Across the Sand

0

Measure for Measure

Victoria

VIC REMEMBERED the first time she wanted to kill a man. And not in the playful way that kids say I’ll kill you to a friend who wrongs them, but in the way that you dwell on, plan, and finally decide to take a human life. To end them forever.

It changes you, when you find that line in the sand. It changes you more when you cross it.

The men who held her down in her mother’s brothel lit an ember in Vic, and she didn’t feel bad about what happened to them after. Just as she wasn’t going to feel bad for this city of monsters who had tortured her people for as long as anyone could remember.

Vic came a long way to get revenge for the men who leveled Springston, who brought down the great wall, where she’d grown up as a kid. She came a long way to pay back those men for trying to blow up Low-Pub, the only other place she’d ever felt at home. She’d walked across No Man’s Land with an atomic bomb on her back, a device she’d been told could be set off just by giving it a tight squeeze.

After crossing No Man’s, Vic dove under a great crack in the earth with more water running through it than a thousand souls could drink in a lifetime. She’d had a week of pure hell to consider what she was about to do, and as she lay beneath the center of this wild city built atop the sand, she felt no regrets. All she had was a lifetime of wounds and a belly full of anger.

She flowed the sand beneath the city up, carrying the bomb with it, forming a column several meters high in the city square. She formed the sand around the bomb into a sphere, and then she compressed that sphere down into a marble of stonesand, into a tiny point, crushing it in a fist of thought.

And the ember those men had sparked in her, it exploded. It became an inferno in that strange and foreign land.

Part I:

The End of All Things

Those who long are longed for. It has always been this way.

—Nomad King

There is no relief

in the world like a kind word

from your torturer.

—Old Cannibal haiku

1

Casting Stones

Anya

Four hours earlier

I THINK JONAH has a crush on you, Mell said.

Anya turned to her best friend. They were walking home from school together, two drops in a river of kids flooding out through town. Today was their last day of school, but neither of them knew this yet. Neither of them knew that the town they called home would soon cease to exist.

Who’s Jonah? Anya asked.

The boy following us, Mell said.

Anya glanced over her shoulder. Sure enough, there was a boy trailing them. She vaguely recognized him from mining class. He was a year or two younger—maybe sixteen?—but in some of the higher-level courses. The afternoon sun glinted off his ridiculous spectacles as he bowed his head and pulled his ratty shawl high up against his cheeks. He was a slight thing; he had to lean forward under the weight of his backpack, which appeared to be loaded down with lead, but was probably just full of books.

Seeming to sense that Anya was looking back at him, Jonah lifted his gaze, and Anya caught the barest of smiles before she snapped her head around, embarrassed that he had caught her looking.

What a ’zoid, she said, and Mell laughed.

Ahead of them, some of the older boys were smoking home-rolleds. Anya didn’t smoke, but she loved the smell of it. She had a crush on one of the boys—Kayek Wu, captain of the school’s varsity wicket team—and when she passed him in the hall, she’d get a whiff of the tobacco; she liked how the smell of him lingered. She felt a light sweat going beneath her shawl from the afternoon heat and the pace, from trying to keep up with the boys and their long strides. When Kayek turned and saw Anya trailing behind, he laughed and blew smoke, and Anya looked quickly to her shoes.

You should just talk to him, Mell said.

Who? Anya feigned, like her best friend knew her so little.

Okay, whatever. But if all you ever do is want after things, you’ll never get them.

The two friends walked in silence, Anya thinking on Mell’s words, how all the things she wanted she kept to herself. What she wanted was out of Agyl, out of school, away from the mining pits. She wanted a life to the east, beyond the oceans, where kings and queens dressed in gold thread and rode chariots in the sky, where all the mined things were fabricated for an empire of magic and wonder. But these were the dreams best kept quiet, lest they drive her mad with yearning.

The stream of students thinned and thinned as they wound their way through Agyl’s tight streets. By the time Anya and Mell had left the twisting alleys on the edge of town, the rough stone pavers had given way to dirt and gravel. Dogs with rib-lined flanks paced behind rusty chain-link fences. Trash fluttered in the wind and wrapped itself around the web of wires running from home to home. In someone’s yard, chickens strutted and pecked at what seemed like nothing in the dirt. The nice clothing shops in the central district melted into junk stores, and then repair shops, and then scrap yards—the world seeming to fall apart as Anya got closer and closer to her neighborhood on the northern edge of town.

