Way Down Dark

by J. P. Smythe

  I can’t sleep. I think about the Low and how I killed him. Maybe not directly, but it was my fault. He might not have died from his injury, I tell myself; people have survived far worse. And it wasn’t my fault that the torch landed where it did, or that what he was wearing burned up as fast as it did.

  But he’s the first person I’ve ever killed by myself. My mother’s hand was on mine when she died. The old leader of the Lows who I stabbed in the neck was finished by somebody else. But this Low? His death is the first time I’ve truly felt the guilt of having somebody else’s blood on my hands.

  I ask my mother not to be disappointed in me. I ask her forgiveness, because I know that she wouldn’t be happy. I shut my eyes, and I try to not picture him burning: the smell of him, the screams as he fell. And then I try to not see my mother’s body burning as well, but I can’t.

  I hear a noise outside my berth. My hand creeps to my new blade, which is lying on the floor next to my bed, still covered in the blood from the Low’s hand. Not one set of feet but two, maybe even three.

  “Go away,” I say loudly enough that they’ll hear. Agatha must have gone, but I don’t know when. I should have been more alert. It makes me complacent, thinking that she’s watching out for me. She can’t be. She isn’t, not anymore.

  The feet don’t retreat. They’re waiting, stalling.

  I stand up and stride to my curtain. “I told you,” I say, and I swing the curtains wide. It’s the family that I visited earlier, that I told to be quiet: the husband and wife and their little girl. She’s terrified, looking me up and down, her eyes wide. I hide my blade behind my back, and she holds something out. Her hands shake as she presents it to me. It’s shiny and blue, a fragment of something that I’m sure was once much more impressive: a gemstone. It looks far larger in her hands than it does in mine. “This is beautiful,” I tell her. “What is this?”

  “It’s for you,” her father says. “They left us alone, and . . .” He shrugs. We survived another night, the gesture says. “Sophia picked it. We’ve got a few of them, and she chose the one that she thought you would like. So yeah, that’s yours. Thanks.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” I say. Something like this stone, that’s worth money here. Anything even remotely rare or precious like this, people will trade the world for. Or worse.

  “The Lows would have come and done what they did in the rest of the sections,” Sophia’s mother says. “They would have chased us out.” And that’s that. She closes my hand on the precious stone, and we stand together and watch the Lows making their way back across to their sections, their expansion complete for the time being. They’ve scared us, and they’ve hurt us.

  And they’ll do it again.

  4

  My mother’s rule about staying away from the gangs is nearly impossible to maintain. Although the Lows might stick to their part of the ship, the Pale Women and the Bells are a different matter. They wander among us, doing whatever it is that they do: the Bells picking fights to prove something, the Pale Women preaching their gospels, trying to convert us. They have their own pockets, like the Lows and like us, the free people. They’ve broken all the lights up there on the top floors and live in total darkness. We never go into their territories unless we have to, and we don’t talk to them unless they talk to us first.

  “Somebody’s looking for you,” the blind knife seller says as I pass his berth on my way to work. I didn’t say a word, so I have no idea how he knows it’s me.

  “Me?”

  “Chan Aitch, daughter of Riadne,” he says. “He’s asking about you, where you live.”

  “Who?” I ask.

  “Smelled like Pale Women to me,” he says. “Hope you haven’t pissed them off.” That sticks with me as I head to the arboretum, as I walk out toward the giant suspended platform it sits on. The walls are misted up, fogged with the heat coming from inside. As hot as it is out here, it’s worse in there. I hope I haven’t pissed them off as well. There are stories—I mean, of course there are stories, there are always stories—about what they used to be like. So, once upon a time, they went around the ship, saving those who needed saving and judging everyone they didn’t save. They were vicious, punishing whoever they thought needed punishing. Those they saved, they took up to the top floor. And those people they took, they were never seen again. That’s the story.

  I’m surprised that there might be Pale Women down here on 40. They don’t come into the light; that’s pretty much the only thing we all know to be true. They stay in the darkness. Something about penitence.

