by J. P. Smythe
“You’ve been one before,” I say, the words out of my mouth before I can even think about how they might sound. “I’m sorry,” I say, backtracking.
But she smiles almost, the corners of her lips tilting slightly. “I was,” she says, “when I was much younger. My parents were.” So that was how she grew up. But she left . . . I wonder why. But I don’t ask any other questions. She seems nice, I think. I haven’t seen her before, but that’s often the way here. If you want to hide, you can. This ship is good for keeping secrets.
“The Bells will fight back,” she says, “but they’ll lose. The Lows will take as much of the ship as they want, and nobody will stop them.”
“But that’s—”
“They’ll hunt down anybody who threatens them, and when the only people left are the weak and sick and scared, they’ll take the ship. Don’t fight. Stand back and watch, and pray that you don’t get in their way.”
As we watch, the Bells are decimated. Some of them run for their lives, scattering to other parts of the ship to nurse their wounds and mourn their dead friends. The Lows have separated them. But they’re done. One night and they’re all but destroyed, and nothing anybody can do now can help them.
And suddenly, as if we blinked and it happened, fast as anything, half of section IV belongs to the Lows: every floor from the Pit up to 50. It’s over just like that, and we’ve lost more of the ship. And now we’re unbalanced; the rest of section IV starts dragging their wounded and dead and sick and young over to section V, crowding in. We lost the lower half to war; we’ll lose the upper half to abandonment. The Lows will take the entire section.
They now have more than half of Australia.
In our section, we make room and we let others in. I find a man and his daughter, scared and wandering, turned away from other places, and I take them to the berth on 85 that Agatha had suggested that I move into, and I tell them that it’s theirs now. They’re grateful.
I go looking for Agatha. I check her new home, but she’s not there. I want to stay and wait for her, but I can’t. Because there are more people who need help. If I can’t help them, I ask myself, what can I do?
The morning means nothing here in the new darkness. Some people with clocks might try to read them, but there’s no sense. It’s strange: when the lights were on all the time and we made it night, you could feel the difference. Now? For some reason, the distinction is no longer there.
I sit in my berth and I talk to myself or to my mother, I’m not really sure which. I tell the darkness in front of me about what’s happening, talking it through as if that will change anything. Maybe it will; I don’t know. Maybe hearing it out loud will make it all make sense.
I’m so tired. My body is so drained, and I feel like I’ve barely slept the last few days. What’s it like to not be here? What would it be like?
“Mother,” I say, but she’s not there, and in the darkness, it makes me wonder if she ever was, or if all those years with her looking after me were only some dream I had.
I wake up. I can’t remember ever having slept so heavily. There is a noise coming from outside my berth: breathing, the sounds of violence. The curtains are drawn closed. I don’t remember doing that, but they are. I don’t know what time it is, how long I’ve been asleep for, and I can’t see how many Lows are out there, waiting for me or about to burst in. I sit up as quietly as I can manage, and the bed stays as quiet as I need it to. This feels like routine now: shoes on, blade in my hand, ready. I don’t think about anything else.
Don’t die, my mother’s voice says again and again. It rattles around my head, and I can’t get rid of it. If only she knew that it wasn’t as easy as it once might have been.
But they’re not for me, not right away. It’s the woman next door. I’ve been woken up by the tail end of them destroying her and her family. I don’t know how I slept through it, but I did. Who she is—who she was—doesn’t mean anything. She defected, and now she’s here, and she’s a threat. They call her a traitor, and she tries to defend herself. She tells them that she was granted pardon. She begs. They don’t care. She throws around names of Lows that she knows, that she was friends with, and she shows them her scars, says that she got them in fights with the same Lows who are there now, torturing her. She begs again, saying that their leader spared her life, that she’s free now. They laugh. The leader who spared her is long dead, they tell her.
Don’t die. I peek through gaps in the fabric. There are so many of them out there, spilling out onto the gantry, lit only by the torches that they’re carrying. A pack of them: ten or so, maybe more inside the berth. They would kill me. I’d never make it through them alive. They haven’t killed her yet, and I don’t know why. They’re keeping her alive. I can see an arm on the floor, and I assume it belongs to one of her sons. The other, I have no idea. Hopefully he wasn’t with them when the Lows arrived.
