Vic began to let out the mainsheet, and Conner furled the jib. Vic then dialed down the power of the skids and rudder, so the sand stopped flowing as easily and slowly braked the craft. They left the main up, just allowed the boom to swing and point with the wind the way a vane does.

“That looks like a body.” Conner pointed to a form lying near the smoking ruin of the sarfer. The man wasn’t moving, was lying close to the wreckage.

Vic jumped down from the sarfer, and Conner scrambled after her. They both approached the wreckage warily. The hull of the burning craft creaked and popped from the heat of the fire. The smell was awful. Acidic and biting. Conner was scanning the scene for more bodies when blood frothed up on the lips of the prone man. One of his hands lifted several inches off the sand before his arm collapsed again.

Conner heard his sister curse. She rushed forward and dropped to her knees beside the figure. She yelled for Conner to bring the aid kit, which he ran back and retrieved from the haul rack. The sand was loose beneath his boots as he hurried back to his sister.

“Oh, god. Oh, god,” Vic was saying. Conner placed the kit in the sand and untied the flap. His sister ignored it. The way she was rocking and holding the man’s hand, Conner knew there was nothing they could do for him.

“Damien?” she asked. “Can you hear me?”

The blood stirred on the young man’s lips. Conner looked him over, couldn’t see any obvious wounds, no blood on his chest or stomach or hands. And then Conner noticed the odd way the man’s legs were bent. They were shapeless. The tight dive suit dented in where there should have been protruding knees. He moved to the other side of Vic and gently slid his hands from the man’s thigh toward his calf, looking for any response on the man’s face, feeling for a break. The man’s lips moved—he was trying to say something—and Conner felt the spongy flesh beneath his palms, the absence of bone.

“Say again,” Vic said. She bent close to the man’s lips, sweat dripping from her nose. The heat of the burning sarfer was unbearable. Conner saw that the man wasn’t moving one of his arms, which looked as limp and deformed as his legs.

“We’ve gotta get him away from this fire,” Conner said.

His sister waved him off and listened. Her face was contorted in concentration, rage, grief, some impossible-to-read combination of worry lines and furrowed brow. Conner joined her by the man’s head and tried to help her listen. The man was rambling, his voice a rough and halting whisper. Conner heard him mention a bomb. Something about playing marbles. He was mixing accounts of the dead with talk of a child’s game. And then Conner heard the name “Yegery,” a name he recognized, a man his sister had talked about often, some kind of divemaster. The injured man licked his lips and tried to speak again.

“I’m sorry,” he wheezed. The words came clear, seemed a powerful effort. There were bloody gasps for air between each short sentence. “Tried to stop them. Heard what they were gonna do. From a defector. Made me tell who I heard it from. I told ’em, Vic. I’m sorry—”

He coughed and spit up blood. Conner saw the tattoos on the man’s neck, the marks of the Low-Pub Legion. One of his sister’s friends.

“What’re they planning?” his sister asked.

The man spoke again of making glass marbles, of a bomb, of people in the group who didn’t want to go along, who were dead now. He said Yegery had gone mad. That there was no talking to him. That this guy from the north was in his ear, in his head. The young man lifted his hand a few inches from the sand, and Vic gripped it with her own. “Today,” he said. His eyes drifted away from Vic and toward the heavens. He stopped blinking away the sand. “Today,” he whispered, the blood finally falling still on his lips.

Vic bent her head over the dead man and screamed. More a growl than a scream. Like a cayote cornered between pinched dunes. An inhuman sound that made Conner afraid.

He sat perfectly still and watched as his sister scooped two handfuls of sand and placed them over the man’s eyes. She dropped his hand and patted his stomach, opened a pocket there and pulled something out. She stuffed this away, then seemed to notice something wrong. She turned back to the suit to inspect it more closely, wiped the tears from her cheeks.

“Those sick fucks,” she hissed.

“What is it?” Conner asked. He could barely breathe. The heat from the fire was intolerable, but he knew he would sit there as long as his sister needed.

“His suit,” she said. She pointed to a tear at the man’s waist, a place where wires had been pulled out and twisted together. There was another spot just like it by one shoulder. “They wired his suit inside out. They used his band to torture him. Turned his suit against him to make him talk.” She punched her fist into the sand. Did it again. Then stood and began marching back toward the sarfer.

“What did he say?” Conner asked, getting up and chasing after her. “What’re they planning to do? Did he say where the bomb would be?”

“No,” Vic said. “But they’re doing it today. They’re gonna end everything. And we’re gonna be too late again.” She jumped back into the helm seat and began taking in the lines. Conner adjusted himself in the other chair and unfurled the jib.

“We’ve got plenty of wind,” he said. “We’ll get there in time.”

Vic didn’t respond. The sarfer lurched into motion and began to build speed. She had been right about the weather that day.

53 • Father’s Last Rites

They sailed in silence for an hour. They passed other sarfers heading north, crossed tracks that led east to west, saw half a dozen craft out with their masts laid back, dive flags flapping from the rails to warn away others. Conner’s thoughts whirled. He gave his sister as much time as he could, but he had to know. When she returned from a trip to the bow to check the lines for chafing, he finally asked.

“So who was that guy? Someone you knew?”

“A friend,” Vic said, taking the tiller back from him. “He used to run with Marco. Some of the Legion guys left a while back to join up with another outfit. I think a few had a change of heart, maybe said some shit they shouldn’t. Damien was unfortunate enough to hear.” She shook her head. “Bastard could never keep a secret.”

“They… what they did to him.” Conner didn’t really have a question, was just trying to process the level of fucked-up they were dealing with. He couldn’t believe there were people who would kill so many, even those amongst themselves, and all for what? What was there to gain when everything was gone? “What was that you took off him? His last rites?”

Vic nodded. Conner knew about this tradition, but he also knew you weren’t supposed to ask divers what they carried in their bellies. And then he felt like an idiot. He remembered the note his mother had given him to pass along to Vic. He hadn’t seen Vic later that night, had spent that time with Gloralai, so he’d forgotten. This didn’t seem like the appropriate time, but he was scared he would forget again. “I’ve got something for you,” he said, digging into his own pocket. Vic tried to wave him off. She was obviously lost in thought, but Conner took over the tiller and forced the letter into her hand. “Mom gave it to me last night. She said to give it to you. I forgot about it until just now.”

Vic started to put the letter away with the other one. But then she hesitated. While Conner manned the tiller, she opened the letter. She kept it down in her lap and behind her knees so the wind wouldn’t tear it from her grip. Conner adjusted his ker and concentrated on where he was steering.

“Who is this from?” she asked, turning and shouting over the noise of the wind and the shush of the sarfer as it tore across the sand.