Near to the gorge now, she could hear the occasional blasts from the mines on the other side, some of the explosions so strong that dust lifted off the ground. Magnets and electric fields pulled all the useful things out of the blasts, leaving debris to float westward, carried off by the wind, away from the city proper and out to the wastelands. Years of schooling had given Anya more knowledge about the mining process than she had ever cared to possess, but these facts were mere background for her mind, just like the booms to the west were an unconsidered background to her life.

Overhead, the ore carts that carried the processed materials floated like fat ugly birds through the afternoon sky. The path home lay beneath the carts, north toward the rail depot and dumping stations and the company bunkhouses beyond. When Anya was younger, she and her friends used to ride the ore carts home from school. She wondered if kids still did that sort of thing. By the time she was thirteen, the thrill of the heights and the effortless motion no longer made up for the ruined clothes and the black smears that resisted washing. The carts back then were exciting and exotic; now they were little more than shadows on the ground.

Right on the edge of the gorge lay the slave pens, where the arrivals from the west were kept. Anya and her friends passed the largest of these pens every day: long buildings with low roofs, sluices and troughs where the river was diverted and ore was washed, the smell of strong chemicals hiding the odors of the foul work conditions.

Several generations of mining students had worn a path in the dirt here. It bent in toward the pens, marking years of curiosity and sadism. There were few rocks along this stretch; they now lay in heaps between the double fences, where they’d been thrown. These days, Kayek and his friends carried stones from town in their pockets. They juggled them and laughed, shouting and tossing them like wicket balls. A mile they carried them, just for cruel amusement. Just to stop near the pens and hurl missiles at the animals who dared to peer out at Agyl in the distance.

Some of the animals flinched back. Some ran away. Some seemed not to feel the strikes of stones that managed to pierce the fence. On the corrugated roof of the pen, errant missiles banged, then settled until parts of the roof sagged from the weight.

The younger kids were made to run to the fence to retrieve underthrown rocks for another round. Anya had long outgrown the task, but she always made the run anyway. In her pocket she carried whatever candies she had palmed that day from the street vendors, plus a heel of bread from lunch with too much blue mold on it. While she gathered stones by the outer fence, she tossed the bread and candies across the gap for the captives inside. She peered between the bars for a familiar face among the crowd, a young girl she’d gotten to know back when her father ran the pens and she spent her afternoons there waiting for him to get off work. She looked for the kid with the wild hair, the bright eyes, and the curious questions. Violet. But Anya hadn’t seen her in weeks.

A rock pelted Anya in the back, and one of the boys yelled Sorry! but rounds of laughter came after. Anya ignored the boys; she searched the faces among the captives slumped near the washing troughs, their work shift done. She gazed beyond the troughs to the far fences, where crowds of these sand people stood gazing at the vast nothingness to the west. The girl was nowhere to be seen.

Out of the way or I’ll peg you again! a boy yelled. Kayek. Anya grabbed two stones and hurried back to the path, offering them to the older boys, a chance to stand close, to be part of their group. Jonah, she saw, had made his obligatory run to the fence but had refused to make another. Kayek threw one of Anya’s stones with a wicket player’s strength, and it cracked young Jonah in the head. The kid fell to his knees, toppling under the weight of his books.

No shirking! Kayek yelled.

Jonah held his bleeding head, stood, straightened his glasses, and ran as best he could under the weight of his bag, the other boys laughing at him, rocks raining after.

Disgusting, Mell said, watching the display. Men stand and fight, they don’t run.

I know, Anya said. It’s a miracle he’s lived this long.

My dad says kids like that, who are all brains and no guts, end up on the streets talking to themselves.

A blast from the mines rocked the air and shook the ground. A cloud of sand and debris billowed upward from the gorge and was carried off by the winds. Anya turned to watch it go. And inside the fence, she saw the most curious thing: a woman moving among the people, someone who hadn’t been there a moment ago. A woman in a tight suit covering her from ankle to neck, shimmering with a web of wire. Anya shielded her eyes and squinted into the haze of the afternoon sun, trying to make out what the woman was doing.

