He broke into one house that had remained intact and found a family of four. A shriek as he approached, the red dive light around his neck aglow, drift pouring in through the hole he’d made. “Hold your breath,” he told them, not sure if he could lift four people at once. Two was a strain. But the sand was pouring into their home. A young girl screamed and clutched her mother. Vic had disappeared into another building. Conner needed his sister. The sand wasn’t going to give them time.
He held the regulator out to the young girl. “Can you breathe through this?” The girl’s mother told her to bite down on it and not to breathe through her nose, to stay close to the diver.
Conner nodded toward the window he had smashed. The family crawled across the rising sand with him, the girl tethered to Conner by the air hose. As the sand sought its level, Conner held out his arms and took a boy Rob’s age in one, the young girl in the other. The parents encircled them all in an embrace. One last look at their faces in the pale red light, deep breaths all around, cheeks puffing, eyes wide with fear, the sand tumbling in, and Conner flowed them toward the window. He strained, the pulse in his temples knocking against his skull like a hammer, a feeling of being in thick and heavy sand, the danger of sinking, but a thought of Vic lifting an entire building, and something surged in him, an anger at the world, and though Conner was too far gone in concentration to even know that they were moving, he glimpsed the purple sky overhead, watched it loom closer, and then felt the wind and the pepper of sand on his face, heard the gasps and gratitude of the family as they held one another, covered there in sand.
There was no time to tell them they were welcome. Just a regulator passed back to him, sand and spit of the saved on the mouthpiece. Conner bit down grimly on this before returning to the depths, a boy who had been told he couldn’t be a diver, becoming one now in the most terrible of ways.
“Where are all the others?” he asked his sister, hours later. They shared a canteen atop the sand. The sun was going down, and both their tanks had long run dry, had been shucked off and set aside. They had gone as long as they could with visors and mere lungfuls, but the adrenaline had worn off, and the rescued had become more infrequent, and their exhausted bodies needed a guilty rest.
“What others?” Vic asked. She wiped her mouth and passed him the canteen.
“The other divers. I saw one or two down there looking for people to save. Woulda thought there’d be hundreds helping by now.”
He took a grateful swig while Vic gazed toward the west to keep the sand out of her eyes. “I saw those divers down there,” she said. “But I don’t think they were after people.”
“You think they were scavenging?” Conner didn’t want to believe this. He wiped his mouth with his ker.
“Looting,” she said, stressing the word like there was some great difference. “The rest of the divers are out hunting for a different buried city,” she added.
“Danvar.”
Vic nodded. “The people who did this, who did that—” She pointed to where the wall once stood. “They’re the same ones who found Danvar. Palmer was with them.” She must’ve seen the confused and horrified look on Conner’s face. “Not withthem in that sense. He wasn’t a part of the bombing. They hired him for a dive. Palmer was the one who found Danvar.”
Conner didn’t know what to say. He remembered how his brother had looked in the sarfer, like a body fresh from a grave. “Is he okay?”
“He was down there for a week. If he lives, it’ll be a miracle. But he’s got his father’s blood, so who knows.”
Conner couldn’t believe how lackadaisical his sister could be about their brother’s life. But then—all the death he’d seen that day already had him inured to the sight of the buried. “Why would anyone dothis?” he asked, though he knew the question was pointless, knew everyone who witnessed the aftermath of a bomb asked the same question and never got a response. Churches were overfull with these unanswered questions.
Vic shrugged. She pulled off her visor and checked something inside the band. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the people who did this were the same ones who spread the word about Danvar. Just to clear out those who might be here to help.”
“The divers,” Conner said. He grabbed his boot and tried to work a kink out of his calf muscle. “So what now?”
“One more run down by the scrapers. There are a few pockets we missed. Then I’ll get you back to the Honey Hole and check on Palm before I head to Low-Pub.”
“Low-Pub?” Conner glanced around at the people staggering across the sand, pulling what they could from the shallows, tending to the exhausted and the wounded. “Aren’t we needed here? What’s in Low-Pub?”
“The people who did this,” Vic said. She put her visor back on. “Palm said they were going to hit Springston first. He overheard them, knew this was going to happen, just didn’t know it would be this… bad. We came here as quickly as we could for some food and to warn someone. But we were too late.”
“You saved us,” Conner said.
Vic’s cheeks tightened as she clenched and unclenched her jaw. She said nothing. Just pulled her ker up over her nose and mouth.
“The people who did this are shacked up in Low-Pub?” he asked. “If you go after them, I want to come with you.”
He thought she would argue. But Vic just nodded. “Yeah. I’ll probably need you. And they aren’t shacked up in Low-Pub. I think they’re gonna strike there next. And that it might be worse than this.”
Conner surveyed the scene around him once more, the wind and sand blowing unfettered where it hadn’t blown for generations. He couldn’t imagine that anything could be worse than this.
49 • Half-Sisters
They arrived back at the Honey Hole to find a broken building where broken people were gathering—and Vic wondered if the place had changed at all. The battered brothel was the tallest structure left standing across all of Springston. What had once sat squat among its peers now towered. And as it sat on the new eastward border of civilization, it was also the new wall. A few tents had already been erected in its lee. Shantytown, spread out to the west, was all that remained whole and intact.
As Vic approached the building, she felt as though she could still see all the bodies beneath her feet, that her sandsight had become permanent. The dead were spots in her vision like you get from staring at the sun too long. They were motes of sand swimming in her eye.
She and Conner dropped their tanks inside the door. The building was still lined with drift. Dunes of it stood in the corners. An even coat covered the floor. Vic had flowed the sand like water as she’d lifted the place, but not all of it had gotten out. It had puddled in places and congealed. Dozens of people were scattered across those piles of drift. Lanterns and candles filled the space in glow and shadow. These small flames beat back the darkness as the sun set outside, and Vic saw people pouring caps of water, ladling beer from barrels. Those few who had survived would flock here. It was the most unlikely of sanctuaries.
She saw her youngest brother Rob tending to a woman laid out on the sand. Her mother was moving from person to person with canteens. There was the smell of alcohol, and Vic saw someone cleaning a wound with a bottle from the bar, tipping it into a dishrag before gingerly dabbing at injured flesh. There were people there that she had pulled out of the sand. Some Conner had as well. They had both told people to seek out the Honey Hole. There were so many and yet not nearly enough.