Doria and Rose exchanged weary and knowing glances. They peered over the railing at all that needed cleaning before happy hour that night. Weekend hell. No sleep for the dreary.
Rose tried to remember a time before this routine. She felt like a speck of sand in an alien land, confused as to how it had gotten there. Carried on the wind from one dune to the next, each getting her closer to a destination she never would’ve chosen if there had been some way to make the wind listen.
There was no one behind the bar. Off to a piss or gone home. That bar had been the first dune, Rose thought. She remembered standing there, drying empty jars, letting the men leer before they went up to give one of her girls five minutes of displeasure. That was the first dune. And it led to all the others. A woman not for sale until the Honey Hole was. But no takers for the latter. Only a few years from being duned over, they said. The books didn’t shine too bright, they said. Not enough coin in it, they said. Can’t mix business with pleasure, they laughed.
Rose had come dangerously close to simply walking away. The only thing that stopped her was not wanting to be like her husband. He had taken even this luxury away from her. Had made her so angry at his abandonment that running away had become a power removed. And so she was trapped.
The door to her prison opened with a squeak, letting some light in. It was her children, Conner and Rob. Just the sort of hour at which she would expect them to burst in, needing something, palms open. She nearly yelled at them, let the mood her client had put her in rain down on their heads, but then she saw what Conner was carrying. Not this. She didn’t need this. She rushed down the stairs to send them away, to tell them to find a damn doctor, not to bring their mistakes to her. But Conner’s mouth opened before hers could—and out spilled the impossible.
40 ? Ticking Bombs
Vic
Vic emerged from the moist and heavy sand and took great gulps of glorious air. She rested as long as she dared, the sun beating down on her, before joining her brother in the shade of the sarfer’s hull. Palmer had been watching her with obvious relief, a grimace-like smile on his face. But as she handed him her canteen, which sloshed now with spring water, Palmer seemed to catch sight of his blurry reflection in the shiny metal. His pained smile melted into a pained frown. He reached up to touch his cheek.
“I don’t look so good,” he whispered. There were tears in his eyes as Vic took the canteen back from him and worked the cap off. Palmer met her gaze. He reached to his swollen lips. “How do I look?”
“You look like someone who should be dead but isn’t. It’s a good look.”
“I feel like a blister that’s about to pop.”
“Yeah, I was going to say that.”
They shared something like laughter, and Vic handed him the open canteen. Palmer took a sip, his cheeks billowing and contracting as he swished the water around. He labored to swallow. “You were gone so long …”
“Sorry. Not much of a spring here. Had to go down quite a ways to fill the canteens. There’s grit in there, so don’t tip it too much—”
“It’s okay. I could eat a dune.” Palmer’s hands shook as he lifted the canteen to his lips again.
Vic helped him steady the vessel. While he worked the water down, she took a small sip from Marco’s canteen, her lips pressed where her lover’s once had. “We’ll get you some food in town,” she said, trying to think on other things. “But we should probably stay here the night.”
Her brother looked past her toward the horizon. “Are we safe? No one followed us here?”
Vic smoothed the hair off his forehead. She remembered Palmer when he was much younger. He seemed much younger right then. Her brother was terrified. “What happened?” she asked. She had yet to ask him about the dive or the discovery, about the people looking for him in Springston. She had been too worried about losing him, too concerned about finding water and food and nursing him back to health.
Her brother took another swig from the canteen, his blistered hands shaking. He dabbed gently at his cracked lips with the sleeve of his dive suit. Winced. Stared up at the bands of sand swirling on the wind.
“They were never going to let us go,” he said. “We were there to find Danvar and then to die.”
“But you did find it.”
Palmer nodded. “Five hundred meters down.”
“No,” Vic said. She situated herself against the hull of the sarfer, blocking the wind for Palmer. “You didn’t go that deep.”
“They’d made a pit and a hole, had the first two hundred clear for us. I don’t know how. Hundreds of dive suits wired up together. It was amazing. And the scrapers down there, Vic. You should see them. Hundreds of meters tall. We hit the tops of the largest of them at five hundred. Was another five hundred or so to the street.”