Now she found herself asking Diana to track those same scraps down, to get them out of the trash. Rose wanted to know more. She was torn between letting the girl rest and assailing her with questions. What of this distant city? What of this camp? What would her husband of old do if their roles were reversed? She tried to think like her husband the Lord, not the desperate and crazed man who had sent a girl to warn his people away. Not him, but the younger man who had once brought other Lords to their knees. The man she’d never told her children about. Would this man run and hide? She didn’t think so. And yet, he was asking them to.

And Rose had a terrible thought. What if her husband was still the same man, and he knew in his battle-scarred wisdom that running was the only option? What if he knew that now was the time for laying low, for giving in, for sliding deep beneath the sand? Rose wiped angrily at her cheek, damning him as was her daily ritual.

“I think this is all of it.”

She turned to find Diana beside her, holding tightly to a bundle of scraps tied up in one of the towels from the kitchen. Rose hadn’t even seen her climb the stairs.

“Good, good. Thanks.” Rose took the bundle.

Diana glanced at the door. “Is she … ? Is that girl okay?”

“She’ll be fine.”

“Another attack? Looked like a bomb, maybe, the way her clothes were shredded.”

“No. Something else. Keep an eye on my boys for me. And no appointments for the rest of the day.”

Diana frowned, but Rose didn’t care to explain. She let herself into her room and shut the door.

The girl was still sleeping. She held the edge of her sheet with her bandaged hands and kept it up against her neck, chin tucked down. Here was another miserable life her husband had made. Another life ruined, no doubt, in the name of love.

Rose set the bundle on the small table by the window where there was light. She untied the towel and began sorting through the scraps. Her stomach twisted up in knots at the sight of blood on the girl’s pants and her dive suit. The rubbery material of the dive suit felt strange—not quite like any fabric Rose had ever seen. It was like the girl’s strange accent, with words understandable but the sound not quite right. Everything about the girl was both alien and familiar.

Rose had to be careful not to prick herself on the torn bits of wire as she sorted through the scraps. As a dive suit, the outfit was ruined. But she found the belly of the suit and the pouch there that no diver would be without. Rose turned the large scrap of material into the light. She ran her fingers across stitches her husband had made. And there across them was a neat snip her scissors had left from cutting the material off the girl. Fumbling to open the pouch, her fingers shaking, hoping against hope, Rose felt the folded piece of paper inside.

She pulled out the letter. Unfolded it, hands trembling, not daring to breathe.

The sight of her husband’s handwriting blurred the words he’d written:

Rose,

I hope this message finds you well. I have forfeited the right to ask anything of you, but I trust the messenger will be cared for. All that awaited her here was misery and death. I don’t have much time left, and so I send her and these words to the gods. I pray I don’t write them in vain.

You alone know all the bad I’ve done. Running from my mistakes was by far the worst. There is a reason no one comes back from this place. They won’t let us. Don’t come for me. Run from these drums, Rose. They grind the earth to nothing here. They take our water from the sky. Mountains are turned into rivers. There is no talking to them, even those of us who have learned their language. We are the salamander living in a hole beneath the sand. They are the boot that unwittingly buries us. To them, it is just a march onward and onward. To us, it is a trampling.

They know you are out there. They know of Springston and Low-Pub. Others before me have told them, have begged to be released, have begged for help, for water, for any of the small miracles we glimpse of their cities and their life. But no help will ever come for us. Our voices will never be heard. They have lesser problems to worry over.

Listen to me, please. This is not a war to win. It’s not one to even fight. Don’t let the young there among you know what we’re up against. You remember how I was. Tell only the old and wise, those with burns and scars, that everything here is to be feared. Tell the Lords. Explain to them that these people are not evil, which we might understand and combat. Explain to them that these people do not care and cannot be made to, which is far worse. There can be no knocking on their doors that they might hear. Nothing we can do or say that will be as loud as the blasts that rob our rain. We are the salamander, they are the boot. You have to make the Lords understand.

Go west if you can. Forget the horror stories of what lies that way. Forget the mountains. Crush their peaks if you must, but go. Take the children and whoever will listen to reason. Those who will not succumb to reason, leave them behind to rot. Leave them here with me where we belong.

