“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? You discovered 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 Pueblo written 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.
“I know. But this is a map of the old world. This thing is ancient. And if it’s to scale—” She held three fingers together and placed them between Low-Pub and the dive site where she’d been picking over a cache of bags for months. Flipping the map around, she refolded it to reveal something else. She measured her way north three fingers at a time. There was an even larger squiggle of lines and place-names right where she expected them to be. “Colorado Springs,” she said. She felt a chill, reading these words, realizing it was Springston. Visors were suddenly pulled down over her eyes that allowed her to see through all the sand that choked the old world. She was a god watching from on high. “This is Twin Rock Path,” she said. She showed her brother the dark set of double lines that ran between Low-Pub and Springston. It was the path their great-grandfather had followed in order to discover Low-Pub. Or so legend had it.
“Enter…State…Twenty-five,” Palmer sounded out. “The path has a number.” He tried to sit up to see better.
“There are a thousand dive sites here,” Vic said. She felt dizzy, looking at the map. Dizzy and excited. The danger her brother was in dimmed for a moment. But only a moment.
“The people who want me dead,” Palmer said. “I don’t… I don’t think they were looking for Danvar to scavenge, Vic. I’m not even sure it was Danvar they were after.”