“And you’re a sand diver,” Rob said, his voice full of awe, as Violet paused to catch her breath. All the nights of hiking and thinking and being alone made her want to say everything all at once.
“The diving was easy,” she said. “The walking was the hard part. It was twelve days of walking. It took Father nine, but he said it would take me twelve, that I would have to count and time it right. It was very important, the day I left. Which day. He drew a picture of the mountains and showed me which was the Pike and that I would keep this just left of my nose and the star to the north directly over my right shoulder, and on the twelfth day I would see smoke and on the twelfth night I would see fire, right past a crack in the ground that he said I could leap over at the narrowest—”
“He knew we’d be camping,” Conner said.
Violet nodded. “He said if I missed the fire I would come to a big wall and a small town, but that if I found the smoke and the fire that I would be home right then. And I was doing good, walking at night and sleeping all day and being careful with my water. Until a wolf came—”
“A wolf?” Rob asked.
“You… you call them cayotes, I think. In camp, they had different names for things, talked a whole other language. I grew up with both, so I forget which goes where. Dad used to say my accent was like theirs. The cayote came for the last of my jerky while I slept on the ninth night. I should’ve just let him have it, but I was scared and so I fought back, and he ripped me good, tore open my pack, and I ran. My last bladder was torn and all the water spilled out, and I ran all day thinking the… cayote would come for me, but it didn’t. I was real tired and thirsty after that, and I had two days more to find the crack in the ground, and my knees were messed up and my stomach hurt real bad, so I went and went all day and night and then on the twelfth day, I was falling asleep while walking and I would wake up on the sand, and the sun would be hot, and I had bad dreams, and my hands and knees were burning, but then I saw the smoke like Father said, and the night came and I saw the fire, and then I had a dream that you were there.”
She looked at Conner. Took deep breaths. Realized she was winded, that she’d been talking and talking. But there was another sip from the jar for her efforts, and when her second mom Rose wiped the hair off her head and tucked it behind her ears, it was with a different look on her face. Her hand stayed on Violet’s shoulder. Everyone else in the room was looking at her with wrinkles of worry, but Violet just rested against the pillows and enjoyed the feel of the sheets and the grumble of her belly around the water. She wasn’t worried. She had made it. Just like Father said she would.
42 • The Letter
Rose left the young girl to rest in a bed too rarely slept in. She made Conner and Rob leave her in peace and pester her with no more questions. Poor Rob had to be dragged away. Both boys had spent the previous day and all night orbiting that bed, waiting for the girl to recover, to come to, to say something. Now they sat downstairs around a table in the slowly emptying bar and slurped greedily at bowls of leftover stew. Rose watched them eat over the balcony rail, her mind in all places at once.
Down the balcony and through a door, Rose could hear a drunk’s labored grunts. Valerie’s room. That such baseness could occur alongside events of staggering significance was like a joke from the gods. Rose fought the urge to bash Valerie’s door down and slap the drunk off her, to yell at them both, to shut it down, all of it down, not just the Honey Hole but the entire exercise of going through the motions, living life, being there among those dunes. If what the girl said was true—that the elsewhere her husband had disappeared into was worse than this place—then the dream of so many for an easy escape was really just another hell beyond their reckoning.
Rose leaned over the rail, wondering what was taking Diana so long. She caught Conner staring up at her. Rob looked up as well. They were just boys. Just boys. But they possessed something like protective ownership of the girl. Conner had even referred to Violet as his sister, after she’d fallen back to sleep. Another sister, this girl who would cause a storm. Yes, her story would lead to chaos once it was out. News of Danvar was nothing. The sands would not sit still for this.
Hard to believe it was only the day before that the boys had arrived with the girl in their arms. Rose had nearly turned them away. She had very nearly refused them when they showed. She did plenty of patching after the occasional brawl, and was the one her girls came to after one of their clients got too rough, but she didn’t want it known that just anyone could be brought in with wounds from elsewhere. Then Conner had explained just how far elsewhere, had said this girl came from No Man’s Land, and that she had a message from their father.
Half of such a sentence as this could fry a woman’s brain. The whole had taken over her limbs. Rose barely remembered carrying the child up the stairs and to her room. She barely remembered cutting the foul clothes from her, getting the sand out of her cuts, sewing her up like a pair of torn stockings. It was as though she’d watched another’s hands apply a salve and pour water between the girl’s lips. Someone else had yelled at her ten o’clock to come back later. No, that was her. She remembered that. And she remembered telling Diana to get rid of the clothes, which were little more than bloody rags with bits of wire in them.
Now she found herself asking Diana to track those same scraps down, to get them out of the trash. Rose wanted to know more. She was torn between letting the girl rest and assailing her with questions. What of this distant city? What of this camp? What would her husband of old do if their roles were reversed? She tried to think like her husband the Lord, not the desperate and crazed man who had sent a girl to warn his people away. Not him, but the younger man who had once brought other Lords to their knees. The man she’d never told her children about. Would this man run and hide? She didn’t think so. And yet, he was asking them to.
And Rose had a terrible thought. What if her husband was still the same man, and he knew in his battle-scarred wisdom that running was the only option? What if he knew that now was the time for laying low, for giving in, for sliding deep beneath the sand? Rose wiped angrily at her cheek, damning him as was her daily ritual.
“I think this is all of it.”
She turned to find Diana beside her, holding tightly to a bundle of scraps tied up in one of the towels from the kitchen. Rose hadn’t even seen her climb the stairs.
“Good, good. Thanks.” Rose took the bundle.
Diana glanced at the door. “Is she… ? Is that girl okay?”
“She’ll be fine.”
“Another attack? Looked like a bomb, maybe, the way her clothes were shredded.”
“No. Something else. Keep an eye on my boys for me. And no appointments for the rest of the day.”
Diana frowned, but Rose didn’t care to explain. She let herself into her room and shut the door.
The girl was still sleeping. She held the edge of her sheet with her bandaged hands and kept it up against her neck, chin tucked down. Here was another miserable life her husband had made. Another life ruined, no doubt, in the name of love.
Rose set the bundle on the small table by the window where there was light. She untied the towel and began sorting through the scraps. Her stomach twisted up in knots at the sight of blood on the girl’s pants and her dive suit. The rubbery material of the dive suit felt strange—not quite like any fabric Rose had ever seen. It was like the girl’s strange accent, with words understandable but the sound not quite right. Everything about the girl was both alien and familiar.