The brigands were still staining the sand with their blood as the people of Low-Pub began to brave the market. Soon Vic wasn’t the only person kneeling and tending to a loved one. A mother wailed and clutched what must’ve been her son. Someone shouted Vic’s name, a young man with short dreadlocks and tattoos on his dark skin. Conner tried not to yelp as the two of them tended to his wound. Every time he cried out about his chest hurting, Vic assured him it was his shoulder, that he’d be fine. He couldn’t feel his hand, but his sister was saying he’d be fine.
The dive suit was cut away from him with a knife, the wires in the fabric popping as they were severed. That suit would never move the sand again. Vic stood and left his side and ran over to shoo someone away from the metal sphere, telling them not to touch it. She didn’t dare touch it either. Instead, she searched one of the impaled men and found her visor and band. Conner watched as she loosened the sand and sent their bodies beneath the market floor. She buried the bomb in the sand so no one could move it.
“Thank you,” Conner said, as the man with dreadlocks finished wrapping his chest and his arm with scraps torn from a t-shirt. Conner managed to wiggle his fingers, which comforted him somewhat. But it still felt like he’d been kicked by a goat. One whole side of his body ached. His feet grew warm, and he realized the boots were still on. As he kicked them off and reached in for the power switch, he caught Vic eyeing them.
“Rob,” Conner said, as if that would explain everything. He remembered yelling at his brother for fooling around with their dad’s boots. The shoes had been nothing more than a memento for years and years, just sitting in a corner or shoved under a bed. Now they had saved Conner’s life. Several times. Instead of yelling at his brother, he should’ve thanked him. He would thank him. And he would have his brother wire up the fucking power switch where it was easier to reach.
Vic clasped her dreadlocked friend on the arm. The man used his teeth to tear more of a shirt into strips of cloth, then surveyed the market, looking for someone else who needed tending to.
“Can you stand?” Vic asked.
Conner nodded, but he wasn’t sure. He got his boots back on, and Vic helped him up. He swayed there. The sight of his blood on the sand made him feel sick. His mind went to Gloralai, the sudden panic of how close he’d come to never seeing her again. And then a flush of guilt that he’d think of a classmate before thinking of his mother and his family. “What now?” he asked. “None of these guys was the one we were looking for, was he?”
“I’m guessing he’s long gone,” Vic said. “The guys who give the orders never get what’s coming to them. They’re the Lords in their towers, the brigands back in their tents while someone else blows themselves to pieces.”
“And that was the bomb?” He nodded to the spot in the sand where she’d buried it. Vic guided him toward the spot, an arm around his waist, letting him lean on her.
“How long before it goes off?”
“I don’t think it will,” Vic said. “Damien said it has to be squeezed to go off. Like making marbles for a child.”
Conner thought of how some divers could force sand together so fast that a tiny perfect sphere of glass would be formed. “Seems like a weird way to set off a bomb,” he said.
“Yeah,” Vic agreed.
“We can’t just leave it here.”
“No,” she said. “We’ll have to take it with us.”
“And bury it as deep as we possibly can,” Conner suggested.
His sister shook her head. She looked at the people coming out from their stalls and homes to see what the commotion had been about. She turned and squinted into the wind, gazing out toward the east.
“We’ve got to do something with it,” she said. “We’ve got to do something.”
56 ? A Place to Rest
The heavy sphere sat in the depression it made up there in the sarfer’s trampoline. Vic had lashed it down with seizings of rope to that great net that spanned the sarfer’s twin bows. Conner lost himself in that bomb from his helm seat. He held his tender arm in his lap, his shoulder throbbing, feeling the gentle sway of his body side to side as gusts puffed variably between the dunes to the east.
There were things that could not be contemplated, he realized. There were potential truths too costly to bear. It wasn’t until after the body was scarred by a brush with danger that it learned fear. Conner thought of all the untouched places on his soul yet to teach him something. All the unblemished parts of him waiting for that razor of truth.