Way Down Dark

by J. P. Smythe

  She used to be a Low.

  I watch her as she tells her children—both younger than me but only by a few years, and maybe they’re twins, that’s how alike they look—to unpack their belongings as they try to make Bess’s old berth a home. It’s obviously smaller than where they’ve come from, from the kids’ moaning about it, but the woman has a power about her that you rarely see here. A control. She’s completely even-tempered, never losing her patience. Her children are dreadful. They’re already lost. They will join a gang, if they’re not already in one, or form one of their own, and soon they’ll be somebody’s nightmare. I can see that their mother knows this and despairs, but for now she’s still got some control over them.

  I don’t know how old she is. Maybe she’s the same age my mother was, but it’s difficult to tell; she has lived harder, a fighter rather than somebody who tried to stay away from trouble. But she cares for her sons. She tells them off, but she watches over them while they work. She’s protective. I recognize it and miss it.

  The Lows don’t believe in family, not in the way that the free people do. They treat everybody as part of the whole, every child a Low rather than a son or a daughter. If they don’t have enough of their own, they take ours. Children are swallowed by them, raised to be monsters. You have a kid when you’re a Low, that kid is basically screwed, no chance for anything else. Probably a reasonably good chance those kids won’t even see adulthood. Maybe they were able to be good once. Maybe they would have been able to do something other than be a Low, but they aren’t given the chance. I can’t be sure, but I’m betting that my new neighbor wanted her children to have that opportunity: the opportunity not to be monsters.

  I go and stand at the entrance to my berth as I pull my shoes on, thinking that I might introduce myself. It can’t hurt. While I’m waiting for the woman to notice me, I spot Agatha at the far end of the gantry. She’s sitting on a crate, head down, trying to go unnoticed. I would say that she’s not very good at it, but I know that’s a lie. She just wanted me to see her. I ignore her and finish getting myself ready.

  By the time Agatha gets up and comes over, I’ve got my blade tucked into my pack. I don’t want to be without it, not anymore.

  “Living here is getting more dangerous,” she says. “You should move upstairs with me.” There are no stairs, not anymore, yet we still say that. We really need new words. “It’s what your mother—”

  “She’s dead,” I say, and that’s the end of the conversation. She can’t go anywhere else with it.

  “The Lows are starting a war. They’re trying to take this section, this part of the ship. They want it, so they’ll take it.”

  “Let them try,” I say.

  “You don’t understand. They’ve done this before, and they have always succeeded. They’ve pushed people out, and they’ve killed anyone who has tried to resist them. This is just them warming up. This is preparation, and it will get so much worse.”

  She suddenly looks old and scared, and I think back to yesterday—the quiet and the darkness of the eighty-eighth floor, laying that wet cloth across the forehead of a sick woman, talking to that old man whose mind was gone. Even looking for Peter—just doing something—was better than nothing.

  I am tired of doing nothing. I like doing something. I’ve spent my whole life doing nothing. I don’t care about the danger. Agatha does. She’s scared, and I don’t know why, but I’m almost ashamed of her. She shouldn’t be. She’s given up. “If we fight them, they will kill us.”

  “Then you won’t be in any danger, will you?” I say. That stings her, I know, and it’s nasty of me. But she’s standing back. The Agatha my mother used to talk about would never have stood back and let this chaos—this violence—happen around her. That Agatha wouldn’t have hidden in the dark. She would have done something, helped people.

  That Agatha would have helped me.

  “I can’t protect you if you stay here,” she says.

  “I know,” I say. And I want to say so much more to her, but the words don’t form in my mouth, and then Agatha turns and leaves, and it’s too late.

  It seems as though everybody starts screaming at once. The noise of it clangs around the ship, waking me up. I don’t know how long I was asleep for, but it wasn’t long enough. I’m amazed that I managed to sleep at all. I remember lying in my bed and trying to pretend that I was somewhere else. I’ve done it before: taken myself away, in that space between sleeping and waking. I’ve found a haven where we’re not here, not on Australia. The fantasy of it is always so strong, because my mother is always alive in these dreams and I can talk to her about everything. I have so much I wish to say to her. And we’re always safe. We’re never running or hiding. That’s the last thing that I remember.

  But the noise of the screaming—which is monotonous and repetitive, like an alarm—is too loud. I open my eyes, and everything is black. I think it’s me at first, but it’s not: shapes start to make themselves known in the darkness, and the layout of my room emerges in dim outlines. I stand up and stumble to my curtains and pull them apart. It’s not just my room: something’s happened to the lights all over the ship. In every other berth, there are the sounds of panic, of people telling their loved ones not to be afraid.

  I can’t see anything.

  “What’s happened?” I ask into the darkness. Next door, the ex-Low lights a candle and the light floods out. Such a small flame, yet the difference it makes is amazing. It’s so bright.

  “They’ve cut them,” she says. “They’ve found a way to turn out the lights.” She points somewhere over toward section IV. “There are wires behind the walls. Cables. They must have found the right one.”

  “It’s so dark,” I say.

