You must know: The children felt nothing.
You must know: they lived short, happy lives.
You must understand: A short, happy life is a great gift.
You might ask: Does a knitter cause one thing to vanish in order to summon another? Does the making of a dog require the unmaking of a mouse? What is the cost of an unmade spirit?
One child? Two?
I can tell you this: Had the children remained, they would have outlived their parents. They would have married and had families of their own. And they would have come, in their middle years, to live in a time of war. This will be difficult for you to hear, but it is true. A distant nation’s army will swarm, many years hence, across the great plains, a terrible, ravaging wave. This will happen.
Both children would be slain. Before that they would suffer. It is better you do not know how.
(Know, too: This war will last a decade. It will end when one of the generals reads a poem, written by a long-dead madwoman from the city. He will recite its words to himself as he rides his horse through a field strewn with bodies. The words will live sweetly on his tongue, like candy in the mouth of a child.)
This all would have happened.
The parents can never know it. They are better for the lack.
Do knitters obey laws, balance scales?
If you find one, ask.
***
The next day the woman wakes. She feeds the dog, then releases him to hunt joyously in the woods. She makes tea with her kettle (she looks at it for a long moment, her mind fuzzy, trying to remember where she obtained it) and watches her husband sleep. The house is strange, still, yet somehow charged with magic, portent. She is surprised—as she always is—by the depth and force of her happiness. She remembers the night she woke beside her new husband in the seaside inn. How she wished for the world to remain exactly as it was. How she was content.
She thinks exactly what the husband does, when he wakes to the touch of her lips upon his brow:
I am happy in this life. I am lucky.
***
You expect a lesson, don’t you?
A reason? An explanation? A different ending?
What makes you think I can provide such things? I am both more and less than what you suppose, and I can tell you: So are you.
What a horrifying tale, you say. A world of pain and questions, of monsters. A man and a woman, made and unmade; their children, made and unmade. So much sorrow and joy, and none of it exactly true. And here it ends, like this? Why tell it at all?
You say: These people deserve better. I deserve better.
What arrogance.
To believe this, you see, you must imagine yourself better than the knitter that made this village, this world, these people, the knitter that tucked and twined and cut these threads. You must believe yourself above such concerns and manipulations, free of all complicity. You must believe you are not a dreaming monster, at the whims of which others must dance.
And yet: You are dreaming, and you will soon wake.
You will turn a page; you will fold another world across this one, and this village, this story, all its people, the man and the woman, will cease to be, unmade.
You will carry them with you only in memory, as a curse. They will live in you, and you will tend them, or forget them, as you will. You must live with the knowing.
I made them for you. With you. And in you, now, they will dwell.
Yet still you want an answer? Some meaning you might grasp?
Very well:
Find me, and you may ask.
THROUGH GRAVEL
Sarah Read
We twisted our bent backs and held our flowers up through the fine-grit gravel and soggy cigarette filters—up through the gaps and the spaces where things don’t fit together anymore, and we waited.
Beth came to us that spring, in her red cardigan, reaching down for the buttercup sprouting from the crack in the sidewalk. She pinched the stem, as delicate as her own little fingers, and she was gone before her guardian could turn to see why she had stopped. She slipped through the cracks of the busy world above, and was ours. The first child of the new spring. The first child in more than eight years.
In the dark of the understreets, by the light of the grates and drains overhead, she smiled nervously as we marveled at her small digits, at how the dimples in her knuckles were fading into lily-slim fingers, at how straight her spine had grown without the weight of the city pressing down from above. At the gap in her smile.
Many of us had gaps in our smiles that year—but none so fresh as hers. Our arthritic fingers grasped at her shining hair. Youth was a balm to eyes even as weak as ours.
We huddled in excited half-formed factions for the meeting where one of us would be blessed with her guardianship. When the hour came and the name was drawn—and it was mine, Aemon—I confess, I wept.
I had never dreamed that when I stooped to my own small flower in the pavement years ago that I would be given a new life. One far from the paths of those I’d lost aboveground.
A new child. My heart filled with love for her—filled the holes in the spaces where things don’t fit together.
I stumbled through the custom of her adoption. It had been so long since I’d seen it done. I wrapped her in my parka and handed her a tarp, freshly patched, washed and folded. It would become her room, and annex to my home—our home. I gave her a trowel—my better one, with the smooth handle and less rust. I sprinkled her brow with water from the Last Drain.
Though it was Chev that had drawn my name, he was the one to protest. As soon as the ritual was complete, he stood; his reverence for the old customs the only thing that had kept him in his seat till then.
“Are you sure you’re up to this, Aemon? You are old in years but young to our kind. Perhaps the child should be placed with someone younger and with more experience in our ways.” He meant himself, of course. He’d been here since he was a tiny thing, born to the understreets to a Kindred mother long since washed away. But he still had youth in him. His hair still grew the color of shadows.
“I am no stranger to raising children, Chev.”
“Yes. I recall. I believe it is relevant for us to inquire as to the nature of your daughter’s death?”
