Skyfall

by Anthony Eaton

  ‘Okay, what now?’ she whispered.

  ‘Feel along the walls. Find a door.’

  They groped deeper into the alleyway, stumbling occasionally when their feet came into contact with chunks of detritus that lay strewn, undetectable, in the darkness. Finally, when they were almost at the outer wall, Kes whispered, ‘Here!’

  In the darkness, her voice seemed unnaturally loud. Lari groped towards it, and a moment later, in a quick flash of light, he saw the door: grey, metallic, rusted.

  ‘That’s it.’

  The handle was icy cold and his palm sweaty as he closed his fist around it and pulled.

  Nothing happened for a moment, and then, with a shriek of protest, the door ground open. The sound, amplified by the tight alleyway, seemed to howl around the whole dome.

  ‘There!’ A shout came from behind them.

  ‘Through!’ Lari shoved Kes into the narrow stairwell and slipped in after her, pulling the door almost shut as he did so. Then he glanced back along the alleyway towards the common, where dark shapes were gliding fast towards the mouth of the alley.

  ‘Shi!’

  There was a scream and the flat crack of a pacifier, followed by another. Then silence.

  ‘Got them?’ Jenx’s voice sounded strangely distorted now.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ a man’s voice replied.

  ‘Good work. Bring them here.’

  A moment later four shapes passed the mouth of the alleyway, dragging two unconscious figures between them.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Kes, a couple of steps below and unable to see, poked at his shoulder.

  ‘We’re safe. They found someone else.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘So, what happens now? Where do we go?’

  Lari looked down. His eyes were starting to adapt and in the thin illumination that came through the crack in the door, he could just make out Kes – a dark outline against the even darker stairwell which twisted down into the maintenance level.

  ‘Down, I guess.’

  He felt Kes’s hand reaching for his and he took it without hesitation, as they gingerly picked their way further around the bend of the staircase. Perhaps it was the darkness, but the stairwell felt tighter and more claustrophobic than the one in his own dome. The light grew more faint, and a musty odour reached up to meet them.

  ‘How long do you think it’s been since anyone came down here?’

  ‘No idea.’

  Their footsteps rang against the hard walls, and as they continued downwards the light faded completely. For a time they moved in darkness so absolute that, had Kes not been gripping his hand, she’d have vanished completely.

  Then, abruptly, two things happened. The floor levelled out, causing Kes to stumble slightly, and a beam of light blasted out of the darkness ahead, straight into their eyes, blinding and freezing them in one ghastly moment.

  ‘You!’ The girl’s voice was soft and dangerous. Lari recognised it immediately. The last time he’d heard it she’d been forcing him to drink the ‘water’.

  ‘Did you do this?’

  She held the light on them, unwavering. Lari’s eyes streamed.

  ‘Do what?’ Kes snapped back.

  ‘The raid. You brought them, didn’t you. You shi!’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. We came to see Gregor.’

  ‘Right.’ The girl’s tone made it clear that she didn’t believe them. ‘Of course you did, mixie.’

  ‘Listen …’ Lari began to move in front of Kes.

  ‘You take one more step, copygen, just one, and I’ll pacify you right now.’

  ‘We had nothing to do with this, honestly. We don’t even know what’s going on up there.’

  ‘Of course not.’ Jem stepped towards them, moving steadily and silently. ‘There were families up there, you know that? Children. They pacified children, you pair of gutless shi.’

  She was close now, the light just centimetres from Lari’s face, making him squint away.

  ‘I should fry the two of you right now.’

  ‘Do it, then.’ Kes retorted. ‘If you’re not going to listen to us, then you might as well.’

  ‘Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t?’

  Lari drew a deep breath. Now, he thought.

  ‘Because we need your help to save your sister.’

  The lights have gone dim.

  She doesn’t know why, or how, but they’ve dimmed, and for the first time that she can remember, the chamber is dark, cool, just a dull shine gleaming off the round white walls.

