A Mark Below the Sand

Create up to 20 seconds from 0:00. Available for free opening episodes. Preparing a clip downloads this episode on your device.

Before dawn, someone walked past Iria's shelter carrying the smell of coffee.

She lay still until the footsteps stopped. The previous evening, the basin had seemed enormous enough to make their five bodies almost irrelevant. In the dark, a person pausing outside a thin wall of cloth occupied the whole world.

"If you want some," Laila said, "come before Tavi decides the pot is his."

Iria found them beside the green truck. The stove's small light showed Ada's hands wrapped around a cup and Eren reading a sheet of paper held close to his face. Beyond the circle, South Ear was a darker interruption in the stars.

"Did the tower do anything?" Iria asked.

"It remained a tower," Tavi said. "An achievement I have not managed."

Laila handed her a cup. They drank without discussing the tracks until Iria had enough warmth in her fingers to hold the mug comfortably. The ordinary kindness made her more willing to ask an awkward question.

"Who is Cale Dorr?"

Eren folded the paper. "A survey contractor. He worked in the basin with me a long time ago. He has been looking for the old stations."

"For the supply project?"

"His company has done work for them. This may be separate."

"You don't know?"

"I didn't know he'd brought a trailer out here."

That was an answer to a smaller question. Iria heard the reduction as clearly as she had heard the closing door. She waited for him to notice. When he did, he put the folded paper on his knee and looked toward the tower.

"I knew he was interested in stone from one of the sites. He believes there's a chamber which would make a remarkable museum installation."

Laila's cup stopped halfway to her mouth.

"An installation of what?"

"Of the chamber. Its sound, its mechanism. He talked about moving an intact section. I said he would need considerably more than enthusiasm."

"And yet enthusiasm has a trailer," Ada said.

After breakfast, Iria approached the tower with Laila. The sand at the arch's foot was disturbed, but not deeply excavated. Someone had swept a narrow patch clear of the threshold and left a small fan of boot marks beside it. On one stone a fresh scrape exposed a lighter surface.

Iria knelt outside the arch. The opening beyond it was too low to enter upright, and the roof at the back had partially fallen. She could see a vertical slit, a narrow chamber and something dark which crossed it. She raised her recorder, then lowered it. A recording of silence would tell her little about the dark object.

"Light?" she asked.

Laila gave her a lamp rather than stepping inside. Together they directed its beam through the opening. The dark bar was attached to a metal pivot. Beneath it hung a stone weight. The pivot had rusted, but the arrangement had the unmistakable untidiness of something built to move.

Iria felt the desire to reach for it. A single careful touch might answer several questions. The fallen roof lay immediately beyond the weight, resting at an angle which made careful a word she did not trust herself to define.

She backed away.

Eren came over with his camera. "Can we free it?"

"We can establish what it is before we try to improve it," Iria said.

He photographed the chamber through the arch. Tavi joined them and suggested that the bar might be part of a shutter, opening or closing the slit above it. He did not claim to know what drove it. Wind, a person, a cord reaching through another passage: he could imagine several arrangements which the visible pieces did not distinguish.

Iria placed her microphone outside the arch. She recorded the orientation and made a spoken note that they had not moved the bar. When the wind changed, the low opening gave a dull breath, almost a tone, then lost it.

She waited. The sound did not return.

By midmorning, the tower's narrow shadow had shifted away from the equipment. Eren wanted to follow Cale's westward tracks before the wind erased them. Laila pointed out that the route card took them toward Glass Well, where the old service track met the eastern return route. The trailer tracks were information, not an instruction to turn west.

"If he has found the next station," Eren said, "we may lose the chance to see it before he changes it."

"If you think he's damaging a site, report it. We don't become a pursuit party because he's difficult to telephone."

They tried the telephone. Cale did not answer. Their scheduled radio contact confirmed receipt of Eren's message, but could not tell them what his former colleague had permission to do. Iria watched Eren waiting for a stronger answer than the radio could supply.

Then Ada called from the support vehicle.

A gust had lifted a corner of the groundsheet she was folding. Under the edge, half buried in gravel, a long flat stone showed the same angular mark as a lintel on the tower. Ada had not moved it. She had put a mug beside it so that nobody drove over the patch before Eren could look.

The mark consisted of a triangle with an open side and a row of small depressions. Iria counted five. One was deeper than the others. A worn groove extended from the open side of the triangle toward an edge still covered by sand.

Eren crouched so quickly that his knee struck the gravel.

"You know that mark," Laila said.

"I have seen something like it. On an old survey."

He took out his camera, stopped, and rubbed grit from the heel of his hand. Iria could not tell whether the movement was pain or an attempt to acquire another moment.

"Which survey?"

"The western basin assessment. Twenty-two years ago. We recorded structures along an abandoned maintenance route. Some of the station stones used that shape."

"You said there weren't any confirmed stations here."

"I said the name on Jun's photograph wasn't confirmed."

The difference was technically defensible and immediately unpleasant. Eren heard it himself. He sat back on his heels.

"I should have brought the old field sheets," he said. "I thought this was farther south. I have a scan of the overview. Not everything."

He showed them the scan on his tablet. The old survey marked a short chain of structures, none named South Ear. At one point, a symbol resembling the triangle lay beside a line which the later map had rendered as a drainage trace. The resolution was poor. Zooming enlarged the uncertainty without improving it.

Iria looked from the scan to the stone. She wanted the groove to point toward a missing city. It pointed, as far as they could establish without disturbing the stone, toward the eastern track.

"Glass Well," Laila said. "Or somewhere beyond it."

"You can't read the mark?" Iria asked.

"I can see where the groove points. That isn't the same thing."

Iria almost apologised, then decided that a better response would be to stop asking Laila to become the answer to every unfamiliar object. She helped Ada move their packed gear away from the stone. They photographed it, left its position unchanged and put no new mark on it.

Before leaving, Eren stood in front of the tower. He had the expression of a man trying to reconcile a remembered room with a building which no longer fitted around it. Iria gave him time. When he finally returned, she did not make the question gentle.

"Why weren't the structures on the map you brought me?"

"Because that map uses the accepted survey layer."

"Accepted by whom?"

He looked back once. "At the time, by people including me."

The green truck rolled onto the eastern track. Their own tyre marks covered part of Cale's approach before the routes separated. Iria watched the older tracks turn west, wanting to follow them and no longer sure whether that desire came from curiosity, competition or fear of being left behind.

Ahead, the ground fell toward Glass Well. For a little while, through the engine noise, she thought she could hear the tower behind them. She did not reach for her headphones. She listened until the sound became what she could actually hear: wind moving along the truck's window, and Tavi asking Laila whether she wanted him to read the next distance aloud.