  But I’m not going looking for them. They want to speak with me for whatever reason, they can come find me. I open the doors to the arboretum, and there he is: their envoy. I can see his neck underneath his hood, sweat running down his pale skin. He mops at it with the sleeve of his gown, and I notice that collar again: tight against his skin. Can’t be comfortable, especially in this heat. Leather makes you sweat. He looks wrong here in this green and growing place. He’s meant to be in the shadows. There are no lights on the top floor, and there never have been. Who chooses to live there, where you can’t see anything? Here, in the brightest part of the ship, he’s totally conspicuous. People are staring.

  “I was told that I would find you here,” he says. “Sister has told me to find you, to extend an offer to you that you come and join us, live with us. She thinks that you would be an asset.” He stands back, his arms hanging by his side as if he doesn’t need to sell me on it any more than that. The Pale Women want me, and I’ll obviously sign up. What possible reason would I have to say no?

  “Thanks, but you can tell her that I’m fine,” I say. I walk past him, down toward the plum trees. There’s nobody working them right now, which is perfect. They’re easy to climb, which means their fruit is easy to pick. I look for Agatha, but she’s nowhere to be seen. That’s unlike her, to miss work, but it’s not unheard of. Sometimes she just doesn’t feel up to it. The envoy follows me as I walk.

  “Did you read the Testaments?” he asks. He has long strides, nearly as big as two of mine, but he keeps staring at the ground, not looking at the trees. I don’t know for sure, but if I were him, living up in the darkness, I think I’d be drinking in the sights and sounds of the arboretum: the rustle of leaves, the hum of insects, the scent of water, of grass, of fresh growing things.

  I stop and I turn, and I see that he’s fixated on the ground. I wonder suddenly if he’s ever seen grass up close.

  “You like it?” I ask.

  “A garden,” he says. “Like it is in the book. A garden, where life begins.”

  “Yeah,” I say. He’s a bit unsettling. Slightly too much on the side of crazy. “I read the book,” I tell him, “but I don’t know that I understood it. Thank you, though.”

  “Sister was insistent,” he says, his voice raised slightly, almost angry. “You should come.”

  I don’t like his tone, and my reply makes that pretty clear. “I’m fine where I am,” I snap.

  “She says that the end days—that war—is coming.” He looks up at me, and I see his eyes clearly for the first time: a green-gray that barely exists outside of paintings and tattoos, not even slightly natural. “There is a protection offered, from the Father. We’re ascending.”

  “If the ship goes to war,” I say, “then nothing will protect you.” I plant my hands on a branch and pull myself up into the heart of the tree. “Besides, if you’ve got a way to save a few of us, why not save everybody?”

  I stop climbing in time to watch him turn and walk back to the entrance. He pulls at the collar around his neck and rubs at his head underneath his hood. They’re not used to rejection, I suspect. Most people here are so scared when they’re alone that they’ll take anything resembling security, no matter how strange it might seem to the rest of us.

  As he leaves, going out onto the gantry, the hood falls from his head. The light here is better, and I see a shock of bright red hair cut close to his scalp. And it’
s his, totally natural. I’ve never seen red hair that hasn’t been dyed before. And I can’t remember having ever seen a color like it.

  My walk home after work is strange. It feels later than it is by the way everybody is acting, rushing home, drawing the curtains tight across the front of their berths, being as quiet as they can. They are crossing their fingers that the events of the last few nights were an aberration, but as I put the bruised and damaged fruit that I kept today away underneath my bed, I see the Lows massing again in their section. Somehow—I have no idea how—there seem to be more of them tonight. With their torches lit and clustered together as they are, it looks as if that part of the ship is on fire.

  Bess and Peter come to me again, and we huddle in my home. We watch as the Lows leave their territory, as they branch out into the rest of the ship. Again flames spring up, showing them where to head.

  “Why is this happening?” Bess asks me.

