“Sam!” said Elma.
“Listen to me,” said the girl.
“Two,” said Sam firmly, cocking the gun trigger.
“Sam!” cried Elma.
“Three,” said Sam.
“We only — ” said the girl.
The gun went off.
In the sunlight, snow melts, crystals evaporate into a steam, into nothing.
In the firelight, vapors dance and vanish.
In the core of a volcano, fragile things burst and disappear.
The girl, in the gunfire, in the heat, in the concussion, folded like a soft scarf, melted like a crystal figurine.
What was left of her, ice, snowflake, smoke, blew away in the wind.
The tiller seat was empty.
Sam holstered his gun and did not look at his wife.
“Sam,” she said after a minute more of traveling, whispering over the moon-colored sea of sand, “stop the ship.”
He looked at her and his face was pale.
“No, you don’t.
Not after all this time, you’re not pulling out on me.”
She looked at his hand on his gun.
“I believe you would,” she said.
“You actually would.”
He jerked his head from side to side, hand tight on the tiller bar.
“Elma, this is crazy.
We’ll be in town in a minute, we’ll be okay!”
“Yes,” said his wife, lying back cold in the ship.
“Elma, listen to me.”
“There’s nothing to hear, Sam.”
“Elma!”
They were passing a little white chess city, and in his frustration, in his rage, he sent six bullets crashing among the crystal towers.
The city dissolved in a shower of ancient glass and splintered quartz.
It fell away like carved soap, shattered.
It was no more.
He laughed and fired again, and one last tower, one last chess piece, took fire, ignited, and in blue flinders went up to the stars.
“I’ll show them!
I’ll show everybody!”
“Go ahead, show us, Sam.”
She lay in the shadows.
“Here comes another city!”
Sam reloaded his gun.
“Watch me fix it!”
The blue phantom ships loomed up behind them, drawing steadily apace.
He did not see them at first. He was only aware of a whistling and a high windy screaming, as of steel on sand, and it was the sound of the sharp razor prows of the sand ships preening the sea bottoms, their red pennants, blue pennants unfurled.
In the blue light ships were blue dark images, masked men, men with silvery faces, men with blue stars for eyes, men with carved golden ears, men with tinfoil cheeks and ruby-studded lips, men with arms folded, men following him, Martian men.
One, two, three. Sam counted.
The Martian ships closed in.
“Elma, Elma, I can’t hold them all off!”
Elma did not speak or rise from where she had slumped.
Sam fired his gun eight times.
One of the sand ships fell apart, the sail, the emerald body, the bronze hull points, the moon-white tiller, and all the separate images in it.
The masked men, all of them, dug into the sand and separated out into orange and then smoke-flame.