three hundred meters. His lungs were straining. And then he remembered the bowl they’d dug, the deep shaft in the sand they’d made, the extra two hundred meters. Fuck, he’d only gotten started. No way, no way, no way.
Palmer stopped moving. He worried less about the flow and more about breathing. The sand held him, but he was able to draw air through the regulator. A breath. A sip. Life. That surreal feeling taking him right back to the day Vic had taught him how to dive, had told him to breathe while his head was under the sand, his body telling him this was impossible, his brain saying not to do it, his sister yelling at him, her voice distant and muffled, to fucking breathe.
And breathing.
Palmer managed a gulp. He peered down at the now-faint image of the sandscraper below. Up was the other way. Away from Danvar. He kicked; he grunted with effort, the sounds of his screams trapped in his own head, his own throat. So far to go. Where was he? There were no transponders, no beacons, but his visor was getting his depth now, so the surface was up there somewhere. No beacon to show him the way. And the shaft they’d descended, that Brock’s men had made, that bright yellow needle deep in the earth, was missing. That’s why so deep.