40 • Ticking Bombs
Vic emerged from the moist and heavy sand and took great gulps of glorious air. She rested as long as she dared, the sun beating down on her, before joining her brother in the shade of the sarfer’s hull. Palmer had been watching her with obvious relief, a grimace-like smile on his face. But as she handed him her canteen, which sloshed now with spring water, Palmer seemed to catch sight of his blurry reflection in the shiny metal. His pained smile melted into a pained frown. He reached up to touch his cheek.
“I don’t look so good,” he whispered. There were tears in his eyes as Vic took the canteen back from him and worked the cap off. Palmer met her gaze. He reached to his swollen lips. “How do I look?”
“You look like someone who should be dead but isn’t. It’s a good look.”
“I feel like a blister that’s about to pop.”
“Yeah, I was going to say that.”
They shared something like laughter, and Vic handed him the open canteen. Palmer took a sip, his cheeks billowing and contracting as he swished the water around. He labored to swallow. “You were gone so long…”
“Sorry. Not much of a spring here. Had to go down quite a ways to fill the canteens. There’s grit in there, so don’t tip it too much—”
“It’s okay. I could eat a dune.” Palmer’s hands shook as he lifted the canteen to his lips again.
Vic helped him steady the vessel. While he worked the water down, she took a small sip from Marco’s canteen, her lips pressed where her lover’s once had. “We’ll get you some food in town,” she said, trying to think on other things. “But we should probably stay here the night.”
Her brother looked past her toward the horizon. “Are we safe? No one followed us here?”
Vic smoothed the hair off his forehead. She remembered Palmer when he was much younger. He seemed much younger right then. Her brother was terrified. “What happened?” she asked. She had yet to ask him about the dive or the discovery, about the people looking for him in Springston. She had been too worried about losing him, too concerned about finding water and food and nursing him back to health.
Her brother took another swig from the canteen, his blistered hands shaking. He dabbed gently at his cracked lips with the sleeve of his dive suit. Winced. Stared up at the bands of sand swirling on the wind.
“They were never going to let us go,” he said. “We were there to find Danvar and then to die.”
“But you did find it.”
Palmer nodded. “Five hundred meters down.”
“No,” Vic said. She situated herself against the hull of the sarfer, blocking the wind for Palmer. “You didn’t go that deep.”
“They’d made a pit and a hole, had the first two hundred clear for us. I don’t know how. Hundreds of dive suits wired up together. It was amazing. And the scrapers down there, Vic. You should see them. Hundreds of meters tall. We hit the tops of the largest of them at five hundred. Was another five hundred or so to the street.”
Palmer must’ve seen the look of disbelief on her face. “They’d dug a pit,” he said. “Did I mention that? But we were down three hundred true. Maybe close to three-fifty.”
“You went down three hundred meters,” Vic said. “Are you out of your fucking mind?”
“You can but I can’t?”
She didn’t have an answer for that. Not without sounding like their mother. “Was it untouched?”
Something flashed across her brother’s face. “Not quite,” he said. “Two other divers had gone down before us, but they didn’t make it back.”
“So you were the first to get down and back up? Youdiscovered Danvar.” Vic heard the awe and disbelief in her own voice.
Palmer looked away. “Hap made it back before me. And Hap saw it first. He’s the one.”
“But you said Hap was dead—”
Her brother reached up and patted his forehead as if looking for something. “My visor,” he said. “They got both our visors.” He seemed to deflate even further with this, seemed to sink down within that too-big dive suit, like the last juice of life had been squeezed from him.
“Do you think you could find Danvar again?” Vic asked.
Palmer hesitated. “I don’t know. Maybe. If we found their camp, or the remnants of their fire, then maybe. But without the hole they made, it’d be too deep to reach those buildings again.”
“I could get down there,” she told him.
Her brother searched her face, almost as if seeing if she was kidding.
“Do you know how they found it?” she asked. “How did they know to dig there?”
Conner nodded up toward the sky. “The stars,” he said. “Colorado’s belt. They had a map that showed Low-Pub and Springston and another town in a line, just like the constellation. The third star was Danvar. They knew where it was.”
“A map…”
Her brother flinched. A jolt of life and energy. He patted excitedly at his stomach, fumbled for the zipper on his pouch, and out spilled coin after coin—
“Shit,” Vic said, plucking one out of the sand. It was a copper. Untarnished. Beautiful. Thirty or more pieces spilled out and were quickly covered by the rush. [12]Her brother seemed uninterested in these as she gathered them up. He pulled out a folded piece of paper.
“A map,” he said. The paper trembled as he struggled to get it unfolded. Vic helped. She took over. It was a large sheet. It popped in the wind, sand collecting in the folds with a hiss and sliding down into her lap. Vic had seen corners and scraps of maps like this, paper rotted by the sand, by time, by moisture, by being passed from hand to hand. But this was whole and untouched and a beauty to behold.
“You got their map,” Vic said. “Fuck, Palm, you got their map.”
“No. I found it in the scraper. It was with the coin.”
Vic bent over to protect the paper from the wind. She folded the map in half and then in half again, had to wrestle with the creases, was worried she or the wind might rip it. There were lines and place-names and numbers everywhere. Every scrap of a map she’d ever seen or heard about could fit together and not equal even a fraction of this massive, undisturbed sheet.
“Do you know what this means?” Vic studied the square she’d left exposed after her folds. There was a bright yellow collection of squiggles with the word Pueblowritten above. But it was a series of rectangles that had caught her eye and had drawn her attention to this part of the map. It was the crooked letter Y the rectangles made at one point, the other part like the letter H. There was a curved structure that stood along the side of them, which she knew had once been covered with a tent but now was full of sand.
“Puh…Eh…Blow. Enter…National. Air…Port.” She sounded it out, stumbling over the words, reading them phonetically. She traced her finger from the collection of long rectangles that she had seen in her own visor, that she knew as cracked concrete slabs beneath the sand, to where she knew the ruins of Low-Pub lay. It was the same place. No doubting it.
“What is that?” Palmer asked. His eyes were wide. “Can you read it?”
“I know this place. I’ve been here. This is Old Low-Pub, the buried ruins just west of town. Fuck, Palm, this is a gold mine.”
“Old Low-Pub is picked over to hell and back,” Palmer reminded her.