“Sandstorm!” somebody cried. Some of us had experience with desert weather, some of us didn’t. That didn’t change the twinge of horror we all felt. The survey team was too far down to winch up and extract in time. The chance that the winch would break under the assault of the storm was high. There was only one option: they had to go down, and stay down until at least the storm cleared, with no supervision. Cheung grabbed a walkie off of the trestle table that had been set out against one wall, otherwise laden with coffee and celebratory individually-wrapped chocolate biscuits, and relayed this to the team.
“bzzt” said the walkie.
Cheung swore. “Signal’s down! Damned magnetic sand!” He looked around at all of us. “What the hell are you looking at me for? Get to a shelter!”
We didn’t need to be told twice. Instantly the entire group scattered away from the pit in the direction of the three buildings on the dig that were rated for a storm like this: The barracks, the secure storage, and the canteen. The storage prefab was closest and smallest, and quickly filled up. Sita and I, who were at the back of the group, ended up with a couple of slower folks holed up in the canteen, including the filmmaker and a PhD student who moved using a cane.
It wasn’t long after that the howling began as the wind reached us. It buffetted and blasted against the shuttered windows and the barred door as though it was a giant hand closing in, crushing the building in its palm. The filmmaker clutched one of his cameras, the only one he’d been able to save.
“It’s safe, the door, yes?” he said, hyperventilating. “Enclosed spaces – I don’t do so well,” he added. The sound of the wind intensified. “My God… to think they’re out there…”
“They won’t be,” said the PhD student practically. “They’ll be far enough below that they probably won’t think twice about it either way. They might notice a bit of sand blowing down from above, that’s all.”
“I hope you’re right,” said Sita, shivering. “I’ve seen pictures of what those storms can do to a person.”
“We all have,” said the PhD student. “Let’s leave it at that.”
I wasn’t involved with this conversation, you understand, because I was busy listening to the wind. I found myself noticing textures in it that I couldn’t name. Then suddenly, another sound joined them.
“Shut up! Everybody shut up!” I hissed. There it was. Unmistakable.

Someone was outside the building.

The wailing noise went on, and then pounding at the entrance of the building.
“We have to open it!” Sita said, darting towards the barred door. But the PhD student and I caught her.
“If you open that door we’ll never be able to close it. We’ll all go through that same horrible process. You’ve seen the pictures,” they said.
“Sita… I’m sorry,” I murmured, letting her go. She fell into the seat of one of the nearby benches and sobbed, her head in her hands.
We all stood still and silent, listening to the wailing until it stopped.

I imagine how you must think of me now. Sort of a monster, no? I might be inclined to agree. God, those screams…!

Gently, I touched Sita on the shoulder. “Listen… the winds have stopped. We can go outside.”
“I don’t want to!” she said, shaking me off violently. “We… we killed that person out there! The four of us did it!”
“Four?” said the PhD student. “But there are five of us?” They looked around, and counted. “One, two, three, four, five!” they said, pointing to themself last.
Sita looked up, her eyes red and streaming with tears. “Five! How can you say that? How can they say that?” she said to me, grabbing my arm. I counted. One, two, three, four…
five.
“I count four,” I said, trying to ignore the fifth figure in the corner of my vision.
“Thank you,” said Sita. I closed my eyes as she closed her arms around my waist and breathed deeply. When I opened them again, number five was gone.
A jolt ran through the lot of us at the rap-rap sound of somebody knocking on the door.
“Hello? Anyone in?” said the unmistakable voice of Prof. Cheung.

It was quite a struggle getting the door open. The sand was built up against the door, you see. We had to wait for the others to dig us out. When we finally did extricate ourselves from the half-buried building, it was into a world transformed. Where there had stood tents, filled with data and artefacts, there was now blank sand, as though no human had ever set foot there before, but for a scattered few papers blowing in fragments in the wind. The prefabs had fared a little better, but only a little. Blasted-in windows, collapsing walls… we had added our own ruins to the ancient site, and it had only taken a few minutes.
My knees were weak. “Everything… gone!” I croaked.
Cheung patted me on the shoulder. “I know it looks bad-”
He turned. Sita was on her hands and knees by the door, throwing great armfuls of sand into the air as she dug frantically.
“What on earth are you doing?” said Cheung.
“Digging- trapped outside- maybe still-” Sita gasped in between throws.
“Ah… She’ll need to go to the medic’s, once she’s set herself up again,” said Cheung. “Buck up, Donna. We still have the catacombs. Compared to them, all this was chicken feed.”