Do you see that? she asked Mell.

What? her friend said.

There. Right there. Anya pointed. But the woman, like an apparition, disappeared. She seemed to melt into the ground of the animal pen.

That hag? Mell asked, referring to some other woman by the fence. Disgusting. Those freaks need to use the sluices to wash themselves sometimes, not just our ore.

She’s gone, Anya whispered. Had the woman been there at all?

You spend too much time thinking on those ’zoids, Mell said. C’mon. Your boyfriend is leaving. Let’s go.

They followed at the back of the group and entered the stockyard and loading stations. There were a dozen trains idling that day. Ore heaped out the tops of the cars like black hills on a rusty plain, and hoppers growled as they loosed their loads into the containers. One of the trains crept along, filled so fast it never needed to stop, quotas being made for the anxious smelters to the east.

Anya and the others weaved their way through the maze of stationary trains while guards and conductors yelled at them to stay clear. Down the track, uniformed men scoured the undercarriage of an outbound train for runaways. The boys ducked under the train; it was too long to bother walking around. Anya followed, palms on cool steel rails and knees scraping rough gravel. Mell’s pack caught on the underside of the train, and Anya helped her get it unstuck.

When I get married, Mell said, it’ll be to a boy who lives in Southtown. I hate it out here.

Anya gazed out where the dozens of rails merged into several and eventually one. Out that way were the flat plains. Eventually they led to the great sea and the golden beyond—the heart of the empire, where old wars had been waged long ago but peace now reigned, where there were more kinds of foods and things to wear than she could possibly hold in her imagination. She’d never seen any of it herself, but she’d heard plenty by those who knew someone who knew someone who’d gotten close enough to see it with their own eyes.

Yeah, she said, agreeing with Mell but contemplating a life even farther away than Southtown.

The company property lay just beyond the tracks, a loose grid of homes cordoned off by a fence of overlapping plywood and corrugated tin. There were several official gates and dozens lesser known. The kids squeezed through one of the latter.

We watching them play wickets tonight? Mell asked, nodding ahead of her toward the boys. There’s gonna be a party after.

Anya watched as Kayek and some of the varsity kids kicked up dust, chasing each other toward their homes.

I dunno, I’ve got a minerals paper to write, Anya said. And advanced ores is kicking my ass.

Mell waved her hand. Blow it off. I’ve got the answers to tomorrow’s ores quiz. Takes five minutes to memorize.

Yeah, great for the quiz, but then I fail finals. Besides, Pop is constantly drilling me with this stuff. He says the only way to not get stuck in the mines is to know everything possible about them. Says the more you know about a thing, the less of it you’ll ever do. She shrugged at the logic of parents.

Oh, yeah. I forgot he was back home. How long this time?

He was gone four months.

"I mean, how long will he be around this time?"

You mean, how long do you have before you can convince me to throw another party? Not happening. And besides, he never knows how long he has. I hope a while. You should’ve seen how worn out he was this time. Came home with his beard all scruffy and natted like he hadn’t trimmed it or washed it since he left. He took a shower and left a cake of mud in there this thick. Anya pinched the air. I swear the company’s working him half to death.

Yeah, but doing what?

Anya shrugged.

Because my dad thinks your dad’s a sloucher, said Mell. Says he gets overpaid to do nothing, just sitting around watching others break their backs.

Your dad’s a drunk. I’m surprised to hear he’s capable of thinking.

Mell punched Anya in the arm. "Yeah, so what’s he do, then? How come he disappears for a quarter at a time? He’s not even listed in the company directory, you know. Can’t see his salary or nothing. You sure he even has a job?"

My dad has a job, Anya snapped. She clenched her fists and kept her eyes on the path. Her friend’s questions stung. These were questions she’d heard before—often from the cracked mirror in her bathroom.

Yeah, so what is it? How come you never ask him?

I ask him plenty, Anya said. He’s a fixer. He fixes problems that no one else can. And when he gets home, he . . . he just doesn’t like to talk about it anymore.

