by J. P. Smythe
“They were gone when you went to sleep?”
“The Lows?” Stupid question, I think, as the words leave my mouth. That’s another thing she hates. Of course that’s what she meant. “They were gone, yes. No sign of them.”
“Had they taken anything?”
“Didn’t look like it. I don’t know what they had before, but their stuff all seemed to be there.” Everything was as neat as I’d ever seen it. The mother’s name was Courtney. I remember standing in that berth and taking the containers of stewed fruit from her when she was done and thanking her. I can’t remember her children’s names. She must have told me them. Must have. And now, as quickly as they’re gone, I’ve forgotten them.
“They attacked others last night,” she says. “A few different people.” She lies back and stretches out her knees. They click as she unbends them, something in her bones and muscles grinding away inside her. I wonder if they hurt or if she’s used to it now. “Maybe they’re looking to expand. This happens.” She waves her words away as if they don’t matter. “It’s a cycle: This has happened before, and it will happen again. We’re powerless, so there’s no sense in fighting it. You should move.”
“I tried to help,” I say. “I went down there, and I was . . .” I don’t know how to finish that. I dawdled. I stood back. I let it happen.
“You shouldn’t have done anything,” she tells me. She doesn’t look at me when she says it, though. “These things will happen, and the best you can do is to stay away from them.” She sits up. “We should get back to work. Life doesn’t stop just because we do.” And then she’s up on her feet and she’s back at the bushes, plucking the berries out and dropping them into her basket. She doesn’t wait for me to join her.
The day goes slowly, as it always does, and I can’t stop thinking about the missing Courtney and her dead husband and sons and how there might have been something that I could have done. I wonder what Agatha would have done in that situation.
I wonder what my mother would have done.
At night I try to sleep, but the ship is shouting. It seems louder than usual, the noise of the Lows echoing through the gulf in the middle of the ship. All around me people are worried. I don’t know how this happens: something in the air, I suspect, that sets everybody on edge. I’m scared, and I don’t mind admitting that. There was a time when I thought that it was enough to have my mother and Agatha here with me, that they would protect me and I didn’t need to worry about shutting my eyes. Now I sleep so lightly that anything—the slightest rustle, the faintest patter of feet on metal floor—can wake me up. Tonight there’s no way that sleep’s coming in the first place. It’s chasing ahead of me and I can see it, but it’s out of reach. I squeeze my eyes shut, but that makes them water. It makes everything worse.
So I picture the things that have made me feel safest. My mother’s face: her eyes, which were so dark that they were nearly black; her hair, the same as mine, tight dark knots constantly fighting to grow out of coarse stubble; and the touch of her soft skin on my face when she held me and told me that this would all be all right. That was her mantra, a song that she used to sing, like a hymn, passed down. Everything’s gonna be all right. Every little thing’s gonna be all right.
I sing it to myself under my breath, so quiet that only I can hear it. It’s a lie, I know. As the noise from the Lows’ half of the ship gets louder and louder, it’s suddenly harder to believe that song than it’s ever been.
“Chan?” Somebody says my name, and that makes me sit bolt upright, my hand darting to my pillow, to my knife. “Chan, are you awake?”
“Yes,” I say, and the cloth drape serving as a door to my berth is pulled back with a musical tinkle from the metal scraps I’ve hung. It’s Bess, the woman who lives in the berth next to mine. She’s holding her son in front of her, and his eyes are a bitter red mess of tears, snot covering his chin.
“We’re scared,” she says. “Can we come and sit with you?” I shuffle to one side of the bunk and pat the space I’ve left behind.
“Of course,” I say. Peter shuffles forward, and I help him onto the mattress. He’s only three, maybe. If he’s older, he doesn’t seem it. “Don’t cry,” I tell him, as if that will help. I’ve never been much good with kids.
“He’s fine,” Bess says. “He just can’t sleep. He always gets like this.” She strokes his head, smoothing his stubbled hair down, his cheeks damp with tears. She holds him to her chest and looks out through the gap she’s left in the curtains. “They’re bad tonight.”
