“This is an atomic bomb.” Yegery walked over to it. “Don’t ask me how it works. All I know is how to work it. Easy as making marbles,” he said. “Easy as pinching it down.” He stared at the column, and the sand rose up and surrounded the sphere.
Conner could feel the hum in the sand beneath him. He wiggled his foot half out of his boot and toggled the power switch Rob had wired up. He got his hand around the band. Worked it out slowly. The man with the gun was watching Yegery as the divemaster continued to talk.
“Now, if you’ll excuse me, the rest of us are going to strap on some tanks and get down where it’s safe. You and your friend here can see how far you can run before this goes off, but I should warn you, if this does what I’ve been told it can do, you won’t get far enough. And I really do hate that for you, Vic. I like you. But this is bigger than us.” Yegery looked at the men. “Get your tanks on. And bring their bands with us.”
“Down to two hundred?” one of the men asked, slinging a tank of air over his back.
“Two hundred,” Yegery said. They were right back to business, not worried about Vic, who was still pinned by the stonesand, and not worried about Conner, who didn’t have his band or visor, didn’t have a gun.
But he had his father’s boots. He had spent enough time in them to be comfortable there, to know what they could do, what he could do. He held the band Rob had made in his hand, his palm sweaty, and he remembered what he’d told his brother beneath their house, about not shorting the wires. He loosened his grip on the strip of fabric and wire. There wasn’t much time. The men were testing their regulators with sporadic hisses, getting the sand out of the mouthpieces, cranking valves and cinching up their harnesses. They would disappear beneath the sand, and Conner and Vic would have to run as fast and as far as they could. But only if they released his sister. Only if he could free her with his boots. Or he could take her straight down while the bomb went off. But then what? Would they let them go free after? The man in charge said this wasn’t about him and his sister. They didn’t seem too angry. But they were about to blow up the square. Conner didn’t know what to do as he prepared to throw the band on and act. He had to do something. Had to stop them.
“Where’s Brock?” Vic asked the old divemaster. “Why can’t he do his own dirty work?”
She was stalling. But she was also getting their attention, which Conner didn’t want. Yegery pulled his regulator out of his mouth and walked back to her. “If he could do this himself, why would he need me? You’re a diver. You know not everyone can do what we do. It’s a good thing he needs me, or I’d be in your situation right now.”
“What about when he doesn’t need you anymore?”
Yegery hesitated. Eventually, he smiled. “He’ll always need me. I’m taking the secrets of diving to his people. For all the magic they possess over there, it turns out some of our tricks are known only to us. Don’t you worry about me.”
“I think he’ll betray you,” Vic said.
“We’ll see,” Yegery told her. He stared down at Vic, made a gesture, and she slowly rose to the surface. She flexed her arms, was free of the stonesand. “You might want to run,” he told her. He reached up for his visor, and Conner knew the time was now. He kept the band close to his body and slid his hands into his lap, then up to his chest. He tried to pre-visualize what he wanted the sand to do, just like his sister had taught him to prep the dunes before diving into them.
“You sure about leaving them up here?” one of the guys asked. “I feel like we should shoot them. Just to make sure.”
Vic turned and glanced at Conner. He had both hands around the band, was making sure he had it lined up right. The wires trailing out from the boot were visible, but there was nothing he could do about that.
“No. Don’t shoot them,” Yegery said. “It’s not my fault they came here. Their death is on their hands, not mine.” He looked down at Vic, who was still in a crouch. “Think of it as a favor on behalf of your father. A gift.” He flipped down his visor and smiled.
“I’ve got a gift from our father,” Conner said. The men turned in his direction. He had the band down over his forehead, could feel the sand beneath him, humming with some terrible power. “Here.”
