Текст книги "Sand"

Автор книги: Hugh Howey

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12 • Father’s Boots

It was late by the time Conner got back to his place. There were lamps burning higher up his dune, two men on the scaffolding there hammering away at the new home being built on top of his. A scrap of tin fell from the scaffolding and pierced the sand outside his door. One of the men above peered down after it, the scaffolding creaking. He showed no remorse for narrowly missing Conner, no apology, just an annoyed grunt at gravity’s tricks and the tiring prospect of climbing down and back up again.

“I still live here, you know,” Conner called out. But one glance at the sand wrapping around his home, and he knew this was a complaint with an expiration date.

He pulled the door open and kicked the scrum [6]6
  Wet sand packed in the soles of one’s shoes.


[Закрыть]off his boots before stepping inside. “Yo, brother! You home?” Pulling the door shut required heaving up with both hands to get the doorknob to latch. Sift [7]7
  Fine sand, usually airborne.


[Закрыть]fell from the ceiling, and the rafters creaked. There was no sign of Palmer, no boots or track of sand, no gear bag or detritus from a raided pantry. Just a voice calling out from below, muffled and distant. Sounded like Rob. The hammering overhead resumed. Conner aimed a middle finger toward the ceiling.

“You had dinner?” he called out. He set his leftovers on the rickety table by the door—half a can of cold rabbit stew from the Dive Bar. His little brother shouted another reply, but again his voice was a dull rumble. It sounded like he was a shack down.

It took four strides to go from the foyer, through the kitchen, and into their shared bedroom with the two little cots on their rusted springs. Rob’s bed was shoved off to one side, and three of the floor planks beneath it had been removed. It was dark below. The only illumination in the small house was what little lamplight filtered through the cracked glass set into the front door. A candle by Rob’s bed had melted down to nothing. Conner rummaged through the bin by his cot and grabbed his flashlight, turned it on. Dead. He threw it back into the bin. Three strides, and he pulled down the gas lamp from the living room. Shook it and listened to the splash of oil. Fumbled to get it lit. “You getting the gear together?” he asked.

Rob didn’t answer. Conner adjusted the lamp until the room was flooded with light. He sat on the bedroom floor and dangled his feet into the pit, then lowered himself down and reached up to grab the lantern. A pale glow filled someone’s former home.

What had once been rafters holding up a roof were now floor joists in Palmer’s house. Someone else’s house stood below theirs, long abandoned and unclaimed. Soon, his own home would be someone’s basement and this a sand-filled cellar. And so it went, sand piling up to the heavens and homes sinking toward hell.

Conner swung the lantern around in the small space. He and Rob kept the few things they owned stowed down there. The bag that held the tent and all their camping gear was undisturbed. It sat right where they’d left it a year ago. It was covered in sift. Conner dusted some of the sand off the bag and wondered where the hell Rob was. He pushed open an old bathroom door and saw more floor planks removed. A light danced below. “What the fuck’re you doing down there?” he asked.

Rob peered up at him through the hole in the old floor and smiled guiltily. He was sitting on a pile of sand one more shack down. It was as far down as one could go, this next buried home nearly full of drift. [8]8
  Sand that enters a home.


[Закрыть]His brother’s hair looked wet, was matted to his forehead, like he’d been exerting himself. Conner quickly looked away.

“Aw, c’mon, man. You’re not down there jerking off, are you?”

“No!” Rob squealed, and Conner peered back into the hole. He saw his brother wiggling back and forth. Rob glanced up at him and bit his lip in frustration. “Where’ve you been?” he asked. “I’ve been calling for you and calling for you.”

Conner realized now that his brother was in trouble. Crouching down, he lowered the lamp below the floorboards and saw that the sand was up to his brother’s hips. There were gouges where Rob had been digging.

“What the fuck have you done?”

“I was just playing,” Rob said.

Conner hung the lantern on a nail and worked his way down another level. “I told you to stay out of here. Drift can dump through in a flash.”

“I know. But… it didn’t dump in. I kinda buried myself.”

Conner spotted the wires trailing out of the sand. He tried to pry his brother out, but Rob wouldn’t budge. The sand around him was hard as concrete. “What’ve you done?”

“I’ve been working on… something.” Rob showed Conner the band in his hand, a cluster of wires trailing off and disappearing into the hard pack. “I wasn’t diving, promise. Not all the way. Just trying to see what I could do with my boots—”

“With your boots—?”

