Sand Omnibus

“Water up to your elbows,” Conner scoffed. “And where’s all this water come from?”



It was clear he didn’t believe her. Father warned Violet this would happen, that no one would believe. “The water comes from the river,” she said. “But you can’t drink it. Some do, and they die. Because of the metals and the mining. The water for drinking comes from way upstream, past all the camps, but they don’t give us much of that. Father says they starve our mouths and drown our arms just to drive us mad. But it didn’t make me mad. Just thirsty.”



Saying this won her another sip from the jar. Violet felt better. It was the sheets and the roof over her head and the jar of water and people to talk to.



“What’s the name of this city?” Rose asked. “Where’s my husband?”



“The city is called Agyl. The people outside the fence call it that, but they talk funny, and Father says I talk too much like them because I was born in the camp. They say it’s a small city, but Father says it’s bigger than where he comes from. I don’t know. It’s the only city I’ve ever seen. Just a mining town. The big cities, they say, are more to the sunrise, all the way to the sea. But that’s—”



“What’s a sea?” Rob asked.



More snapping.



“Tell me about the people in this camp,” Rose said. “How many are there? Where did they come from?”



Violet took a deep breath. She eyed the water. “There are hundreds,” she said. “Five hundreds? More. Most come from the sunset like Father. Some get there by doing something wrong in the cities. A few of these get let out after so long of working, but more are always let in. Our camp had a big number for a name, which Father said must mean there are lots of them. There are people in our camp who came from the north or the south and are already hungry like us. The ones who come from the sunset don’t get let go. Not ever. They have fences and towers where they watch for them and nets to put them in.”



“How is … your father?” Rose asked. Her voice sounded funny. Violet eyed the jar.



“Is it okay to have more water now? It’s been a while.”



Rose let her take a small sip. It reminded Violet of her father, getting a ration like this, and she started crying. She wiped the tears off her cheek with the back of her wrist and drank them too. “Father said you’d ask how he was and to say that he was okay, but Father doesn’t always tell the truth.”



This made Rose laugh, but then she covered her mouth and was crying, too. The boys were quiet without being snapped at. Violet thought of what she wanted to say, some of what she was told to say with some truth mixed in as well.



“They don’t feed us enough,” she said. “That’s what the adults say. And so people come in with muscles and then it goes away. Sometimes the people go away all at once. That’s when their sheets are pulled up over their heads. I always tucked my chin down like this—” She lowered her chin against her chest and pretended to hold sheets tight up against her neck. “—so it wouldn’t happen to me. Father was stronger than most of the men there. Tall. With dark eyes and dark skin like the men from the sunset and dark hair like yours.” She nodded to Conner. “But I could lay a finger between his ribs while he slept, and his ribs would go out and in, and he gave me too much of his bread.”



Violet thought on what else she needed to say. There was a lot. So much that her thoughts were getting jammed like the trough sometimes did when too much metals came.



“Did he tell us how to get to him?” Conner asked. “What did he say we should do?”



There was no snapping for quiet. Her second mom wiped her cheeks and waited for an answer.



“He wrote a note—” Violet said.



“A note from Father?” Rob asked.



“Where is it?” Conner wanted to know.



“It was in my suit, against my skin. I think I lost it with my pack. Father told me not to read it …” She hesitated.



“It’s okay,” Rose said. Her second mom reminded Violet a lot of her first one.



“I read part of it while he was writing it. He made me promise not to read any more. The part I read said not to come for him, to look west over the mountains, and then a confusing part about the sand in the wind and how it comes from the mining they do, that the wind also comes from something bad … something with the lands. I’m sorry. I’m trying to remember …”



“You’re doing a great job,” Rose said. She smiled, but there was still water in her eyes.



