Sandstorm Box Set Page 13

  Samel walked quietly, mirroring the expressions of those around him. Every once in a while, he snuck a glance at Raj. During the last procession, Samel had whispered several questions, earning disapproving looks from those around them.

  Today, he behaved as expected.

  Samel was learning.

  Deep in the distance, the first of the colonists in line reached the ten-foot-wide wooden bridge, making room for one another as they shuffled into rows, eventually spilling off the other side and reforming. Raj looked for Bailey and his friends in the line, but he didn’t see any of them in the dense crowd.

  With no sight of them since yesterday, he allowed a hope to grow: perhaps they’d heeded the Watcher’s warning, and would leave him and Samel alone.

  The procession continued past the rows of Green Crops on the other side of the bridge, and curved, headed toward the far end of the western rock formation in a slow, deliberate procession.

  Raj’s hand moved to his right pocket, where he kept the strange metal gift. His thoughts drifted to Adriana.

  He looked around again, but he didn’t see anyone who fit the brief memory he had of her. He had thought of her often last night before sleep, as he’d rolled the strange gift in his hand in the dark. The metal keepsake was as unexpected as their chance encounter. Try as he might, he couldn’t solidify Adriana’s appearance in his mind, having only seen her the day her grandmother died.

  Hopefully, he’d recognize her at the ceremony.

  Soon Raj, Helgid, and Samel passed over the wooden bridge, their boots clopping on the wooden planks. Raj looked over the four-foot-high railing to the river. Every so often, on a normal day, one of the younger children disobeyed a parent’s warning, climbed, and lost their balance. Most of the time, those children were fished from the slow-moving river before they drowned, but every once in a while, a tragic accident occurred. Thankfully, Samel knew better than to horse around.

  Crossing the bridge, they passed the Green Crops on either side, reaching a patch of open desert that ran between the last parts of the cliffs.

  Not for the first time, Raj pictured his father alone in the desert, wandering farther and farther away from the colony. His father was never far from his mind, every time he attended a ceremony. And neither was his mother.

  Raj looked up at the highest western cliffs, toward which the line veered. A few of The Watchers stood, silhouetted by the sun, keeping track of the people below, or looking out for storms. Raj didn’t need to look to know that some of The Watchers stood on the eastern cliffs, as well.

  The crowd rounded the western cliffs, following the path to the other side.

  The Watchers disappeared from sight.

  An open landscape spanned as far as the eye could see. The path on which they traveled ran parallel to the cliffs, but beyond, several hundred feet were dotted with rocks and stones, spanning the width of the other side of the rock formation and eventually seguing to desert.

  The graveyard.

  Staring at the graveyard, Raj saw sections.

  The freshest graves—those that hadn’t been claimed by the desert—were at the far end of the graveyard, mostly unburied by the shifting sands. The slightly older graves were in the middle, reduced to tips of stones. And the oldest were mostly invisible.

  About halfway back, in the middle section, was the empty grave that marked Raj’s father, along with the full one that marked his mother. He scanned the hundreds of stones, as if he might find them, but he was too far back to see.

  It had been too long since he visited them on his own.

  He made a mental note to visit them soon.

  The line kept going until the colonists reached the western edge of the graveyard, where the freshest graves were located.

  A group of two-dozen men stood at the threshold of three newly dug holes. Next to them, three bodies lay wrapped in sheets, ready for burial. As the line reached the waiting men, the bereaved relatives broke from the crowd and lined up—the men in front, the women behind, so their crying could not be heard over the speech to come. Next, the other colonists filed into spectating rows, where they could watch the ceremony.

  Raj searched for Adriana among the bereaved. He noticed a few young women that fit her description, but it was impossible to tell for certain, because most wore shawls over their faces.

  Raj, Helgid, and Samel merged into one of the long rows of colonists facing the graves, settling about ten rows from the front. When the last sounds of crunching boots stopped, the desert quieted and they waited for the ceremony to begin.