  She can see where they watch from. Above her. Around the very top of the room, a curved band of shining panels, even smoother, somehow, than the rest of the walls.

  Something’s changed. Something is very, very wrong.

  Lari hasn’t returned. He’s gone, too, she thinks. First her mother, then Dreamer Wanji, then Dariand, now Lari.

  Gone. Into the skyfire.

  They haven’t slept her for a long time now and Saria wonders why. Usually they sleep her regularly. Whenever they want to do things to her they change the air and she sleeps.

  But they haven’t. Not for an age.

  She rises and paces around the edge of the room. Somewhere behind those shining surfaces, she knows, they’re watching her. Waiting for something.

  They wanted her to help them. That was what Lari had said, but then he left.

  And he hasn’t come back.

  With a sinking feeling, Saria suddenly knows.

  They don’t want her help any more.

  They don’t want her any more.

  Even at night it was never truly dark in the underworld, just as during the middle of the day it was never truly light. Always the distant glare of the lit-up skydomes reflected down, dispersed through the layer of murk that separated the skycity from the underworld. It was more than enough illumination for Gregor Kravanratz to see his way.

  The street was ancient, lined on either side by crumbling ruins, most just grey piles of stone and concrete. If you looked hard, you could make out the basic shapes of some of the houses, but for the most part this section of the underworld was nothing more than ancient wasteland.

  Gregor walked confidently, his feet knowing the way, even though he hadn’t come here in years. A little behind him, two underworlders followed warily. Even those born and bred down here usually avoided this part of the old city.

  Turning from the road he picked his way between a couple of stunted trees, their leaves and wood grey with the effort of trying to survive in the eternal twilight of the cityshadow. Something was burning nearby, but that wasn’t unusual around here; it was close to where the ocean clan eked out an existence along the grey coastwater edge.

  Ahead, an earth embankment rose up, blocking the way like an ancient, fallen barricade, and Gregor clambered to the top. At his feet two long, parallel streaks of brown rust ran along the top of the embankment, stretching in both directions for as far as he could see.

  Down the other side, and through a tangle of steel and wire, and Gregor had arrived at his destination.

  ‘Wait here,’ he said to his two companions. ‘I’ll be a while.’

  They nodded and sank gratefully to the ground, relieved at not having to follow any further.

  It hadn’t changed, not a bit. But that wasn’t unexpected. The clans were superstitious and this place was more taboo than anywhere else in the underworld.

  The Land of the Dead, they called it.

  Once, it had been fenced, hedged by wire and thick bushes, but that was centuries ago. Now both were gone, the wire rusted into oblivion and the plants shrivelled and wasted as the atmosphere toxified and the sunlight was gradually stolen from above by the expanding skycity. The only barrier now was in the minds of anyone game enough to venture here, and that was enough to keep the clans well away.

  Not Gregor, though. For him, the place was perfect.

  He walked in silence throug
h the narrow wasteland and entered the stones.

  They stretched in every direction, row upon row of them, pale in the dull overhead gleam. Some leaned at awkward angles and many had fallen, of course, and a lot of the larger, more ornate ones had crumbled with the passage of time. But a lot still stood, etched by acidic rainfall, eroded by wind and time, but each, Gregor knew, marking a life. Some ancient life, now long past.

  This was where they had buried their dead.

  Once, the thought would have horrified him. Burying someone. Being buried. Going underground …

  But that was the old Gregor. Before he’d fallen.

  Before he’d jumped.

  Slowly, he ambled along the rows. Had anyone been watching they’d have thought he was walking without purpose, without direction, but even as he stopped here and there to crouch and examine a faded, almost-vanished inscription, his steps led him always towards a certain corner.

  So many of them. So many lives.

  Here a large stone had fallen and the figure of a weeping woman, which had once stood atop it, lay shattered on the hard earth. Stooping, Gregor picked up a chunk of it – her head, blurred almost to featurelessness with age, but still just evident. He weighed it in his hand thoughtfully, before gently placing it back on the ground, exactly as it had fallen.

