“That’s a rare sight,” Armonk remarks.
On closer approach, we see that the house is perched at a crazy angle, as if it’s been lifted off its foundation and dropped down hard, perhaps by a wicked sandstorm. I’ve been made brave by the good interaction with the nomads, and I’m not quite ready to be done with discovering new things.
“Want to go down? Take a quick look at it?” I ask Armonk.
He slows the glider for a landing and we get out. “Anyone home?” he calls as we reach the open front door. Each time he gets a hollow silence in return. He ventures in first, taking care to lift his prosthetic leg high enough to overshoot the hill of sand and sharp piece of broken floor molding that’s angling out of it.
I climb over next. It’s spooky, but thrilling, this private space in the middle of nowhere, and I can’t help wondering how many more half-buried sanctuaries there are in Skull’s Wrath.
The first room was painted long ago in earthy yellow ochre. It’s faded and crackled in places, lending it a pleasing softness. Two other rooms are the mottled blue of Bea’s eyes. There are drawings on the walls, as if this place was a shelter for many before it got buried in sand. Nudie art—a crudely drawn woman with bulging breasts—makes me blush. As if the people taking shelter were men, missing their women. But in another room there are also children’s drawings—of a boy throwing a dog a stick. There’s scribbling too and words scratched out.
“Look! A calendar,” I exclaim. I pull it out of the floor sand, and we peer at it together. Certain days are Xed off.
“March 2078,” Armonk reads, “Three years before I was born.”
“Four years for me.” I read the legible notations: “Sealy’s birthday, depot trader coming by.” And the last, disturbing one: “I shot a thief who stole our water.”
“They wrote that two days after the trader visited,” Armonk notes, looking over my shoulder at it. “I wonder if the trader came back and stole their water.”
“Hope not.” I think of Depot Man. How he took Stiles’ bribery money to talk. I imagine if he were desperate enough he would steal, even kill. How we all might if we had to.
Armonk and I dig out other things: three chairs, a small bureau, a busted stove, chipped coffee mugs and random shoes. One is a man’s boot, one a child’s slipper, and finally a matched pair of medium sized hiking boots. I pack them up for The Greening.
“A family must’ve lived here,” I figure. “Wonder whether they got out alive.”
“Hard to say.” Armonk examines the man’s shoe from various angles, as if that will provide answers.
“I hope they made it to Vegas-by-the-Sea. I like imagining that.”
“Me too, I hope they’re all safe and chowing down on fresh skyfarmed perch.” Armonk turns the shoe face down, and pours the sand from it. He places it by the door.
We sit on the chairs, still not quite ready to leave.
“What’s your project? Do you think you’ll make it to the Axiom finals?” he asks.
I describe my various elixirs, including the one that healed his face. “What’s yours?”
He’s pensive, picking at peeling paint from the side of the chair. “I have a theory about Fireseed, something that Dr. Varik wrote to me about it.”
“What?” I persist.
“How it’s a fire-starter. How something makes it spontaneously combust. He said that inside the rock formation where he found it there were a whole bunch of charcoal stumps—old Fireseed plants—that would have had no reason to catch fire. He said that his father had made a reference to it being a fire-starter in his research paper. Varik never knew why.”
“Wow! How will you find out why it catches fire? Did you ever see it self-combust?”
“One night when I was on sentry duty, I heard the whirring of a hovercraft, really low, as if it was right over the tarp. I hurried outside but by the time I inspected the roof area the craft was gone.”
“Sounds scary, but what does that have to do with Fireseed combusting?”
“Because when I went back to that section of the field, one of the plants had burned to the roots. No one lit a match. No one else was there.” The intensity of Armonk’s eyes seeking out my reaction sends a shudder through me.
“You never told Nevada?”
“No. I need to do more research and experiments before the final picks. I want to discuss it with Dr. Varik.” Armonk’s face spreads into a crafty grin. “How badly do you want to see Vegas-by-the-Sea?”