  All eyes turned to a man who stepped a few paces in front of the two dozen important men. Raj and Samel shifted, looking through the rows of the crowd, so that they could see the colony leader.

  Gideon’s stern expression did not change as he scanned the crowd. Looking over his shoulder, he nodded at his Heads of Colony, and his Watchers, before speaking. His austere voice carried over the crowd.

  “The heavens have claimed the lives of three more of us, but they are not lost,” Gideon began, loud enough to be heard by all in the desert quiet. “The winds that took them from our colony will carry them upward and on to better things, to a place where food is plentiful, to a place where the elements cannot harm them. The whispered words of our ancestors will comfort them as they move from this life to the next.”

  A few heads bowed. A few women shed quiet tears.

  “The heavens will guard these stones, so that our deceased are never alone. They will not be forgotten.” A subtle breeze blew, lifting the hair of the bereaved women, some of whom had removed their shawls to blot their faces. “We will remember them by the lives they led, and the people they touched.”

  The crowd alternated its focus between Gideon and the wrapped, lifeless bodies. Raj noticed a few children in the front row shifting from foot to foot. He looked over at Samel, thinking he might have to scold him, but Samel stood quietly and rigidly. Sensing Raj’s eyes, he looked over and nodded.

  Another of The Heads of Colony, Wyatt, stepped forward from the important men. Normally, the tall, skinny man reserved his voice for passing out rations or giving directions to The Watchers who carried out Gideon’s projects. Today, it served another purpose. Tilting his head up to the sky as if he sought wisdom from the sun or the twin moons, Wyatt spoke.

  “The heavens have a purpose for taking our loved ones, greater than any of our individual comprehension. We honor our loved ones, as painful as their passing might be, by carrying on their hard work. We persevere in their memory.” Wyatt beckoned to the three bodies. “We will remember them by carrying on in their name. That is their legacy.”

  Listening to Wyatt, Raj felt a pit in his stomach. Raj barely recalled his mother’s funeral, but he recalled his father’s with clarity. The crowd had proceeded in the same march. The men had watched solemnly. Children had clung to their parents, listening. But those speeches sounded different, without a body to bury.

  Dad had only an empty grave to mark his remains, and few relatives to remember him. He had no whispers from ancestors to take him to the sky. His body had long rotted in the desert, food for the few animals clinging to life out there. Or maybe he was buried, like the oldest graves.

  Neena had looked for him, but she hadn’t found him.

  Or, at least, that was what she told Raj, although sometimes he suspected she was holding something back.

  He listened as Wyatt concluded his speech and stepped back into line, and The Watchers moved forward to start the burials. Scanning the three wrapped sheets, Raj wondered which was the woman he’d helped pull from that collapsed house.

  He didn’t have to guess for long.

  One of the bereaved—a girl—uncovered her face, letting out a long wail as she moved past the others, kneeling at the first grave’s edge. Raj recognized her long, dark hair and her mannerisms. She brushed away tears with slender hands as she spoke quiet words and The Watchers lowered the first body, before she moved back to embrace her
relatives, all of whom listened intently for the rest of the ceremony.

  That must be Adriana, he thought.

  Chapter 32: Darius

  Darius scurried through the colony with his cane. During the ceremony, he had made sure to keep his distance from the others, including Elmer, out of a cautious fear that someone might suspect something.

  Now, he headed to his friend’s house.

  He couldn’t get his mind off of what he’d seen in the caves. He needed to talk with Elmer in private.

  Walking up to the old, faded house he’d visited the day before, Darius found Elmer returning.

  “Elmer!” he called, with enough vigor to make the man turn from the doorway.

  Elmer’s good eye lit up as he saw his friend. “Darius!”

  “Can I come in?” Darius looked on either side of him. Everyone else was preoccupied with returning home, tending to their children, or heading off to morning chores. A handful—the Crop Tenders who lived close by—headed off to work detail.

  “Sure,” Elmer said, leading his friend inside.

