“No guns,” someone said.
“She’s clean,” said another.
Conner blinked and looked around. He found himself among a gathering of legs and boots, those men at the center of the square. His sister was lying on the ground ahead of him, her visor gone as well. A man was pointing a gun up in the air. Conner tried to tell if his sister had been shot. He thought maybe she’d been punched or had cried out in alarm. An older man with a beard approached her. He had a crazy patchwork dive suit on—strips of varying cloth sewn together, wires trailing up along the outside in tangles and coils. He jangled as he walked.
“What the hell’re you doin’ here?” the man asked. When Vic tried to get up, he made a fist. She sank a foot down into the sand and cried out as the ground pinched her. “Trying to sneak up on me?” It was a question soaked in disbelief more than anger.
Vic grimaced, but stopped fighting the sand. “Don’t do this, Yegery. You don’t have to do this.”
Behind the man, Conner saw a solid column of sand sticking up from the desert floor. A smooth metal sphere stood atop this, gleaming in the high sun. Vic was looking at it too.
“Oh, but I do.” Yegery knelt down beside her. The man by Conner kept a hand on his shoulder. There was a gun in his hand. Conner knew sorta how to use one if he could wrestle it away. He was pretty sure.
“You see,” Yegery said, “we’ve been fed a lie. We’ve been told to feast on the sand and be happy. But there’s a bigger and better world out there, and I’ve been promised a piece of it. All it takes is learning to let go of this—” He waved his hands around at the market, then stood up. “We’ve been digging for something better all this time. I’ve spent my entire life digging. Your father spent his life digging. And then he wised up. He knew where to look.”
“I have a note from him,” Vic said. “You wanna read it? He says it’s hell over there!”
“Ah, that’s because he’s on the wrong side.”
Several of the men laughed. Conner pulled his feet up underneath him and was told not to fucking move. “Sit on your hands,” the man standing over him said.
Gladly, Conner thought. He tucked his hands and boots beneath him. His sister strained against the clutches of the stonesand.
“What is that thing?” she asked, staring at the strange column.
“This is an atomic bomb.” Yegery walked over to it. “Don’t ask me how it works. All I know is how to work it. Easy as making marbles,” he said. “Easy as pinching it down.” He stared at the column, and the sand rose up and surrounded the sphere.
Conner could feel the hum in the sand beneath him. He wiggled his foot half out of his boot and toggled the power switch Rob had wired up. He got his hand around the band. Worked it out slowly. The man with the gun was watching Yegery as the divemaster continued to talk.
“Now, if you’ll excuse me, the rest of us are going to strap on some tanks and get down where it’s safe. You and your friend here can see how far you can run before this goes off, but I should warn you, if this does what I’ve been told it can do, you won’t get far enough. And I really do hate that for you, Vic. I like you. But this is bigger than us.” Yegery looked at the men. “Get your tanks on. And bring their bands with us.”
“Down to two hundred?” one of the men asked, slinging a tank of air over his back.
“Two hundred,” Yegery said. They were right back to business, not worried about Vic, who was still pinned by the stonesand, and not worried about Conner, who didn’t have his band or visor, didn’t have a gun.
But he had his father’s boots. He had spent enough time in them to be comfortable there, to know what they could do, what he could do. He held the band Rob had made in his hand, his palm sweaty, and he remembered what he’d told his brother beneath their house, about not shorting the wires. He loosened his grip on the strip of fabric and wire. There wasn’t much time. The men were testing their regulators with sporadic hisses, getting the sand out of the mouthpieces, cranking valves and cinching up their harnesses. They would disappear beneath the sand, and Conner and Vic would have to run as fast and as far as they could. But only if they released his sister. Only if he could free her with his boots. Or he could take her straight down while the bomb went off. But then what? Would they let them go free after? The man in charge said this wasn’t about him and his sister. They didn’t seem too angry. But they were about to blow up the square. Conner didn’t know what to do as he prepared to throw the band on and act. He had to do something. Had to stop them.
“Where’s Brock?” Vic asked the old divemaster. “Why can’t he do his own dirty work?”
She was stalling. But she was also getting their attention, which Conner didn’t want. Yegery pulled his regulator out of his mouth and walked back to her. “If he could do this himself, why would he need me? You’re a diver. You know not everyone can do what we do. It’s a good thing he needs me, or I’d be in your situation right now.”
“What about when he doesn’t need you anymore?”
Yegery hesitated. Eventually, he smiled. “He’ll always need me. I’m taking the secrets of diving to his people. For all the magic they possess over there, it turns out some of our tricks are known only to us. Don’t you worry about me.”
“I think he’ll betray you,” Vic said.
“We’ll see,” Yegery told her. He stared down at Vic, made a gesture, and she slowly rose to the surface. She flexed her arms, was free of the stonesand. “You might want to run,” he told her. He reached up for his visor, and Conner knew the time was now. He kept the band close to his body and slid his hands into his lap, then up to his chest. He tried to pre-visualize what he wanted the sand to do, just like his sister had taught him to prep the dunes before diving into them.
“You sure about leaving them up here?” one of the guys asked. “I feel like we should shoot them. Just to make sure.”
Vic turned and glanced at Conner. He had both hands around the band, was making sure he had it lined up right. The wires trailing out from the boot were visible, but there was nothing he could do about that.
“No. Don’t shoot them,” Yegery said. “It’s not my fault they came here. Their death is on their hands, not mine.” He looked down at Vic, who was still in a crouch. “Think of it as a favor on behalf of your father. A gift.” He flipped down his visor and smiled.
“I’ve got a gift from our father,” Conner said. The men turned in his direction. He had the band down over his forehead, could feel the sand beneath him, humming with some terrible power. “Here.”
The world erupted into violence. For a moment, Conner thought the bomb had gone off, that Yegery had triggered it with his band, that this was what it felt like to die in a blast, a split second of noise and a jolt of pain and a flash of light. He had told the sand what he wanted, had built up the vision in his mind, pictured it like a coiled spring, ready to unleash. But he had to go and say something as the connection hit. He saw a gun come up, the flash of light and a loud noise, so fucking stupid, a burst of agony in his chest, shot, falling backward into the sand, but the sand wound tight in his head and exploding out in the shape he’d imagined, inspired by that column with the bomb on it.
That column of sand with the sphere inside collapsed. The silver ball rolled across the blood-soaked sand toward Vic. Five other columns had shot up, sharp points of stonesand beneath each of the men, impaling them, one of them screaming and writhing before falling silent, all of them quickly dead.