Chapter 21 — The Last Seed Keeper

By the fifth day on Dong Tro, Khe Mien had learned to distinguish three different types of silence in the land of the dead.

There was the silence of the morning, when the light was soft and the air unheated, a silence that was almost gentle if she could forget the filter mask rubbing against her cheek. There was the silence of noon, thick and heavy, when the heat pressed all sounds close to the cracked ground, making each step of the group sound unusually loud in their own ears. And there was a third silence, the silence that Ngan The Binh taught her to recognize that afternoon, when he suddenly stopped walking in the middle of the road, raising his head to look at the sky for a moment longer than usual.

"Stop," he said, his voice not loud but loud enough to make the whole group stop immediately.

Dinh Bach Lam, who was leading a few dozen steps away, turned around, his eyes immediately changing from a state of constant alertness to a much sharper focus. "Wind?" he asked, just one word.

"It's not a normal wind," Ngan The Binh replied, his hand pointing towards the western horizon, where Khe Mien saw only a pale, opaque yellow strip, no different from the sky they had been walking under for the past four days. "Look closely at the bottom border. It's thickening. And silent — can you hear that? No more wind whistling through the cracks in the rocks."

Khe Mien listened, and for the first time she realized that what he had just said was horrifyingly true - the constant whispering sound of the dry wind blowing through Dong Tro, a sound she was so used to that she no longer paid attention, had completely disappeared in the past few minutes, replaced by a silence as tense as a string before breaking.

"Sandstorm," Dinh Bach Lam said, not a question. He had strode closer, his eyes scanning the surrounding terrain with the speed of someone who had done this hundreds of times. "How much longer?"

"No more than forty minutes," Ngan The Binh replied. "Maybe less."

"There are no cliffs nearby," Bach Lam said, his voice still maintaining the familiar cold calm even though Khe Mien could see that the pace of his movements had increased markedly. "We have to make our own shelter."

Ve Diem Quynh, standing next to Khe Mien, began to tremble slightly, not because of the cold but because of the fear she was trying to suppress. "Do we bring a storm tent?" she asked, trying to keep her voice steady.

"Yes, but the tent can only protect against wind, not against fine dust if the storm is strong enough," Bach Lam replied, already starting to remove the thick roll of gray fabric from his backpack, signaling Kien to do the same. "We need a depression, as deep as possible, then cover it with a tent, sealing the edges with rocks and dirt."

The group spread out to search, and it was Kien who was the first to discover a small depression not far away — a crack less than two meters wide, only as deep as an adult's chest, the remains of a stream that had dried up long before anyone in the group was born.

"Here!" he called out, his voice both happy and trembling.

Not deep enough, not wide enough, but it's all they have. Dinh Bach Lam came to check for a few seconds and nodded decisively. "Okay. Everyone come down here now. Ngan The Binh, help me set up the tent. Khe Mien, Diem Quynh, Kien — the three of them sat close together in the middle, hugging their luggage tightly, especially the seed box."

Khe Mien slid down the crack, felt the crushed stone cutting into her palm through the protective gloves, and hugged the shockproof box tightly to her chest as a reflex without thinking. Diem Quynh sat close to her right, Kien to her left, all three huddled into a small mass in the bed of the rock crevice, while overhead, Bach Lam and Ngan The Binh worked with the speed and coordination of people who had faced this danger together countless times.

The tent sheet was stretched, one end tied to a protruding rock at the mouth of the crevasse, the other end pinned to the ground with short metal stakes driven deep with a hammer, creating an inclined roof enough to block most of the crevice. Bach Lam uses rocks and soil to cover each edge, working with both hands with almost mechanical precision, without a single redundant movement.

The sound of the wind began to rise, at first it was just a distant hiss, then it grew louder, faster than Khe Mien expected, turning from an audible sound into a pressure she could feel through her eardrums.

"Hurry up!" Diem Quynh shouted, even though no one needed her to remind her.