Gasps echoed off the high stone walls of the meeting chamber. Chev raised his hands. “This is a rare moment where I feel a discussion of his life before coming to us as Kindred is not only prudent but necessary.”
I thought of not answering. This was a violation of my rights. As far as the Kindred are concerned, no one has a life before their life underground. Our lives start with the appreciation of small flowers, from the time we notice a spot of brightness and pause to take it in. When the city forgets us and we slip through the cracks, we are born again beneath the streets.
But Beth looked scared. Her cheeks, rosy with chill a moment before, had gone white. I couldn’t have that. For her sake, I let the fight fall from my shoulders.
“It was a car accident. My wife and daughter were driving home from the ballet. A drunk driver struck them. They both died.”
I felt Beth’s small hand then, inside my own. It was already taking on the cold of the underground, but it warmed me better than any sun that I remembered.
Chev’s gambit had worked against him, and the Kindred shot him troubled glances as they crept away into their tunnels, to their tarp homes to cultivate their small patches of flowers. In hope of catching a Beth of their own.
Beth clutched her tarp to her chest, her red sweater darkening in the damp air of the tunnels.
“I’m sorry about your daughter.” Her pupils stretched wide in the darkness, searching for scraps of light. Soon they would learn to fix open into the black stare of the Kindred, able to pull in the light from a storm drain three tunnels down.
I squeezed her small hand. “You’re my daughter, now. And the only one in all the understreets.”
She was silent, then. I thought it was out of shynes
s. But knowing her now, I believe she was thinking. Planning.
***
“Why doesn’t anyone else have children?” Beth crumbled compost over the delicate buttercup sprouts that lined the old brick wall.
“Most of us are very old. Only the very old and the very young stop for small flowers anymore. And the young these days are older than the young that used to be. There are too many cares on their shoulders to bother with a small bit of brightness underfoot.” I looked at how her arms bent to her task—willowy and lean. “And you are very old or very young, for a newborn.”
I could hear her thinking in the way that she breathed. Slow and shallow, like a rush of fresh air might interrupt her train of thought. Though the air isn’t fresh. Not down here and not up there.
“Do you miss your mother, Beth?” I shouldn’t have asked it. I should have done as Kindred do and pretended she’d never had one. That the canal through which she was born was a drain—her caul the tender leaves of sidewalk weeds.
“I never knew her. I don’t miss the nuns. They never let us play in the dirt.” She ran her fingers through the black soil at the base of an unfurling sprout.
It’s not uncommon for a Kindred. It’s easier to slip through the cracks when no one is looking.
“Are you bored, Beth? Are you lonely?”
“No.” She plucked at a mushroom sprouting from ancient grout and popped it in her mouth. “But maybe a little. Or maybe just worried.”
I paused in my digging and fixed my black eyes on her. “Worry leaves no room for small flowers.” It’s what Belle had told me once, when I was newborn to the understreets, before the sun had faded from my skin and my collar sprouted lichen.
“But I’m worried about the Kindred, Aemon.”
“No need for that, child. We left our worries aboveground.”
“But if there are no other children, who will there be when the elders are gone?”
“No one, love.”
“But who will tend the flowers?”
“No one. Might be that’s an end for small flowers in the city above. Or might be that they never needed tending. Might be that the tunnels will fill with streams of wild buttercups.”
She smiled through the dark and I saw her eyes were as black as mine. But then her smile wilted and her pupils shrank to pinpricks—her eyes wide discs of blue.
“I’ll be alone, then. When all of you are gone. That can’t happen,” she said, and jabbed her trowel into the offal piled under a drain.
***
Toes tapped like the incessant drip of water, echoed through the meeting chamber as we waited. Beth balanced along an old train rail, dragging her toes through the grit, oblivious to the empty seat that held the elders rapt.
Roz never came.
The agenda was cast aside in favor of organizing a search. Chev knew where her tarp was, but none knew her fishing spot—her crack in the sidewalk where she held her flower, hopes high.
“Her knees have ague,” Dane said, “It won’t be far from her tarp.”
No maps are allowed in the understreets, but any Kindred worth his muck can follow the glowing fissures in the street overhead. It’s the branching vascular system of our world.
Dane found Roz in a bright beam of light pouring from the hole where a slab of sidewalk had fallen in and crushed her. Her fragile frame curled in at jointed angles, like a dry spider. She held a fistful of buttercups—one still pinched in her outstretched fingers. The flowers drank in the light and glowed with it.
We squeezed our eyes against the glare, wrapped strips of black cloth across them, and felt our way toward her. She had to be moved before the sunwalkers found her—before their light-kissed faces peered curiously through the hole, now a window to our world.
There was a rustling and crunch of gravel.
“Aemon, what should we do with her flowers?” A small voice echoed from somewhere in front of me. I peered at her from beneath my cloth. She stared at Roz’s fallen form, her face pinched in a familiar kind of pain. Her childhood had faded from her in that moment—her shoulders squared and fists clenched.
“Beth, get away from there! The street here isn’t stable. Put your blindfold on and stand back.”
“I don’t need a blindfold, Aemon, the light doesn’t hurt after a minute or two.” She kneeled and took Roz’s hand in her own.
