She jumped down to the sand and helped her brother out of the haul rack. The small bimini she’d made to keep him in the shade was already tattered and threadbare from the half day of sailing due south. Part of her wanted to press on to Springston and get there before dark. The rest of her felt sure her brother wouldn’t make it that far without water.
His head listed from side to side as Vic gathered him in her arms. He weighed little more than a tank and a gear bag. Vic lowered him to the line of shaded sand by the sarfer’s hull and grabbed Marco’s dive suit from the gear she’d crammed into his helm chair. She folded the suit several times, lifted Palmer’s head, and slid the pillow between him and the sand.
Palmer asked for water. Vic slung her canteen around from her back and shook it. Empty. “Hang in there,” she said. “I’m getting you some.”
She left him in the shade. Back at the helm, her own dive suit was plugged into the small wind generator that poked up from the aft of the sarfer. She unplugged this, stripped down in the hot sun, grabbed scoops of sand and rubbed it over her armpits and her sweaty chest, then brushed herself off as best she could. She tugged on the dive suit, which was hot and smelled like melting rubber. Tears wetted her cheeks. She cursed these and wiped them away. Her brother was dying. Her brother was a pile of chapped and sunburnt bones. It horrified her to see him that way. Horrified her to think of Marco, her lover, dead. Killed right in front of her. And now she was going to lose a brother, too.
She dug her visor out of her gear bag, wiped her cheeks again, and promised herself that it wouldn’t happen. Not Palmer. Through clenched teeth, she promised. No one else would die that day. No one. She slung Marco’s canteen over her head. It rattled emptily against hers and Palmer’s. “I’ll be right back,” she said. She scanned the horizon for sarfer masts, had seen dozens in the distance on the sail south, but none right then. Supine on the sand by the sarfer’s hull, Palmer looked peaceably asleep. This is what she told herself as she powered on her suit and disappeared beneath the sand.
Palmer lay alone on the warm sand and stared at the dark patch his sister had vanished into. The minutes ticked by like hours. The crows that’d followed them as they’d sailed south circled overhead. His sister had taken his canteen. Hap’s canteen, the one with his name etched into the side. Palmer remembered the dive they’d been on when Hap had carved his name there with his dive knife. They’d left their gear buried in the sand. Hap had been worried they might get their canteens mixed up. Same models. Both new. So young then. Worried about whose was what. Worried about sharing. Tenuous friends. A lifetime ago.
More minutes went by. Palmer stared out over the desert sand. Vic had emptied her canteen into his mouth one cap at a time. His stomach was in knots. Springston and hope felt so very far away. And where could they go once they got there? People wanted him dead. He remembered the way Hap’s body had been twisted out of shape. What the hell had he gotten himself involved in? And for what? Some coin?
A crow swooped down and lighted on the sarfer. The mainsail flapped, and the bird flapped back. It pecked the aluminum with its beak, the reaper rapping to be let in. Palmer waved his arm and begged it to go. He wondered what he would do if Vic didn’t come back. How long before the sun slid overhead and his shade dwindled to nothing? How long before another diver or a brigand found the sarfer with its flapping sail? How long?
The crow startled, and with a beat of its black wings, labored into the sky. Palmer heard a deep gasp. He turned to see Vic sliding up out of the ground, sand cascading off her and catching in the breeze. She took deep breaths. Rested on the sand for a moment. And then she flipped up her visor and startled Palmer with the barest of smiles.
36 • A Note from Father
“We’re gonna put a tear in Father’s tent,” Rob warned. He could see at once what his older brother had planned, could tell by the way he was knotting the ropes. It wasn’t going to be good for the tent.
“This is our tent,” Conner said, correcting him. “Yours and mine. Not Father’s. And we can’t very well carry her all the way to town.”
Conner went back to his knots, and Rob watched his brother work in the pale light of the starry sky. The horizon was beginning to lighten beyond No Man’s Land, out where the sporadic bootfalls of stomping giants could be heard. The sun would be up within an hour, by his estimate.
He turned back to the girl and watched her sleep. They had moved their bedding and the girl out onto the sand in order to collapse the tent. She lay flat on her back with her head to the east and her feet to the west. Sand gathered in her hair. She might appear to be dead were it not for the imperceptible rise and fall of her chest, which lay partly exposed by the rip in her shirt. Rob reached over and pulled the fabric shut, covering her pale flesh. He had watched as Conner had cleaned her wounds. His brother had two extra canteens of water and all kinds of bandages and supplies in his pack. Rob didn’t ask about these things. He knew what they were for. He didn’t ask why Conner had been out of the tent in the middle of the night. He knew where Conner was going. It scared him to think of being alone, but that’s what Conner had planned. Rob kept all this to himself. He often saw how things worked, how they fit together, and had long given up on explaining these things to those older than him. Adults just looked at him with strange expressions when he spoke his insights, like they didn’t believe him. Or were frightened of him. Or both.
“If you’re done fondling her breasts, you can grab my pack and stop this damn tent from flapping.”
Rob grabbed Conner’s pack. No point telling him he wasn’t fondling her breasts. It would just sound like he had been. Silence would sound the same way, too. Didn’t matter either way, so he saved his breath. He carried Conner’s pack and set it on the folded tent opposite where his brother was knotting the lines. The fabric stopped flopping around in that pre-dawn breeze.
“Make a pillow for her. Up here where her head will go.” His brother sounded annoyed. No, something worse than that. Conner wasn’t being himself. He sounded scared and unsure. Rob didn’t like that.
“We should put her head back here and drag her feet-first,” Rob told his older brother. “To keep the wind and sand out of her face.”
Conner studied him a moment. That look. “Whatever,” he said. It’s what adults said instead of: You’re right.
The girl was moved onto the sand for a moment. The bedding went onto the tent, and then the girl went back onto the bedding. All their gear was arranged on the flat canvas, which was now like a sarfer with no skids and no sail. Just two sets of lines to shoulder. It was a long way back into town, but neither Rob nor his brother complained as they adjusted their kers, draped the ropes over their shoulders, and leaned into the task.
“What if she dies before we get there?” Rob asked.
“She won’t.”
“But how do you know?”
“I just do, okay? Now shut up and do your share or we’ll go in circles.”
Rob pulled. He counted his steps. Whenever he could, he counted anything that could be counted. A few years back, he and Conner’s camping trip had come on a windless night, and when the fire had died down to coals and the stars had burst bright, he had counted five thousand two hundred and fifty-eight stars before he couldn’t be sure if he was counting the same ones over again. Numbers calmed him in a way that words couldn’t. If he thought with words, they went around in circles and crashed into each other and grew more dire and terrifying, just like they were right then as he forgot to count steps and remembered that camping trip and worried they were dragging a dead girl across the sand.