“Father used to tell me that it doesn’t rain where he comes from. He said the dirt the mining men throw up in the air for the magnets makes the clouds release their water into the cavern, and that’s where the river comes from, and that all the rain meant for his people is taken out of the air by the sand.” She licked her lips. Again, the sting of a wolf’s bite. “He used to get really mad and talk about this and watch through the fence as the sun went down. There was always the loud booms out that way that made my ears hurt and blocked the sky up so everything was a haze, but he spent all his time on that side. The sunset people were the only ones who liked it over there. Father wanted me to stay close, but I’d rather pray for candy and not rocks by the other fence.”



“How did you get out?” Conner asked. And Rob nodded. Rose said nothing to quiet the boys, so Violet figured it was okay to answer.



“Father gathered stuff. For as long as I can remember, maybe before I was born. Years and years. He said he was going to get us out, just the three of us, and then Mother died when I was six, and he said it would be me and him. He kept stuff in the sand, said it was silly none of the guards looked there, that people would know better where he was from. Bits of wire, a rubber raincoat, batteries, a drill someone left behind because the motor wouldn’t work—but Father knew how to fix it. He spent the better part of a year getting a tool for melting wire. It was all so slow. I wanted him to hurry. And then I could place two fingers down between his ribs while he slept and his breathing sounded like he needed to cough all the time, but he said he was going to get us out.



“And then he showed me what he was making, made me swear not to tell any of the sunset people, and I had to wear it under my clothes so it wouldn’t be found. He would have me take it off at night so he could work on it, adjust the wires so they didn’t scratch me, and then he showed me how—”



“He made a dive suit,” Conner said.



Violet nodded. Rose held the jar to Violet’s lips, and she took two swallows. She felt selfish after this and dabbed her lips with her bandaged hand.



“There’s a big crack in the ground,” she said. “This is where the muddy river is, where the sand is thrown into the sky and the metals are got out. Bigger than a hundred leaps across and it got bigger and bigger every year. Father said I would have to go under this, that I would have to hold my breath a long time, that it was the only way out. He made me hold my breath while I worked the trough, made me do it over and over, could tell when I was using my nose. I practiced until I could do it for long enough.



“I learned to move the sand, and one day I wanted to show him how good I was getting, so I went under the fence and came up the other side toward the city, but he got madder than I’ve ever seen him and told me never to go that way, that I’d only end up back here and then they’d know what we could do and everything would be worse. I had to go west, he told me, and I had to tell his people to keep going west. That’s what he said. There had been a family in the camp when I was too little to remember who shared a story about a sea even past where the sun went at night, where the water wasn’t muddy. It never rained there, but there was water as far as you could see.”



Conner grunted at this. Violet remembered how the sunset people in the mining camp hadn’t believed this story, either. But her father had. And Violet, too.



“He said we shouldn’t come for him,” Rose said, almost to herself.



Violet nodded. “There were fights in camp. Some of the people from the city said there were too many of us, more and more coming all the time, that we were making their life bad. But our life felt bad. Father said I had to get out, that I was young and strong and that I could make it. He made me dive at night when everyone was asleep. And for months and months, he drank half rations and filled bladders with the other halves. He caught rats and made jerky. Said it kept him going, all these things. Said it was good to stay busy. Said he never should’ve come there, never left his people, but that I would make it okay because I would come back and tell about the world that doesn’t care for us.”



“And you’re a sand diver,” Rob said, his voice full of awe, as Violet paused to catch her breath. All the nights of hiking and thinking and being alone made her want to say everything all at once.



“The diving was easy,” she said. “The walking was the hard part. It was twelve days of walking. It took Father nine, but he said it would take me twelve, that I would have to count and time it right. It was very important, the day I left. Which day. He drew a picture of the mountains and showed me which was the Pike and that I would keep this just left of my nose and the star to the north directly over my right shoulder, and on the twelfth day I would see smoke and on the twelfth night I would see fire, right past a crack in the ground that he said I could leap over at the narrowest—”



“He knew we’d be camping,” Conner said.



