Mk's Arc

Chapter 2 of 6

Mk walked out of Star West at first light with the handshake still fresh on his palm. Two weeks on Finn Jarro's claim. Two weeks of wind piling sand over the one patch of desert that mattered. He climbed the ridge above his dig site and looked down. The hole he had scraped yesterday was already gone. By the time he earned the scanner, every ripple that hinted at the fleet would be flat as a table. He needed to mark the site before he started Finn's labor. Something the wind could not erase. The gecko shifted on his wrist as he turned toward the low huts at the edge of the flats. An old woman named Roma Lyle kept a clay hut out there and sold rope, water, and dried meat to anyone crossing through. She had watched him dig for weeks and never once laughed. Mk ducked under her reed awning. Roma sat on a stool cleaning a lamp. He asked if she knew a way to fix a location in the desert without a stake, without a flag, without anything the wind could take. Roma set the lamp down. She said stakes were for miners. She said hunters used a line of three, sighted against something that would not move. She walked him outside and pointed east. Two knobs of dark rock stood on the far horizon, and a third leaned between them. If he stood on his dig site, she said, and the leaning rock split the gap between the other two, he was standing on the same grain of sand every time. No wind could shift stone that big. Mk went back up the ridge before noon. He walked the dune until the three rocks lined up the way Roma had described. He drove his broken shovel handle into the sand at his feet, just to feel the spot, then pulled it out. He paced ten steps north, ten east, ten south, ten west, and checked the sightline from each. He could find the center again from any of them. He wrote the count and the bearing on the inside of his pouch flap, next to the pigments he had refused to sell. That afternoon he rode out to Finn's claim and started swinging a pick. Finn watched from the shade and said nothing about the dust on Mk's boots. On the walk in, Mk had passed two figures loading a cart near Frontier Row, a man he recognized as Running Bear and a girl he had seen at the well, Aiyana Redfeather. They were headed the same direction he had just come from, toward the flats past Roma's hut. Mk did not think about it until his second swing. He drove the pick down. The site was fixed. The wind could not take it now. But someone else was walking toward it, and he had thirteen days and a half left before he could go back.