2

The Gentle Path

Anya

ANYA AND MELL parted where the paths to their homes diverged. Lost in thought, Anya almost didn’t see Jonah ahead. But boys were like words: once a new one was discovered, you suddenly saw it everywhere.

For some reason the little pipsqueak was crouching not far from the rear door of her house. He seemed to be writing something in the dirt, but his back was turned. Anya felt a rage boil inside at this intrusion into her life, this little stalker and nuisance. She considered what her father would do to a strange boy creeping around their house. The Brock she knew would rip that boy in two.

Almost as much to save his life as to scare him half to death, she snuck up behind Jonah swiftly, on the balls of her feet, and shouted close by his ear, Whatcha doin’! while digging her fingers into his ribs.

Jonah jumped as though stung by a bee. He leapt up, twirled around, and gaped at who had startled him—then ran away as though the rest of the nest were out to sting him.

Anya collapsed into fits of laughter. What a ’zoid. She wished Mell were there. The next time she saw the boy, she resolved to bop him on the nose or bean him with a stone like Kayek. Far better than the freak deserved, and far less than her father would dole out for sneaking around.

Kicking the dirt from her boots, she pulled open the screen door and stepped inside. Pop? I’m home! The old screen door slammed behind her. In the distance, the mine roared with a fierce blast. Dishes startled in the cupboards, rattling against their neighbors.

Pop?

Anya shouted for her father a second time before she nosed the booze. Following the high-proof perfume into the living room, she found her dad slumped sideways in his ratty recliner, snoring. Aw, hell, Pop. C’mon.

Anya grabbed her father’s hand and tugged until he was sitting up straight. Her father shook his head, cocked a fist back, and looked up at her with wide, fearful eyes.

It’s me, Anya said, knowing her father would never hit her, knowing he only lashed out in his sleep at whatever ghosts visited him there.

Her dad wiped spittle from his beard with the back of his hand. Jussa nap, he slurred. Jussa nap.

Yeah, well, let’s get you in bed. C’mon. Up.

She draped one of his arms over her shoulder and tried to lean him forward. Her father helped. He must’ve weighed three times what she did, but together they managed to get him to his feet, where he wobbled and used his daughter as a crutch.

Shoulda gone by now— he said.

No, Pop, you shouldn’t be gone by now. You just got here. You should stay home a while. With me.

They staggered toward his bedroom, her father shuffling his feet. One of his boots was off. The one he still had on was unlaced. His breath reeked of the sweet stench of gin.

"Naaah! Shoulda gone off by now. Bomb shoulda gone— He waved his arm violently, as though trying to dispel some vision, and it nearly sent him toppling over. No flash, he said, slurring so badly she could barely understand him. Vermin still out there."

Through the open doorway and to his bed, Anya steered him, like aiming a large boulder down the tailing hills. Her father crashed into the mattress, the springs squeaking but holding, a cloud of dust billowing up.

Somethin’ wrong ’cross the sand . . . her father muttered.

Anya tugged off his lone boot, studied him closely. What do you mean across the sand?

Vermin! her father shouted. It was what he called the people kept in the cages, the refugees who wandered out of the wastelands.

What about them? Anya asked. She set his boot on the floor and moved to the head of the bed, knelt down like they used to back when she and her father prayed, back when they believed in such things.

Still out there, her father whispered, and Anya could tell she was losing him to slumber. No ’splosion, he muttered. No flash.

As if on cue, there was a roar from the mines. The dust suspended in the air—caught in shafts of light from the setting sun—seemed to jitter to one side. And Anya’s drunken father began to snore.

Anya couldn’t study. She ran her eyes across the words in her text, but none of it landed. After reading the same sentence three times, she pushed her book away and went to the kitchen to make herself a mug of soup and some buttered bread. Reaching into the bread box, past the heel and the first few crusty pieces for something partway soft toward the rear of the loaf, it occurred to her that the first pieces only got crusty because she kept reaching past them. A self-fulfilled prophecy.