Violet nodded. “He said if I missed the fire I would come to a big wall and a small town, but that if I found the smoke and the fire that I would be home right then. And I was doing good, walking at night and sleeping all day and being careful with my water. Until a wolf came—”



“A wolf?” Rob asked.



“You … you call them cayotes, I think. In camp, they had different names for things, talked a whole other language. I grew up with both, so I forget which goes where. Dad used to say my accent was like theirs. The cayote came for the last of my jerky while I slept on the ninth night. I should’ve just let him have it, but I was scared and so I fought back, and he ripped me good, tore open my pack, and I ran. My last bladder was torn and all the water spilled out, and I ran all day thinking the … cayote would come for me, but it didn’t. I was real tired and thirsty after that, and I had two days more to find the crack in the ground, and my knees were messed up and my stomach hurt real bad, so I went and went all day and night and then on the twelfth day, I was falling asleep while walking and I would wake up on the sand, and the sun would be hot, and I had bad dreams, and my hands and knees were burning, but then I saw the smoke like Father said, and the night came and I saw the fire, and then I had a dream that you were there.”



She looked at Conner. Took deep breaths. Realized she was winded, that she’d been talking and talking. But there was another sip from the jar for her efforts, and when her second mom Rose wiped the hair off her head and tucked it behind her ears, it was with a different look on her face. Her hand stayed on Violet’s shoulder. Everyone else in the room was looking at her with wrinkles of worry, but Violet just rested against the pillows and enjoyed the feel of the sheets and the grumble of her belly around the water. She wasn’t worried. She had made it. Just like Father said she would.



42 • The Letter



Rose



Rose left the young girl to rest in a bed too rarely slept in. She made Conner and Rob leave her in peace and pester her with no more questions. Poor Rob had to be dragged away. Both boys had spent the previous day and all night orbiting that bed, waiting for the girl to recover, to come to, to say something. Now they sat downstairs around a table in the slowly emptying bar and slurped greedily at bowls of leftover stew. Rose watched them eat over the balcony rail, her mind in all places at once.



Down the balcony and through a door, Rose could hear a drunk’s labored grunts. Valerie’s room. That such baseness could occur alongside events of staggering significance was like a joke from the gods. Rose fought the urge to bash Valerie’s door down and slap the drunk off her, to yell at them both, to shut it down, all of it down, not just the Honey Hole but the entire exercise of going through the motions, living life, being there among those dunes. If what the girl said was true—that the elsewhere her husband had disappeared into was worse than this place—then the dream of so many for an easy escape was really just another hell beyond their reckoning.



Rose leaned over the rail, wondering what was taking Diana so long. She caught Conner staring up at her. Rob looked up as well. They were just boys. Just boys. But they possessed something like protective ownership of the girl. Conner had even referred to Violet as his sister, after she’d fallen back to sleep. Another sister, this girl who would cause a storm. Yes, her story would lead to chaos once it was out. News of Danvar was nothing. The sands would not sit still for this.



Hard to believe it was only the day before that the boys had arrived with the girl in their arms. Rose had nearly turned them away. She had very nearly refused them when they showed. She did plenty of patching after the occasional brawl, and was the one her girls came to after one of their clients got too rough, but she didn’t want it known that just anyone could be brought in with wounds from elsewhere. Then Conner had explained just how far elsewhere, had said this girl came from No Man’s Land, and that she had a message from their father.



Half of such a sentence as this could fry a woman’s brain. The whole had taken over her limbs. Rose barely remembered carrying the child up the stairs and to her room. She barely remembered cutting the foul clothes from her, getting the sand out of her cuts, sewing her up like a pair of torn stockings. It was as though she’d watched another’s hands apply a salve and pour water between the girl’s lips. Someone else had yelled at her ten o’clock to come back later. No, that was her. She remembered that. And she remembered telling Diana to get rid of the clothes, which were little more than bloody rags with bits of wire in them.