“Father gathered stuff. For as long as I can remember, maybe before I was born. Years and years. He said he was going to get us out, just the three of us, and then Mother died when I was six, and he said it would be me and him. He kept stuff in the sand, said it was silly none of the guards looked there, that people would know better where he was from. Bits of wire, a rubber raincoat, batteries, a drill someone left behind because the motor wouldn’t work—but Father knew how to fix it. He spent the better part of a year getting a tool for melting wire. It was all so slow. I wanted him to hurry. And then I could place two fingers down between his ribs while he slept and his breathing sounded like he needed to cough all the time, but he said he was going to get us out.
“And then he showed me what he was making, made me swear not to tell any of the sunset people, and I had to wear it under my clothes so it wouldn’t be found. He would have me take it off at night so he could work on it, adjust the wires so they didn’t scratch me, and then he showed me how—”
“He made a dive suit,” Conner said.
Violet nodded. Rose held the jar to Violet’s lips, and she took two swallows. She felt selfish after this and dabbed her lips with her bandaged hand.
“There’s a big crack in the ground,” she said. “This is where the muddy river is, where the sand is thrown into the sky and the metals are got out. Bigger than a hundred leaps across and it got bigger and bigger every year. Father said I would have to go under this, that I would have to hold my breath a long time, that it was the only way out. He made me hold my breath while I worked the trough, made me do it over and over, could tell when I was using my nose. I practiced until I could do it for long enough.
“I learned to move the sand, and one day I wanted to show him how good I was getting, so I went under the fence and came up the other side toward the city, but he got madder than I’ve ever seen him and told me never to go that way, that I’d only end up back here and then they’d know what we could do and everything would be worse. I had to go west, he told me, and I had to tell his people to keep going west. That’s what he said. There had been a family in the camp when I was too little to remember who shared a story about a sea even past where the sun went at night, where the water wasn’t muddy. It never rained there, but there was water as far as you could see.”
Conner grunted at this. Violet remembered how the sunset people in the mining camp hadn’t believed this story, either. But her father had. And Violet, too.
“He said we shouldn’t come for him,” Rose said, almost to herself.
Violet nodded. “There were fights in camp. Some of the people from the city said there were too many of us, more and more coming all the time, that we were making their life bad. But our life felt bad. Father said I had to get out, that I was young and strong and that I could make it. He made me dive at night when everyone was asleep. And for months and months, he drank half rations and filled bladders with the other halves. He caught rats and made jerky. Said it kept him going, all these things. Said it was good to stay busy. Said he never should’ve come there, never left his people, but that I would make it okay because I would come back and tell about the world that doesn’t care for us.”
“And you’re a sand diver,” Rob said, his voice full of awe, as Violet paused to catch her breath. All the nights of hiking and thinking and being alone made her want to say everything all at once.
“The diving was easy,” she said. “The walking was the hard part. It was twelve days of walking. It took Father nine, but he said it would take me twelve, that I would have to count and time it right. It was very important, the day I left. Which day. He drew a picture of the mountains and showed me which was the Pike and that I would keep this just left of my nose and the star to the north directly over my right shoulder, and on the twelfth day I would see smoke and on the twelfth night I would see fire, right past a crack in the ground that he said I could leap over at the narrowest—”
“He knew we’d be camping,” Conner said.
Violet nodded. “He said if I missed the fire I would come to a big wall and a small town, but that if I found the smoke and the fire that I would be home right then. And I was doing good, walking at night and sleeping all day and being careful with my water. Until a wolf came—”
“A wolf?” Rob asked.