Palmer mustve seen the look of disbelief on her face. Theyd dug a pit, he said. Did I mention that? But we were down three hundred true. Maybe close to three-fifty.
You went down three hundred meters, Vic said. Are you out of your fucking mind?
You can but I cant?
She didnt have an answer for that. Not without sounding like their mother. Was it untouched?
Something flashed across her brothers face. Not quite, he said. Two other divers had gone down before us, but they didnt make it back.
So you were the first to get down and back up? You discovered Danvar. Vic heard the awe and disbelief in her own voice.
Palmer looked away. Hap made it back before me. And Hap saw it first. Hes the one.
But you said Hap was dead
Her brother reached up and patted his forehead as if looking for something. My visor, he said. They got both our visors. He seemed to deflate even further with this, seemed to sink down within that too-big dive suit, like the last juice of life had been squeezed from him.
Do you think you could find Danvar again? Vic asked.
Palmer hesitated. I dont know. Maybe. If we found their camp, or the remnants of their fire, then maybe. But without the hole they made, itd be too deep to reach those buildings again.
I could get down there, she told him.
Her brother searched her face, almost as if seeing if she was kidding.
Do you know how they found it? she asked. How did they know to dig there?
Conner nodded up toward the sky. The stars, he said. Colorados belt. They had a map that showed Low-Pub and Springston and another town in a line, just like the constellation. The third star was Danvar. They knew where it was.
A map
Her brother flinched. A jolt of life and energy. He patted excitedly at his stomach, fumbled for the zipper on his pouch, and out spilled coin after coin
Shit, Vic said, plucking one out of the sand. It was a copper. Untarnished. Beautiful. Thirty or more pieces spilled out and were quickly covered by the rush. Her brother seemed uninterested in these as she gathered them up. He pulled out a folded piece of paper.
A map, he said. The paper trembled as he struggled to get it unfolded. Vic helped. She took over. It was a large sheet. It popped in the wind, sand collecting in the folds with a hiss and sliding down into her lap. Vic had seen corners and scraps of maps like this, paper rotted by the sand, by time, by moisture, by being passed from hand to hand. But this was whole and untouched and a beauty to behold.
You got their map, Vic said. Fuck, Palm, you got their map.
No. I found it in the scraper. It was with the coin.
Vic bent over to protect the paper from the wind. She folded the map in half and then in half again, had to wrestle with the creases, was worried she or the wind might rip it. There were lines and place-names and numbers everywhere. Every scrap of a map shed ever seen or heard about could fit together and not equal even a fraction of this massive, undisturbed sheet.
Do you know what this means? Vic studied the square shed left exposed after her folds. There was a bright yellow collection of squiggles with the word Pueblo written above. But it was a series of rectangles that had caught her eye and had drawn her attention to this part of the map. It was the crooked letter Y the rectangles made
at one point, the other part like the letter H. There was a curved structure that stood along the side of them, which she knew had once been covered with a tent but now was full of sand.
PuhEhBlow. EnterNational. AirPort. She sounded it out, stumbling over the words, reading them phonetically. She traced her finger from the collection of long rectangles that she had seen in her own visor, that she knew as cracked concrete slabs beneath the sand, to where she knew the ruins of Low-Pub lay. It was the same place. No doubting it.
What is that? Palmer asked. His eyes were wide. Can you read it?
I know this place. Ive been here. This is Old Low-Pub, the buried ruins just west of town. Fuck, Palm, this is a gold mine.
Old Low-Pub is picked over to hell and back, Palmer reminded her.
I know. But this is a map of the old world . This thing is ancient. And if its to scale She held three fingers together and placed them between Low-Pub and the dive site where shed been picking over a cache of bags for months. Flipping the map around, she refolded it to reveal something else. She measured her way north three fingers at a time. There was an even larger squiggle of lines and place-names right where she expected them to be. Colorado Springs, she said. She felt a chill, reading these words, realizing it was Springston. Visors were suddenly pulled down over her eyes that allowed her to see through all the sand that choked the old world. She was a god watching from on high. This is Twin Rock Path, she said. She showed her brother the dark set of double lines that ran between Low-Pub and Springston. It was the path their great-grandfather had followed in order to discover Low-Pub. Or so legend had it.