  Is that the weight of a life? he wondered.

  Turning a corner, he followed a long row of dead trees – their bare trunks still standing but weathered as cold and hard as iron now – then made his way around the ruins of a crumbled structure that had once stood close to the centre of the haunted field.

  This was where she was.

  Naturally, there was no stone. No weeping woman. No memorial of any kind.

  But even now, twelve years after he’d put her here, Gregor could make out the scuffled earth. When he closed his eyes he could remember looking down at her face one last time, as she lay in the earth, finally peaceful after so many hideous hours of giving birth.

  The smell of the earth.

  It had taken him a whole day to dig a hole large enough. By the time he’d eased her into the ground, he was covered in the heavy earth, head to toe. It had settled on him, mixed with his sweat and left dark smears across the still-ravaged skin of his face, its scars barely a month old, then.

  The shifties hadn’t helped, of course. They’d brought him here, but only after he’d insisted, and once among the stones, they’d stood distant, clustered close and watching, mute, as he wrapped the remains of his DGAP tunic around a long-discarded shard of rusted metal to form a makeshift spade, then chipped and scraped at the hard, ancient ground until he’d finally levered aside enough of it to set her into.

  There’d been nothing to her as he gently eased her into the hole.

  ‘Goodbye, Jani.’

  The tunic, unwrapped now from the handle of his shovel, lay across her face and he’d used his hands to slowly scrape the dirt back into place over her.

  ‘Ready now?’ The shiftie leader, a bloke named Weymouth, had stepped forward once it was all done.

  ‘Yeah,’ Gregor had said, but he’d made no move to leave, even as the rest of his escorts edged back along the pathway through the stones. The two men had stood there, the old shiftie and the new, silently contemplating the freshly turned earth.

  ‘It’s a funny business, this,’ Weymouth had finally observed. ‘You coulda jus’ burned her, you know?’

  ‘No, not her,’ Gregor had replied. ‘Never her.’

  ‘So what are you gonna do, lad?’

  ‘Do?’

  ‘You’re not gonna be welcome back up there.’ The old man had gestured upwards into the twilight. ‘Not with a face like you got now.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter. There’s only one thing I want from the topsiders now.’

  ‘An’ what’d that be?’

  Gregor had met the old man’s eyes. ‘Equality.’

  In the stillness of the ancient graveyard, Weymouth had let out a wheezy chuckle.

  ‘Equality? Then let me give you one bit of advice, eh?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’d better get working on it soon, ’cause I suspect it’ll take you a while.’

  And now here he was again, years later, at that same patch of hard earth. Gregor breathed in deeply and tried to drive out the burning rage which had fuelled him all this time.

  You’d better get working on it, the old man had said, and that was what he’d done.

  ‘Hey, Jani.’ Gregor eased himself to the ground alongside the gravesite. ‘You listening? Course not.’

  He drank in the stillness, and something almost like peace threatened to wash over him.

  ‘She’s here in the city. In DGAP. They got her and now they’re using her. Just like they used you. Like they used us both.’

  A breath of wind drifted between the stones.

  ‘Jem’s okay, though. You’d be proud of her. She’s grown up just like you. Strong. Brave.’

  ‘Ratz …’

  One of his companions stood between the stones a few metres away, looking nervous.

  ‘I told you to wait.’

  ‘You’d better come. There’s a problem.’

  ‘What problem?’

  ‘87b. Security have taken it to bits.’

  Gregor’s stomach gave a sickening lurch. ‘Jem?’

  ‘No news. She might have gotten out.’

  ‘Did they get anyone?’

  The other man nodded. ‘Everyone. Pacified the whole dome – women, children.’

  ‘How many Underground did we lose?’

  ‘Twenty-four.’

  ‘Shi!’ Gregor leapt to his feet. ‘Same cell?’

  ‘Different ones. It was Jenx. We’re completely compromised.’

  ‘How long ago did it happen?’

  ‘A couple of hours.’

  Gregor stood for a moment, his mind racing.

