She hurried up the slope of sand until her legs were sore and would barely obey. She angled for where the Honey Hole used to sit. Vic pulled her band on, flipped her visor down, powered up her suit as she dove forward. She disappeared into the sand with barely a splash. Down where she was free and nothing could pin her.
Bright objects everywhere. The yellow and orange of great spoils, a scroungers paradise, so much worth saving. There were riches here carried all the way from the great wall. The rich were here as well. Vic saw a form trapped ahead of her, probably too late, but she formed a column of sand beneath the body and sent it to the surface. There were entire homes buried and flattened. There was debris everywhere to dodge. And ahead of her, right where shed been running, was the three-story building she remembered, the house of nightmares, completely encased by the dune. No one would ever be harmed in that building again. They already had been. They already had been. The place was full of sand.
Vic slid through a busted window, hardening the sand around her to protect herself from the shards of glass. The walls inside were askew. The building had nearly buckled. It might have buckled were it not for the low concrete wall on the back side of the building to hold back the sand. Vic dialed her visor down to account for the loose pack inside the Honey Hole. Too bright in there. Bodies everywhere. Chairs and tables and the flash of glass jars and bottles. She raced up through the great hall and over the railingor where the railing once stood. A purplish pocket of air along the third floor. The sand only got so high. Vic started to move who she could toward the air, but there wasnt enough time. Not enough time. Even if the people
there had gotten a lungful when it happened. Even if they had closed their mouths. Dead in minutes. Her mom was gone. Never got to say goodbye.
Vic saw the door to the room where it had happened all those years ago. The door was still whole, still solid, still closed on what took place in there. No one knew but those who had been inside. No one. Suffocating.
In her visor, her suits power glowed a bright green. A full charge. Ready for a deep dive, all that extra juice for holding the world at bay, for holding up that column of sand and air that was always pressing down on her, pressing down. Vic only had breath enough in her lungs for another minute or two. Her heart was racing, burning through her oxygen, not prepared for this. Not ready to see this. Not ready for her mother to die.
She couldnt scream beneath the sand. There were no divers to hear the shouts rising up in her throat. Nowhere for that rage to go. But something inside Vic burst, something like a great wall meant to hold back the years and years. It toppled all at once, anger flowing outward, a power shed honed in the deepest of sand now surging through her suit. That power exploded; it raged in the deadly spill from that tumbling dune; and the muscle to lift a motor, a car, to rip the roof off an ancient skyscraper, billowed forth.
There was a rumbling in the earth, a swelling, a press of sand from beneath, and the Honey Hole creaked upward, out of the spill, Vic screaming and crying beneath the sand where no diver could hear her, hands curled into claws of rage and effort, the sand spilling into her mouth and onto her tongue, sand soaked in beer and tasting of the awful past, and a grumble, a grumble as the world tilted and walls popped and sand flowed from orifices, out of windows and doors, flowing like warm honey, like blood and milk, draining from that awful place where the past had long been buried, as the Honey Hole rose out of the desert and settled, shuddering, atop the dunes.
The Honey Holefull of the spitting and coughing and bewildered and deadwas sickeningly saved. And Vic, exhausted again in that place, terrified and weeping, collapsed to the ground outside her mothers door, her mothers open door, blood coming only from her ears and nose this time.
Part 5: A Rap Upon Heavens Gate 
45 A Quiet Dawn
He took the steps two at a time. His brother Rob chased after him. There were more of the muffled blasts in the distance as they raced down the balcony. Danger outside. Violence. Or maybe it was nothing. Maybe it was cannon fire to celebrate the discovery of Danvar. Conner almost felt silly for running to his mother, a child doing what boys did in a panic, turning to a parent to save them, to tell them what to do.
He threw open her door, knew there were no clients inside, just his half-sister Violet who had emerged from No Mans Land. And as he stepped into the room, Conner felt a rumble in the earth, felt it through his fathers boots, and he knew what was happening. He knew that this was more than the usual bombs. That great roar and that impossibly loud hiss meant the sands were coming for them all.
And in the brief flutter between two beats of his heart, as the din grew and grew, as his mother yelled for the boys to run, to hold their breath, to move , Conner thought only of diving onto the bed, of protecting the girl hed spent the last two days looking after. He bolted across the room, Rob on his heels, got halfway there, when the wall of sand slammed into the Honey Hole.