“Father’s boots.”

“You mean myboots.” Conner snatched the band out of his brother’s hand. “Eleven fucking years old, Rob. You’re gonna get yourself killed playing with this shit. Where’d you get the band?”

“Found it.”

“Did you steal this?” Conner shook the band. He had half a mind to leave his brother there for the night, just to teach him a lesson.

“No. I found it. Swear.”

“You know what Palm would’ve done if he found you playing with this? Or Vic?” Conner checked the band. It belonged to an old pair of visors, but someone had removed those. “Did you find this in the trash? Because that’s where this piece of shit belongs.”

Rob didn’t say. A scavenger’s admission.

“Did you do the wiring?”

“Yes,” his brother whispered. “Con, I can’t feel my feet.”

Conner saw that his brother was crying. And one of his arms was pinned. Rob didn’t need to be told how serious this shit was.

“Look,” Conner said, “you can’t leave these contacts exposed like this. They’ll work for a while until you get a sweat going, and then they’ll short.” He used his shirt to dry the inside of the band. “Once that happens, everything you try just gets worse and worse. You were tightening the sand by trying to loosen it. All we’ve gotta do is kill the power and the sand should unclench.”

Rob sniffed. “I put the power in the left boot,” he said.

“In the boot?Why the fuck would you do that?”

Rob wiped his cheek with his free hand. “’Cause I thought I could make a dive suit without the suit. Just the boots.”

“Jesus Christ, how did you make it to eleven?” Conner checked the band, made sure it was dry, and was about to press it to his forehead and release his brother when he thought of his sister and what she would do.

“Hold still,” he said. He pulled his shirt over his head, found a dry patch, and patted his brother’s forehead dry.

“I’m not crying,” Rob said quietly, as Conner dabbed his head.

“I know you’re not crying. I’m drying your temples.”

His brother held still. Conner checked the dive band to make sure it was aligned right, then paused a moment to admire the tiny solders his brother had made. “You’re a piece of work,” he said. He slid the band down on his brother’s head. “Now listen, I don’t want you to just release the sand, got it?”

Rob nodded.

“I want you to flow it down around your legs, okay? Feel it move. Direct it. And then let it push up on the bottoms of your feet. You have to picture two hands down there beneath you, lifting you up. Two hands with good grips on those boots, okay? Can you feel the fingers? The palms?”

“I think so,” Rob said, biting his lip.

“Okay. Try it. Quick, before you start sweating.”

“’S’not helping,” Rob grunted. He squinted his eyes and concentrated. Conner felt the sand stir and loosen beneath him.

“Good,” he said. “Now up.”

Rob yelped as he shuddered skyward. His head nearly bumped into the rafters. The sand lifted him through the hole in the old bathroom, until his boots were high and dry on the pile of drift.

Conner laughed and brushed the spill [9]9
  Sand knocked loose from someone’s exertions.


[Закрыть]off his lap. Rob whooped and pumped his fists.

“Awesome job,” Conner said. “Now take those boots off. You’re fucking grounded.”

13 • Son of a Whore

Conner stayed up late that night and waited for Palmer to get home. He finally passed out beside Rob on the tiny cot and woke in the morning to find his own bed undisturbed. He had left it open for Palmer, but his brother had probably gotten lucky with a girl. Totally flaking out on them again this year, even after promising. After really promising. And now Conner had a crick in his neck for nothing.

He got up and stretched. Rob grabbed the loose sheets, rolled over, and cocooned himself. Conner grabbed a white open-front shirt that tied shut around the waist. He stepped into the washroom and rubbed sand on his face and hands, exfoliating the sweat and grime and stink. With some sand in the shirt, he rubbed the fabric together with his fists. The sand in the basin still had the faint smell of old dried flowers crushed up in there. Damn faint, though.

He shook the sand back into the basin and got dressed, leaving his shorts on and knotting the shirt. Hurrying out into the morning chill, he pissed in the general vicinity of the nearby latrine, steam swirling off in the breeze. After kicking some light sand on the dark sand, he hurried back home.

“Yo, Rob, I’m running out for a fill and to find Palm. Get the tent aired out, will you? And no fucking around down there.”

There was a grunt from the bedroom, and the Rob-shaped mound shifted beneath the covers. Conner gathered his canteens: one on the hook by the door, an old beat-up one of Vic’s sitting in the window like a relic or a piece of decoration, and a third he’d hidden on top of the kitchen cabinet. He strung all three over his head, grabbed all the coin he owned in the world—which fit easily in one palm—and called into the bedroom again.

