The Word for Stay

By Brian Bullock. A Starborne Studios Production.

Cole Renner had spent eleven years hauling cargo across Harran's world, long enough to read its dust the way other men read weather.

The dust never stopped falling here. It came down fine and gray and slow and buried everything in the end. He read it now from the cab of the crawler, one scarred hand loose on the yoke, the other shading his eyes against the haze. The dunes ran gray to the horizon in long slow waves, and the wind lifted veils of it that hung and turned and settled, and somewhere out in all that nothing was the claim he had paid three years of hauling to register, a square of dust that looked like every other square of it and was his.

"You're squinting again," Tess said.

"I'm working."

"You squint when you don't know where you are."

Renner looked over at her. She was nine, maybe ten, nobody including Tess was sure, and she sat in the jump seat with her boots not reaching the floor and a filter mask pushed up on her forehead and the certainty of a child who had never once been wrong about him. He had found her two seasons back working a slag line, for a man who fed her with what the line spat out, and he had not set out to take on a mouth he could not feed, but he had taken her on anyway.

"I know where I am," he said.

"Then why are we stopped."

He was stopped because the ground was different. Eleven years in the dust taught a man to feel the crawler through the seat of his pants, and a hundred meters back the ride had changed, a hardness coming up under the dunes. Renner had learned a long time ago to listen when the ground changed its rhythm and tune.

"Eat your paste," he told her. "I'm going to walk it."

He went down into the haze with a probe rod and his hood sealed and the wind pushing at him, and he walked the line where the ride had changed, sinking the rod every few steps. Dust, dust, dust, and then, at the ninth try, not dust. The rod stopped a meter down on something that did not give. He worked it sideways. The hardness kept going. He moved twenty meters and sank it again and it stopped again at the same depth, and he stood in the blowing gray with the rod in his fist and his chest went tight. Hardness that ran level under the dunes was not rock. Rock did not run level. Only something manmade sat level, and this was big, under a lot of dust. You hear rumors about things like this, but you never really think they're real.