“Yes,” I say.
“But we can’t do anything.”
“No,” I agree. Then we sit there in silence. We all shut our eyes, all three of us. This reminds me of the past. That’s comforting in itself.
Screaming. Not from Bess or Peter but coming from farther away. Still, it’s close enough, and it’s so full of fear that it sinks into the air around us and won’t fade. I’ve still got my knife in my hand, and I slip my feet into my shoes and wrap a cloak around me. I think about the children the Lows killed last night and how scared they were and how I didn’t do anything. I can’t do that again. I won’t do it again.
“Stay here,” I tell Bess. “You’ll be safe here,” and I leave my berth and look around for the source of the noise. You can see the Lows’ half of the ship from here: below the arboretum, their bottom floors peering out from underneath it, a constant reminder. Over there, their torches are lit, and fires burn, and I can see them beating at their chests, rallying each other. They’re clustered somewhere down below. I can just see them through the darkness: a pack of them, cheering something. One of them is speaking to the rest.
Then the scream comes again, louder, from the next section over, on the same floor as mine. Not Low territory. My territory.
Last night I dawdled. This I can do something about.
I run down the gantry, toward the noise. It keeps going, which helps, like a beacon, calling for me. It’s them. It must be them.
I don’t stop running, flashing by the people cowering in their berths, under blankets, behind curtains and makeshift doors, their shades pulled tight. I see glimpses of their eyes peering out as I run, watching me. They’re keeping their heads down. That’s sensible. I should take a leaf from their book, I know, but I’m in this now.
Stay out of trouble, my mother’s voice says. Be selfish. Don’t die.
“I’ll be fine,” I tell her, but I’m not even sure that I believe it myself.
The screaming woman is on her own in a berth that’s on the far end of section IV, as close as you can get to living near the Lows and still be free. I recognize her: she works in the arboretum as well. She’s older than me, and she’s got something wrong with her left arm, which usually just hangs by her side as she works the soil. She’s holding a knife in her good hand now, her arm outstretched, swinging it wildly at the Lows who surround her. Her clothes are torn, and there’s the twitching body of a Low woman lying at her feet. There’s blood arced across her, across her berth: so much mess that it can only have been an accident that she managed to kill the Low. If you know what you’re doing, it’s always neater. But there are still three others, and they’re circling her, laughing their strange half coughs at her. There’s no time to stop and take stock, to catch my breath. I can’t let last night happen again.
As they move toward her, so do I. My knife is smaller than theirs, but it’s sharp and I know how to use it well. Agatha gave it to me to protect myself. She used to use it herself. It’s good to know that it saved her life. The Lows are so focused on the girl that they don’t see me coming. I slice the little tendon at the back of the ankle of the one nearest to me. He collapses to the ground as if there’s never been a single muscle in his body holding him up, screaming his pain aloud. The other two turn, and they look back at me, their expressions almost comically confused.
“Let her go,” I say.
And they do. All of a sudden, I’m much more interesting to them. On
e of them—the one who isn’t holding a weapon—swings at me, and his fist connects with my chin. It’s a sloppy punch, totally untrained, no real weight behind it, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. My head snaps up, and I can feel my chin reddening, bruising, almost immediately. He tries again, and this time I duck. I step back to get some distance between us. Behind them, the girl whimpers.
“Run,” I say to her, but she stays still. The other Low has a mace of some sort, a thick wrought-iron stick with what looks like shards of glass fastened to its head, and she rushes forward, swinging it wildly. I’m smaller than her, and faster as well, and I hop backward, avoiding her. She swings again, and this time the side of the bar hits my leg. It hurts a stupid amount, but I can’t think about that. You get caught in the pain and it’s all over. I manage to stumble forward and slash out, and I catch her belly, cutting through the vest she’s wearing and puncturing her skin in a thin, sharp line. She gasps and staggers backward. It’s an opportunity. I back up more, leading them out onto the gangway, away from the girl’s berth. They follow slowly, wheezing their intentions at me with threatening breaths, their eyes fixed on mine.