  Darius walked into the familiar hovel. Unlike Darius’s house, which was filled with scraps of metal and weapons to be fixed, Elmer’s house was relatively clean. The house contained only cookware, a few piles of clothing, and a tidy hearth. Darius’s eyes flicked to the long, brown shawl hanging on the wall, which had belonged to Elmer’s dead wife. He felt a tug of sympathy.

  “I’ll shut the door,” Elmer said, waiting until Darius was inside before he closed it. Without the commotion of the alleys to distract them, he asked in a whisper, “How did it go last night?”

  Darius looked behind him. He still couldn’t convince himself that a shadow hadn’t followed him from the cave’s bowels, watching him scurry through the streets, to his house, and to the ceremony. And here. Maybe someone had noticed him hurrying back with his bag and unloading it. Maybe a group of Watchers waited outside to bring him to Gideon and punish him.

  Keeping his voice low, he said, “I found something in the tunnels.”

  “What did you find?” Elmer’s face grew serious as he shuffled closer.

  “I was in the eastern section, past the first few intersections, and through the cave broken down by the old miners,” Darius started, realizing he rambled about a place where Elmer had never been. To his credit, Elmer didn’t question him. “I was halfway down that tunnel when I frightened a fox, and it ran into a hole in the wall.”

  “A den,” Elmer assumed.

  “That’s what I thought, at first,” Darius said, keeping his voice hushed as he got to the crux of the discovery. “Until I saw the place where it disappeared. The fox scooted into a hole in the wall, covered by rocks. I uncovered them and found a passage leading to a tunnel I’ve never seen.”

  Elmer leaned forward, listening intently.

  “Even I’m not foolish enough to think there are places I haven’t discovered,” Darius clarified, “but there was something about this passage that made it even more intriguing.” Darius paused, making sure he had the full attention of his friend’s good eye. “Akron’s mark was on the wall, right near it.”

  Wonder filled Elmer’s face, as he remembered, “A triangle.”

  Darius nodded.

  “Did you find anything else?” Elmer asked.

  Darius shook his head. “I looked around a while, following the new tunnel to its end, until I reached an exit. By that time, it was late enough that I had to get back.”

  “You didn’t want to be caught,” Elmer said, knowingly.

  “I still have one more side to explore,” Darius told him. “I have no idea what is on the other end, or how many other passages it might reveal.”

  “At least you will have a place on which to focus, when you return,” Elmer said.

  “Maybe tonight,” Darius said.

  “Tonight?” Elmer seemed surprised. “That is risky. Usually you space out your visits, Darius.”

  “I think this is worth the risk,” Darius said, unable to get his mind off of Akron. “I can’t stop thinking about that tunnel, Elmer. I need to see what is in it.”

  Chapter 33: Neena

  Slowly, the desert underneath Neena’s and Kai’s boots gave way to more solid terrain. Rocks of various sizes littered the ground as far as the eye could see, with wispy shrubs reaching for sunlight in between. In a few spots, hills jutted out from the brown earth, covered with larger rocks, and a few coarse plants made of a sickly green. A smattering of sand covered the landscape, carried by the storm, or the daily winds.

  Neena welcomed the easier travel, as they stepped from the sand to firmer ground.

  But she had a new fear, too.

  In the sand, they knew what to expect. Here, a single noise on the slightly harder ground might lure the hungry beast. She picked a path between rocks, avoiding noisy clomps that might give them away, walking heel to toe, as she had done in the desert. They walked for some time, under a sun that grew hotter.

  Neena chose a path between two familiar hills, where sparse weeds shot up from the sides. She studied the ground for cracks or holes—anything that would indicate that the creature had gotten ahead of them—but she saw none. Reaching up, she dabbed away some sweat with her shawl.

  “Over there,” Kai said, pointing, as they passed the two hills and found another. A tall, recognizable tree jutted out from the new hill’s base. “Is that the tree?”

  “Yes, that’s the warden’s root, of which I spoke,” Neena said.

