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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.

Now she found herself asking Diana to track those same scraps down, to get them out of the trash. Rose wanted to know more. She was torn between letting the girl rest and assailing her with questions. What of this distant city? What of this camp? What would her husband of old do if their roles were reversed? She tried to think like her husband the Lord, not the desperate and crazed man who had sent a girl to warn his people away. Not him, but the younger man who had once brought other Lords to their knees. The man she’d never told her children about. Would this man run and hide? She didn’t think so. And yet, he was asking them to.

And Rose had a terrible thought. What if her husband was still the same man, and he knew in his battle-scarred wisdom that running was the only option? What if he knew that now was the time for laying low, for giving in, for sliding deep beneath the sand? Rose wiped angrily at her cheek, damning him as was her daily ritual.

“I think this is all of it.”

She turned to find Diana beside her, holding tightly to a bundle of scraps tied up in one of the towels from the kitchen. Rose hadn’t even seen her climb the stairs.

“Good, good. Thanks.” Rose took the bundle.

Diana glanced at the door. “Is she… ? Is that girl okay?”

“She’ll be fine.”

“Another attack? Looked like a bomb, maybe, the way her clothes were shredded.”

“No. Something else. Keep an eye on my boys for me. And no appointments for the rest of the day.”

Diana frowned, but Rose didn’t care to explain. She let herself into her room and shut the door.

The girl was still sleeping. She held the edge of her sheet with her bandaged hands and kept it up against her neck, chin tucked down. Here was another miserable life her husband had made. Another life ruined, no doubt, in the name of love.

Rose set the bundle on the small table by the window where there was light. She untied the towel and began sorting through the scraps. Her stomach twisted up in knots at the sight of blood on the girl’s pants and her dive suit. The rubbery material of the dive suit felt strange—not quite like any fabric Rose had ever seen. It was like the girl’s strange accent, with words understandable but the sound not quite right. Everything about the girl was both alien and familiar.

Rose had to be careful not to prick herself on the torn bits of wire as she sorted through the scraps. As a dive suit, the outfit was ruined. But she found the belly of the suit and the pouch there that no diver would be without. Rose turned the large scrap of material into the light. She ran her fingers across stitches her husband had made. And there across them was a neat snip her scissors had left from cutting the material off the girl. Fumbling to open the pouch, her fingers shaking, hoping against hope, Rose felt the folded piece of paper inside.

She pulled out the letter. Unfolded it, hands trembling, not daring to breathe.

The sight of her husband’s handwriting blurred the words he’d written:

Rose,

I hope this message finds you well. I have forfeited the right to ask anything of you, but I trust the messenger will be cared for. All that awaited her here was misery and death. I don’t have much time left, and so I send her and these words to the gods. I pray I don’t write them in vain.

You alone know all the bad I’ve done. Running from my mistakes was by far the worst. There is a reason no one comes back from this place. They won’t let us. Don’t come for me. Run from these drums, Rose. They grind the earth to nothing here. They take our water from the sky. Mountains are turned into rivers. There is no talking to them, even those of us who have learned their language. We are the salamander living in a hole beneath the sand. They are the boot that unwittingly buries us. To them, it is just a march onward and onward. To us, it is a trampling.

They know you are out there. They know of Springston and Low-Pub. Others before me have told them, have begged to be released, have begged for help, for water, for any of the small miracles we glimpse of their cities and their life. But no help will ever come for us. Our voices will never be heard. They have lesser problems to worry over.

Listen to me, please. This is not a war to win. It’s not one to even fight. Don’t let the young there among you know what we’re up against. You remember how I was. Tell only the old and wise, those with burns and scars, that everything here is to be feared. Tell the Lords. Explain to them that these people are not evil, which we might understand and combat. Explain to them that these people do not care and cannot be made to, which is far worse. There can be no knocking on their doors that they might hear. Nothing we can do or say that will be as loud as the blasts that rob our rain. We are the salamander, they are the boot. You have to make the Lords understand.

Go west if you can. Forget the horror stories of what lies that way. Forget the mountains. Crush their peaks if you must, but go. Take the children and whoever will listen to reason. Those who will not succumb to reason, leave them behind to rot. Leave them here with me where we belong.