  “You’re scared?” She moves away from the candle, and I can’t see her face anymore. Her boys stir in their makeshift beds on the floor. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d be scared of anything. I know about your mother. I know who she was.” She comes toward me, through the darkness. I can see her silhouetted against the flicker of a flame behind her. “And I know about you,” she says, and I can see that she doubts the stories that have spread about me.

  I’m about to say something back to her—to defend myself—when there’s a sound from section IV. It’s colossal: a crash, the sound of metal collapsing onto metal, of screaming and terror, worse than before. I can’t see what it is, but I have to. I pull on my clothes, my shoes, get my blade, and I run. Despite every ache in my body, every painful muscle screaming at me to rest, I run.

  On the forty-third floor, at the edge of section IV, the gantry has collapsed in on itself. Too much has been taken away over the years, too many of the support beams that hold it in place have been chipped away for weapons or whatever. Apparently, whatever the free people had done to stop the Lows from crossing was the last straw: a few too many things taken from the edge to widen the gap, or maybe whatever they piled up to use as a barricade was just too heavy. Either way, the contents of three berths have spilled out, the gantry bent down to the floor below. There are people trapped down there, a mixture of Lows and others, and the only way that we can see what’s going on is in the flickering light of candles and torches reflecting off the dark metal.

  I climb down and start helping as the free people from this section of the ship pull off the metal, yanking it away from where it’s fallen, trying to free those who are trapped underneath. Nobody notices who I am, and nobody asks about the blade that I have with me, and nobody says anything about my mother’s ghost or what I might want. We don’t even talk unless it’s to coordinate lifting up the metal and pulling out the people trapped beneath it. Time passes. I don’t know how much.

  On the other side, at the edge of section III, I suddenly notice the Lows. They have torches: thick rods of metal soaked in something that burns so brightly that the flames are almost white. They stand and they breathe their sick huffs, and they scream.

  And then I see her: Rex, their leader, the woma
n who was there the night my mother died. She’s more scarred now, that’s for certain, with fresh welts running across her chest and face, and I’m sure that her hair is singed in places—short to the scalp on one half of her head. She looks at me and then at the fallen gantry around us all. She has no expression on her face as she looks at the chaos.

  And then she says, “Take them.” I can see her lips move; I know that’s what she says even through the noise all around us. And at this, the Lows hoot and howl and drop ladders and planks across the stairwell and onto the creaking mess of metal around us. I watch, frozen, and she stares back at me, and she smiles. I’m sure of it.

  There are too many of them. We back off, those of us who were trying to help the trapped and fallen, because they outnumber us. Ten, fifteen, twenty I count, piling over the gap. We can’t save the others and ourselves. We retreat, because there’s nothing else that we can do.

  Agatha was right. The incursions of the nights before weren’t war.

  This is.

  AGATHA

  Your mother was a pain in the backside. I think that’s fair to say. She was a nightmare, and your grandparents couldn’t control her, so they asked me to help. I was treated as a part of the family after I rescued her—maybe a distant relative, coming every so often for food and company—and they needed help. She was inquisitive. Here, people change, but she was different. There used to be a saying: a leopard never changes its spots. You’ve seen drawings of tigers? A leopard was like them, but spots, not stripes. That was your mother. She was twelve or thirteen, and she wanted more than Australia could offer her. She wanted some degree of freedom, which . . . She managed to forget what she was like, I think, when she was dealing with you. You were your own person and yet so like her.

  She was going out a lot in the mornings and then not coming home. Your grandmother wanted to teach her—they had bargained for books, and they wanted to give her something like an education, as much as they could manage—and she refused. She had better things to be doing, she told them. So they asked me to watch over her, to make sure she was all right. What they meant was: find out what she is doing. They were worried. People should worry; it’s a sign that they care.

  So I followed her, and she had no idea. I’m good at it. I know the ship like the back of my hand, and I know where to hide. I knew what paths to take to be able to watch her as she went without being seen, and I got to watch everything that she did. Meeting with her friends, talking, sitting. The games they played, daring each other to go to places in the ship where they weren’t supposed to go to. Climb high, visit the Pale Women; walk into Bell territory and tell them a joke; go into the Lows’ section and steal something. The dares got worse and worse, the children pushing themselves as far as they could go. One of them was caught by a Low one time and killed. I didn’t intervene. I stood back and watched their horror, and I thought, this will be the lesson. This will be what stops them.

  Of course, it didn’t. You know what your mother was like: you told her not to do something, and she proved as stubborn and defiant as anybody’s ever been. They didn’t stop the games. Quite the opposite. I had to watch as they put more pressure on each other to perform, to outclass one another. Her friends . . . eventually they grew up, got scared, learned to be afraid. But not Riadne.

  Anyway, one day I stopped her. I grabbed her, because they were throwing knives that they had stolen from somebody, tiny little things, sharp spikes with fins on the side. They stole them, and they made a game of it: trying to hit targets below by dropping them through the grating of the floor, to watch them plummet and stick somebody who didn’t see it coming. I grabbed her and pulled her to one side, and I told her to stop.

