“No. Something else. Keep an eye on my boys for me. And no appointments for the rest of the day.”
Diana frowned, but Rose didn’t care to explain. She let herself into her room and shut the door.
The girl was still sleeping. She held the edge of her sheet with her bandaged hands and kept it up against her neck, chin tucked down. Here was another miserable life her husband had made. Another life ruined, no doubt, in the name of love.
Rose set the bundle on the small table by the window where there was light. She untied the towel and began sorting through the scraps. Her stomach twisted up in knots at the sight of blood on the girl’s pants and her dive suit. The rubbery material of the dive suit felt strange—not quite like any fabric Rose had ever seen. It was like the girl’s strange accent, with words understandable but the sound not quite right. Everything about the girl was both alien and familiar.
Rose had to be careful not to prick herself on the torn bits of wire as she sorted through the scraps. As a dive suit, the outfit was ruined. But she found the belly of the suit and the pouch there that no diver would be without. Rose turned the large scrap of material into the light. She ran her fingers across stitches her husband had made. And there across them was a neat snip her scissors had left from cutting the material off the girl. Fumbling to open the pouch, her fingers shaking, hoping against hope, Rose felt the folded piece of paper inside.
She pulled out the letter. Unfolded it, hands trembling, not daring to breathe.
The sight of her husband’s handwriting blurred the words he’d written:
Rose,
I hope this message finds you well. I have forfeited the right to ask anything of you, but I trust the messenger will be cared for. All that awaited her here was misery and death. I don’t have much time left, and so I send her and these words to the gods. I pray I don’t write them in vain.
You alone know all the bad I’ve done. Running from my mistakes was by far the worst. There is a reason no one comes back from this place. They won’t let us. Don’t come for me. Run from these drums, Rose. They grind the earth to nothing here. They take our water from the sky. Mountains are turned into rivers. There is no talking to them, even those of us who have learned their language. We are the salamander living in a hole beneath the sand. They are the boot that unwittingly buries us. To them, it is just a march onward and onward. To us, it is a trampling.
They know you are out there. They know of Springston and Low-Pub. Others before me have told them, have begged to be released, have begged for help, for water, for any of the small miracles we glimpse of their cities and their life. But no help will ever come for us. Our voices will never be heard. They have lesser problems to worry over.
Listen to me, please. This is not a war to win. It’s not one to even fight. Don’t let the young there among you know what we’re up against. You remember how I was. Tell only the old and wise, those with burns and scars, that everything here is to be feared. Tell the Lords. Explain to them that these people are not evil, which we might understand and combat. Explain to them that these people do not care and cannot be made to, which is far worse. There can be no knocking on their doors that they might hear. Nothing we can do or say that will be as loud as the blasts that rob our rain. We are the salamander, they are the boot. You have to make the Lords understand.
Go west if you can. Forget the horror stories of what lies that way. Forget the mountains. Crush their peaks if you must, but go. Take the children and whoever will listen to reason. Those who will not succumb to reason, leave them behind to rot. Leave them here with me where we belong.
Yours,
Farren Robertson Axelrod — The Pickpocket of Low-Pub
Rose ran her fingers across her husband’s name. She could feel the graceful groove the press of his pen had made. A man she thought dead had written this. She sat there for a long time with that letter in her hands, gazing upon the words, while a young girl lay in the bed beside her, murmuring in her dreams.
Rose remembered a time and a life when things had been different. She read the letter again, hearing the voice of her husband reading it to her, remembering his smell, his touch, the itch of his beard against her neck, the way a man could lie with her and she would want it to last, not end as quickly as possible. Love she would give anything for.