She took her bread and soup outside and ate on the stoop, her back against the frame of the screen door. There was a game of hide-and-seek being waged across the commons by some of the younger kids. Most of her friends would be washing up to go back to town for the wickets game that night on the school quad. Anya blew on her soup and watched the little ones have a hard time finding the kid who had scampered up onto a roof. It was the Pickett kid. Only eight or nine, but he could climb like a treefrog. As Anya sipped her soup, something in the corner of her vision caught her eye.

She took it for a sleeping dog at first, but it was just a ratty brown backpack. It belonged to that Jonah kid. Must’ve dropped it when she startled him, and he’d been too chickenshit to come back and retrieve it.

Anya sipped soup and studied the forlorn pack.

There was a commotion across the commons, the thunder of someone running across a tin roof. The chase was on. The Pickett kid leapt from the roof of the commissary to the Dawson house. The chasers were taking all the wrong angles to cut him off, and Anya could see at once that he’d get away. If only it were that easy when you got older, to run off and hide.

Ah, screw it. Anya set down her soup and tossed the last morsel of bread into her mouth. She jumped off the porch and strode over to the backpack. Maybe she’d find homework and take Mell’s advice and skip doing it on her own, just go to wickets and a party. So tempting. Her dad was dead drunk and would be none the wiser.

The pack was heavy. Anya hauled it to the stoop, set it on the lower step, and opened the top flap.

Reaching inside, she roughed her knuckle against something hard. A rock. Peering into the bag, she found rock after rock. The entire sack was full of them. From ores lab? A school project? She pulled one out and studied it, then another, but there was nothing unusual or notable about them. Igneous basalt, no hint of minerals, just the dumb kind of rocks kids threw for sport. No wonder the kid didn’t come back; who would want these? But what the hell was he doing? Some kind of punishment? Trying to get big and strong like the other boys so they’d stop picking on him? Or trying to get his legs stronger so he could run away faster like the little chickenshit he was?

Anya shook her head out of pity. Mell’s father was right: boys like him ended up on the streets, alone and muttering to themselves.

Across the commons, a girl was hopping down one of the many stone-lined paths. Anya watched her, saw how she jumped on two feet twice, then one foot three times, then two feet, then back to the other foot, before turning around to do it again. Anya had always been good at spotting patterns. She often thought she could see an event unfurl before it happened, like witnessing the trajectory of a hurled stone and knowing where it would land. Like seeing her wasted life and knowing precisely where it would end up. Probably working the pens like her father had when he was younger, stuck in border towns along the gorge, living in homes with cracked mirrors and roofs that leaked.

A pattern . . .

Anya scanned the commons, taking in the paths that led from house to house, merging and melding in the center, forming a wide circle around the old well, even framing the practice wickets court. She traced the paths with her eye, much like the girl hopping down them, saw how they wound toward her back stoop, how the path there was not complete, broken on one side and only half-finished on the other.

Leaving the stoop, Anya studied the stones that lined the paths. Igneous. Basitic. Not from the tailing heaps nearby, then. More like the stones broken up and uncovered when foundations are laid and streets are made. City stones. Rocks from Agyl. None of these stones belonged here. She’d somehow never noticed that before.

She looked to Jonah’s pack again. Why would the boy be collecting these rocks? Why take apart the path that leads to her back door?

And then it hit her as neatly and cleanly as a wickets ball. It hit her with such force, her breath was taken away. The world got blurry. She grabbed the pack and dumped the rocks out onto the dirt.

Images of the young kid by the fence, every day, gathering rocks.

Images of him handing one or two over before running like a coward, his back bent under the weight of his pack.

Images of him gathering stones in town before others could, carrying them all that long way.

The older boys were always complaining of the dwindling supply of stones for throwing. Always complaining there weren’t enough to go around.

Anya looked back to the commons, to that maze of pathways twisting their way through town, years’ worth of work, moving bullets out of arm’s reach. Years’ worth of work. Not taking apart, but laying out and building.

There was a pile of stones at her feet. Anya picked one up. She placed it in the broken line leading toward her door. Then placed another. Shots rang out as the Pickett kid thundered across a roof, and the rest of the children went tearing after. One of them disturbed a stone on a nearby path, and ore dust must’ve gotten in Anya’s eye. She wiped it away angrily and took her time replacing the rest of the stones.

