The sand don’t care!
He didn’t know why he thought those words at that moment, but he did think them. He’d heard the phrase bandied about by divers who’d been around awhile and were still alive. Those who’d made it through tough scrapes. It was true. The sand didn’t care. But Marisa did, and that made him move.
He kicked again, pushing surface-ward, but on his second kick he felt his tank go dry—and there was still no red object above him on which he could focus his attention. Nothing to give him hope. In the distance, he could barely make out the faint pulse of his beacon on the surface. Too far away to mean anything if he didn’t find the spare tank. He adjusted his regulator and reached back to fiddle with the knob, checking the line too. Nope. Already his mind was screaming and fear was causing him to sweat despite the cold. He knew he could hold his breath for several minutes more, but his body didn’t listen to his mind, and that craving to exhale came upon him like never before. He dropped one of the cases—an offering, or maybe it was just panic—and pushed harder upward. Still no red in sight, and he felt himself growing lightheaded, and all the while the weight and pushback impressed upon him that the sand didn’t care.
Bleeding Red
Chapter Seven
When the Poet figured he’d gone a quarter mile, bobbing to the surface for breaths after every dune, he stopped and waited just under the sand with his body mostly buried and his head in the lee of a rise. He waited for the sun to go down, and for the moonrise over the wastes to light up the silica like little diamonds or stars in the night.
The bleeding from his head hadn’t fully stopped, but he applied pressure with his hand as best as he could. And when that blue-gray glow was sufficient that he knew he could travel safely in the shadows of the dunes, the Poet surfaced and walked back to the site of the battle. Struggling. Step by step. On top of the sand, but still subject to its whims. He had to know if any of the team was spared; and if no one had lived, then he needed to look for gear or weapons. Anything that might give him a chance at survival.
When he reached the site of the battle, he wasn’t really that surprised by what he found. No survivors there, and the bodies he could find had been stripped by the brigands. There were no tools or canteens left behind, or even a spare ker to stanch the blood seeping from his head. Bad luck. He sat down against a dune and cried for a moment, not knowing what he should do.
This was no way to treat a valuable man. His life was worth more than this. If it was Brock and his men, they should have known better. They’d treated him just like a common diver. And although he had trouble grasping it, it was very likely that they’d succeeded in killing him along with the others—it was just taking a little longer for him to die. No way he could walk the dozens of miles back to Springston, and the wastes had a way of making even faint hope disappear with the sift. Dying like a diver, robbed and bleeding out in the wastes. No, this was no way for a valuable man to go out.
He tried to calculate how many days he could go, and how much battery he had left in his suit, but his calculations went awry as his head began to spin and his consciousness drifted in and out like the sift. He brought his hands to his face and saw the blood was still running down past his temple and matting in his beard. He tried to mouth the word “blood,” but he never got it out before he fell unconscious back onto the dune. For its part, the dune received him with apathy. Just another body in the sand.
A Man’s Breath
Chapter Eight
When the Poet regained consciousness, he found himself in the haul rack of a sarfer. The man who was sailing the thing was talking non-stop and was in mid-story and mid-sentence. It looked to be early morning, and from the angle and direction of the first glows of sunrise, he figured they were heading south. He tried to rise and to speak, but couldn’t. He raised his hands to his head, and found that it had been wrapped thickly in a heavy cloth. The fabric of the cloth was so dense and luxurious that it was altogether something he’d never felt before. He’d only seen such things in the black market, coming from salvage found from the old world.
“…so when I found my spare tank, I’d been holding my breath—I don’t know—maybe four minutes or more. I was blacking out when I saw the red of the spare in my visor…”
The young man kept on telling his story, even though the Poet had obviously missed most of it, and didn’t care about the rest.
“…I broke through the surface about a minute after my spare tank ran out, and I thought I was dead. I’d sucked in so much grit I thought I’d never cough it all out…”
The Poet felt up under the head cloth; it seemed that he was no longer bleeding, that the blood had finally clotted up. The diver had put a thinner cloth directly on the wound, and that cloth was stuck in the dried blood. He didn’t want to peel that off because he was afraid the bleeding would start up again. But the heavier material—the luxurious fabric—he unraveled from his head.
The diver looked down at him and saw him working on his head cloth and smiled. “Try not to do anything stupid. Seeing as how you already got yourself near-enough killed once already on this trip.”
The Poet glared at the diver. “I’ll have you know that I am known as the Poet, and I—”
“I don’t care if you’re one of the Lords himself or maybe one of the gods of Danvar!” the diver spat. “They just call me Peary, but surprise, looks like we both bleed the same. And if you start up bleeding again I don’t know if I’ll be able to get it stopped again.”
“Well, I do thank you for saving my life, but—”
The diver stopped him with a raised hand. “I don’t care what else you have to say, but your thank-you is received and appreciated. Now shut up while I finish my story. You see, the two cases I’d found and pulled up were heavy and full…”
The old Poet stared at Peary, not knowing what to think about the young man. The unraveled cloth was now whipping in the wind as the sarfer cut in an angle down from a very high dune and sped toward a long area of flats. The light was enough now that he could see the mountaintops off to the south and west, and he guessed they must be getting close to Springston—or maybe they were already west of it. He held the cloth up so that he could see it in the light. It was some kind of garment, and it was the brightest orange he’d ever seen. It was a color that didn’t happen in nature. Almost electric, like the orange you’d see in a visor. There was an emblem on the front of the garment, and words that he couldn’t yet make out.
“…and the cases were full up with clothes and trinkets. More stuff from the old world than I’d ever seen in one place! Just one of the larger items would probably bring more coin than I could make in a year or more.”
The Poet interrupted. “Are we going to Springston?”
“No.”
“Why not?” the Poet asked.
“Springston’s gone.”
The Poet looked up at the stranger. He stared for a moment before daring to speak. “Springston is… gone?”
“That’s what they say.”
“That’s what who says?”
Peary jerked his head back, as if to say back there.
The Poet tried to straighten himself in the haul rack, but he was hemmed in by some large, hard cases. “Who says Springston is gone?”