“It’s been too long to save anyone buried in solid drift,” she told him. “We’re looking for air down there, okay? Any spot of purple, that’s what you aim for. We’ll start here on the edge of town where chances are best. No point in checking every small building, just the intact ones. Anything with an eastward window you can skip. This regulator jams now and then—you have to take it out and knock it against your tank. Can you handle that?”
Conner nodded. He slipped his arms through the tank’s harness as his sister held the worn cylinder aloft.
“Good. Let’s go.”
It was another long run back toward the wasteland of broken homes. Soon the dive suit smelled of Conner’s sweat. And then his sister pointed toward the edge of a roof jutting up from the smooth sand, and she dove forward and was swallowed by a dune. Conner pulled the visor down over his eyes, wrangled the flapping regulator at his hip and shoved it into his mouth. He vibrated the air and the sand so that it slid out of his way as he tumbled forward. The desert claimed him as it had claimed so many others. But he could breathe. And he could help those who couldn’t. There was so much to do and not enough buckets.
48 ? A Fortunate Few
He had to ignore the math. There were thousands of bodies scattered and buried beneath the sand, and he and Vic had only found dozens alive in pockets of air. Maybe a hundred survivors in total. He ignored the math and concentrated on these few sputtering and alive that they were able to rescue.
After depositing a man he’d found beneath an upturned tub, he dove back into the sand and raced alongside his sister beneath the dunes. He had a sensation of flight, the suit and band she’d given him more powerful than any he’d ever donned before, a rebel suit turned up to dangerous degrees. Every shimmering flash of purple or dark blue where the visor’s sandsight was broken by a pocket of air stood out as a beacon of hope. Conner drifted past bodies and around shattered homes, bashed his way through walls and intact windows, told the terrified he found there to hold their breath as he gathered them up and lifted them toward the light.
He broke into one house that had remained intact and found a family of four. A shriek as he approached, the red dive light around his neck aglow, drift pouring in through the hole he’d made. “Hold your breath,” he told them, not sure if he could lift four people at once. Two was a strain. But the sand was pouring into their home. A young girl screamed and clutched her mother. Vic had disappeared into another building. Conner needed his sister. The sand wasn’t going to give them time.
He held the regulator out to the young girl. “Can you breathe through this?” The girl’s mother told her to bite down on it and not to breathe through her nose, to stay close to the diver.
Conner nodded toward the window he had smashed. The family crawled across the rising sand with him, the girl tethered to Conner by the air hose. As the sand sought its level, Conner held out his arms and took a boy Rob’s age in one, the young girl in the other. The parents encircled them all in an embrace. One last look at their faces in the pale red light, deep breaths all around, cheeks puffing, eyes wide with fear, the sand tumbling in, and Conner flowed them toward the window. He strained, the pulse in his temples knocking against his skull like a hammer, a feeling of being in thick and heavy sand, the danger of sinking, but a thought of Vic lifting an entire building, and something surged in him, an anger at the world, and though Conner was too far gone in concentration to even know that they were moving, he glimpsed the purple sky overhead, watched it loom closer, and then felt the wind and the pepper of sand on his face, heard the gasps and gratitude of the family as they held one another, covered there in sand.
There was no time to tell them they were welcome. Just a regulator passed back to him, sand and spit of the saved on the mouthpiece. Conner bit down grimly on this before returning to the depths, a boy who had been told he couldn’t be a diver, becoming one now in the most terrible of ways.
????
“Where are all the others?” he asked his sister, hours later. They shared a canteen atop the sand. The sun was going down, and both their tanks had long run dry, had been shucked off and set aside. They had gone as long as they could with visors and mere lungfuls, but the adrenaline had worn off, and the rescued had become more infrequent, and their exhausted bodies needed a guilty rest.
“What others?” Vic asked. She wiped her mouth and passed him the canteen.
“The other divers. I saw one or two down there looking for people to save. Woulda thought there’d be hundreds helping by now.”
He took a grateful swig while Vic gazed toward the west to keep the sand out of her eyes. “I saw those divers down there,” she said. “But I don’t think they were after people.”
“You think they were scavenging?” Conner didn’t want to believe this. He wiped his mouth with his ker.
“Looting,” she said, stressing the word like there was some great difference. “The rest of the divers are out hunting for a different buried city,” she added.