He reached for the canteen, saw that it was tangled, and pulled out his bloodstained dive knife. He cut the strap. A quarter full. He was too weak to ration and took great gulps. The water burned his parched lips. His stomach churned, was startled to have something to do. Palmer twisted the cap on and sat with his back to the wind, studying his dead friend.
It wasn’t the canteen strap that’d been tangled, he saw. It was Hap’s body. Palmer covered his mouth. The grumbling in his stomach grew worse, and he feared he might lose what little fluid he had just taken in. Hap’s leg was twisted beneath him. Where the thigh meets the pelvis was torn the wrong way. An arm was shattered, white bone pointing up at the stars. Palmer tried to make sense of this. He had seen bodies snared in the sand before, had seen them trapped in silent and peaceful repose. This was not that. This was a life that had met a violent end. His brain whirled as the clues fell together. His homing beacon was in a mesh pouch on Hap’s thigh. Palmer had found his friend a hundred meters down, right beneath the dip in that great bowl Brock’s men had dug, right where their dive had begun. Hap had made it back after all.
Maybe the walls of that strange shaft had crushed him. Maybe Hap had gotten back too late, right as they’d given up on them both, and when they released the held-back sand, the walls had pushed in violently around him. But no, there would be damage everywhere. It would be even. Hap had been hit on that side, there. A fall. A great fall.
It was the visor that told the story. Hap’s visor was gone. The visor would have a recording of his dive. Of Danvar. Of the location of every building, maybe even the streets below, every block of that buried legend.
Sand blew across Hap’s body and ramped up against his side. His mouth was packed with grit, his nostrils clogged, his lifeless eyes dusted. Palmer saw now that there was never any coin in this for either of them. This had been the plan all along. Get a layout of the land, see where to dig, where to put their efforts, and keep the location of all those vast spoils to themselves. He saw in Hap’s open and horrified eyes what had happened, imagined him pulled up by the ropes, maybe saying that his friend was still down there, that there was a pocket of air in the building, that they needed to go back. Or maybe Hap telling them that it was no use, that his friend was dead.
Palmer scooped a handful of loose sand and placed it over Hap’s eyes, duning them shut. It was no wonder they were never told what they were looking for when they took this job. If Palmer and Hap had known they were diving for Danvar, they would’ve wondered why they weren’t blindfolded for the hike north. Hell, they would’ve known right then and there that this was a one-way trip. Of course. Otherwise, they would’ve begged to have been blindfolded. They had marched north from Springston as dead men.
“You saved my fucking life,” Palmer told his dead friend. “You betrayed me, and you saved my fucking life.”
And who knows, maybe Hap would’ve come back for him. Who was to say what decision he’d made, what was going through that mind of his, what he had told Brock and the others. Yes, he would’ve come back for him. Palmer was sure of it.
He was also sure that his life was now in danger. Not just because he was in the middle of the desert and starving, but because he knew what Brock didn’t want anyone else knowing. Palmer reached up and touched the visor on his forehead, needed to make sure it was still there, that his dive was still there, that it had happened.
As exhausted and weak as he was, he needed to do something about Hap. Not relishing the task, he patted his old friend’s pockets, pulled the two transponders out of his hip pouch, then reached into Hap’s belly pocket for his death note and the few coins there. With his suit’s charge dangerously low, he flowed the sand beneath Hap and sent his body straight down. No way of getting the distance exact, but Palmer planned on being long gone before anyone realized the body had moved.
He took off the tank he’d stolen from the other diver and stretched his limbs, pulled his hiking goggles out and adjusted them around his eyes, stowed his visor away. He would have to carry the tank a few dunes away and bury it. Couldn’t leave anything behind, couldn’t flow it down with Hap where it might be discovered, where Brock’s next foray into the sand would reveal that they had a problem.