Reggie closed his eyes and spoke only with much effort. “I’m dying. We all know it.” He opened his eyes and looked at the old man. “I’m dying and you’re old.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” the old man said.
“We all know that the only thing slowing us down is that we have two too many people on these sarfers, and too much weight. So I say that you and I,” he said, pointing at the Poet, “stay behind.”
“Stay behind?”
“We’ll take our coin and stay behind. That’ll lighten the load and give Peary and Marisa the best shot at getting away.”
“No,” Peary and Marisa said in unison.
“Hear me out,” Reggie said. His voice grew stronger. Not from any improvement in his health, but from the strength of his desire to do the right thing before it was too late. “We can bury our coin. That way if either of us lives, we can come back and get it. After we take the crew to Danvar.” He pointed his finger at the old man. “You know where to find it, and maybe they’ll accept that. Maybe they won’t keep chasing Peary and Marisa.”
“No,” Peary said. He was shaking his head and pounding the sand with his fist. “No way will I let you do this.”
“I’m not going to do it anyway,” the old man said, “so it is a moot point. If we both don’t do it, then the plan will fail.”
“Don’t be so selfish,” Reggie said.
“Easy for you to say, sandal hop,” the Poet said. “You’re going to die either way. But I’m not dying!”
“Maybe they let you go,” Reggie said. “Maybe they see you as just an old man who can’t hurt them, so they let you go after you take them to Danvar.”
The Poet shook his head. “That’ll never happen and you know it.” He looked up at Peary. “And I’ll never, ever, take those people to Danvar.”
Reggie looked at the Poet, imploring him. “It’s the right thing to do.”
“Don’t look at him,” Peary said. His anger was boiling over and his voice trembled as he spoke. “We’re not leaving anyone behind, do you hear me?”
“It’ll work,” Reggie said quietly. The strain turned out to be too much for him, and he closed his eyes and lay back on the sand. Peary and the old man carried him back to the sarfer and placed him back on the netting in the haul rack. They covered him to keep him warm, then the old man pushed Peary back toward Marisa. “I’ll take care of him,” the Poet said. “You go comfort your lady.”
Peary walked back to where Marisa was now standing and put his arms around her. She shivered a little, more from the situation than the chill, but he held her closer just the same.
“We can’t let them do this,” she said to Peary.
Peary nodded. “We won’t.”
Reggie was dead by morning. Peary had known the sandal hop was going to die, but he’d figured the man had a few days of excruciating pain and discomfort to suffer before he’d finally enter the grace of death. None of them, it seemed, had anticipated the reality of having to unstrap the sandal hop from the sarfer and decide what to do with his body.
The valleys were still in shadow, but the pink-orange rays of morning were visible up on the very tops of the dunes, and the cool night was already giving way to the warmth of the day. In the distance, out to the west, the mountaintops beckoned like sirens sent to torture the souls of men, and up above—high up above—a sand hawk circled, his shriek echoing through the morning air.
“Let’s just bury him deep,” the Poet said. “That’s probably what he would have wanted anyway.”
Peary looked down at Reggie’s body and didn’t look up. His words came out in a whisper, but the other two could hear. “You don’t have any idea what he would have wanted. None of us do.”
“We could load up and be gone in minutes,” the Poet said. “With the lighter weight, maybe one of us could actually get away.”
“And I suppose that ‘one of us’ would be you, Poet?”
The Poet looked down and shrugged, “No… I… I wasn’t…”
There was a long period of silence, then Marisa spoke.
“Something tells me these last few days together might have been some of the best times of his life,” she said.
Again, for a moment, there were no words. A bitter silence permeated the air, only to be broken once again by the screech of the sand hawk.
“So what do we do now?” Marisa asked.
“I don’t know,” Peary said.
The old Poet looked out and pointed to the west. “We can still run. Maybe something happens. Maybe they miss the turn, or lose a sarfer. Maybe they don’t catch us.”
Peary glanced at the Poet, then his eyes scanned over until he was looking at Marisa. “Yes, we’ll run. We’ll load everything onto my sarfer and I’ll carry the old man.” He took Marisa’s hand in his own. “You go first. Get out of here now. Just as soon as we’ve unloaded all the weight from your sarfer. We’ll be right behind you, Marisa, but don’t stop for anything. Ride on ’til you outrace the sand itself.”
“No,” Marisa said coldly.
“Marisa!”
“No.” She looked up at him and shrugged. “I won’t do it.”
The silence fell again like a curtain, moments passing like the drift. Until, without words, the Poet stood and began suiting up. When he was ready, he pushed Reggie’s body down deep into the sand and disappeared entirely with the sandal hop. Peary didn’t know how deep the old man took Reggie, because the Poet was down awhile, but when the old man surfaced again he pulled himself onto the sand and sat with his arms hugging his knees. There were tears in his eyes and a deep sadness on his face. Deeper than usual.
“So it’s suicide, then?” the Poet asked. “Or if not suicide per se, then a suicidal plan to outwit them and escape, which amounts to the same thing."
Neither Peary nor Marisa answered him. The eyes of all three met and darted back and forth for a moment.
“Well, if it’s to be suicide, then I say we make a plan,” the Poet said.
“They’ll set up camp as soon as they’ve caught up with us,” the Poet said. “I’ve been in enough pirate camps to know how they’ll orient the tents.”
“How does that help us?” Marisa asked.
Peary pointed down into the very bottom of the valley. “We can bury some dive gear. Not deep. Just deep enough so that we can find it in the dark and dig it out with our hands.”
“I know where they’ll put their command center,” the Poet added, pointing. “The bosses will be using that tent after dark, but it also becomes a gathering place—like a party center at night. There’ll be a supply tent, right over there, with boxes of ammunition and explosives, tools, food supplies.”
“I thought you said their supplies were way behind them… being brought up by tri-hulls?” Marisa asked.
“Could be,” the Poet said. “But the stuff will be here soon enough one way or another. And they’ll want to rest after chasing us for so long, so they’ll camp here a few days at least. Could be two. Probably three.”
Marisa nodded. “So we get a bomb and blow them all up?”
The Poet nodded. “They’ll keep us alive, since they don’t yet know who knows what about the location of Danvar. They’ll threaten us of course, but they won’t kill anyone until they know everything they need to know about the location of the lost city.”
“They’ll torture us and probably rape Marisa,” Peary said. He didn’t look at her when he said it, but he could feel her eyes on him anyway. “And I’m not going to let that happen.”
The Poet nodded. “They will, but not at first. They’ll threaten, but they’ll play nice for a day or two. First and foremost, they want the information, and they won’t put that objective at risk. But their patience will not last forever. I’ve been in these camps before. I know how they think.”