  “I don’t know,” I say. I wish that I did. I wish that Agatha were here, because she might have more of an idea. In her stories, she talks about how they rose and fell over the years: not just the Lows but other gangs and cults and groups. “Stay here,” I say to them, and I go to the edge and look up to Agatha’s part of the ship. She lives on the sixtieth floor, in section VI. Her floor is dark under the ever-present lights, and there are no candles, no flames, no torches coming from any berths. Except hers. There’s a light coming from her berth: a single flame, beckoning the Lows toward it. She wasn’t at work today; the flame is burning tonight.

  There’s something wrong. There has to be. I tell Bess and Peter to stay where they are, and I take my new blade. I’m going to need a holder for it, I tell myself. I’ll try to make myself one tomorrow. There’s always tomorrow.

  Agatha’s floor is swarming with Lows by the time I get there. They’ve come over from below and climbed up, and they’re fast. Everyone on Australia is taut and lean, but there’s something about living in their part of the ship, something about their lifestyle, that makes the Lows even more so. Some have let themselves go, true, and their muscles aren’t as hard, and there are stories about those who live on the very bottom floors of the ship and the state that they’re in, but I’ve never seen those Lows myself. The only ones we free people ever see are the fighters.

  I stay in the shadows where I can. On each floor, only about half the lights work anymore. I wonder what this place was like when it was bright. Now there are sections where I can crouch, empty berths—their inhabitants either panicked away recently or long since gone—and I sneak through as I count Lows. Five of them already on this floor, with more on the way. I get closer to Agatha’s berth. They must have her. They might have killed her: I can’t hear her, and she would be fighting, I know that much.

  I get out onto the gantry, and I pull my blade out and clasp it with both hands, ready for them. They aren’t looking in my direction, so I sneak forward. I’m not going to kill them, at least not intentionally. Accidents happen, sure, but I’m going to injure them where I can avoid it. No killing, not after that last one. I don’t know that I can handle the guilt. But I have to stop them, that’s for sure. If I can get there before they see me, I might be able to take out one or two of them without—

  A hand across my face, across my mouth, and another on my shoulder, pulling me backward. I kick back, trying to free myself, and I turn, grabbing a handful of cloak; my attacker is hooded. I drop the knife and reach up to the head of my attacker, grabbing it at the back. The hood falls back, and it’s Agatha. She lets go of me, and in the darkness I see the ropelike scar of her lip twisting at me in a smile. She nods, and I do the same, and she takes me by the hand and pulls me with her into the dark. In the stairwell between V and VI we climb, using the fragments of railings and stairs to pull ourselves up, again and again and again. She doesn’t stop. Her knees must be killing her, I think; I ache enough myself, and she’s much, much older than I am. Compared with most people still alive here, she’s pretty ancient.

  We pass the rusted remnants of the sign for the sixty-eighth floor and she finally stops. She stands on the gantry and puts her hands on her legs and bends forward, and I can hear her breathing. She sounds almost like a Low, it’s so strained.

  “What are you doing here?” she asks.

  “Looking for you,” I say. “I wanted to know where you were.”

  “I’ve been watching them,” she replies. “And watching you.”

  “Me?”

  “I promised your mother that I would,” she says, “and I’d never break my word.” She stands up and stretches, and I hear everything moving in her back, her muscles and bones as they grind and click into place. “Come with me. I’ve got something to show you.”

  I follow her down the gantry. The berths here are like everywhere else: free people cowering, taking cover. They watch us as we go, suspicious and worried. The higher up the ship you get, the farther from the arboretum and the markets, the more frail the people who live there are, it seems. These floors house the elderly, the sick, and the tortured. There’s no help for any of these people and no way out. Nothing will get better for them.

  Agatha stops in the middle of the gantry, halfway between stairwells, and leans over the edge. “Look down,” she says, and so I do.

  I can see them. They’re at my berth. Bess is being dragged out, and I watch as the Lows raise their hands and slam them down on her body. She crumples to the gantry. I can’t see details because it’s all so fast, but I can make out the Lows, Bess cowering in the middle of them. Peter is nowhere to be seen.