  She refused. Of course she refused, because I was just like her parents. Couldn’t have been more similar in her eyes. I made things worse then, because I slapped her. I’m not proud of that, but there it was, and she was shocked, and she slapped me right back. So she took my criticism of her and then went further. She pushed harder.

  This would have been the first time she went down to the Pit. Everybody goes down there eventually, and I don’t mean in some hazy, mystical way; I mean, to see what it’s like down there. There are bodies, and everybody has to see it. I know about the first time you went down, even. It’s a secret, a dare. We make it into a rite of passage. But it’s a test.

  Your mother dared her friends—four of them, I remember: three girls and one boy—to go down there, as they had done before. But this time, they were going into it. Not sitting on the side, not looking away as whatever grisly mess floated toward them, actually setting foot in it. She told them that she would go first. I tried to stop her once I caught wind of what they were planning, but she wouldn’t listen to me. They went, climbed down and down, and they ended up on the bottom floor. I don’t need to tell you what it’s like down there. It’s dark, and the ship seems to shake more than anywhere else, and the smell makes you retch. There’s a kind of mist above it, from the bodies. That’s why the stories about the ghosts came about: because down there people swear that they hear voices. Your mother? She wanted to meet a ghost. That’s what she said the dare was about. Go down there, into the Pit, and meet one of the ghosts.

  I waited two floors above and watched them. I didn’t want to make her do anything that might actually result in her harming herself. And defying me? That could have been what pushed her over the edge. Her friends were nervous. I don’t want to say that they were more sensible than she was, but they knew to be cautious. Your mother, though? She went in. She sat on the edge and she put her feet in, and then she went for it. She waded out waist-deep in that mess, and she grinned as if she had achieved something truly great. She was the first person she knew who had done what she just did, and she was proud.

  She was also foolish. She didn’t see the Lows at the lip of their section, stepping in. They forage from the Pit, and they always have, trawling it for anything that they can use. Weapons and clothes end up down there, and . . . There have always been stories. They don’t eat from the arboretum, at least not that we know. Some people must trade with them, and they steal things, but there are enough of them that most of their food must come from somewhere else. The bug protein can’t be enough to sustain them; we all know that. They take what they can get; that’s always been their way. Your mother didn’t see them, but I did. I was willing to bet that they wouldn’t care what they found in there, living or dead. They don’t tend to make the distinction at the best of times. She waded out backward, facing her friends, and then they saw the Lows coming, and they pointed, and your mother turned and saw them too and tried to run, but the Lows ran faster.

  She should have been able to make it out, but she tripped and fell, and that was enough. Down and under she went, under the blood and the bodies. You’ve seen it; you know what it’s like down there. It’s never been any different. She tripped, and then she screamed. Her foot was caught on something.

  Her friends abandoned her. They didn’t wait even a moment, didn’t offer her any help. They ran, because they didn’t want the Lows to turn on them when they were done with her. She was alone—or she would have been if I hadn’t been watching her.

  I went in after her, and I dealt with them. They didn’t make it out, but she did. And I dragged her home, coughing and spluttering, and I cleaned her off before her parents saw her, and I told her what we would say to them: that she was done with going off alone and wanted to help them out more. She was going to be the ideal daughter, I told her, and she agreed. No more going off on her own. No more lying. No more secrets.

  But she lied. She lied to them and to me. She would always have her secrets, even from me.

  5

  First they destroy the Bells.

  The Bells are . . . There’s a story. There’s always a story. This one goes that the Bells came from experiments before we left Earth. They were soldiers, modified by doctors back then, bits of their brains limited to focus them. That’s how wars were
fought, with people turned into single-minded killing machines. On Australia, though, that kind of focus isn’t useful, not without anybody to tell them what they should be doing. Here they’re nothing but muscle, driven by impulses rather than anything like logic. They’re violent and they’re angry, but they’re also malleable. Get into a fight with them and you’re dead, but it’s pretty easy to talk your way out if you’re able to think on your feet. They’re harmless.

  Or they were.

  The Bells live below the collapsed part of section IV, those floors way beneath. Once we’re all scared away—by their numbers, more than anything—the Lows move down, flooding into the twenty or so floors that the Bells call home, using the darkness to their advantage. And they tear them apart. The Lows bring their torches with them, and I can see the fighting. I watch as Bells are thrown into the Pit, as the Lows cut them with weapons, as they throw firebombs to burn them up, to drive them out. Before? That wasn’t expanding. That was just the Lows flexing their muscles. This is the Lows expanding.

  I stand at the gantry railing to watch, and the woman who now lives in Bess’s berth joins me. She rolls her shoulders as she approaches, and she snorts rather than saying anything, nodding to acknowledge me.

  “Are you scared of them?” she asks. Her voice is throaty and hoarse, like they all are. She can’t lose that, I suppose.

  “Yes,” I say. Better to be honest.

  “There’s no end to this,” she says. She pauses, seeming to weigh the words before she says them. I try not to stare at the burn marks on her face. “They won’t stop, and what happens then? When they’ve taken the ship for their own? Then we’re all Lows.”