At one hundred and fifty he felt the press and he dropped his first tank. He watched it disappear behind him, glowing bright red in his visor with orange at the edges. With his twin tanks, he was good down past two hundred meters and could still make it back without a spare. If he was careful with his breathing, two fifty was doable. Beyond that and he’d have to rely on the spares—and he’d be well past his deep.
Peary stretched out and tried to slow his breathing even more, felt his muscles strain, and his mind too. He tried to keep himself going straight vertical, and focused on keeping the sand closest to his upper body as loose as possible. The pushback was strong; he could feel the tightness around his neck, and his lungs had to work to push outward with each breath. And to think that people—mere human divers—had gone down half a mile or more? Or so the rumors went.
Then he could see it. Not through his visor, but in his mind’s eye. His own body trapped in the sand. He immediately pushed that thought away, because that was the thought that would kill you. He’d almost coffined like that before, at a much shallower depth. A lapse like that and everything around him would turn hard as stonesand and his next breath would never come. Even with the tank and whatever precious oxygen remained in it, his lungs would never expand again, because the sand would crush in on him and thwart his inhale. So he put his thoughts on Marisa, and he pictured himself telling her he loved her and how much he appreciated her.
Past two hundred meters. The death zone. Hard to tell now because the reading in his visor was starting to fade. Losing all contact with the surface. He stopped and looked around, concentrated on keeping the sand soft around himself. He looked down, and when he calmed himself, he saw the first dot of orange, and then red, and it surprised him. As if this whole dive had been an exercise and he’d never really hoped to find anything. He moved again. The dot grew until he knew he was looking at a
The Poet licked his lips, even though he knew better. Waste of water, and it made them dry out faster. His daddy used to smack him when he licked his lips out in the dunes under the relentless sun. He would say, “Go on and cut your wrists, boy, it’ll be faster!”
The sand near where the divers had disappeared didn’t stir, and all the men were watching, waiting for one of the divers to break the surface, to hold up those precious containers of liquid life. Someone told an awful joke, and everyone laughed, even the other divers, even though the joke was about how divers dying down there was just something to be expected.
That’s when the first man died. He was in mid-laugh when it happened. He was a diver too, laughing about divers dying, and a spear went through his throat and pinned him to the gnarly gray-black treetop that arrogantly dared poke its way up through the sand.
Then the arrows and spears rained down and one nearly took off the top of the Poet’s head, too. Knocked him right down into the sand, and he saw the blood flow down, mixing with the silica and grit. His own blood, red and thick.
He glanced up and men were falling everywhere, most dead and some wounded, and other men were streaming down the dunes toward them. Brigands. Screaming in the voice of war. At a glance they looked like they could be Brock’s men, but the Poet couldn’t tell with blood running into his eyes. The two divers poked up then, at just the wrong time, and the Poet saw them killed right quick. They always thought they’d die down under the sand, or up on top in a bar somewhere, but they died half in and half out, with sand up to their waists.
Without hesitation, the Poet reached under his robe and activated his suit. He’d learned to dive as a boy, hiding from his father in the box town outside of Low-Pub. And he was good, too—a natural, they said. He never dove deep and he never took salvage, but he could move sand like no one’s business. But that was before his daddy taught him about the fundamental worthlessness of a diver, about how being a diver was like being a dog, only without the intrinsic values of loyalty and obedience that came with the canine species. So the Poet had given up diving, though he kept up his skills by going out a couple of times a year—out into the Thousand Dunes, to make sure he could survive.
Now he took a big gulp of air and made himself sink until the sand swallowed him whole. He struggled with the robe on, but what could he do? He worked his way under the sand and over to his gear bag, and when he knew he was near it he thrust his hand up above the surface and groped around until he felt his hand hit the bag.
The dead men were only a few feet apart, so whatever had happened, it looked like they had died together. Maybe there was some peace for them in that, but Peary wouldn’t know. He was, as always, alone.
He softened the sand as best as he could, but it was tough going at that depth. He did the calculations in his mind and he realized he didn’t have enough juice to make it back to the top if he tried to drag both divers’ bodies with him, even if he could physically do it, which he doubted. One diver was clutching some kind of case in his hands, and had obviously been trying to get the salvaged materials back up to the surface when something had happened. It was a pretty common story with divers. Coffining happened most often either when a diver panicked, or was trying to move heavy salvage.
Instinctively, Peary reached his hand down the man’s leg to see if the man was carrying a dive knife—something that might have his name on it so that the body could be identified. He couldn’t find the knife, but he did find out what had contributed to the man’s death.
There was a long, steel cable wrapped tightly around the man’s leg. He felt farther down and found the cable’s other end was wound almost in a knot around the heavy metal of the structure. He pulled hard a few times to try to free the diver’s leg, but the man was stuck and there was no extricating him.
Peary took a pull on his own regulator and got that response that told him his own oxygen was running out.
Time to head back up
He kicked again, pushing surface-ward, but on his second kick he felt his tank go dry—and there was still no red object above him on which he could focus his attention. Nothing to give him hope. In the distance, he could barely make out the faint pulse of his beacon on the surface. Too far away to mean anything if he didn’t find the spare tank. He adjusted his regulator and reached back to fiddle with the knob, checking the line too. Nope. Already his mind was screaming and fear was causing him to sweat despite the cold. He knew he could hold his breath for several minutes more, but his body didn’t listen to his mind, and that craving to exhale came upon him like never before. He dropped one of the cases—an offering, or maybe it was just panic—and pushed harder upward. Still no red in sight, and he felt himself growing lightheaded, and all the while the weight and pushback impressed upon him that the sand didn’t care.
He tried to calculate how many days he could go, and how much battery he had left in his suit, but his calculations went awry as his head began to spin and his consciousness drifted in and out like the sift. He brought his hands to his face and saw the blood was still running down past his temple and matting in his beard. He tried to mouth the word “blood,” but he never got it out before he fell unconscious back onto the dune. For its part, the dune received him with apathy. Just another body in the sand.
The diver looked down at him and saw him working on his head cloth and smiled. “Try not to do anything stupid. Seeing as how you already got yourself near-enough killed once already on this trip.”
The Poet glared at the diver. “I’ll have you know that I am known as the Poet, and I—”
“I don’t care if you’re one of the Lords himself or maybe one of the gods of Danvar!” the diver spat. “They just call me Peary, but surprise, looks like we both bleed the same. And if you start up bleeding again I don’t know if I’ll be able to get it stopped again.”
“Well, I do thank you for saving my life, but—”
The diver stopped him with a raised hand. “I don’t care what else you have to say, but your thank-you is received and appreciated. Now shut up while I finish my story. You see, the two cases I’d found and pulled up were heavy and full…”
The old Poet stared at Peary, not knowing what to think about the young man. The unraveled cloth was now whipping in the wind as the sarfer cut in an angle down from a very high dune and sped toward a long area of flats. The light was enough now that he could see the mountaintops off to the south and west, and he guessed they must be getting close to Springston—or maybe they were already west of it. He held the cloth up so that he could see it in the light. It was some kind of garment, and it was the brightest orange he’d ever seen. It was a color that didn’t happen in nature. Almost electric, like the orange you’d see in a visor. There was an emblem on the front of the garment, and words that he couldn’t yet make out.
“…and the cases were full up with clothes and trinkets. More stuff from the old world than I’d ever seen in one place! Just
The Poet interrupted. “Are we going to Springston?”
“No.”
“Why not?” the Poet asked.