  ‘Get back and tell the others to move. Find out who we’ve still got loose and get everyone to their backup locations, then tell them to wait until I call for a regroup. Tfell Garin and Cairn to get their stuff together.’

  ‘But they’ve got us. They’ll know everything. We’re stuffed, Ratz.’

  ‘Not if we move fast and hit hard.’

  ‘We’re not going to wait?’

  ‘No.’ Gregor shook his head. ‘The Underground is done waiting. It’s time to tear down the sky.’

  The hatch in the floor swung back to reveal … nothing.

  ‘No way,’ Kes said, backing away from the gaping void.

  ‘It’s this way or it’s upstairs to the security boys, mixie. That’s the choice. We’re just lucky this old dome has a drop-hatch.’

  Below, the stem of Dome 87b fell away into the underworld, dropping into vertiginous nothingness. Attached to the stem were ancient rungs leading down until they too vanished into the gloom.

  ‘They built escape hatches onto these early domes. I guess they were low enough to make it worthwhile.’ Jem latched the hatchway open and stepped back, and a cold breeze slid through the opening with a faint moan. ‘Once you get going, it’s not so bad.’

  ‘You’ve done this before?’ asked Lari.

  ‘I’ve spoken to people who have.’

  ‘I can’t.’ Kes was shaking her head. ‘There’s got to be another way.’

  ‘This is it, mixie. It’s your choice, but I’m going in thirty seconds, whether you’re with me or not.’

  ‘It’ll be okay, Kes. Just take it slowly.’

  ‘How far is it?’

  ‘No idea,’ said Jem. ‘A few hundred metres.’

  ‘What if we slip?’

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘Kes, we’ve got no choice.’

  Finally, reluctantly, Kes nodded, and Jem pointed to Lari.

  ‘You go first. Climb slowly and stop if you need to rest.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘I’ll come last. I’ve gotta close the hatch behind us.’

  ‘Are y
ou sure about this?’

  ‘I’m sure I don’t wanna get caught by Jenx.’

  ‘How do we know we can trust you?’

  ‘Sky, copygen! You can’t. I thought that was obvious. Now, are you gonna get moving or do I have to push you?’

  Slowly, Lari eased himself to the floor and shuffled forwards towards the hatch. The first couple of metres through the base of the dome were an enclosed vertical tunnel, but then the sky opened up, a whole world of nothing. Taking a deep breath and trying to ignore the upward rush of wind, Lari set his feet onto one of the rungs, then reached forward and grabbed a handhold set into the stem.

  ‘Ready.’

  ‘Once you’re out of the tunnel, stop and wait for the mixie. Just get used to being outside.’

  ‘Outside I can handle. Falling I can’t.’

  It was hard to be certain through the girl’s mask, but Lari thought she might have grinned.

  ‘See you at the bottom. Try not to trip.’

  His hands were shaking as he eased his foot off the first rung, but the next felt solid enough. Carefully he lowered his other foot past, then transferred his hands to the first rung and then he was climbing slowly down, out of the floor of 87b, clinging to the domestem like a tiny insect.

  Emerging from the tunnel, his hands were slick with sweat and a surge of adrenaline shivered through him, setting his toes tingling in his shoes. He breathed deeply until it cleared.

  The wind was strong. It surged around the stem and tore at his clothes. Looking up, he could see Kes easing herself onto the ladder.

  ‘Don’t look down, Kes,’ he called. ‘Just keep your eyes on the ladder. It’s easy.’

  She didn’t reply and he climbed down a little further, making room on the ladder for her. His heart was slowing now, the initial shock of being so high and so exposed wearing off, and he looked around. It was vaguely like being out on the balcony, except that the air tasted different. It still had that same, ancient, dusty quality, but down this low there was something else – a certain … oiliness that he wasn’t comfortable with.

  Kes was just a few rungs above now, clinging to the ladder with white knuckles. Above her, Lari heard a faint clang as Jem pulled the hatchway back into place.