Yours,

Farren Robertson Axelrod — The Pickpocket of Low-Pub

Rose ran her fingers across her husband’s name. She could feel the graceful groove the press of his pen had made. A man she thought dead had written this. She sat there for a long time with that letter in her hands, gazing upon the words, while a young girl lay in the bed beside her, murmuring in her dreams.

Rose remembered a time and a life when things had been different. She read the letter again, hearing the voice of her husband reading it to her, remembering his smell, his touch, the itch of his beard against her neck, the way a man could lie with her and she would want it to last, not end as quickly as possible. Love she would give anything for.

There was no telling how long she sat like this, there in that feeble shaft of light dumping through sand-dusted glass. The sand hissed on the panes. It came in waves with the wind. Her daydreaming of the long ago brought with it more than the sound of Farren’s voice. It brought the thunder of drums, which she used to hear from the great wall. Drums like a heartbeat out of rhythm.

The empty water jar on the table shuddered, which snapped Rose back to the present. The drums were real. She could still hear them popping—that unmistakable dull roar of buried bombs being triggered. But too many. She lost count. Rose leaned over the table and banged on the window with her fist, loosening the cake13 so she could see. There was a noise outside her door, the sound of boots hurrying up the stairs and across the balcony. This was soon muffled by a growing grumble beyond her window, a thunderous din that grew and grew. There was noise everywhere. The door to her room flew open. Rose turned and saw Conner there, Rob standing behind him, both boys winded, eyes wide, looking to the bed and then to the window.

“Mom?”

Rose turned as the sound grew deafening. She peered through the glass toward Springston. The letter trembled in her hands. The jar wobbled as the violence approached.

“No,” she muttered, realizing what was coming, what was happening. The room shook. The Honey Hole quivered. The young girl woke suddenly and began screaming, and Rose yelled at her boys to take a deep breath, to get down. She dove from the window and threw herself across the girl.

And then the sand bashed through the window and buried them all.

43 • The Great Wall

Vic

Vic and Palmer spent a night at the oasis. Palmer needed time to regain some strength before another day of sailing, and Vic wasn’t comfortable navigating the dunes at night. They left at first light in a building breeze. She stopped twice to check on her brother and force him to drink. While she sailed, he rode along in the haul rack, a small bimini flapping above him, his head lolling side to side as he drifted off to sleep.

They arrived at Springston a little past noon, the sun just crossing the mast as Vic steered due south by compass. She took in the mainsheet and sailed the sarfer up and along a ridge of dunes toward the north side of town. Freeing the mainsail and furling the jib, she slowed the craft to a halt. The aluminum hull groaned on its rusty rivets as the pressure on the mast lessened, the sand crunching as the craft came to a rest. Vic set her teeth and rummaged through Marco’s gear bag—an unpleasant reminder of his absence. She always figured she’d lose him on a dive or in some retaliatory bombing, some nonsensical violence, an effort to depose one Lord and replace him with some identical other. She tried not to think of how it had happened. Or the click of that misfire aimed at her own skull. She found his binoculars in his bag and placed the strap around her neck. Today. Focus on the now.

“Why’re we stopping?” Palmer asked. He had propped himself up in the sarfer’s haul rack, Vic’s gear bag a pillow behind his head. The bimini Vic had rigged up to keep him in the shade made it difficult for him to see where they were.

“We’re stopping so I can get a look at town. Last time I was here, someone tried to kill me, and everyone is looking for you. We need food, and I’d like to get word to some friends to be on the lookout for Brock and his men. I’m hoping I can do both at the market on the edge of town here. If it looks too risky, we’re gonna push on to Low-Pub.”

Palmer groaned. “I don’t think I can go another dune in this rack, Vic.”

She unplugged her suit from the charger fed by the wind turbine and stood on the deck of the twin-hulled craft. She gave the boom a wary glance, made sure the wind wasn’t going to blow it toward her. “I know,” she said. “I’d rather not ride any farther myself. But I’d also prefer not to get killed, either.”