  “I have to help her,” I say, but Agatha grabs my arm.

  “You can’t do anything,” she says. “And you shouldn’t try.”

  “Let go of me,” I tell her. I taste blood in my mouth, and I don’t know where it’s coming from. It’s just there, welling up: sharp and metallic.

  “You aren’t special, Chan. You can’t change anything. The best you can do is survive. You survive, and you do whatever you can to keep surviving.” She sighs. “We’ll move up here together, move all of our things. They aren’t coming this high up in the ship, not yet. We can buy some time.”

  “No,” I tell her, and I slap her hand away and I run.

  What happened to Bess is my fault, I tell myself over and over as I climb down the stairwell. I invited Bess into my berth. She thought that she would be safe, and she wasn’t. This is my fault.

  I’m climbing down so fast that I’m almost slipping, losing my grip again and again because I’m pushing myself, trying to do things that I’ve never done before: dropping whole floors and landing on rubble and attempting not to fall or hurt myself. The only thing worse would be if I died on my way to save her.

  The sixtieth floor, the fifty-eighth, the fifty-fifth. I keep going.

  The fifty-second, and I’m exhausted. I can’t think when I’ve ever pushed myself so hard. Even when trying to save my own life I’m not sure I’ve moved this quickly.

  Then I drop from 51 to 50, and I land awkwardly. When I stand, my ankle hurts and my hands burn, the calluses on them rubbed sore. The ship never gets kinder, and we never treat it any better. But I don’t stop. Last time I hesitated, people died. This time I charge at them, pulling my blade from my pack as I run, and I scream to let them know that I’m coming. The pain almost helps.

  One of them, a female, is kneeling down next to Bess, crouched by her head, whispering something to her. I throw a smoke pellet, clouding the area, and I rush in. The Low is who I aim for, and I tear into her with my blade, pushing her backward, kicking her in the neck. She crumples to the ground beside Bess, and the others all inhale at what seems like the same time, their thick wheezing suddenly all that I can hear. In this moment, the engine noise slips away, and the cries coming from the rest of the ship: There’s just me and these Lows.

  I fight.

  And I win.

  Bess thinks that I’m dead, but I’m not. I can still wriggle my toes and my fingers, and I twitc
h them just to check that they’re all there. The first few Lows were easy to deal with because they were surprised, but the rest of them had time to attack. Still, they all ran or fell. They’re not here anymore. And I’m cut, I know that much: all across my side there are slashes, because one of them had blades stuck to his fingers in some sort of glove, and I remember the way it felt when he grabbed me with it. Bess gasps when she sees me moving, and she cradles my head.

  “Peter,” she says, “my son. They’ve got him.” That kicks me awake. My pain will go. My injuries aren’t so bad that I won’t heal. I can still breathe, and I can still move.

  I push myself. “They took him?”

  “He’s not here!” she yells, and she beats the ground. No, not the ground: one of the Lows, unconscious, barely breathing. As my eyes start to clear and everything stops blurring together, I focus on him. I should end this, stop him from waking up, exacting revenge. Something from the Pale Women’s Testaments leaps out at me: kill or be killed, one of the commandments that their god passed down.

  In the Testaments, all of the stories have morals. Thinking about it, every story does.

  “Where did they take him?” I ask, but she only shakes her head. “Bess, you have to tell me,” I say, and I try to get to my feet, but the movement makes my head swim, and all I want is my bunk, but there’s no time for that. Later. Now I have to help. I have to make up to Bess what she lost because of me. I promised to be selfish, so I will be. If I don’t help Bess, the guilt will probably be the end of me. “I’ll get him back, but you have to tell me what happened.”

  She explains through heaved sputters of tears. They appeared, and they burst into my berth, and they dragged her out. She told Peter to hide, but she didn’t see where he went, and now he’s gone.

  “You didn’t see them take him?”