Bach Lam inserted the last edge and then slid down the ravine with Ngan The Binh, just seconds before the storm really hit. The first sound was a low roar, as if the whole sky was being torn apart, followed by the continuous impact of sand and rubble on the tent stretched above, so intense that Khe Mien felt the entire small space they were sheltering in vibrate with each wave.

"Bend low, cover your mask," Bach Lam ordered, his voice having to be raised to drown out the sound of the wind, even though in the narrow rock crevice the echo made every word sound distorted. He moved to sit next to Khe Mien, one shoulder pressed against the tent to keep it from falling off the pegs, his body becoming a living barrier between Khe Mien and the gap where the wind could rush in strongest.

She didn't ask why he did that. Amidst the roar of the wind and the dim darkness of sand seeping through every smallest gap in the tent, she could only feel the warmth of his body close to her, the steady though strained rhythm of his breathing, and a strange feeling — amid the fury of the outside world, she felt safer than at any time since she left the Filtration Roof.

The storm lasted nearly two hours, much longer than what Ngan The Binh initially estimated. There were moments when the wind was so strong that the tent shook as if it were about to be torn apart, and each time, Khe Mien felt Bach Lam's arm tighten around the nearest stake, his body leaning further toward the weakest point of the makeshift structure they had hastily erected.

Kien, sitting on her left, began to tremble uncontrollably when a particularly strong wind caused sand dust to seep through a small gap, blowing straight into his face before Diem Quynh could cover it with a spare piece of cloth.

"It's okay," Khe Mien said, holding his hand, her voice trying to be steady even though she wasn't sure if what she just said was true or not. "We'll be fine."

"Are you scared?" Kien asked, his voice was low, barely audible over the roar of the wind.

"Yes," Khe Mien admitted, not trying to hide it. "But I believe in the people who are here with me." She glanced at Bach Lam, who was still holding the tent tightly with his whole body weight, and he, without turning to look at her, nodded slightly as if he had heard that statement and wanted to confirm it.

When the storm finally began to weaken, the howling wind gradually reduced to intermittent blows and then fell silent. The whole group sat motionless for a while longer, no one daring to believe that the silence had really returned and not just a temporary silence between two waves of wind.

"Wait another ten minutes," Bach Lam said, his voice hoarse from shouting so much in the past two hours. "Sometimes storms have a second wave, which is milder but still dangerous enough if someone goes out too early."

Those ten minutes passed in silence, with only the sound of five people breathing and the sound of tiny sand still falling sporadically from the tent. When Bach Lam finally nodded to signal safety, he was the first to stand up, removing each peg to open the exit, and the late afternoon light rushed into the crack of the rock, dyeing everything a dull orange from the dust still floating in the air.

Outside, the landscape has completely changed. The mounds of earth they remembered as landmarks had been eroded or buried under new layers of sand, and for a moment, even Ngan The Binh stood still, scanning the circle to reorient.

"We're lucky," he said at last, his voice low. "If the storm hits when we're an hour away, there won't be any crevices in the rocks to take shelter in."

Khe Mien looked down at her protective suit, covered in a layer of fine gray-yellow dust so thick that she could barely make out the original color of the fabric underneath. She touched the seed box in front of her chest, checking the lock again even though she knew it was still safe — a habit she couldn't break since the day she left the Green Dome.

"Thank you," she said to Bach Lam, as he approached to check on the group's condition, "for..." she hesitated, searching for the right words, "for being there."

He looked at her for a moment, his face covered in dust, making his sharp lines look somewhat softer. "That's my job," he said, but his tone, this time, wasn't as coldly pragmatic as the previous times he'd said the same thing. "But it's not just about work either."

That sentence, short and without further explanation, stayed in Khe Mien's heart for the rest of the afternoon, as the group continued on their way to find a safer place to camp before it got completely dark, each step leaving a mark in the sand that had just been rewritten by the storm across the entire surface of Dong Tro, as if this dead land never allowed anyone, even those who had passed through it hundreds of times, to feel like they truly understood it.