3

A Ball of Gray

Anya

THE TAILINGS from the old mines formed seven ridges north of town. The older ridges had weathered into something like hills, their crowns smoothed from wind and rain and wear. Grass and weeds grew everywhere, old shrubs, even a copse of trees. At the end of one ridge lay a cluster of aerial towers with dishes pointed east, south, and north, connecting the remote border town with the rest of the empire by microwave.

The hills were a favorite place for the kids at night, close enough to home to not worry the parents, far enough to feel like they weren’t being watched. And there was something primal about gaining height, about looking down. Or perhaps knowing that no one else was looking down on you. It hadn’t taken much asking among the hide-and-seek crowd to find out that Jonah was probably up on the tailings to watch the sunset.

Anya should’ve stayed home and studied, but some problems were more interesting than others. She needed to know if her hunch was right, if the kid had built all those paths, and how long ago he’d started. How had she not noticed them forming? Because of the gradual pace? Like the creep of a mine down a seam of promising ore?

There were some trees that had managed to make root on the south side of the ridge closest to town. A few of the trees had died and stood spindled and naked, barkless white and smooth, perfect for climbing. Anya spotted Jonah in one of the trees. He was high up on a branch, back wedged into the crook, an open book in his lap, chewing on a pencil or a stick.

Winded from the climb and annoyed by a pebble in her boot, Anya sat on one of the logs that’d been arranged like benches on the edge of town and took off her shoe. She shook the small rock out, her thoughts drifting to her drunk father, and quizzes, and wicket games, and parties unattended.

The sky to the west was turning red, the color of blushing cheeks. There was a peal of bells from one of the many steeples in town, the spikes on the skyline that seemed to warn the gods to not tread there. Anya slipped her shoe back on. She watched the silhouette of the dumping station, earth pouring from ore carts and rumbling up conveyor belts and spilling out at sharp peaks before raining down in landslides. It was beautiful from a distance.

The city was more than the mines, which was easy to forget. It was restaurants and shops and bars. Open squares between them where kids were probably running and chasing through the grass, adults on benches reading books and chatting, people walking their dogs, going home from work, or out to dinner. Someone would be on a first date that night, and they would fall in love and get married. Somewhere else a fight was brewing that would lead to a divorce. It was weird how the distance brought out the details; she saw none of this while she strode through town.

So many churches, Jonah said.

Anya turned and gazed up, saw that Jonah was speaking down to her. He pointed toward Agyl. Twenty-three of them. I counted. That’s the First Union ringing now, the one that made you look up. I think their clock is off. It always rings early. You go to church? Jonah asked.

No, Anya said.

Yeah, me neither. In fact, I don’t know anyone who does. But there’s a bunch of churches, and the bells still work like someone’s listening.

Anya laced up her shoe and went to tighten the laces on the other, annoyed that the kid had pestered her with inane questions before she got to her own. Before she could unlace her other shoe, a bright flash erupted in the gray of dusk, a light like a blinding sun—

For a moment, Anya thought it was in her mind, a misfiring of neurons, a stroke, or that she’d been struck in the head with a rock. But there was no pain, no noise, just a bloom of light over Agyl, in the center of town, a flash of light bigger than the town itself.

It was too bright to look at. She turned away and covered her face with the crook of her arm. By the time she dared to look back, a giant cloud had appeared, a massive sphere of smoke that covered everything. Everything. Expanding outward. Swallowing all.

Anya watched in stunned silence. Half-blinded, blinking away the green seared into her retinas, she fought to comprehend what she was seeing.

The boom hit her moments later. A sonic roar followed by a low grumbling as the ball of gray expanded more slowly now, its center rising up and billowing out to an impossible height, clear up against the heavens, shoving the clouds aside.

Did you see that—? Jonah shouted. The mines—

That wasn’t the mines, Anya said.

As the cloud grew and thinned, the shrapnel of old buildings could be seen inside, toppled and hollowed out, many of them orange and ablaze, an entire town stricken and on fire.

Her friends. Anya thought suddenly of her friends, of Kayek and Mell. She thought of Kayek first and hated herself for it. She knew even as the clouds grew upward that she would