“The sensors were supposed to—not you. We were never supposed to get out this far.”
Moreno half-raises a hand. It flops on the end of her arm like a dead fish.
“Now everything’s gone to shit and I have to—improvise. I’m so sorry, Koa.”
“Mid… easht—pashpor…”
“I’m sorry you chose the wrong side,” he says, and breaks her neck.
By the time her heart stops the pressure in the shack is up to nine. Galik turns, crouching in the cramped compartment, catches passing sight of the text message still accreting on the board—
SOS received
awaiting req approval on dsrv will advise
Nautilus LLC denies any knowledge of S.Earle req
No employees deployed to CCZ
No Alistor LNU listed on sh
—and kneels to undog the deck hatch.
The lights come up as he climbs down: indirect, full-spectrum, illuminating a cozy half-hemisphere where struts and plating are all padded and wrapped in PVC. Interfaces and control panels sleep on curved bulkheads, on the desks that extrude from them. Behind a bulkhead that splits the upper deck, visible through an open hatch, bunks and lockers lurk in shadow. A spiral staircase corkscrews down to the deck below.
He searches the hab and finds it empty. He awakens its controls, checks logs and manifests. He explores remote-piloting options for Cyclopterus, teaches himself how to send the little craft far away on its own recognizance.
He eats from the shack’s well-stocked galley, sleeps in its salon.
Four and a half kilometers overhead the mixing zone churns beneath the surface; the surface churns beneath the sky; immortal Nāmaka churns between. Back on shore the fires burn ever-hotter along the coast. Deserts spread and clathrates bubble; winter heat waves scythe across the Mediterranean; wheat rust and monkey pox fell crops and people with equal indiscriminate abandon. Tuvalu and Kiribati sink beneath the waves. Protesters mourn the loss of the Pizzly Bear and the Bengal Tiger while underfoot, the trillions of small creeping things that hold up the world disappear almost unnoticed. The human race runs ever-faster to the finish line, numbers finally thinning out on the last lap, rioting and revelling and fighting over whatever crumbs are left after three hundred years of deficit spending.
All the while, the Nikkei never stops climbing.
Alistor Galik—formerly Staff Sergeant Jason Knowlton (ret.), USSOCOM—bides his time on the bottom of the ocean, drawing plans and selecting targets. Waiting patiently for the minions of Zero Point to arrive and show him the way back to their masters.
Dune Song
SUYI DAVIES OKUNGBOWA
Suyi Davies Okungbowa (suyidavies.com) is a Nigerian author of fantasy, science fiction, and horror inspired by his West African origins. His debut, the godpunk fantasy novel David Mogo, Godhunter, was hailed as “the subgenre’s platonic deific ideal.” His shorter fiction and essays have appeared in Tor.com, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Strange Horizons, Fireside, PodCastle, The Dark, and in anthologies like A World of Horror and People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction. He lives between Lagos, Nigeria, and Tucson, Arizona, where he teaches writing to undergrads while completing his MFA in Creative Writing.
Do not go out to the dunes, the Chief says to Isiuwa. You’d do well not to awaken the wrath of the whistling gods.
This does not stop Nata from trying to leave again.
Once the New Moon assembly is over, she slinks away to the community market. This early in the morning, the desert haze hangs heavy, and everything moves in stutters, like tortoises in the sand. The sun is out and warm, not hot because Isiuwa isn’t really in a desert; or at least, not like the deserts the Elders speak of when they tell about the world before it was all dunes.
Isiuwa moves like a buzz, like sandflies in formation. The market is a manifestation of this, laid out in wide corridors of bamboo and cloth, a neat crisscross of pathways. Bodies scuttle along, dressed in cloth wrapped to battle every iteration of dust-laden wind. No one pays Nata any heed—no one ever does—as she drags a bag too big for her frame, folds of cloak falling over her arm multiple times so that she has to stop every now and then to wrap them again. Her hair is wild with fraying edges, and her eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep, but Isiuwa does not notice.
First, she goes to the molder. The bulk of what she has available for barter here is household jars and utensils she will no longer need. The man takes everything without a word and pays her in sugarcane, which is just as well because quenching thirst is the number one priority out there. Next, she takes Mam’s big old metal box, the one with which she used to make those contraptions for the village. No one in Isiuwa has tools like these any longer; strange, archaic, from the time before sand. It was the only thing salvageable after Mam’s disappearance. It still contains all her tools for carving and repairing artifacts no longer here. When she places it in front of Isiuwa’s prime fruit merchant, he stares at it for a long time.
“They will catch you,” he says. “Again.”
“Maybe,” Nata says. “Maybe not.”
He nods and gives her brown sugar and dried fruit for it.
She leaves her most valuable barter for last. She hefts her flatwood under her arm and visits the woodworker, the same woman who helped her find the bulk of old tree Mam carved for her into this sleek, flat thing polished with paraffin wax. Wood is so scarce now, unlike in the early days of sand, Mam used to say. This could literally be Nata’s most prized possession.
The woodworker isn’t there, but her apprentices are, and they offer her a good amount of water in an earthen jar. She haggles and gets some bread and roasted termites thrown in before she lets them have it, staring as they discuss butchering it to barter in bits.
She remembers how she cried and cried to Mam that she must, must have a flatwood. One just like those in the books the Elders keep in the archives of artifacts before dunes, which only they, the Chief, and their novitiates are allowed access to (though Mam somehow managed to have that one). She remembers having hopes that one day, even if for just a day, she would go out to the dunes with the flatwood and slide down the upflow like the children did in the pictures in that book. But it’s too late for that. This dream will belong to someone else now.
Nata leaves them without saying goodbye. Goodbye would mean that she is bidding positive farewell to Isiuwa, but no, she really isn’t. She hopes that the minute she steps out of the bamboo fence, the sun will lean down and slap the settlement with fire, for everything they have done to her, to Mam. She hopes that all the dunes will whistle at once, a harmony of dooming dissonance, and the sand will flow and sweep over all of Isiuwa like a great ocean so that no one will ever need to know pain like hers again.
But first, she must get Tasénóguan.
Do not go out to the dunes, the Chief tells Isiuwa. The gods will whistle you to death.
Isiuwa listens to a dune whistle about once every moon-cycle. Each time, the sand advances on Isiuwa, moving with a morose, flutelike song, the only sound to plant tears in their chest that does not come from a living being. A shrill, underlined by wind rushing through a tube. The Chief calls it the whistle of the gods and says it is the sound of an errant person being taken. Every time an errant person dares venture beyond their allowance and ends up taken by the dunes—as they always are—the dunes move toward Isiuwa. The whistle is a warning, a warning that those of the world before it was punished with sand refused to heed. The Chief tells a story of a time before the old world, when it was once punished in the same way, but by the gods of water. It is Isiuwa’s duty to preserve this order and bring forth the next world.