“All right. I’ll be back. Don’t sleep till noon, man. I want to get going early enough we aren’t figuring the tent out in the dark like last year.”

Conner sat on one of his sister’s old chairs and grabbed his boots. Then he spotted his dad’s boots where he’d dumped them the night before and decided to wear them instead. Maybe he was already thinking about his trip that night and wanted something of his father’s with him, or maybe it was just to keep Rob from getting into trouble while he was gone.

The band and a tangle of wires his brother had rigged up hung inside the right boot. Conner looked for a way to unplug the thing. He glanced into the bedroom, but the glorious Cocoon-of-Rob had not opened and sprouted its precious little butterfly, so he didn’t ask. He saw how the band split in two, little metal contacts soldered into snaps, and took it apart. Each half went up a leg of his shorts and out at his waist, snapped back together, and then the band went into his pocket. It was eerie how well the boots fit. He felt a little older as he grabbed his ker, stepped outside, and shook the sift out. He left the door open to let in the light and keep Rob from oversleeping, then set off toward Springston.

His first stop would be the Honey Hole. Palmer would’ve hit their mom up for money, no doubt. And then he’d try the dive school. As much as he dreaded visiting the Honey Hole, morning was the safest time of day. Not because he minded the patrons and bar fights and the slosh of beer downstairs, but because it presented the best chance of catching his mom when she wasn’t working.

The Hole was on the edge of Springston, right between town and the sprawl of shacks and shops that made up Shantytown. The location kept the riffraff who worked and drank there out of the town proper while also keeping the alluring fruit upstairs well within reach of the Lords and the wealthy. No one wanted to walk through Shantytown to find a good time. It would annul the effects of the carnal visits during the long stagger home.

Beyond Springston loomed the great wall where Conner had been born. The towering edifice of concrete rose nearly a hundred meters above the sand, had been erected generations ago by a rare union of Lords in the most massive of public work projects. It was said that this wall was bigger than any of the last and would stand for all of time. It now leaned noticeably westward over Springston, had angled itself toward the nicest parts of town. Any view of the wall reminded Conner of the first six years of his life. The good years. There were the baths he could submerge in, covering his whole body and even his head. There had been electricity and toilets that flushed—no going out to shit in the sand and having to dig his own hole only to find two other shits already buried there. These luxuries he remembered that Rob would never understand, luxuries he had to share with his brother like stories about their dad. They were half-memories of things blurred by childhood and by having taken those years for granted.

Nearer to him, rising up between two of the sandscrapers, was a column of black smoke. The top of the column sheered off into wisps as it rose past the lip of the wall and met the wind. Conner thought he’d heard a rumble in the middle of the night. Another bomb. He wondered who the fuck this time. The self-styled Lords of Low-Pub? The brigands up north? The dissidents there in the city? The FreeShanties out in his neighborhood? The problem with bombs when everyone was making them was that they no longer stood for anything. You forgot what the fuck for.

He rounded a low dune and approached the Honey Hole, a building no one would ever bomb, not in a million years. The various brothels along the edges of Springston had to be among the safest places across the thousand dunes. Conner laughed to himself. Probably why the Lords spend so much time in them, he thought.

He kicked the scrum out of his boots before pulling open the door and stepping inside. Heather was behind the bar, drying a jar with a rag. A lone man sat on a stool in front of her, bent over with his head on his arms, snoring. Heather smiled at Conner before glancing up at the balcony that ran clear around the second floor. “She should be up,” she called out, not bothering to lower her voice. The man in front of her didn’t stir.

“Thanks,” Conner said. Upwas where he liked to find his mom. Standing. He headed for the stairs and nearly tripped over a drunk sleeping on the floor. Foreman Bligh. Conner resisted a dozen spiteful urges and stepped overthe man. It was easy to blame people for the misery of life rather than blaming the sand. Yelling at the sand got you nowhere. People yelled back, and at least that was a response. An acknowledgment. Being tormented and simultaneously ignored was the worst.

He marched up the stairs toward the balcony, old wood creaking with each step, and couldn’t imagine being one of the drunks who took this walk in full view of their friends. But then men bragged about whom at the Honey Hole they’d bagged the night before. Enough trips up those stairs, and maybe it feels normal. Fuck, he didn’t want to get a day older. He imagined sitting down there getting hammered out of his skull one day, a beard down to his navel, smelling like a latrine, then paying someone to lie still while he fucked them.