The world erupted into violence. For a moment, Conner thought the bomb had gone off, that Yegery had triggered it with his band, that this was what it felt like to die in a blast, a split second of noise and a jolt of pain and a flash of light. He had told the sand what he wanted, had built up the vision in his mind, pictured it like a coiled spring, ready to unleash. But he had to go and say something as the connection hit. He saw a gun come up, the flash of light and a loud noise, so fucking stupid, a burst of agony in his chest, shot, falling backward into the sand, but the sand wound tight in his head and exploding out in the shape he’d imagined, inspired by that column with the bomb on it.
That column of sand with the sphere inside collapsed. The silver ball rolled across the blood-soaked sand toward Vic. Five other columns had shot up, sharp points of stonesand beneath each of the men, impaling them, one of them screaming and writhing before falling silent, all of them quickly dead.
Conner groaned and held his chest, cursing himself. Beneath him, the sand slipped and swirled as he lost his concentration, his connection with his father’s boots. He ripped the band off, and the world was mostly still. Just the thrumming of his pulse and the agony of the wound.
“Easy,” Vic said. She was beside him. She ripped the dive suit along a seam, opened it up to inspect the wound.
“I’m gonna fucking die,” Conner whimpered.
Vic swept his hair off his forehead. “You’re not gonna die,” she said. “It’s not that bad.”
Conner kicked the sand in pain. “It feels fucking bad,” he said. He watched as his sister surveyed the mess all around them, the towers of gore that her brother had made.
“I’ve seen worse,” she said.
55 • A Deep Discomfort
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.
Sons of whores had existed before him. This was a fact, just not one he’d ever lived with. And so it wasn’t a pain he felt for others. Not until it was his mom coming home with bruises lurking beneath her makeup. Not until it was his mom that the fathers of friends boasted of. There had been others like him before. He’d just never thought of them.
The same was true for the leveling of a town. Witnessing Springston in the aftermath of its destruction made the danger to Low-Pub real. Fear required precedents. The newborn reaches for the hot poker— look how red and bright!
That silver sphere might’ve been a harmless thing in his mind, resting gently there in that trampoline, were it not for Springston. And the threat Vic had made after lashing the bomb down—this idea that she would deliver Brock’s gift to him—might be a joke to ignore, had Conner’s father not disappeared across the Bull’s gash all those years ago.
“What about Mom?” Conner asked. He tore his eyes away from the bomb and gazed off to the west, toward the tall peaks and the setting sun.
“What about her?” Vic asked. “You think she cares if I disappear? You know how many years we went without talking?”
Conner thought he knew. But he also saw their mother differently now. Had seen her tend to Violet, had seen her save Rob’s life. She wasn’t defined by what she had to do in order to survive. None of them were.
“It’s a damn miracle,” Vic said, “that I didn’t leave years ago.”
Conner turned toward his sister. Sand hissed against his goggles. He adjusted his ker to keep the sand out of his mouth. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.
His sister stared over the bow for a long while. When her ker flapped up, he could see that she was biting her lower lip.
“You want to know why I don’t go camping with you boys?” she asked.
Fuck yeah, he did. “Why?” Conner asked.
“Because any step in that direction, and I’m not turning back.” She turned toward him, unreadable behind dark goggles and ker. “I feel what Dad must’ve felt. There’s something bigger than us out there, stomping around. It’s either better than this place or it’s an end to me. I contemplate both.”
“If you go, I’m going with you.”
Vic laughed. “No. You’re not.”
“That’s bullshit.” Conner felt tears of anger well up in his eyes. “You can dive, but I can’t. You can move off to Low-Pub, but it’s too dangerous for me. You can date whoever you want, but Palmer is an idiot for hanging out with Hap.” Conner pointed up the mast with his good arm. “Flying over the dunes with red sails and a Legion ker and you’re gonna tell me what I can’t do because it’s too dangerous? But it’s okay for you? You’re a fucking hypocrite, Vic!”
His sister raised a hand in defeat, and Conner calmed himself. Vic turned toward him and lowered her ker so she could be heard without shouting. “I’m not a hypocrite,” she said. “I’d be a hypocrite if I cared about myself as much as I care about you. But I don’t. I think parents know this. Older siblings know it as well.”