‘Chicken feed’ was a reasonable descriptor of the menu at dinner that night, coincidentally. A lot of food supplies had been destroyed by the storm, and we were on subsistence rations until the next delivery from the city. Sita still looked desperately unhappy, but I think she had come to accept what happened in the canteen as the unsolvable dilemma it had been. I reached across to her and touched her hand.
“You feeling alright?” I said, with a careful softness in my voice.
She shook her head, and then looked at me accusatorily. “How are you?” she said, not as a question. “How are any of you okay with what happened today?”
I had asked myself that question many times since that morning. I always prided myself on my practicality, but to take it to that extent… intellectually, I was horrified at what I had done. Tantamount to murder. But on a visceral, instinctual level, I had come to realise, I felt no more upset than I would have been at a slight inconvenience.
“Who’s missing?” I said suddenly. Glancing around the crowded canteen, I didn’t recognise any concerned faces, anyone looking for a misplaced friend who was never coming. I stood up to get a better view, drawing a few odd looks. “Excuse me,” I said. “Is everyone accounted for? Have we got everyone, I mean?”
Cheung, at the top table, looked around, puzzled. “I rather think so,” he said. “We wouldn’t start dinner without everyone here.” This did not reassure me.
“Is anyone missing anyone?” I said. “Anyone at all?” There were empty seats of course, all around the canteen, but these were easily explained by the continued absence of the survey team, who were awaiting rescue from the pit when the winch was dug out enough to operate.

The body was an awful sight. The dark sand was stained with crimson drying to rust brown around the edges, and the exposed flesh was pocked and partially stripped, sand clinging to the glistening muscle visible in the larger wounds. Whoever it had been, they were now unrecognisable by any metric beyond DNA identification. Their clothes were a handful of tatters.
I stood alongside the few others who had been told. “Nobody seems to be missing anybody,” I said. “Do we have radio contact with anyone in the pit yet?”
“It can’t be one of them,” said Cheung. “There’s no way they could climb up alone. They would have had to use-”
“-use the winch,” I said, pointing to the partially-excavated yellow machine by the side of the pit where we were now standing. “And they didn’t have control?” I asked. Cheung shook his head.
“It was only controllable from up here.”
“Presumably, that was their intention. Maybe to bring a harness up so that they could descend.”
“Impossible,” said Cheung. “The survey team are to remain in their safety harnesses at all times. If he brought them up, they’d suffer the same fate as he did.”
“Sabotage, then?” I offered. “Or suicide?”
“Either way,” said Cheung. “I have arrived at a conclusion as to the identity of this corpse. Think, Donna. Nobody is missing anybody at dinner. That tells you that this is somebody who wasn’t expected for dinner. If it was one of the survey team, there would be four others with it.”
“Gordons?” I asked. Cheung nodded.
“That seems too easy,” I said eventually. But I could offer no rebuke. It didn’t look like him. But then a body can look like a lot of things in that kind of state.

Sita slipped her shirt off and let it fall to the floor. I averted my eyes.
“I almost thought that we had imagined it when you asked around at dinner. Nobody missing, or so we thought.”
“I don’t know. Something still doesn’t add up,” I said. “What would he be doing at the winch?”
Sita came over to me. I breathed inward sharply as I realised she was still topless. “Was he actually at the winch?” she said. “Is that a map of the scene?” She pointed to the rough sketch in my notebook, which I was staring at blankly. I nodded dispassionately, a flat lie. I had no memory of drawing the picture. The great dark circle at the centre of it held my eye as Sita draped her arms around my neck and began to unbutton my top.