“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.
53 • Father’s Last Rites
They sailed in silence for an hour. They passed other sarfers heading north, crossed tracks that led east to west, saw half a dozen craft out with their masts laid back, dive flags flapping from the rails to warn away others. Conner’s thoughts whirled. He gave his sister as much time as he could, but he had to know. When she returned from a trip to the bow to check the lines for chafing, he finally asked.
“So who was that guy? Someone you knew?”
“A friend,” Vic said, taking the tiller back from him. “He used to run with Marco. Some of the Legion guys left a while back to join up with another outfit. I think a few had a change of heart, maybe said some shit they shouldn’t. Damien was unfortunate enough to hear.” She shook her head. “Bastard could never keep a secret.”
“They… what they did to him.” Conner didn’t really have a question, was just trying to process the level of fucked-up they were dealing with. He couldn’t believe there were people who would kill so many, even those amongst themselves, and all for what? What was there to gain when everything was gone? “What was that you took off him? His last rites?”
Vic nodded. Conner knew about this tradition, but he also knew you weren’t supposed to ask divers what they carried in their bellies. And then he felt like an idiot. He remembered the note his mother had given him to pass along to Vic. He hadn’t seen Vic later that night, had spent that time with Gloralai, so he’d forgotten. This didn’t seem like the appropriate time, but he was scared he would forget again. “I’ve got something for you,” he said, digging into his own pocket. Vic tried to wave him off. She was obviously lost in thought, but Conner took over the tiller and forced the letter into her hand. “Mom gave it to me last night. She said to give it to you. I forgot about it until just now.”
Vic started to put the letter away with the other one. But then she hesitated. While Conner manned the tiller, she opened the letter. She kept it down in her lap and behind her knees so the wind wouldn’t tear it from her grip. Conner adjusted his ker and concentrated on where he was steering.
“Who is this from?” she asked, turning and shouting over the noise of the wind and the shush of the sarfer as it tore across the sand.
“Mom,” he said.
Vic bent forward and read some more, then flipped the letter over, studied the back, studied the front again, seemed to read it a second time. Conner glanced repeatedly from the bow to his sister, watching her head swing across the lines on the page. She turned and looked at Conner for a long time; whatever was spinning in that head of hers was lost behind her goggles.
“Dad wrote this,” she said.
Conner’s hand nearly slipped off the tiller. “What?” Maybe he didn’t hear right.
“What the fuck is this?” Vic asked. “Where did this come from?” She tucked the letter under one leg and eased the main, let out the jib. They lost some speed, and it got easier to hear, easier to talk. She pulled the letter out from underneath her and showed it to Conner. “Dad signed this,” she said. “Is this why you said we should go west? This letter?”
“I didn’t read it,” Conner said. He gave his sister the tiller and took the letter. He read it. It was the note Violet had mentioned, the one that got lost. He turned to his sister. “Violet told us some of this. She’d read some of it when Dad wrote it out. She said she lost the letter. Mom must’ve found it. I had no idea. But yeah, this is what we were trying to tell you. Screw rebuilding, Dad wants us to move on.”
“But Palm says he doesn’t believe this story—”
“Palm is fried. He said this girl talks like someone else. That doesn’t mean anything.”
“This girl who’s our sister.”
“Yes.”
The sarfer sailed on. Vic took in the main a little.
“So what’s she like, this supposed sister of ours?”
Conner laughed. “Headstrong. She sounds a lot older than she looks. Has all of our more annoying traits.”
Vic laughed. “A half-sister as half-crazy as the rest of us? That means Mom’s right about where all that comes from.”
“Heh. I guess. You’d like her. She’s a diver, too. Dad taught her. But she does talk funny—”
Vic stiffened. She turned and stared at Conner, pulled her goggles down around her neck. Her eyes were wild. “But what if Palmer’s right?”
“Vic, I’m telling you—”
“No, what if this girl and Brock are from the same place?”
“I don’t think—” But then Conner realized what she was getting at. That her conclusion was the opposite of Palmer’s. “Oh, fuck,” he said. “Yeah. God, yeah.”