Free Sand: Omnibus Edition by Hugh Howey Page B

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 really promising 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 him you’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