Every day, Vic told him. Every day, the sun rises out of the sand without effort. It glides. It burns. It melts all in its path, and then it shows us how its done in the evening as it bores straight down through the jagged peaks. Through solid rock, Palm. And all youve gotta to do is move the sand .
The sun. His father was calling. His father, who told him he would be a great diver one day. Sitting on his lap, Palmers earliest memory, back when his father had been a great man and a ruler, telling his firstborn son that he would be the greatest of divers one day. Nearby, Vic listened, ten years old, sitting in the same room and unmentioned. Unmentioned.
No shadows cast, not from this son. No, this son lived in shadows. Lived in the dark and cool sand. Watched his sister dive and rise up again, basking, radiating glory, a rebel and a pirate and a scrounger and a great diver. But Palmer who saw Danvar when it was a legend who spilled the life of a man with his dive knife who would die with a tank of air on his back and a quarter charge in his suit his white bones at three hundred meters.
Three hundred meters. The depth reading flashed in Palmers awareness like the appearance of a mothers face in the midst of a burning fever. Like a knock at a door in the middle of a nightmare. A small part of his brain yelled at the rest of him, saying hey, you might want to see this.
But hed been going up. Should be less than three hundred meters. His lungs were straining. And then he remembered the bowl theyd dug, the deep shaft in the sand theyd made, the extra two hundred meters. Fuck, hed only gotten started. No way, no way, no way.
Palmer stopped moving. He worried less about the flow and more about breathing. The sand held him, but he was able to draw air through the regulator. A breath. A sip. Life. That surreal feeling taking him right back to the day Vic had taught him how to dive, had told him to breathe while his head was under the sand, his body telling him this was impossible, his brain saying not to do it, his sister yelling at him, her voice distant and muffled, to fucking breathe.
And breathing.
Palmer managed a gulp. He peered down at the now-faint image of the sandscraper below. Up was the other way. Away from Danvar. He kicked; he grunted with effort, the sounds of his screams trapped in his own head, his own throat. So far to go. Where was he? There were no transponders, no beacons, but his visor was getting his depth now, so the surface was up there somewhere. No beacon to show him the way. And the shaft theyd descended, that Brocks men had made, that bright yellow needle deep in the earth, was missing. Thats why so deep.
It grew harder to breathe, even as he pierced two hundred meters. Should be getting easier. Air was running out. Fuck. Air running out. Only enough to get back to the bottom of that well. No. Not this close. He wouldnt die this close. He felt the resistance of the dry tank, that fruitless tug on a bottle sucked dry, and his air was gone. Maybe he could get fifty meters on a lungful. Maybe. Two hundred meters to go. He kicked anyway. He wouldnt make it. This registered as bright as metal in loose sand. He wouldnt make it. Could feel himself blacking out. Still another one fifty, as deep as many divers dared to plunge,
at the bottom of most dives, and he was down there with a lungful of nothing but toxic exhalations.
An orange spot in the sand above. Thirty meters away. Something to steer for. A dying light. An island in the vastness. His body needed to breathe; his body told him to spit out his regulator and suck down sand; it was that impulse at the end of asphyxiation, the urge to get something into the lungs, anything , even the soil. Whatever it took to breathe . To gasp . Just fucking do it. Clog his lungs with sand and end the pain. He would. He would. But an orange spot. A body.
Palmer ran out of energy. The sand would no longer flow. There was a diver there beside him, and he numbly, distantly, in some corner of his diminishing soul, knew why Hap never came back for him.
Hap had never made it.
Palmer spit out his regulator. He tasted the sand on his tongue. He could see Haps face, the way his body was twisted out of shape, something wrong about that. Something wrong. A frozen look on Haps face, mouth and eyes wide, regulator dangling. Palmers regulator. Palmers regulator.
Palmer flowed the sand around the regulator and grabbed it, placed it into his mouth. No hope. No hope. But air cares not for hope. It is or it isnt. And here it was. Here it was .
Air.
Energy flowed into Palmers cells like electricity. He blinked away the tears behind his visor. Vic and his father were yelling at him. His mother was yelling at him. His baby brothers. Hap. All yelling at him. Go. Go. Fucking breathe.
A hundred meters to the surface, to the bottom of that slowly filling bowl of sand. No time to switch tanks. But this was sand he could handle. Even as he could taste the wet metal on his tongue that let him know this other tank was running dry, this tank and regulator he knew so well running dry, he also knew the loose sand. He knew this dead diver. Palmer was a scrounger, a sand diver, one who brought back heavy loads from the past and saw the sun glint off them for the first time in generations. He flowed the sand upward, pulling Hap and his tank with him, rising through the last hundred meters of sand as his air ran out, as his air ran out, but he knew and Vic told him that he could make it. And he believed.