She pulled her goggles off, wiped the gunk from the corners of her eyes, and lifted the binoculars to study the lay of the land. There were a few sarfers parked along the dunes between her and Springston, dive flags flapping high up their masts to warn territorially of activity below. Vic had parked a little west and just north of the line between town proper and the unofficial scattering of shacks known as Shantytown. The last place she’d lived out there had been pushed under a dune a while ago. The morning market on the north side looked like it had already shut—the tents had been broken down and hauled off. Probably from lack of activity. So many had scattered in search of Danvar. There used to be a grocer just beyond the market; Vic could always leave Palmer with the sarfer and go check. She had the coin he’d scavenged. She just needed to get in and out without drawing attention.

She scanned farther to the east. There was a sandscraper near the great wall that had been abandoned for its lean. That might be the safest place to spend the night if Palmer couldn’t take more travel. The vagrants there would know where to grab an emergency bite. If she got desperate enough, she could make her way beneath the sand and just steal something. Better risk a hanging than starve for sure. Amazing how quickly one could reach such a decision. If it were Marco there suggesting such a thing, she’d be the voice of morality, of caution. But Marco was gone and people wanted her brother dead. She supposed there was a different sort of morality that took precedence. A hierarchy. Life and liberty were the Lords of action, now.

Focusing past the tall scrapers, she surveyed the great wall. The leaning concrete face was still in shadow. Another way she knew that it was a touch past noon. Vic remembered watching a quiet sunrise from those ramparts when she was a child, remembered not worrying about her next meal or the next cap of water. She licked her chapped lips as she remembered baths, as she remembered braying goats that could be had for their meat as well as their milk and cheese. Her stomach begged her to remember no more.

She spotted people up on the wall, little black specks of privilege. She envied them that home, that fortress that protected bustling Springston. Here was one solution to the winds from the east; a different answer to the same problem could be seen in Shantytown. The problem in common was that the world was in flux. The sands were always shifting, always pushing from east to west. Progressing, as her father used to say. Always progressing from east to west.

Vic swung the binoculars across Shantytown, where the people moved with the dunes. Not a day went by without a house collapsing. And the rhythmic rattle of hammers there was as constant as the wind. Build and destroy. Destroy and build. People tunneled through the dunes as they closed in around their homes. Back doors became front doors. A doormat shaken out and relocated. Adapt and survive. Life goes on.

People died, of course. Houses collapsed in the middle of the night. Sand rushed through breached walls at any hour. A handful mourned. Hands slapped faces in grief. And then came the rhythmic rattle of hammers, building. The wail of a newborn, breathing.

Change in Shantytown was gradual and continuous. Dunes slid and moved and people adjusted around them. The change was backbreaking and exhausting, but it was a way of life. Each day was much the same as the last. The misery came in buckets, which could be handled. Time. The dunes. Society. The people. They all progressed, as her father would say.

Such were Vic’s distractions as she scanned the line between Shantytown and Springston, thinking on change and life rather than food, putting off how best to proceed. The high sun beat down on her. She could hear Palmer twisting the cap off his canteen, knew they were both getting low on water. Making a decision with his life in the balance made it difficult to be prudent and wise. She was used to risking only her own life. She preferred diving solo.

“What do you see?” Palmer asked from the haul rack.

“One stall near the market,” she said. “Might be our best bet.”

She focused the binoculars on the stall, which would have to be their oasis. They could sail over and park close by, get in and out, drop some coin and a warning about Brock’s men. She watched a family tend the stall, a woman sweeping sand into piles and two kids hauling it out to the dunes. Maybe she could meet the children there and pay them to bring the food out. She watched them work, not wanting to hurry any one plan, and her mind flitted back to these two ways of managing the dunes, Springston’s and Shantytown’s. Here was the perfect vantage for seeing how both worked. In Shantytown, the gradual battle with the sand spread misery across the generations. Evenly distributed. While in Springston, people lived protected from the wind, with flat desert and tall buildings rarely swamped by the dunes. Years of woe were stored up behind a teetering wall. That woe missed some generations entirely. It built and built.