As much as the entire scene disgusted him, Conner knew that most men ended up right there, hating their life and trying to avoid it. One night of escape at a time. Drowning their misery with a bottle and paying for a brief spasm of lust. It would probably get him too, as much as he hated the thought of succumbing to that. It would get him too if he stuck around. Man… he remembered wishing life would rush along, that time would hurry up and go and he would get older already, but now he wanted it to stop. Stop before shit got any more dreary than it already was. If life would stop moving, maybe he could clear his head. He wouldn’t have to run out on it.

He paused outside his mom’s room, almost forgot why he was there. Palmer. Right. He lifted his hand and knocked, really hoped he didn’t hear a man barking at him to scram, this one’s taken. But it was his mother who opened the door, a robe draped over her shoulders. She tightened it up and cinched the sash when she saw who it was.

“Hey, Mom.”

She turned and left the door open, walked back to her bed and sat down. There was a bag beside her, a roll of cloth laid out with brushes. Lifting her foot to a stool, she went back to painting her toenails.

“Slow night,” she said, which Conner tried his damnedest not to picture the meaning of. But trying made it happen. Fuck, he hated that place. Didn’t know why she didn’t just sell it and do something else with her life. Anything else. “I don’t have a coin to spare,” she told him.

“When’s the last time I came here asking for coin?” Conner asked, offended.

She glanced over at him. He still hadn’t stepped inside. “Wednesday before last?” she asked.

Conner remembered that. “Okay, fine, but when before that? And that was for Rob, just so you know. The kid has fucking holes in his kers.”

“Watch your language,” his mother said. She jabbed her tiny brush at him, and Conner resisted the urge to point out that her profession sorta depended on that word.

“I just came to see if you’d heard from Palmer. Or maybe even Vic.”

His mom reached for the bedside table where a curl of smoke rose from an ashtray. She took loud, popping tokes and got the cherry glowing again. Exhaling, she shook her head.

“It’s that weekend,” Conner told her.

She turned and studied him for a long while. “I know what weekend it is.” A column of gray ash fell from her cigarette and drifted to the floor.

“Well, Palm promised he was coming this year—”

“Didn’t he promise last year?” She blew smoke.

“Yeah, but he said he was reallypromising this time. And Vic—”

“Your sister hasn’t been out there in ten years.” His mom coughed into her fist and went back to work with the little brush.

“I know.” Conner didn’t bother correcting her. It’d been eight years, not ten. “But I keep thinking—”

“When you get older, you’ll stop going out there too. And then poor Rob will go out on his own, and he’ll make you feel bad for not going with him, but it’s himyou’ll feel sorry for, and you’ll sit around and wait for him to grow up and figure out what the rest of us know.”

“And what’s that?” Conner asked, wondering why the hell he even tried anymore.

“That your father is long gone and dead and the more you go on wishing he weren’t, the more sick you make yourself for no good reason.” She studied her handiwork, wiggled both sets of toes, and screwed the small brush back into its little bottle. Palmer tried not to think where she got little artifacts like this. Scavengers and divers trading for her wares. Fuck, his brain was obstinate.

“Well, I guess I came by for nothing.” He turned to go. “By the way, Rob says hello.” Which was a lie.

“You ever think about what I named you boys?”

Conner stopped and turned back to his mom. He didn’t answer. He’d never thought about the fact that she’d named them at all. They just were.

“Palmer and Conner and Rob,” she said. “All of you little thieves. I named you after your father.”

Conner stood rooted in place for a moment. He didn’t believe her. It was a coincidence. “What about Vic?” he asked.

His mom took a drag on her cigarette and exhaled a fountain of smoke. “When I had Victoria, I didn’t know your father was a goddamn thief. That he was gonna run off and leave us with nothing.”

“He wasn’t a thief,” Conner said. “He was a Lord.” He tried to say it with conviction.

His mother took a long, deep breath. Let it out. “Same damn thing,” she said.

14 • Sandtrap

Conner left the Honey Hole and kicked along the edge of Shantytown. He stared down at his father’s boots and thought for the first time on his name and the names of his brothers. Palmer, Conner, Robert. What kind of shit was that to learn? And it was like she’d gotten more blunt over time. Had to be a coincidence. Something her madness had dreamt up after their father’d left. He hoped his mom never told Rob—the kid would be crushed. Would take to calling himself Bobby.

