Palmer groaned. “I don’t think I can go another dune in this rack, Vic.”
She unplugged her suit from the charger fed by the wind turbine and stood on the deck of the twin-hulled craft. She gave the boom a wary glance, made sure the wind wasn’t going to blow it toward her. “I know,” she said. “I’d rather not ride any farther myself. But I’d also prefer not to get killed, either.”
She pulled her goggles off, wiped the gunk from the corners of her eyes, and lifted the binoculars to study the lay of the land. There were a few sarfers parked along the dunes between her and Springston, dive flags flapping high up their masts to warn territorially of activity below. Vic had parked a little west and just north of the line between town proper and the unofficial scattering of shacks known as Shantytown. The last place she’d lived out there had been pushed under a dune a while ago. The morning market on the north side looked like it had already shut—the tents had been broken down and hauled off. Probably from lack of activity. So many had scattered in search of Danvar. There used to be a grocer just beyond the market; Vic could always leave Palmer with the sarfer and go check. She had the coin he’d scavenged. She just needed to get in and out without drawing attention.
She scanned farther to the east. There was a sandscraper near the great wall that had been abandoned for its lean. That might be the safest place to spend the night if Palmer couldn’t take more travel. The vagrants there would know where to grab an emergency bite. If she got desperate enough, she could make her way beneath the sand and just steal something. Better risk a hanging than starve for sure. Amazing how quickly one could reach such a decision. If it were Marco there suggesting such a thing, she’d be the voice of morality, of caution. But Marco was gone and people wanted her brother dead. She supposed there was a different sort of morality that took precedence. A hierarchy. Life and liberty were the Lords of action, now.
Focusing past the tall scrapers, she surveyed the great wall. The leaning concrete face was still in shadow. Another way she knew that it was a touch past noon. Vic remembered watching a quiet sunrise from those ramparts when she was a child, remembered not worrying about her next meal or the next cap of water. She licked her chapped lips as she remembered baths, as she remembered braying goats that could be had for their meat as well as their milk and cheese. Her stomach begged her to remember no more.
She spotted people up on the wall, little black specks of privilege. She envied them that home, that fortress that protected bustling Springston. Here was one solution to the winds from the east; a different answer to the same problem could be seen in Shantytown. The problem in common was that the world was in flux. The sands were always shifting, always pushing from east to west. Progressing, as her father used to say. Always progressingfrom east to west.
Vic swung the binoculars across Shantytown, where the people moved with the dunes. Not a day went by without a house collapsing. And the rhythmic rattle of hammers there was as constant as the wind. Build and destroy. Destroy and build. People tunneled through the dunes as they closed in around their homes. Back doors became front doors. A doormat shaken out and relocated. Adapt and survive. Life goes on.
People died, of course. Houses collapsed in the middle of the night. Sand rushed through breached walls at any hour. A handful mourned. Hands slapped faces in grief. And then came the rhythmic rattle of hammers, building. The wail of a newborn, breathing.
Change in Shantytown was gradual and continuous. Dunes slid and moved and people adjusted around them. The change was backbreaking and exhausting, but it was a way of life. Each day was much the same as the last. The misery came in buckets, which could be handled. Time. The dunes. Society. The people. They all progressed, as her father would say.
Such were Vic’s distractions as she scanned the line between Shantytown and Springston, thinking on change and life rather than food, putting off how best to proceed. The high sun beat down on her. She could hear Palmer twisting the cap off his canteen, knew they were both getting low on water. Making a decision with his life in the balance made it difficult to be prudent and wise. She was used to risking only her own life. She preferred diving solo.
“What do you see?” Palmer asked from the haul rack.
“One stall near the market,” she said. “Might be our best bet.”
She focused the binoculars on the stall, which would have to be their oasis. They could sail over and park close by, get in and out, drop some coin and a warning about Brock’s men. She watched a family tend the stall, a woman sweeping sand into piles and two kids hauling it out to the dunes. Maybe she could meet the children there and pay them to bring the food out. She watched them work, not wanting to hurry any one plan, and her mind flitted back to these two ways of managing the dunes, Springston’s and Shantytown’s. Here was the perfect vantage for seeing how both worked. In Shantytown, the gradual battle with the sand spread misery across the generations. Evenly distributed. While in Springston, people lived protected from the wind, with flat desert and tall buildings rarely swamped by the dunes. Years of woe were stored up behind a teetering wall. That woe missed some generations entirely. It built and built.
And somehow, Vic knew what was happening before it did. Maybe she knew from her life with brigands, from all their plans and boasts, from living with Marco, from beginning to think like them. Or maybe it was the little black figures she spotted running along the ramparts as if something was wrong, chasing some people away. Or maybe the sound came first, and then her brain whirred with such ferocity, such speed, that all the thoughts came next in an eyeblink. It felt as if minutes passed, as if all she considered about the great wall and the coming ages of man flew by between the first deep thump deep in her chest and the subsequent signs of disaster.
Or maybe it was coincidence. A diver’s intuition. Palmer’s story about a crate of bombs taking out all of Springston, an old dream of insane schemers and revolutionaries who knew how to destroy but not create. Whatever the cause, her gaze was upon the great wall when it happened. And her mind was on the many falls of man.
Thoughts spun. She saw the ages counted by each collapse. Empires that came and went and that made up all of their history and lore. Their ends were both inevitable and unpredictable. The catastrophic nature of each grew bigger with time. No one thought an end would come in their lifetime. People glanced up at the towering wall of concrete and iron bars and reckoned their children or grandchildren would see it topple. It would be left to some distant generation to build the next wall, and to build it stronger. Bigger. Like each fall.
Meanwhile, on the back of the wall, the sand grew heavier and heavier. One grain at a time. Like a clock. Like the ticking clock on a bomb. Or a whole string of them—dozens of bombs like loaves of bread—buried along the base of the wall in the middle of the night, placed there by divers with a hellish bent, divers and pirates who had grown weary of that cool shadow that divides one world from the other, that harsh line between those who toil all day and those who can afford to wait.
Those who thinkthey can afford to wait.
Tick. Tick. Tick.Sand and second hands. Vic watched from the top of the dune, from the deck of her dead lover’s sarfer, a sickness deep in the pit of her stomach, a powerful dread, all of this flashing through her mind as the dull thumps hit her in the chest.
The roars were muffled. They came like drums beat out of rhythm: boom… boom-boom… boom. Boom.