This exit was more like being belched out from the sand’s unhappy maw. He was spat sideways through the small avalanche that had slid inside the building and was ejected into the open air.
Palmer landed with a thud and a crunch, first on his shoulder, then sprawling painfully to his back, his tanks jolting his spine. The swimming purples vanished as his visor was knocked from his eyes. There was sand in his mouth, his regulator half out, his lungs emptied by the impact.
Palmer removed the mouthpiece and coughed and spat until he could breathe again.
Breathe again.
The air was foul and musty. It smelled like dirty laundry and rotting wood. But Palmer sat in the utter and complete dark of eyelids squeezed tight on moonless nights, and he took another cautious sip. There’s air in here, he told Hap, speaking with throat whispers, but of course his friend couldn’t hear him. His visor band had been knocked askew, and anyway he was no longer buried in sand, had no way of projecting his voice.
Shouting wouldn’t do, either. Palmer fumbled for his dive light and flicked it on. A world of the gods unfolded dimly before him. He turned away from the avalanche of sand, which seemed to writhe and creep ever inward as the deep dunes snuck inside to seek solace from their own crushing weight.
The objects in the room were recognizable. Artifacts just like those found beneath Springston and Low-Pub. Chairs, dozens of them, all identical. A table larger than any he had ever seen, big as an apartment. Palmer tugged off his fins and set them aside. He lowered his air tanks to the floor and killed the valve, made sure he saved his oxygen. Powering down his suit and visor, he relished the chance to gather himself, to give his diaphragm a rest from the struggle of breathing against the press of sand, a chance for his ribs to feel whole again.
On a side table, his expert salvaging eyes spotted a brewing machine. The pipes were rusted and the rubber appeared brittle, but it would fetch fifty coin at market. Double that, if his brother Rob could get it working first. The brewer was still plugged into the wall as if someone expected to use it still. The fit and finish of everything in the room felt eerily advanced and ancient at the same time. It was a feeling Palmer got from all the relics and spoils of a dive, but here the feeling overwhelmed, here it hit him on an inconceivable scale—
There was a crash and the hiss of advancing sand behind him. Palmer startled, expecting the drift to crush the rest of the weakened glass and consume him with his visor up on his head and his suit powered down. Instead, there was a thump and a grunt as Hap tumbled into the room.
“Fuck—” Hap groaned, and Palmer hurried to help him up. Sand slid around their feet as it found its equilibrium. It was wet and packed enough that it wasn’t free to flow inside and fill the room. Not immediately, anyway. Palmer had swum through enough smaller buildings in shallower sand and had seen what sand would do if given the time.
“There’s air,” Palmer told Hap. “A bit foul. You can take your visor off.”
Hap stumbled around in his fins a moment as he regained his balance. He was breathing heavily. Wheezing and gasping. Palmer gave him a chance to catch his breath.
Once he got his goggles off, Hap blinked and scanned the room. He rubbed the sand out of the corners of his eyes. His gaze seemed to flit across all the coin stacked here and there in the shapes of ancient things. And then he found his friend’s face, and the two of them beamed at one another.
“Danvar,” Hap said, wheezing. “Can you fucking believe it?”
“Did you see the other buildings?” Palmer asked. He was out of breath as well. “And I spotted the ground another three hundred meters or so further down.”
Hap nodded. “I saw. I couldn’t have gone another meter, though. Fuck, that was tight.” He held his goggles to his face for a moment, checking his readouts most likely, and frowned. Hap shrugged his tanks off.
“Don’t forget to kill your valve,” Palmer said.
“Right.” Hap reached to spin the knob. There was sand stuck to his face and neck where he’d been sweating. Palmer watched his friend shake a veritable dune out of his hair. “What now?” he asked. “Do we poke around? You got dibs on the brewer?”
“Yeah, I already spotted the brewer. I say we check a few doors, catch our breath, and then get the fuck out of here. If we stay longer than two bottles should last, our friends up top might think we only made it as far as the last assholes, and then they’ll close that tunnel on our asses. I don’t think I have enough air to get all the way back to the surface without that shaft.”
“Yeah…” Hap appeared distracted. He popped off his fins, shook the scoop out of them, and dragged his gear away from the drift invading through the busted window. “Good move popping through the glass like that,” he said. “I just saw you disappear, but I couldn’t see inside.”
“Thanks. And this is good, catching our breath. It would’ve been tight getting back up. We can get our strength.”
“Amen. Hey, did you happen to spot the other divers on the way down?”
Palmer shook his head. “No, did you?”
“Naw. I was hoping they’d stand out.”
Palmer agreed. There was almost nothing more valuable to salvage than another diver. It wasn’t just their gear—which could run a pretty coin—it was getting cut in on any bounties they had or wills they’d left. Every diver was afraid to some degree of being buried without a tombstone, and so the bone-bounties, as they were called, made every diver a comrade of the dead.
“Let’s try those doors,” Hap said, pointing at the double set at the far end of the room.
Palmer agreed. He got there first and ran his hands across the smooth wood. “Fuck me, I’d love to get these out of here.”
“You get those out of here and you could fuck someone prettier than me.”
Palmer laughed. He gripped the handle, and the metal knob turned, but the door was stuck. The two of them tugged, grunting. Hap braced his foot on the other door, and when it finally gave way, the both of them went tumbling back into the table and chairs.
Hap laughed, catching his breath. The door creaked on its hinges. And there was some other sound, a popping like a dripping faucet, like a great beam settling under some weight. Palmer watched the ceiling closely. It sounded like the scraper was adjusting itself, like its belly was grumbling around these new morsels in its gut.
“We shouldn’t stay long,” Palmer said.
Hap studied him a long while. Palmer could sense that his friend was just as afraid as he was. “We won’t,” he agreed. “Why don’t you go first. I’ll save my dive light in case yours burns out.”
Palmer nodded. Sound thinking. He stepped through the door and into the hallway. Across from him, there was a glass partition with another door set in it, a spider web of cracks decorating the glass, the effect of the building settling or being crushed by the sand. There appeared to be a lift lobby on the other side of the partition. Palmer had been in a few lifts in smaller buildings, found them a good way to get up and down if a building was full of sand. The hallway he stood in extended off in both directions, was studded with doors. To his right, there was a high desk like some kind of reception area, but everything was so damn nice. He coughed into his fist. Hopefully the air here wasn’t—
Behind him, the door slammed. Palmer whirled in panic, thinking the drift must’ve flowed into the room and pinned the door shut, burying their gear. But he was alone in the hallway. Hap was gone.