The crack up there was getting worse as well. Widening. A zig at the end that used to be a zag, moving its way back and forth across that warped surface. The sands were shifting, the walls twisting, a house out of shape.

And the springs. The springs of the bed needed oiling. They sounded like the mad call of some crazed bird, some animal that chirped over and over, waiting for a response, for some hint of life, for awareness from some other, but only getting a rhythmic silence. A pause for every squeak. Week, week, week, week. Years piling up.

Her husband had brought her the bed triumphantly, had raised it from nearly four hundred meters, or so he’d bragged. And it was heavy. She could attest to that. Rose had moved it with a friend when the palace had fallen. It was all she had left in the world: the bed, that dresser, this brothel. It was fitting how her husband had left her prepared for her new life. Other men concerned themselves with getting their family up on their feet. Rose had fallen for a man who had left her on her back.

“How was that for you?” the man asked. He had evidently finished. Was now looking down at her expectantly, sweat dripping from his nose to splash between her breasts. His arms—muscled but layered with fat—trembled. There was more hair on his shoulders than his head, and his beard was full of sand.

“Oh, you’re the best,” Rose told him.

“Ah, you’re just saying that.” He grunted and fell to the side, a flock of startled springs chirping.

“I’m not,” Rose said. “You know you’re my favorite.” She prayed to the gods he wouldn’t ask her what his name was. Please, please, please don’t ask. They always wanted to hear it, to make it personal, to own more than just her time. But he didn’t ask. Worse: he started snoring.

Rose groaned and moved gingerly to the washbasin. She pulled the sewn intestine out from between her legs and washed it in the shallow puddle of water. The milky swimmers swirled on the surface with the others before slowly settling to the bottom. Rose draped the intestine over the lip of the basin with two others to dry. With a towel, she wiped off what had leaked out and had dribbled down her inner thigh to her knee. She dressed while the man snored. She would charge him rent for the bed if he stayed more than an hour. Serve him right.

Leaving the room, she stood on the narrow balcony walkway that circled the inside of the Honey Hole. It was dead quiet below, early in the morning, but the remnants of a noisy evening were scattered everywhere. Drunks sleeping on the floor, curled around barstool legs like lovers. Spent as much time on them as on any woman, Rose thought. A card game had been abandoned, the pot and players missing but the empty jars and cans and glasses standing in a crowd around the discard pile and folded hands. There were two puddles in the middle of the floor to clean up—piss or spilled beer. Idiots wasting their coin on fluids they couldn’t get in them, or on fluids that would pass right through.

Another of the doors opened down the catwalk—or the Esplanade of Pussy, as one of her regulars called it. Doria stood in her doorway and suffered a deep kiss goodbye, and then her client waddled down the stairs toward the bar, fumbling with the laces on his fly as he went.

Doria and Rose exchanged weary and knowing glances. They peered over the railing at all that needed cleaning before happy hour that night. Weekend hell. No sleep for the dreary.

Rose tried to remember a time before this routine. She felt like a speck of sand in an alien land, confused as to how it had gotten there. Carried on the wind from one dune to the next, each getting her closer to a destination she never would’ve chosen if there had been some way to make the wind listen.

There was no one behind the bar. Off to a piss or gone home. That bar had been the first dune, Rose thought. She remembered standing there, drying empty jars, letting the men leer before they went up to give one of her girls five minutes of displeasure. That was the first dune. And it led to all the others. A woman not for sale until the Honey Hole was. But no takers for the latter. Only a few years from being duned over, they said. The books didn’t shine too bright, they said. Not enough coin in it, they said. Can’t mix business with pleasure, they laughed.

Rose had come dangerously close to simply walking away. The only thing that stopped her was not wanting to be like her husband. He had taken even this luxury away from her. Had made her so angry at his abandonment that running away had become a power removed. And so she was trapped.

The door to her prison opened with a squeak, letting some light in. It was her children, Conner and Rob. Just the sort of hour at which she would expect them to burst in, needing something, palms open. She nearly yelled at them, let the mood her client had put her in rain down on their heads, but then she saw what Conner was carrying. Not this. She didn’t need this. She rushed down the stairs to send them away, to tell them to find a damn doctor, not to bring their mistakes to her. But Conner’s mouth opened before hers could—and out spilled the impossible.

40 • Ticking Bombs

Vic emerged from the moist and heavy sand and took great gulps of glorious air. She rested as long as she dared, the sun beating down on her, before joining her brother in the shade of the sarfer’s hull. Palmer had been watching her with obvious relief, a grimace-like smile on his face. But as she handed him her canteen, which sloshed now with spring water, Palmer seemed to catch sight of his blurry reflection in the shiny metal. His pained smile melted into a pained frown. He reached up to touch his cheek.

“I don’t look so good,” he whispered. There were tears in his eyes as Vic took the canteen back from him and worked the cap off. Palmer met her gaze. He reached to his swollen lips. “How do I look?”

“You look like someone who should be dead but isn’t. It’s a good look.”

“I feel like a blister that’s about to pop.”

“Yeah, I was going to say that.”

They shared something like laughter, and Vic handed him the open canteen. Palmer took a sip, his cheeks billowing and contracting as he swished the water around. He labored to swallow. “You were gone so long…”

“Sorry. Not much of a spring here. Had to go down quite a ways to fill the canteens. There’s grit in there, so don’t tip it too much—”

“It’s okay. I could eat a dune.” Palmer’s hands shook as he lifted the canteen to his lips again.

Vic helped him steady the vessel. While he worked the water down, she took a small sip from Marco’s canteen, her lips pressed where her lover’s once had. “We’ll get you some food in town,” she said, trying to think on other things. “But we should probably stay here the night.”

Her brother looked past her toward the horizon. “Are we safe? No one followed us here?”

Vic smoothed the hair off his forehead. She remembered Palmer when he was much younger. He seemed much younger right then. Her brother was terrified. “What happened?” she asked. She had yet to ask him about the dive or the discovery, about the people looking for him in Springston. She had been too worried about losing him, too concerned about finding water and food and nursing him back to health.

Her brother took another swig from the canteen, his blistered hands shaking. He dabbed gently at his cracked lips with the sleeve of his dive suit. Winced. Stared up at the bands of sand swirling on the wind.

“They were never going to let us go,” he said. “We were there to find Danvar and then to die.”

“But you did find it.”

Palmer nodded. “Five hundred meters down.”

“No,” Vic said. She situated herself against the hull of the sarfer, blocking the wind for Palmer. “You didn’t go that deep.”