“Rob!” he called. “Rob! Wake up!”

There was a glow inside the tent a moment later. Conner started to set the child down outside the tent when the flap parted, his bleary-eyed brother peering out. “What time—?” Rob began.

“Help me get her inside,” Conner said. And Rob did. The girl was unable to move on her own. The two boys got her into the tent, and Rob closed the flap on the wind. The dive light dangling from the tentpole threw light and shadows across the disheveled bedding. Conner laid the girl out, then unbuckled his hip belt and shrugged off his pack. He caught Rob studying the heavy load as he set it aside.

“Don’t just sit there,” Conner said. “Get her some water.”

Rob looked up at him, blinked away the fog of sleep, and then lurched into action. He pawed through his bedroll to find his canteen while Conner got a good look at the girl. And the story he had made up in his head was shattered. Not the story he had prepared for Rob about stealing out for a piss and finding kids braving the gap—but the story he had told himself about where this child had come from.

Springston was not so big that he didn’t recognize most faces, even if he didn’t know their names. But this child was a stranger for other reasons. She was emaciated, her arms like the legs of a bird, one arm folded across her chest, the other bent around her head. Her britches were in tatters and of a strange cloth. The knees of this material were worn through, the flesh beneath torn and bloody and with dark rivulets tracing down her shins. The wounds were black from having dried at least a day ago, but there was fresh wetness on top from where the scabs had ripped and ripped. There was sand in all the wounds.

She moaned. Her lips were cracked and dry, her face burnt like a daywalker’s. The shoulder of her shirt was missing, torn away, the rest of it barely hanging on. She looked as though she’d been dragged across a thousand dunes, and when Conner saw the bloody stumps of her fingers where her nails used to be, he knew that this poor creature had done her own dragging.

She was half-dead and senseless. And Conner knew as a diver does when he raises an unseen relic from the cold sand that this thing at his feet did not come from Springston, nor from any other living world. This child was from No Man’s Land. Someone had wandered out. Had crossed that impassable divide.

“How do I make her drink?” Rob asked. He had the canteen open and was looking to Conner for help.

“Just a cap,” Conner whispered, his mind reeling from what this girl meant. “Give it to me.”

Rob poured a cap, the canteen trembling and spilling, and Conner wondered if his brother knew what he himself knew. Probably. Rob was the smart one.

“Careful,” he said, taking the cap of water. He positioned himself at the girl’s side, folded her other frail arm across her chest, and slid his hand behind her neck. Gingerly, he lifted her head and scooted a knee behind her until she rested on his thigh. Another faint moan escaped her lips, a feeble sign of life. The girl appeared to be eight or nine years old, but it was difficult to tell, as gaunt and frail as she was.

Conner dribbled the water onto her cracked and bloody lips. He imagined he heard a sizzle there, as moisture hit the fire of thirst. Her cheeks twitched, a wince of pain, and he had to steady her head. He tried to drip the water past her wounded lips and directly onto her tongue.

“Easy,” Rob whispered.

“I know,” Conner said. He emptied the cap, watched the child’s throat bob as her body unconsciously swallowed. “Fill it again.” He passed the cap back to Rob, whose hand was steadier now as he poured another ration.

This time, the girl seemed to help with the drinking. A weak hand came up and rested on Conner’s arm, nailless and bloody fingers curling there, tender and thankful. Desperate.

“Drink,” he told the girl, as if she needed any encouragement. She drank that cap and another, whispered for more, but Conner told Rob that was enough. Too much too fast was a bad thing. He had seen the madness of thirst before.

Her eyelids blinked open. Fluttered. She squinted up at the dive light, which shone harshly down onto her face. “Get that away,” Conner told Rob, but his brother was already doing it, was just as keenly aware of the girl’s suffering.

Her face dimmed as Rob held the light by her side and out of her eyes. “Easy,” Conner told the girl. “We’ve got you. Everything’s gonna be okay.” He said this for himself and for Rob as well. He wasn’t sure. “I want you to rest while I look over your wounds, okay? You can have some more water after I clean you up. I’ve gotta get this sand out of you.”

He reached for his pack, was thankful for the extra water, for all the emergency supplies he’d brought along that were meant for him and his trek.

The girl made a sound. “Can… near…” she whispered.

Conner turned back to the child as she said the words a second time. “What?” he asked.

The girl clutched his shirt with her small and bloodied hand and whispered it again.

“She wants us to come closer so we can hear,” Rob said. His little brother bent his head to better understand the girl’s whispers. “What do you need?” he asked.

But the girl was looking past him and up at Conner. Her eyelids fluttered open, and for a moment, her cloudy eyes grew bright like a break in a sandstorm. They were half-familiar eyes that bored into Conner as the girl summoned the strength to speak, pulling desperately on the air in that stuffy tent.

“Con… ner,” she said again, each syllable an effort, the corners of her mouth curling into the barest of smiles, a smile of some faint recognition and some great relief. “… Father… sent me.”

And then the light in her eyes went gray again, wounds and exhaustion claiming her. And this girl out of No Man’s Land fell into the stillness of death and sleep, Conner’s name echoing softly in his ears, certain that he had never seen this girl in all his life, this girl who spoke of his father as if he were her own.

Part 3:

Return to Danvar

19 • The Prodigal Daughter

All of life was like the deep sand, Vic had learned. From birth to death it was a series of violent constrictions, one after the other, an oily fist gripping hapless souls who popped free long enough to gasp half a lungful before they were seized again. This was how Vic had come to see the world. Everywhere she looked, she saw life squeezing people, forcing them from one tight spot to the next, the cruel palms of misfortune wrapped around hapless necks.

The secret to surviving these sufferings, she had found, was to keep perfectly still in its clutches. Learning how not to breathe was the answer. Learning how to find joy in not breathing. The only difference between a choke and a hug was an open pathway. Which was why Vic had taught herself to hold her breath. And then life had become a series of uninterrupted embraces.

At six hundred meters, sand refused to budge. It grew deaf as a selfish lover to her thoughts and wishes. It pinned her and held her helpless. Six hundred meters was well past where divers perished. Long before they reached these depths, most died because they struggled to simultaneously breathe and flow the sand. Wrestling two men at once was futile. Vic knew.

Another two minutes on that lungful of air, and she would pass out. Already, lights popped in her vision, the edges growing dim. It would take her thirty minutes to get to the surface from that depth. Thirty minutes to go on two minutes of air. She would be fine. She spotted two of the hard metal cases near one another, the kind with the good seals. The cases stood out bright orange in her vision among the greens and blues of the softer bags. The oval conveyance device from which the bags had spilled was a brilliant white. All that metal, preserved by the deep pack of sand. It would live there forever, that buried and gleaming steel. Too deep to pull it apart and haul it up. Too risky.