Two of them. I can take two of them.
The one without a weapon runs at me, and I meet him, ducking down at the last second to try to use his momentum to trip him, knock him over. Agatha taught me to defend myself when I was younger, just as she once taught my mother, and this was her first tip: someone bigger comes at you, you use their own weight against them. I push him up and over me and he thuds to the floor, right on the edge of the stairwell gap that leads to section V. Damn. Any closer and he’d have been over and down into the Pit, and this fight would have been one on one. My leg stings, and my chin aches. The one with the weapon swings it. The mace clips my hand hard enough to make me lose my grip. I drop my knife, which bounces on the floor and then over the edge and into the darkness below.
Damn, damn, damn.
Don’t die, my mother’s voice repeats inside my head. I turn and leap across the stairwell gap, and I don’t miss a step. It only buys me a second. I keep running, but they’re right behind me. My feet clang on the metal flooring and theirs follow, their footsteps like echoes of mine, and I can see their shadows flickering as they pass dimmed nighttime lights, first ahead of me and then falling behind as we run past the individual lights. Four berths away from mine, and then three, two, and then I’m throwing aside my curtains, and I’m here. Bess and her son sit up on my bunk, rubbing their eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I say to them, “but you’ll have to hide. Under the bunk.” They move, but too slowly. “Now!” I shout, and that kicks them into action. They’re scared of me, I think. They’ve probably never seen me like this. I’m not sure that I’ve ever actually been like this. I can hear the Lows outside, stopped, talking about what to do. They know about me, and they know who I am. They know the reputation that my mother had, the power. I have to channel that. They have to be afraid of me.
They have to believe that I am willing to kill them.
“Riadne’s daughter?” one of them says. I don’t answer. I scramble around on the floor, trying to find a jagged edge, and when one catches on my fingertips, I press my palm to it and I push down, breaking the skin, and I drag my hand across to make a proper cut, nothing that will hurt too much in the morning but enough to draw blood. I flex my hand over and over, making it flow, and I smear it onto my face. This is all for show. My mother used to do this, I think. War paint, she called it. I want them to see how like her I am. When it’s done, I rifle through my mother’s things, the stuff that she left. I find her smoke pellets. She used to use them to scare people away, and Agatha used them when she died in exactly the same way. Maybe they’ll work again now.
The Lows pull back the curtains, and they see me standing there, eyes closed, head bowed, my face covered in my own blood. They watch me: I can feel their gaze on my head, looking all around me. I’m terrified, but I can’t let on. They can’t see me crossing my fingers, praying that this works. They step forward: time for them to meet her ghost and see just how afraid of me they should be.
I slam one of the pellets to the ground, and it takes a second—a second in which I think that this is all over, that I’m screwed, that they’ll be in here and on me and I’m dead—but then it coughs out the smoke in these towering plumes around my body. Through the smoke, I speak. “Leave,” I say. I channel her voice, lowering mine. I speak almost from my throat. “Leave or I will kill you.” I can’t see them through the smoke now, but I hear their footsteps stop, their breathing quiet. They’re scared, or wary at the least. They’re trying to work out if they can take me or if the rumors are true and I’m protected by something other than just my tiny knife.
They’re trying to work out if I’m worth it.
I’m not. They leave, backing away from my berth, and I follow, striding slowly through the smoke, letting everyone see me. They skulk off down the gantry, looking back over their shoulders. I hear their footsteps getting fainter, and then they haul themselves down off the edge. I go back to my berth, indicating to Bess to stay down, below the level of the smoke, and then I creep to the edge of the gantry, to the railing. I put my hands onto the cold black metal and hold on, and I lean over, craning my neck to see them return to the girl’s berth. I can’t see inside. I don’t know if she’s still there, still alive. They throw her things over the side, but there’s no noise from her, and then they throw the bodies of their fallen after them, and I watch them fall until they’re just glints in the darkness at the bottom, joining my knife and God knows how many other bodies.
