Damien waved his hand and spit sand. “News like this don’t go for a joke.”

“Don’t you fucking dare,” Marco hissed, but this only seemed to get Damien’s attention.

“It’s not a joke,” Vic said. “It’s a true story. And I promise you won’t be disappointed. You’ll be getting the good end of this bargain, I swear.”

“I dunno…” Damien said, walking back their way. “There ain’t never been news this big. But fuckit, I’d rather you hear it from me than from someone else.”

“You first,” Vic said. In truth, she didn’t care about his news. She was just rehearsing how best to tell this story, a story that would get many retellings.

Damien took a deep breath and searched their faces. The two sand divers waited. The clatter of Low-Pub spilled over the dunes, and sand rode through the sky above their heads.

“Fucking Danvar,” Damien finally said. “Somebody found it.”

21 • Buried Alive

It was a crypt for a king. His friend Hap had left him to die in a crypt for a goddamn king—this tomb of untold riches. Palmer was going to take his last breath in a manor no Lord of Springston could refuse. A place where a truly great man should be laid to rest.

And it’ll do for me, he thought morosely.

The air in the buried sandscraper tasted stale and seemed to be growing thinner. But it had outlasted his water. Palmer had poured himself half-caps for what felt like five days. He had eaten both strips of jerky one tiny nibble at a time, like a mouse trying to win the cheese from a loaded trap. Now all of that was gone, along with fifteen or twenty pounds of himself. He hadn’t been eating that well even before the march north. The stress of a deep dive always messed with his appetite. No… it hadn’t been the dive. It had been the camping trip coming up, the anniversary. He never ate well before that trip. Had bugged out the year before. Damn… maybe he’d already been down there a whole week. Con and Rob would go without him, just like last year. Con and Rob. They would never hear from their big brother again.

Or maybe it hadn’t been so long. He had counted five days—five urges to sleep—but maybe it was four. Hell, it could be ten days or ten hours since Hap abandoned him. His mind was playing tricks. He heard noises and voices. Had a dream about his father that seemed so real, Palmer had truly thought he was dead and in heaven. Ah, a crypt fit for a king, and where was his asshole father buried? His father’s bones had ground to sand in No Man’s Land, that’s where. A pauper burial for a Lord. A place for desperate dying. It was as ironic as Palmer’s lavish crypt.

But Palmer had been old enough to remember a Lord’s life. He had bawled when his mom pulled them away from the wall. Had bawled when he was put in a different school with strange kids who smelled bad. Had bawled harder when he could no longer smell them because he had begun to stink as they did. What he wouldn’t give to have all those tears back. Just a capful.

He licked his cracked and burning lips. The dream about his father made sense now. Some part of him had been dwelling on the anniversary. He’d let Con and Rob down again. He was a shitty brother and a shitty son and did not deserve to die in so fine a place as this.

Such were his wild thoughts as he left the conference room where he’d been imprisoned by his hope of Hap’s return. He staggered out and through the dark building, his dive light as dim as he could make it, its staid old battery down to rations as well. Maybe he’d find a pool of water where a spring had flooded or where trapped moisture had drained down through the impossibly tight pack. But there was little hope of that. He left the conference room to get away from his nightmares and his failures. To let his body wander instead of his mind.

Before he died, he should go out into the sand one last time. Better to perish there and be discovered by another diver as they came to pick over this city. He still had a good charge in his suit, might see how far he could make it before the sand filled his lungs. But some naive part of him kept thinking Hap would come back, that Brock would send others, that he would be a fool to go out and die when there was still air in that building to breathe. At any moment, Hap would burst in with a second set of twin tanks, laughing and saying he’d only been gone two hours and here’s the coin those scroungers paid and all the beer and pussy in Springston would be theirs.

Palmer kept thinking this, but the hope had grown as stale and thin as the oxygen. The hope that had kept him prisoner in that room with the chairs and the great table and the brewing machine had weakened. Gone was the need to be there when the divers came for him. And as that hope waned, he left through the door that had damned him, that heavy door that Hap had slammed shut on his face, and with his dive light barely aglow, he nosed around his crypt for the first time.

He had seen many crumbling office buildings full of sand outside Springston, but never on such a scale as this, never so pristine. The buildings he had seen had been picked over for centuries. Men with mastery over the sand had ripped out great holes and had salvaged almost anything worth taking. But Palmer now strolled through a perfect recreation of that long-dead world. It was a museum for the buried gods and the world they had lived in. His fragile mind tallied stacks and stacks of coin as he felt his way down the hall. There were clocks; pictures framed and behind perfect glass; recessed lights and miles and miles of copper wire; unbroken tile; wood countertops. Coin everywhere.

Other divers would come and claim these things. Probably not Hap, for the guilt would gnaw at him. At least, Palmer hoped it would. No, it would be some other diver who would find his bones. They would remove Palmer’s skeleton from his suit piece by piece and marvel that he still had a charge left, that he had been too scared to make for the surface, and someone would point out that he didn’t have tanks, and some other asshole would say that there was a girl from Low-Pub who could’ve done it, and none of them would know that these bones in their hands belonged to that girl’s brother.

He tried another room. A bathroom. Porcelain fixtures and indoor plumbing. He felt insane for twisting the spigots, but no one was watching.

The next room was a jackpot. A bonanza of riches. A small room no bigger than a bed but full of tools. Brooms and mops and much else. He picked up one of the brooms. Synthetic bristles. Plastic. As good as the day it was made. Palmer kicked some of the scrum from his boots to the marble tile and whisked the sand around with the broom. His mother—the mother of his youth—would’ve loved such a broom. Palmer flashed back to chasing Conner through the house when they were boys, giving him a beating before his sister caught up to them both and dispensed two beatings. Back in the closet, he shook bottles of liquids, cracked the cap on one of them and took a sniff. His nose burned. If he needed an easier way out than the sand, here it was.

He surveyed all the useful things packed into such a small space, enough coin to retire on, and closed the door. Someone else would come and take these things. They would figure out a way to dive deep and bring it all back. Wouldn’t bother with him, though. Palmer thought of the city that would be built above these dunes on all that was stolen from the past. There would be an orgy of excess. A gold rush like the old-timers used to tell of Low-Pub’s founding. No one would remember the first person to set foot in that scraper. He pictured Hap in the Honey Hole at that very moment, blisteringly drunk, delicious golden beer everywhere, telling the gathered that he’d been the first one inside, that he’d discovered Danvar all on his own. Fucking Hap.