Chev’s deep voice came from the left, “Obey your father, child. If you would be Kindred, your eyes must be attuned to the dark. Light poisons them. Shun it.”
“The light isn’t poison. Our flowers need it—so we need it. We need more of it,” Beth said.
Heavy footfalls fell beside me. I ripped off my blindfold.
Chev had removed his as well, and he sprinted to Beth, grabbed her ear, and dragged her from Roz’s sunbeam. My eyes burned in the light. Chev swung her by the ear into my arms. He narrowed his black eyes to see, and glowered. “Your duty is to raise her as Kindred. If you fail in this duty, you will be banished. I’ll raise her myself. Properly.”
Beth clutched at the redness of her ear peeking from between her curls.
Dane stood from where he’d cleared the concrete from Roz’s crushed form. Raw pinkness bubbled up from where she had folded. “You can’t banish a Kindred, Chev. And even if you could, you shouldn’t. We need every Kindred who comes to us.”
“If you could see her eyes right now, Dane, you’d know she isn’t one of us.”
Beth’s eyes were as wide and blue as the sky. Sunlight danced across their shining surfaces. My own eyes had stopped burning, and I stared in wonder at the way the concrete dust sparkled in the beam of light.
“Change takes time,” Dane said. He hefted Roz into his arms. “I only hope we’ve got enough time.” He walked into the tunnel, heading for the Last Drain, the final resting spot of all Kindred.
Beth handed me a bouquet of Roz’s buttercups. She grinned. Light glinted off her snaggletooth smile. “Your eyes are green,” she said.
***
Roz’s tarp was patched, washed and folded, and handed to Chev at the next meeting, ready to be given to the next child, whenever one might come to us.
Beth sat in Roz’s empty chair. Chev overlooked it, though his brow lowered at the breach in decorum. There were now more chairs than elders.
Chev stood with his fists clenched in his coat pockets. “We are here to discuss new openings found to the street above. Has anyone witnessed promising new fishing grounds?”
No one answered. Beth toyed with a strand of yarn that had unraveled from the cuff of her cardigan. Her black eyes roved over the circle of elders. “Have you checked at the new museum?” She flinched as all eyes turned to her. I reached for her hand.
“What museum, child?” Belle asked.
“There’s a new children’s learning center, up on Wilson Stree—”
“We do not name streets here,” Chev bellowed, his voice frothing into a white cloud in front of his mouth.
Beth stared at him. The soft lines of her face hardened. “In the far west sector, there is a new children’s museum. They have a large parking lot, and a playground. The concrete is fresh. It may crack when it settles.”
Dane stood. “I have no new fissures to report in the far west sector. But I will check there often in the next few weeks.” He nodded his thanks to Beth.
“Have you tried—” Beth’s voice trailed off as Chev hissed at her further interruption. She lowered her eyes.
I squeezed her small, cold hand.
Belle stood. “I would like to hear what the child has to say.”
Beth slid off the end of her chair, shoes tapping against the damp brick. “Have you tried making a crack?” she asked. “Splitting a small hole in a spot where you know our flowers might be seen?”
Chev made a sound like a drain. “If finding small flowers were so easy, those that found them would not be Kindred,” he said. “The Kindred are drawn to them because they are looking for something—and only in that moment unders
tand that they have found it. It is a rare person who stops for small flowers.”
“But what if it isn’t? What if Kindred are not rare at all? What if they’re just in the wrong place?”
Chev’s voice rose and echoed through the tunnels. “A Kindred still looking for their flower is not yet ready for the understreets. This meeting is over.” He stalked from the chamber, vanishing into the tunnel that led to his tarp.
The other elders remained in their seats, looking at Beth.
“We don’t have many tools,” Dane said.
Beth held her trowel out, small fingers curled around the worn handle; its blade flashing in light so faint that even our gaping pupils strained.
***
Beth slipped the edge of her trowel into the seam where the rough under-grit of road met the smooth sidewalk near a drain, where the road had been opened before and worked soft. She twisted and pushed, digging away at loosened slag until a small seam of light opened and grew across her knuckles. She pushed the metal in farther. The plane of pavement shifted.
Beth’s dark hair was showered with grey dust that sparkled in the light from the new fissure. She turned to me and smiled. I traded a flower for her trowel, and she raised it into the daylight. We breathed the fine dust that hung in the air.
Laughter and joyful shouting spilled through the beam of light. Within moments, the flower was pinched. The world blurred, as it always did at the birth of a Kindred. A deep scrape, as if all the streets of the city above were sliding over the tunnels, sounded in my ears. Like the world pulling apart and then falling back together.
Beth tumbled to the tunnel floor, a fair young boy in her arms. His hair was so bright it stung my eyes. He smiled at Beth, and wrapped his chubby arms around her neck.
***
Trowels chimed like small bells against the rough rock overhead. All through the tunnels, they made music, and seams of light opened across the understreets. So much light that new flowers bloomed—ones we hadn’t seen since our sunwalker days. Our faces pinched, adjusting to the new brightness in our world. Our black eyes began to shrink back into a multitude of color.
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