Her mother Rose was directing the chaos. Several of her girls were still in their balcony getups, but now they moved through the bar tending to the sobbing, the wounded, the thirsty. “There’s Palmer,” Conner said, gesturing toward the stairs. Vic saw her brother hammering nails back into place, wiping the sweat from his forehead between blows. She hung her visor on the top of her dive tank and hurried over to him.
“What’re you doing?” she asked, snatching the hammer away.
Her brother opened his mouth to complain, but then seemed to wobble. Vic steadied him. Conner was there as well. They guided him to a barstool while Palmer croaked about all that needed doing. “The stairs are gonna collapse,” he said.
“ You’regonna collapse,” Vic told him. “Get him some water.” And Conner hurried around the bar. Vic weighed the hammer in her hand. She could barely stand herself, was past the point of exhaustion, but she moved back to the stairs and started driving in the loose heads. Swinging back for another strike, a hand snatched her wrist.
“What do you think you’re doing?” her mother asked. She took the hammer away and placed a steaming mug of stew in Vic’s hands. “Sit. Eat. You’ve been diving for hours.”
Vic studied her mom, saw the creases of age in her face, the features so much like her own, and she saw the woman and not the profession, saw that this would be her in just a few years, exhausted, worn out, doing whatever it took to get by. She started to apologize, she wasn’t sure what for, but couldn’t form the words. And then she found herself fighting the urge to cry, to sob, to hold her mother and smear tears and snot into the crook of her neck, to tell her about Marco, how great a guy he was even if he was caught up with the wrong people, how he was dead along with so many thousands more. But she fought this and won. She allowed herself to be guided to the bar, where she sat and spooned stew between her lips, doing what she was told because she knew she needed the sustenance, because she knew her mother was right.
Palmer drank beer from a jar, probably to save water for someone else. Conner was given his own bowl of stew. Rob joined them, pulled from the crowd by the gravitational tug of so much family all in one place, and Vic tried to remember the last time they’d been together like this. She caught her mom giving her a look like she was having the same thought.
“How bad is it?” her mother asked. And Vic had been wrong. Her mother was thinking on more than just family.
“Pretty much all of Springston,” Vic said. She stirred her stew. “The east wells will have to be re-dug. They’re buried. The pumps with them.”
Conner stiffened. “I need to go see about the pump in Shantytown. And I need to find—”
“The Shantytown pump won’t be enough to water everyone,” Vic told him. “How many people from that side of town came over here to the cisterns?”
“What about Dad’s advice?” Conner asked, turning to their mom. “Maybe we should go west like Father said.”
Vic’s spoon froze halfway to her mouth. Stew dribbled onto the bar. “When did Dad ever say we should go live in the mountains?”
“Not in the mountains,” Rob told her. “ Overthem.”
Vic turned and studied her little brother, who was perched on a barstool. “You need to stick to water,” she told him, thinking he’d been into the beer.
Rose placed a hand on Vic’s shoulder. Palmer was looking at her funny. “What?” she asked Palmer. “What’s that look about?” It was as though everyone else knew something she didn’t.
“Don’t freak out,” Palmer said. “I just learned a few hours ago.”
“Let her eat,” their mother said. Then, to Vic, “Finish your stew, and then I need you to come upstairs with me.”
“Upstairs?” Vic felt her palms go clammy. Felt that old terror swell up within her. She didn’t think anything would get her up those stairs ever again. She had a sudden compulsion to yank out the few nails she’d driven in, to yank them all out so no one could ever climb those stairs again, not her or her mother or anyone. “Why do you want me to go upstairs?” Vic asked.
“Finish your stew. And then I need you to meet someone.”
Vic couldn’t very well sit there and eat with everyone acting strange, watching her like that. Her appetite was gone, anyway. “Who?” she asked.
It was Rob who blurted out what no one else would say. “Our sister,” he said. And when Vic shot him a look, he showed her his jar. “It’s water, I swear.”
50 • The Backs of Gods
“I don’t have time for games,” Vic told her mom. She stopped at the bottom of those stairs, her hand on the rail, unable to muster the courage to lift her boot. “What I need is to get back to the sarfer and get to Low-Pub. The people who took down the wall are hitting it next.”
There was a hand at her back, urging her up. Just like before. Like when she was sixteen. Vic resisted. Her mother went past her to the bottom step, turned, looked out over the lantern-lit and pathetic crowds, and then lowered her voice.
“I don’t know what the hell is going on,” Rose said, “or what you might be involved in. I don’t know what’s happening out there.” She looked to be on the verge of tears, and Vic forgot her terror for a moment and truly listened. “This is all too much at once. It’s too much.” She shook her head and covered her mouth with her hand. Vic saw that her brothers were watching from the bar.
“Mom, you need to get some rest. What can be done is being done. There’s no one left to save. All of this can wait until morning.”
“Your father is still alive,” her mother blurted out.
Vic gripped the railing. The Honey Hole slid back down into the dunes and spun around her. “What—?” Her mother held her by the waist to keep her from sagging to the ground.
“I don’t know how all of this is happening at once, what games the gods are playing at, but Conner and Rob brought a girl here the day after you came to see me. The morning after I saw you, they came in with a starved and injured girl who made it out of No Man’s Land.”
“What?” Vic whispered again. She didn’t understand. “How long had she been gone? How far did she get?”
“She didn’t wander in from over here,” Rose said. “She crossed all the way. Come upstairs. Please.”
Vic found herself coaxed upward. It felt as though her mind and senses were floating above the ground. “What do you mean, Father is still alive? Why did Rob call her my… ?”
“Your sister. Half-sister. You need to hear what she has to say.” Vic glanced back and saw that Palmer and Conner were following them up the stairs. Rob was climbing down from his barstool.
“And Dad?” She looked to the balcony.
“He’s being held on the other side of No Man’s Land against his will. I’ll explain. But it means you have to put Low-Pub out of your mind. Your brother is right, that going west might be the only way. I think that’s what the gods are trying to tell us.”
Vic felt a flush of rage at the mention of the gods, at the talk of destiny. She’d seen too many dead to think of that bitch, Fate. She found herself standing there on that balcony, high over the scene of so many hurt and wounded, so many sobbing and mourning their loved ones. Listening to their soft wails, smelling the sweat in her dive suit, thinking on all the buried she’d seen that day, all the horrors visited on that already miserable place, the image of Marco shot dead, seeing a man’s face stove in behind Graham’s workbench, all the bombs over the years, the rape, the scars, the buckets of hurt more numerous than the sands.