His fear was that Vic would be gone and far beneath the sand by the time he got outside. He navigated the staircase, which swayed beneath his feet, was hanging on by a few sad nails. There were people stirring across the expanse of the bar, helping one another up, piles of drift everywhere, some bodies half-buried, as many alive here as dead, a miracle. By the time he reached the front door, Conner had a vague sense of what his sister had done, why any of them were still alive. He knew, but it wasn’t possible. Lifting a building like this. The blood leaking from her ears and nose. He felt afraid of his sister right then, a feeling remembered from childhood.
He spotted her outside, saw her running across the sand rather than diving into it. A nightmarish world stood all around: folded tin and splintered wood jutting up through a rolling sea of new sand. To the west, the sprawl of Shantytown seemed to have been spared. Those on the eastern edge, however, were gone. Conner saw people rushing in with shovels and buckets. More stood scattered atop the distant dunes, shielding their eyes and staring numbly toward the scene of such awful destruction. Conner chased after his sister. He glanced over his shoulder toward the east and saw the mostly flat expanse of ruin. A ridge of a fallen sandscraper jutted out of the sand like the spine of a half-buried corpse. A high dune stood where the great wall had once been. All the rest of that sand—stored up for generations—was gone. All that misery had been evenly dispersed.
Conner concentrated on keeping up with Vic, tried not to think of the great wall and the sight of empty air where it had once loomed. He could taste the fear in his mouth at the sight of such permanence ended. Don’t think about it. Follow Vic—who for some reason wasn’t diving beneath the dunes to rescue others like he thought she might. She raced instead through structures that became more intact the farther west and north they went. Conner was out of breath, his heart pounding. He chased her around a home, was fighting for the voice to call out to her, when he spotted the sarfer sitting out on the open sand.
The mainsail was still up, the fabric luffing, boom swaying. A rebel sarfer with a red canvas. Some part of Conner knew that his sister being there when the great wall collapsed was no coincidence. The thuds he had heard before the sand had rolled in—he remembered the sounds like distant bombs. Dozens of them. Vic spent time with the sorts of people who might do this. The thought that she might be involved, might have a hand in the death of thousands, might have come there only to rescue their mom—this was a more personal and direct hurt than the toppling of the wall. It was the scratch that burns rather than the blunt trauma that knocks a man numb.
At the sarfer, Vic rummaged for something in the haul rack. No … not something, someone. Conner drew near and realized it was his brother.
“Palm?” he asked, the confusion piling on now. He rested against the sarfer’s hot hull and caught his breath. His older brother gazed at him from the shade of a makeshift bimini. His face was blistered. His lips swollen. He managed a wan smile. Vic was giving orders to them both. She pressed something into Conner’s hands. He looked down. A pair of visors. A band. She pulled a dive suit from a bag in the passenger seat. Palmer was saying that he was okay to dive, to give him the suit. He tried to get up, but Vic shoved him back down.
“You can barely walk,” she said.
Conner wondered what was wrong with his brother. Palmer’s face had shrunk; his cheeks were sharp; there were the beginnings of a beard on his chin. “I can walk,” Palmer insisted.
Vic took all of two beats to consider something. As rarely as she stood still, it felt like a lifetime. She reached some decision. “Head to the Honey Hole, then,” she said. “Help Mom. Wait for us there.”
“What about the sarfer?” Palmer asked.
“Leave it be. Just take the water. And be careful. The sand is loose, and there’s debris everywhere.” She turned to Conner. “What’re you waiting on? Get that suit on and let’s go.”
Conner fell to the sand and kicked his boots off. Stowed the band away. His shirt was already gone, left behind in the Honey Hole with his sister’s blood on it. He pulled the dive suit on. It was big for him and smelled of another man’s sweat. His sister helped him with the zipper, bitched about the sand in it. She gave Conner instructions as she pulled the dive tanks from their racks and cracked the valves.