They were parked in the shurta patrol car and watched the robot. The robot was a klick away, over the dunes. They tracked it through night vision and its magnetic field.

The robot had been digging for hours.

It dug deep. Mounds of sand gathered on the desert floor. The robot was out of sight, down in the hole. Nasir couldn’t figure out what it was doing out there. Other than, of course, digging. Nasir thought about Mariam. He had liked her since they were kids. He just never had the courage to ask her. Seeing her again brought it all back.

He shook the thought away for now. Stared at the position of the robot on the screen.

“I used to go metal detecting with my dad when I was small,” Laila said. Laila was born shurta, and everyone knew she was going to make rank. She was going to be commander one day. “On the beach, mostly. On the hotel strip when we could. You wouldn’t believe what people leave behind them. But we never dug this deep.”

“Did you ever find anything valuable?” Habib said. Habib wasn’t going to make rank. He was just a guy who liked a steady job with steady pay.

“Found a gold wedding ring once,” Laila said. “But we returned it.”

“Who did it belong to?” Habib said.

Laila shrugged. “Some Martian tourist.”

They were outside the city boundaries. Nasir liked the infrequent patrols. Neom itself was clean, efficient, comfortable. It wasn’t happy, because no city is truly happy, but it seldom needed policemen, and Nasir had always wanted to be one, ever since he was a little boy. Only it turned out it was not very exciting, most of the time, not if you lived in Neom. The only real crime in Neom was being poor. And only the poor joined the shurta.

Nasir liked those nights out of the city. The quiet of the desert and the sight of the Milky Way stretching from one horizon to the other, a river of stars. The city was awash with light, and it was seldom truly quiet. It was ever-new, brash, a place for making new things and selling new things, a place for seeing and for being seen. The desert was none of that. It was old, and in its vastness you could hear and see more, and though it seemed empty it was nothing but. Homo sapiens had migrated across it from Africa to Europe and gods were born on the peninsula, traders crossed the sands for endless centuries, carrying perfumes and spices and other rare and precious things. Messiahs raised new religions that changed the world. And as Arabia came to the world, the world came to Arabia.

“We should check up on it,” Laila said. “Maybe it needs help.”

“Help digging,” Habib said, and he laughed at his own joke.