I breathe then. I didn’t know that I was holding my breath or how long I’d held it for, but my lungs almost ache when I start again. As the smoke dissipates, I shut the curtains to my berth and wipe my blood off my face, and I hold myself to stop myself shaking. Bess tries to say something to me, but I can’t listen to her, not right now.
I feel like I’m a child again, wanting to hide behind my mother’s legs while she protects me, but now she isn’t here to tell me that it’s all going to be better again.
It’s not enough that life is scary. We invent other things to be terrified of, to scare the children into staying in line. There are things worse than Lows, we say. The story of the Bell who went insane, who killed an entire section of the ship in the early days; the story of the Nightman, who comes and takes children who wander off while their parents are asleep; the story about when the Pale Women supposedly poisoned the water in the arboretum, killing off all the fish and water bugs. All of them carry their own warnings, but there’s nothing worse than the Lows. They’re here, and they’re not stories. And we’re right to be scared.
After a night spent with Bess and Peter—all three of us drifting in and out of half sleep, waking each other with our snoring—work seems like a relief. Being back in the arboretum, among the plants and the grass and the trees, is calming.
I ache like I’ve never ached before: My chin is tight when I try to speak, and my leg hurts so badly that I’m walking with a limp. I look at myself in the river, kneeling on the bank and peering into the water. The flesh is a plum color underneath my jaw, and the skin is slightly broken (the punch was harder than I thought, evidently), but I’m fine. I wash my face, and that makes it feel slightly better. It always does, without fail. My leg is worse but not nearly as bad as it could have been: a nasty graze, that’s all. I wash and dress it. It will heal.
Around me, everybody is talking about the Lows; everybody has a story about what they did last night. The girl I saved wasn’t a one-off: Lows were everywhere last night. Every story ends the same: they killed or injured somebody, threw their things into the Pit. I listen to snippets of conversation about how they spilled over the edges of their sections, out into section IV or section VI, how they attacked somebody, ruined some berths. Agatha joins me after a while and snorts at what we overhear.
“They think that the Lows’ incursions will end,” she says.<
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“You think that they won’t?”
“They’re marking their territory,” she tells me. “It’s expansion. It’s animal instinct.” I don’t understand her, and I don’t like to ask. “But you’re okay?” she asks.
“I’m fine,” I say. I don’t tell her what happened. If she cared, she would already know.
“You don’t look fine.” She glances at my chin, and I look down, hiding the mark from her. “You’ve been in a fight.”
“I’m fine,” I repeat.
“Your mother would be worried about you,” she replies, and that’s it: she walks off, leaving me there, no comeback, no way to argue my case.
I take a break and leave the arboretum to stand on the gantry that runs back toward my berth. I watch the free people work to protect themselves against the Lows. The spaces between sections I and VI and between III and IV—the stairwells, the only physical gaps that keep them from our half of the ship—are being stockpiled with whatever people can find. They’re erecting jagged metal barriers and tearing up the few remaining stairs and ladders to make it as hard as possible for the Lows to get across to us. It’s happening on every floor that I can see.
People are scared.
This is the time of day when most Lows are asleep—most, but not all. Some are on watch, guarding, and I look at them in the distance, standing there, watching just as I am. They don’t seem even slightly concerned.
Later, I’m working the vegetables—pulling turnips from the ground and cleaning them off, checking for mite rot and that they’re safe to eat. I stay at ground level because I’m hoping that I might see the girl from last night, and she works only the jobs that don’t require her to use her useless arm. Even though Agatha’s not with me, I picture myself arguing with her, and I get angry with her—and with myself—because of everything that’s not being said. I’m not saying what I did last night, because I’m scared of Agatha and of how she’ll react; and I’m not telling her that I’m angry with her because she’s breaking her promise to my mother that she would watch over me; and I’m not telling her that I miss her, because she won’t let me.