Conner wondered if dredging up the past was even a good idea. It was like being a sand diver in a lot of ways. There were all these rusty hurts buried deep. Bringing them up and trying to oil them, sand them, make them into something they could never be again—how was that healthy? Maybe it wasn’t worth it to know who his dad was. Maybe his mom was right and he should just move on. If their dad did come back, he would be older, weaker, grayer, not the same man. Clinging to an idealized past was a poison of sorts, that bastard Nostalgia, making people think there was a better time and place if they could just get back to it.
He glanced toward the great wall, that towering symbol of his past with its dangerous lean. A distant grumble from No Man’s Land could be heard, the faint boom boom boom of who-the-fuck-knew-what. The future, that’s what. The very near future. The grumble of the unknown, like a hungry stomach that knew it needed feeding, like the hungry soul that needs some new adventure, the boom boom boom of a man’s pulse when he’s scared he won’t amount to shit, that if he sits still, the dunes will claim him.
The three canteens rattled emptily by Conner’s hip, and he remembered he needed to stop and fill them. He needed to buy some jerky as well. Between Gloralai and his mother and Palm being an asshole, his brain was well and truly scrambled. His father’s boots didn’t help matters at all. He passed through the low Bleak Wall, which divided Springston and Shantytown in disjointed gaps and divides, a cheap and hasty imitation of the larger wall farther east. In the morning shade of the wall, a game of football was being played, shirts and skins. Boys Conner’s age ran back and forth, kicking an inflated gooseskin and tackling one another, coming up covered in sweat and sand. There were three skins and four shirts. Guilla, a friend of Conner’s, tackled a boy from Springston. As they disentangled themselves, Guilla spotted Conner skirting the playing field, which was laid out by canteens and shoes.
“Yo, Con!” he shouted. “We need another.”
“Can’t,” Conner said. “Wish I could.”
Guilla shrugged, and the boys returned to their storm of sand-clouds and scrapes.
Past the wall, there was a line at the cistern. Conner fished in his pockets for three coins and waited his turn. He watched a mother scold her son in the middle of a path, saw Jenkins’s dad emerge from their small walled garden holding a headless snake in one hand and a hoe in the other, then march inside their house probably to cook it. He became hyperalert at any gathering like this, saw all the tiny details of normal life humming right along. This was when the bombs came and ripped through crowds. At funerals and weddings and religious celebrations. At cisterns and cafes and protests. It was strange how tense one could become while surrounded by the banal. It was the waiting, waiting. It made Conner want to flee his flesh, sitting still in that creeping line. It was why he had to go.
Finally, it was his turn. He paid his coins and watched the canteens fill. “To the brim,” he said. The pumpman looked at him with disdain but didn’t skimp. Conner put the three straps over his head, the canteens heavy and full on his hip. He headed off to buy some jerky. It would wipe him out, this trip. He reached into his pocket and felt the last of his coins there. Crossing the empty patch of dunes between the cistern and the market, mentally packing for his journey, the ground suddenly shifted beneath his feet—
Conner stumbled. He nearly fell forward, had to throw his arms out for balance, his mind seizing on the idea that it was the damn boots, the band shorting out in his pocket from canteen water, fucking Rob. But he heard the hiss of flowing sand, and then the laughter of boys, and Conner couldn’t move. He looked down to see his legs buried up to his knees, the sand packed so hard around his shins that his feet throbbed. He couldn’t fall over if he tried.
“Whadja step in, Whoreson?”
Twisting at the waist and craning his neck, Conner could see Ryder and two others behind him. They had sand in their hair and on their shoulders, visors pressed up on their foreheads, had probably been diving in the training dunes near school or had seen him checking the dorms. Conner tried to pull his boots free but couldn’t.
“Let me go, Ryder.” He stopped struggling and fought the urge to say This isn’t funny, because that would only draw laughter. He fought the urge to remind the boys that sandtrapping someone like this was a buryable offense, because that would only bring more threats. Reaching into his pocket, he felt the band there that his brother had made. If only the power weren’t in the boots—
“Hey, Whoreson, I’ve got a question.” Ryder stepped around in front of him, grinning. The other two boys flanked Conner to either side. “When you were a baby, how much did your mommy charge you to suck her tits? ’Cause she charges my dad five coin each!”
The laughter echoed over the dunes. The sun was barely up, but to Conner it suddenly felt like midday. Ryder stepped close. Conner could smell stale beer and onions on the boy’s breath.
“I don’t want to see you near her,” he said.