  Kai looked at her with a quizzical expression. “You mean a sandalwood?”

  “We must call it different things,” she said. They had similarities, but of course they had differences.

  “No matter what you call it, we should probably fill our flasks,” Kai suggested.

  Neena nodded. They veered from their path, skirting more boot-sized rocks and getting closer to the broadleaf tree. The warden’s root rose several feet before expanding into a multitude of branches, jutting out at different angles. Round, green leaves stuck off of the ends of those limbs, providing some welcome color in the mostly desolate landscape. More than once, Neena had run into other hunters in the area, collecting liquid from the tree’s base.

  She saw no one now.

  A strange, ominous feeling took hold of her: for a brief moment, it felt as if she and Kai were the only people left on Ravar, and everyone else had vanished. Shaking off the thought, she walked softly and looked left and right, until she reached the warden’s root, one of the few things in this area that retained enough water to be worth tapping. Unslinging her bag, she pulled out a small wedge that she had fashioned—a tiny, hollowed-out stick that allowed water to pass through to her flask from trees such as this.

  She knelt and quietly dug near the tree’s base with her knife, working around a few old notches. Kai looked as if he wanted to help, but with only one blade between them, he waited. After tapping the tree and putting in her wedge, she watched water drip into her flask, doing the same with Kai’s. The process was slow, but soon she had replenished most of what they drank.

  “We’ll have to ration the water, of course,” she said.

  Kai nodded.

  Neena remained underneath the thin shade of the tree for a moment, cooling off, while Kai took small sips from his replenished flask.

  “Look over there,” he said, spotting something on the hill.

  Neena followed his gaze.

  Walking up the hill to retrieve a broken limb, he said, “One of the branches fell from the tree. The wood is dry. Maybe we can make those spears we talked about this morning.”

  “Can I see it?”

  He handed the branch to Neena, who gauged its thickness. “We won’t be able to fire dry them, but I think you have a good idea.” The prospect of having something other than a knife to fill her hands was a welcome thought.

  “We’ll have to work quietly, of course,” Kai warned, looking around the landscape. “And quickly. Perhaps we can fashion them at the t
op of the hill, where we’ll have a better view of our surroundings.”

  With an agreement reached, they ascended the small climb, gaining a better view of the landscape. Deep in the north, Neena saw the quashed dunes of the desert they’d left behind. To the south she saw more of the same hard ground. Spotting nothing of concern, she knelt and clutched the branch, cutting it in half and starting on the first of the spears. She carved a tip sharp enough to jab, to hunt. Kai watched her with respect.

  “I’ll admit, I haven’t seen many women performing the task.”

  “Not many women know how,” Neena said with a shrug. “But it is a necessary skill.”

  “Of course.”

  It took her a while, whittling at the wood, but eventually she fashioned a crude point at the end, hefting the stick in her hands. The spear wasn’t as comfortable or as sleek as her old one, but it would ward off an animal, if they needed. Finished with the weapon, she took a practice heave. Noticing Kai’s gaze, she handed it to him.

  He hefted it, while Neena carved another.

  “This is a lot sharper than the stick I carried,” Kai said gratefully.

  When she had finished, she tucked away her knife and held up the second spear. It felt as if too much time had passed without one. With weapons to fill their hands and some water in their flasks, they continued down the hill and headed south.

  Chapter 34: Raj

  Raj stood outside of Helgid’s house, turning the strange metal keepsake in his hand.

  The grieving girl at the ceremony had to be Adriana.

  Raj didn’t want to bother her. She had just lost someone. But he did want to thank her.

  Pondering that for a moment, he decided that he would find her house, speak to her, and see how it went. If she asked him to leave, or seemed upset at his presence, he would say a quick word of condolence and go.

  Heading past a few houses, he waved at a few of Helgid’s neighbors, who busied themselves with chores. Most liked Raj, but they kept their distance, knowing they didn’t have enough food to feed him. Occasionally, he felt resentful about their strange behavior, but not today.