He thought about diving out in the sand with the woman who’d been his wife. How she’d stay up top, breathing in the sift without a ker, and she’d always quiz him when he returned about how deep he’d gone. He’d lie and tell her some number sure to elicit a proud response, but going deep had never been his thing. Let the divers go deep, boy, his daddy would say. They got nothing up top to live for.
Quit daydreaming, old man. He heard the voice almost in the back of his throat, the vibrations moving up from his jawline and entering his brain—without, it seemed, passing through his ears. It was Peary, speaking to him through his communicator. We’re not down here sightseeing. Save the oxygen, Poet. Let’s get down and back up, okay?
The Poet nodded his head, then realized that Peary probably couldn’t make out such a tiny motion. Got it, he said and pushed deeper. The sand didn’t move so easily for him, and he felt awkward as he kicked, the aged muscles never quite responding as he’d hoped; and if the body struggled, then the sand was always worse.
One hundred meters.
He thought of a thousand poems he’d written in his mind, and that helped him move with a little more fluidity. In the distance he could see the red glow of his cases in his visor and he forced his mind to concentrate on them. He reached for them with gloved hands, and that was when he felt something on his ankle. He looked back and saw Peary, who had grabbed him and was now slowing to a stop. The ghostly figure of the young diver, orange with greens shimmering on the edges, pointed with his hand, and the Poet heard the man speak.
There.
He looked in the direction Peary had pointed—mostly up and a little to the south—and he could see two forms moving through the sand. Humans. Divers. The Poet’s heart jumped, and immediately he could feel the chill of the sand and the pressure of depth, things he’d just begun to tune out. The attackers picked up speed, and the Poet’s own hand, almost disembodied but still under his control, reached for his dive knife.
Up top, Reggie saw them first. The tips of sarfer masts and sails moving toward them through the dunes. He shouted at Marisa, who—though she became alert and looked in the direction he pointed—kept the gun trained on the sandal hop.
“Trouble,” Reggie said.
“Stay calm,” Marisa replied. “Maybe they’re going on by. Maybe they won’t see us.”
“I need a gun.”
“Stay calm, Reggie.” Marisa turned in a full three-sixty to see if there were sarfers coming from any other direction. She didn’t see any, but it was hard to tell. “Probably just heading north to look for Danvar. Besides, we’re too close to Low-Pub for pirate work. There’s nothing out here to steal.”
“There’re always things to steal,” Reggie said, “even if it’s just sarfers or lives.”
“Shut up for a minute,” Marisa said. Her thumb flipped up the safety, just in case.
The sarfer sails grew larger, and one of the sand ships crested a dune and headed straight for them. There were three men on the craft, eyes covered with dark goggles, kers tied fast around their faces. Their kers and their red sails marked them as part of the Low-Pub Legion, but Marisa couldn’t imagine what they’d be doing this far south when everyone was out looking for Danvar.
“Uh-oh,” she heard Reggie say, and then she felt a sharp crack across her wrist and she almost dropped the gun. She turned just as Reggie swung at her with all of his might. She ducked—just barely—and the blow glanced off the top of her head. She pulled her gun hand free and brought the weapon up as the sandal hop pounced on her. She squeezed and felt the pistol kick just as Reggie landed on top of her with all of his weight and crushed her into the sand.
The two attacking divers reached Peary at about the same time. One grabbed at his regulator, yanking out his mouthpiece, as the other stabbed at him with a dive knife. The sand whipped around, confused by commands and pressures from competing sources. Peary felt a sharp pain in the upper part of his left shoulder, and instinctively he kicked backward to put some sand between himself and his attackers. Then everything seemed to slow down, as if his life had been switched into slow motion by some unseen hand working up top in the dunes, or perhaps way up in the heavens.
The two orange figures, outlined in green and shimmering from the sand moving around them, jumped toward him again, but just as they did so they were struck from behind by another figure. From Peary’s point of view, the three orange shapes grappled in a confused blend of colors and shapes, and it took him a moment to realize that the old man had attacked the invaders from the rear. In that moment one of the strangers kicked at the Poet, and then used the sand to push him deeper. And then Peary saw something that chilled his blood like nothing he’d ever witnessed. He saw a cube of sand harden and then glow the brightest of yellows, the unmistakable sign of stonesand trapping the Old Poet as if he’d been frozen in a block of ice.
Without any conscious application of his will, Peary seized the moment—that slowed-down, crawling window of time—and let his outrage flow out from him like a windstorm whipping the sand into tiny knives out in the Thousand Dunes. He thrust his fists forward, focusing his wrath in an explosive outpouring toward every wrong and every crime he’d ever heard of or witnessed in his life. The environment obeyed him, and a razor-thin shelf of sand sliced outward from his hands, splitting the ocean of silica like a knife through hardened fat. He watched as the shelf cut through the two brigands without slowing in the slightest, and he could see the orange and then green show through in the place where the two men had been sawn in twain by his rage.
He didn’t pause to gape at what he’d done. He flowed the sand around himself and reached out toward the glowing yellow cube that encased the old Poet. When he reached the impossible block of yellow, his hands struck the stonesand as if punching rock. Solid, impermeable rock. A tomb that had no intention of releasing its hold on the Poet. A glowing grave that, like the whole world of the sand, didn’t care.
Knot 3: Sand Hawk.
Relics
Chapter Sixteen
This is what it feels like to die in the sand, he thought. Like a distant star blinking out to nothing while everyone sleeps so no one notices. Or like a lonely old lizard who never fell prey to a bigger predator but grew old and one day fell asleep and just got covered by the drift, so the surviving didn’t end up meaning much anyway.
The Poet was dying, buried beneath uncountable grains of crystalline nothingness, exiled from the breathing world of the up top. The world of the living. Dying like the lowest species of man—a diver—something he’d never thought would happen to him.
“Only fools and the low kinds end their lives down deep, son,” his daddy would say. “Not even the God of the before cares who dies under the sand.”
Strangely enough, despite his predicament, the Poet’s thoughts were now crystal clear. Maybe clearer than they’d been in a very long time. He could almost make them out—as if they were soldiers in a line, or cards laid out on a table. He picked up a single thought and examined it.