Conner crossed a low dune between a freshly collapsed house and a new one under construction. A handful of men were hauling material from the ruin and nailing it back together two dozen paces away, once again forestalling the inevitable. The most disturbing thing about the scene was how normal it seemed, how many times Conner had watched this play out in Shantytown, a ruin serving as the foundation for new construction. But now his mother had him seeing the commonplace in a new way. If anything, this alien view strengthened his resolve for that night’s plans. It undid what a beer and rabbit stew with Gloralai the night before had started doing to his head.

He cut through a row of apartments that abutted the back of the dive school. Palmer was probably back at his place right now helping Rob unpack and air out the tent. But still a good idea to check the dorms and see if he’d crashed there the night before.

Ms. Shyler waved from her porch as he passed. She went back to sweeping the sand out of her house, when one of her kids stomped inside, transferring some of it back. She turned and yelled at the boy, was her own sissyfoot in a way. They all were. The men building the house from the remnants of a house, all these tasks that required doing over and over with no end in sight, filling canteens and eating, shitting, sleeping, looking forward to a weekend and dreading the week that would come after. Life was lived by sissyfoots, all of them. One bucket of sand at a time.

He had to stop thinking like that. There was progress somewhere. Something better. That’s what the slow stagger of men, women, and families believed as they marched off toward the horizon. They believed in a life far away from the fighting and the bombs. Away from the riots and the patter of morning gunfire. Away from the shops where sunlight and sand filtered through bullet holes in wrinkled tin. Away from Lords with fickle rules and those who meant to topple them with indiscriminate bombs.

There had to be a reason so many left and never returned. It was the allure of a good life. Or simply no longer being able to stand the sound of distant grumbles, drums, and thunder without feeling an urge, a compulsion, to go see for themselves. That’s what his father must’ve believed. It had to be what he felt. Conner’s mom was just trying to poison the memory of the man because she hated her own life. That was it.

The door to the dorms was open, letting the light and a swirl of drift in. Conner stepped inside. There were two dive students in the back of the bunkroom, a clatter of dice. They turned when Conner’s shadow darkened the pips. “Have you guys seen Palmer?” he asked.

One of the boys shook his head. “He and Hap are out on a dive. They’re not back yet.”

“Wasn’t that a week ago?” Conner asked.

“So it was a long fucking dive. How should I know? They were all secretive about it.”

“Yeah,” Conner said, dejected. “Thanks.” Another year of disappointment from their big brother. Poor Rob.

“Yo, please kindly shut the fuck up,” someone called from one of the bunks.

Conner apologized and left. The dice clattered against the wall.

Heading home, he realized it would just be him and Rob that night, which screwed up his plans a little. Still workable, though. It would fall on him to lead the talk and to work the lantern. He wasn’t prepared. Especially not after visiting his mom. All of his stories had been told and retold to death.

He hiked back through the schoolyard and tried to match his memory of his father with his mother’s account. He’d had much more of her version of events than actual time with his dad. He’d been six when his father had left, had spent twice that number of years living in his absence, relying on stories passed down from others. Vic had done her share to muddy his recollection, telling all the stories from when their dad was younger, growing up in Low-Pub, making a name for himself as a diver, the years leading up to his taking over as Lord of Springston, back before his breakdown.

Conner wondered if dredging up the past was even a good idea. It was like being a sand diver in a lot of ways. There were all these rusty hurts buried deep. Bringing them up and trying to oil them, sand them, make them into something they could never be again—how was that healthy? Maybe it wasn’t worth it to know who his dad was. Maybe his mom was right and he should just move on. If their dad did come back, he would be older, weaker, grayer, not the same man. Clinging to an idealized past was a poison of sorts, that bastard Nostalgia, making people think there was a better time and place if they could just get back to it.

He glanced toward the great wall, that towering symbol of his past with its dangerous lean. A distant grumble from No Man’s Land could be heard, the faint boom boom boomof who-the-fuck-knew-what. The future, that’s what. The very near future. The grumble of the unknown, like a hungry stomach that knew it needed feeding, like the hungry soul that needs some new adventure, the boom boom boomof a man’s pulse when he’s scared he won’t amount to shit, that if he sits still, the dunes will claim him.

