Sand: Omnibus Edition by Hugh Howey Read Free Book Online Page A

the fuel caught. He turned off his dive light, and the tent was filled with the more primitive and inconsistent glow of a beating flame. It was the light of childhood and nostalgia. The ephemeral light. That which does not last.
    Both boys stared at the living flame for a long while, drawn back in time to simpler days, family days, when the concern for light meant another jar of rendered fat and not some rechargeable battery.
    “This was Dad’s lantern,” Conner said. “He left it for us the night he departed so that we could find our way home.”
    This was how Conner began the yearly ritual. It was how he always began it. His older brother Palmer had said these lines before him and their eldest sister Vic had spoken them before that.
    Conner looked up from the lantern, breaking the spell, and realized suddenly that Rob would never have a reason to speak these words. There would be no one to listen. No one to care. Rob coughed into his tiny fist, almost as if to say Let’s get on with it.
    “Dad left us … twelve years ago today. We will never know why. All that remains is our memory of him, and that is what we honor. This tent … our father’s tent … was the last place we saw him. It was less crowded in the morning when we woke. You were sleeping in mother’s womb. Palmer used to say that I kicked him all night and stole the blankets. Vic says she awoke as Father made ready to go, saw him in the moonlight when he flapped the tent, and that his face told her everything. In the morning, we all knew. I was six. Palmer was little older than you are now. Mother was young and beautiful. And breaking down the tent that morning was the first thing we ever did without him.”
    Conner fumbled with the canteen. His hands were shaking. His convictions, too. He poured water from the vessel and into the lid, rationing as was proper. He handed the cap across to his brother, who drank it down in a gulp. Conner poured a cap for himself. “The last night we were together, Father shared his canteen, and he told us stories. Mom was given two caps that night, one for you.” Conner tipped the water into his mouth and swallowed. He poured another.
    “The first time Father brought Palmer and Vic here, it was before I was born. He and Mother spoke of their parents, their past, the need to remember. After he left us, we made a vow to come back once a year so that we wouldn’t forget.”
    Conner caught Rob looking to the side where Palmer would normally be. Gone, just like Vic. So much for promises. Conner dipped a finger into the cap and held it over the open flame, ashamed of his plans, of growing up to be like his dad. “This is the hiss of life,” he said. The flame ducked and sputtered as the water hit, and then it leapt back up. “Our lives are the sweat on the desert floor. We go to the sky, over the jagged ridge, and we fall in the heavens where it rains and floods.”
    He passed the cap to Rob, who repeated the ritual and the old saying that went with it. They were, the both of them, religious for one day of the year. There was no pastor to finish the cap, so Conner told Rob to drink it. And he did. The cap went back on the canteen.
    Rob studied the flame for a long while. His eyes shone in the beating light. And then he looked up at Conner. “Tell me about Father,” he said.
    In that instant, Conner was peering at his old self. He was young again, and his older brother was telling him stories of Father back when he was Lord of Springston, before the land was corrupt, before the wall took its lean, before Low-Pub took its independence, back when their dad walked the streets and clasped hands and clapped backs and privately wept while his hair fell out, back before the office of Lordship and the suffering of his people drove him to No Man’s Land with all the others who leave and never return.
    Across the recovered lamp-flame sat a younger Conner, eyes aglow. He could see himself huddled there beside his older brother