There was a noise on the other side of the door. Palmer looked up and down the hallway, the dim red glow of his dive light barely penetrating a dozen paces. He tried to get his bearings. Was this the room he’d been wasting away inside of? Did he get turned around? The darkness beyond the feeble reach of his dive light made everything seem distant and full of quiet potential. He tried the door and found it unlocked. A single door. A different room. He stepped inside and saw rows of desks, those flat plastic screens on each. Several of the desks were jumbled together; they had been shoved away from a large pile of drift pushing its way into the room.
Palmer’s brain wrestled with possibilities: An old breach, a building giving way from years of the crush. It was on the opposite side of the building from his approach with Hap, so he hadn’t seen it. He might have swum right in if he had.
Perhaps other divers had made this. A new hole. They had come here while he had slept. Brock’s men—with Yegery, the old divemaster, to confirm the find and salvage a few things. Yes, there were signs that others had come. Bootprints of sand. Two desks cleaned off and pushed together, away from the others. Yes. The plundering had begun. Divers must be descending on this place as he stood there. He would be saved.
Or was it Hap? Maybe Hap had come back. Hap had come back for him, hadn’t found the other way in, had made a new way, and had left tanks of air for him so Palmer could save himself. Yes! There were the tanks, a triple set, sitting beyond the reach of the sand like a gift from the gods. Unless he had gone mad. Unless this was an apparition like his father. Unless he was still dreaming as before.
Palmer staggered through the desks and toward the dive tanks, wanting to touch them to see if they were real. All the possibilities for how this drift of sand had breached the building, and the true answer never occurred to him. Never occurred to him even though he should’ve remembered. Should’ve remembered that he and Hap weren’t the first to be sent down to discover Danvar. And they hadn’t found the bodies of the other two divers in the sand. All of this would come too late. It would come to him as the animal shot out from behind a desk, claws out and teeth bared, hellbent and determined to kill him.
22 ? A Fight with Madness
The man was naked. He was all bones and ribs and snarling mouth. The front of him was caked in blood, a smear of charcoal black in the dim red glow of Palmer’s dive light. There was just a flash of this grisly image before the man crashed into Palmer, knocking him to the ground, desperate hands clenching around his throat.
Palmer saw pops of bright light as his head hit the floor. He couldn’t breathe. He heard his own gurgles mix with the raspy hisses from the man on top of him. A madman. A thin, half-starved, and full-crazed madman. Palmer fought for a breath. His visor was knocked from his head. Letting go of the man’s wrists, he reached for his dive knife, but his leg was pinned, his boot too far away. He pawed behind himself and felt his visor, had some insane plan of getting it to his temples, getting his suit powered on, overloading the air around him, trying to shake the man off. But as his fingers closed on the hard plastic—and as the darkness squeezed in around his vision—he instead swung the visor at the snarling man’s face, a final act before the door to that king’s crypt sealed shut on him.
A piercing shriek returned Palmer to his senses. Or it was the hands coming off his neck? The naked man howled and lunged again, but Palmer got a boot up, caught the man in the chest, kicked him. He scrambled backward while the man reeled. The other diver. Brock’s diver. Palmer turned and crawled on his hands and knees to get distance, got around a desk, moving as fast as he could, heart pounding. Two divers. There had been two divers. He waited for the man’s partner to jump onto his back, for the two men to beat him to death for his belly full of jangling coin—
—when he bumped into the other diver. And saw by his dive light that he was no threat. And the bib of gore on the man chasing him was given sudden meaning. Palmer crawled away, sickened. He wondered how long the men had been down here, how long one had been eating the other.
Hands fell onto his boots and yanked him, dragging him backward. A reedy voice yelled for him to be still. And then he felt a tug as his dive knife was pulled from its sheath, stolen. Palmer spun onto his back to defend himself. His own knife flashed above him traitorously, was brought down by those bone-thin arms, was meant to skewer him.
There was a crunch against his belly. A painful blow. The air came out of Palmer. The blade was raised to strike him again, but there was no blood. His poor life had been saved by a fistful of coin.
Palmer brought up his knee as the man struck again—and shin met forearm with a crack. A howl, and the knife was dropped. Palmer fumbled for it, his dive light throwing the world into pale reds and deep shadows. Hand on the hilt, his knife reclaimed, he slashed at the air, and the man fell back, hands up, shouting, “Please, please!”
Palmer scooted away, keeping the knife in front of him. He was weak from fitful sleep and lack of food, but this poor creature before him seemed even weaker. Enraged and with the element of surprise, the man had nearly killed him, but it had been like fighting off a homeless dune-sleeper who had jumped him for some morsel of bread. Palmer dared to turn his dive light up so he could see the man better.