Thoughts spun. She saw the ages counted by each collapse. Empires that came and went and that made up all of their history and lore. Their ends were both inevitable and unpredictable. The catastrophic nature of each grew bigger with time. No one thought an end would come in their lifetime. People glanced up at the towering wall of concrete and iron bars and reckoned their children or grandchildren would see it topple. It would be left to some distant generation to build the next wall, and to build it stronger. Bigger. Like each fall.
Meanwhile, on the back of the wall, the sand grew heavier and heavier. One grain at a time. Like a clock. Like the ticking clock on a bomb. Or a whole string of themdozens of bombs like loaves of breadburied along the base of the wall in the middle of the night, placed there by divers with a hellish bent, divers and pirates who had grown weary of that cool shadow that divides one world from the other, that harsh line between those who toil all day and those who can afford to wait.
Those who think they can afford to wait.
Tick. Tick. Tick. Sand and second hands. Vic watched from the top of the dune, from the deck of her dead lovers sarfer, a sickness deep in the pit of her stomach, a powerful dread, all of this flashing through her mind as the dull thumps hit her in the chest.
The roars were muffled. They came like drums beat out of rhythm: boom boom-boom boom. Boom.
And then the teeteringthe unholy teetering. A thing meant to last leaned its sad head. The body shuddered, losing its balance, feet knocked out from underneath. Vic covered her mouth and watched. Sand peppered the binoculars. Palmer yelled at her and asked what that was, his voice muffled by his ker.
The luckiest in life became the unluckiest. Those who lived nearest the wall were crushed. Those who lived inside it disappeared. These were the ones with the most to lose, and they lost everything. The sand they had let build for generations flooded down, finishing what the bombs had started. And a slab of concrete as high as many of the sandscrapers thudded impossibly flat.
The dune Vic stood on trembled. Sand flowed down the face of every dune in sight as gravity and the trembling of the world made them all lose an inch of height. Vic could feel the impact in the deck of the sarfer, in the soles of her feet. The rumble came moments later, a roar deep in her chest. And then a great wave of sand slid through Springston, a torrent of this unnatural dune finding its rightful level, flowing like water down on the sandscrapers and markets and square, buildings toppling as their knees were knocked out from under them, small black shapes spilling from the upper reaches, these people wrenched violently from their bequeathed homes.
Onward, the sand flowed. It spilled out to the side and caught Shantytown, those few unlucky enough to live along the edge of the shadows, where the summer solstice made the walls shadow more inclusive for a season. These went too.
Only in the distance were they spared. The reckoning of the decades made good in a single moment. Shantytown the new Springston. And the Honey Hole, Vic saw, knocked aside at the far reach of the sands wake, right along that fuzzy line between town proper and town improper.
Her mother, buried. A town, lost. A small group of men, somewhere out there, cheering.
The wind stirred. The heavens themselves seemed to adjust to this new world. The sarfers boom creaked as the mainsail shifted. Palmer was yelling. Vic ignored him and jumped back into her seat. She grabbed the lines and pulled them taut. The jib unfurled with a mighty pop, and the sarfer lurched into motion. Vic sailed the craft dangerously down the side of the dune, fighting the tiller, her mind in splinters. She sailed for where shed last seen the Honey Hole. She had vowed never to return to that place. Now, she couldnt get there fast enough.
44 Held Down, Violently
awayShe had only gone inside for a drink. She and two friends. One drink had led to two drinks. She still had her wits about her, was able to tell the men no. She wasnt laughing, not anymore. But the rooms were there, as was the expectation from those who had learned that anything they saw and wanted could be had for a price. A price. Cheap for them. Rent a room. Cmon, itll be fun. Firm hands. Friends egging her on.
Tears streaked down Vics face as she ran across the sand, remembering.
Two men. Laughing. Beer on their breaths. Strong arms from building and making. Strong arms for tearing and taking. Laughing. Her screams were funny to them. Her arms weak. But the way she squirmed made them roar. And Vic could hear her friends shouting through the walls, shouting now for them to stop, rattling locked doors, yelling at the people in another room, where similar horrors were more habit than happenstance.
Loose sand. Vic reached the end of intact houses, the extent of the onrush of that great dune. She ran past people gazing, people watching, people standing still, not helping, not hearing the muffled screams, the calloused hands over pretty mouths, the beer-breath lips crushing down, the feeling of sand piled on, of being buried alive, a pressure against new parts of her, the first time, crushing, crushing.