The three canteens rattled emptily by Conner’s hip, and he remembered he needed to stop and fill them. He needed to buy some jerky as well. Between Gloralai and his mother and Palm being an asshole, his brain was well and truly scrambled. His father’s boots didn’t help matters at all. He passed through the low Bleak Wall, which divided Springston and Shantytown in disjointed gaps and divides, a cheap and hasty imitation of the larger wall farther east. In the morning shade of the wall, a game of football was being played, shirts and skins. Boys Conner’s age ran back and forth, kicking an inflated gooseskin and tackling one another, coming up covered in sweat and sand. There were three skins and four shirts. Guilla, a friend of Conner’s, tackled a boy from Springston. As they disentangled themselves, Guilla spotted Conner skirting the playing field, which was laid out by canteens and shoes.

“Yo, Con!” he shouted. “We need another.”

“Can’t,” Conner said. “Wish I could.”

Guilla shrugged, and the boys returned to their storm of sand-clouds and scrapes.

Past the wall, there was a line at the cistern. Conner fished in his pockets for three coins and waited his turn. He watched a mother scold her son in the middle of a path, saw Jenkins’s dad emerge from their small walled garden holding a headless snake in one hand and a hoe in the other, then march inside their house probably to cook it. He became hyperalert at any gathering like this, saw all the tiny details of normal life humming right along. This was when the bombs came and ripped through crowds. At funerals and weddings and religious celebrations. At cisterns and cafes and protests. It was strange how tense one could become while surrounded by the banal. It was the waiting, waiting. It made Conner want to flee his flesh, sitting still in that creeping line. It was why he had to go.

Finally, it was his turn. He paid his coins and watched the canteens fill. “To the brim,” he said. The pumpman looked at him with disdain but didn’t skimp. Conner put the three straps over his head, the canteens heavy and full on his hip. He headed off to buy some jerky. It would wipe him out, this trip. He reached into his pocket and felt the last of his coins there. Crossing the empty patch of dunes between the cistern and the market, mentally packing for his journey, the ground suddenly shifted beneath his feet—

Conner stumbled. He nearly fell forward, had to throw his arms out for balance, his mind seizing on the idea that it was the damn boots, the band shorting out in his pocket from canteen water, fucking Rob. But he heard the hiss of flowing sand, and then the laughter of boys, and Conner couldn’t move. He looked down to see his legs buried up to his knees, the sand packed so hard around his shins that his feet throbbed. He couldn’t fall over if he tried.

“Whadja step in, Whoreson?”

Twisting at the waist and craning his neck, Conner could see Ryder and two others behind him. They had sand in their hair and on their shoulders, visors pressed up on their foreheads, had probably been diving in the training dunes near school or had seen him checking the dorms. Conner tried to pull his boots free but couldn’t.

“Let me go, Ryder.” He stopped struggling and fought the urge to say This isn’t funny, because that would only draw laughter. He fought the urge to remind the boys that sandtrapping someone like this was a buryable offense, because that would only bring more threats. Reaching into his pocket, he felt the band there that his brother had made. If only the power weren’t in the boots—

“Hey, Whoreson, I’ve got a question.” Ryder stepped around in front of him, grinning. The other two boys flanked Conner to either side. “When you were a baby, how much did your mommy charge you to suck her tits? ’Cause she charges my dad five coin each!”

The laughter echoed over the dunes. The sun was barely up, but to Conner it suddenly felt like midday. Ryder stepped close. Conner could smell stale beer and onions on the boy’s breath.

“I don’t want to see you near her,” he said.

Conner knew who Ryder meant. He tried to hold his tongue, but couldn’t. He should’ve told Ryder the truth right then and said he would never see her again anyway. That none of this bullshit mattered. That they were kids and the fucking sand didn’t care. Instead, he sneered at Ryder, unable to resist. “That’s for her to decide.”

Ryder smiled. “That’s where you’re wrong, boy. Ask your mom who decides.” He gripped the back of Conner’s neck and squeezed. Conner wanted to punch the bigger boy, but he knew how badly that would go. There were three of them, and his boots were pinched. “There are men in these dunes and then there are little boys like you. I’m a sand diver, and we take what we find. And I found her first.”

“You’re a trainee,” Conner said. “You’re not even a sand—”

There was a flash of rage on Ryder’s face—a horrible spasm of bared teeth and wrinkled brow—just before the sands opened and Conner was sucked down.