Then the Lows fall silent. All I can hear is their breathing and the gasps for air coming from my neighbor. There’s the sound of feet on the gantry in the distance. Metal soles on the shoes, the solid thud that they make as she walks. It’s Rex, and she’s here.
“Kill the rest of them,” she shouts. I remember her voice: so strangely monotonous, like there’s nothing there behind it. It’s terrifying, worse than the voice of any other Low.
I have to leave. I have to get out of here. I look down at my hands, and I see that my new blade is shaking, and it takes me a second to realize that both of my hands are shaking, that my whole body is. I should be stronger. I should be trying to help my new neighbor. She might have done wrong once, but not anymore. She wanted to get away from them. I have to believe that she’s a good person and that what’s being done to her isn’t fair.
But I don’t want to help as much as I want to live. I’m scared, and right now there’s nothing that I can do.
The Low who was my neighbor screams. The more noise she makes, the better chance I’ll have to escape. I peek through the curtains, and I can’t see Rex. Maybe she’s in the next berth; maybe she’s left, gone somewhere else. I can’t tell.
When my neighbor howls again—louder this time, and it makes me feel sick to my stomach to hear, because it’s so loud and so pained—I open the curtain slightly, and I step out, ready to break into a run.
I don’t get the chance.
Rex’s hand clamps onto my throat, her nails digging in, tight and sharp. I don’t want to scream, and I don’t want to shut my eyes. She’s so close to me. We’re the same height, but she’s stronger than I am. The muscles in her arm jut and swell as she grips me tighter. I wonder in that second if she might be able to lift me clean off my feet.
I can’t breathe, and everything starts to go red. Lit by their torches, everything goes the same color as the fire, and then there’s blackness, deeper than the lack of light. I kick out. I somehow put my hands on her arm, and I try to pry her fingers open.
She digs her fingers deeper into my neck.
“Don’t cry,” she says to me. “Don’t cry.” I didn’t realize that I was crying. I somehow manage to take a breath, and I see her clearly for a second: her eyes huge and empty, her title carved into her chest still, now healed over into thick creamy welts that run over the thin skin. In her other hand, I see a knife: my mother’s. It’s the one that I used to kill her, that Rex in turn used to take her place as head of the Lows. She’s kept it, and now she lifts it up to show it to me. She knows that I recognize it. She brings it close to my throat, resting it on the top of her hand, pressing it against my skin. She says something else, but I don’t hear it. Her voice sounds like it’s coming from another place as the darkness swarms my vision again.
Everything goes black, and then—
I drop. I’m suddenly on the floor, on my back, and I’m gasping in air, coughing it straight back up. The light—as little of it as there is—comes back, and I can see feet, a struggle of fighting in front of me, and blood, pouring from somewhere, that is hitting the floor i
n front of my eyes, spattering onto my face. There’s screaming again, but this is different. It’s angry.
I’m wrenched to my feet, and I barely have time to see what’s happened before Agatha is looking into my face. She pulls me close to her.
“You have to run!” she whispers. Behind her, the Lows cluster around their leader, who clutches at her arm. Her head is rocked back, mouth open, teeth bared. Some of them, I see, have been filed down into points. She never bares them, doesn’t use them to scare. She’s just done it because she likes it.
And then I see her hand on the floor. It’s still clutching my mother’s knife.
“Where?” I ask Agatha as Rex starts looking around, as the Lows gather their weapons, as they start toward us. I see Rex snatch a lit torch from one of her followers, and she drives her hand into it, screaming as she cauterizes the wound. “There’s nowhere safe!”
“The Pale Women—” Agatha says, and she’s cut off, like she’s going to say more but can’t, and that’s all I’ve got.
I reach out and grab my blade from the floor, and then I run, like she told me to. I don’t know if Agatha is behind me. I’m more scared than I’ve ever been in my whole life.
I climb up a floor when I reach the first gantry, and again, and then I see Lows, terrorizing the fifty-third floor, so I go along to try to reach the next stairwell, between sections V and VI, past the berths here as the Lows are in them, and I see them, and I think, Don’t die, and I keep moving, because that’s the only way I know to avoid the fighting; and I climb up another floor, and another, and another, and I’m exhausted and aching and shaking, but I can’t stop, so I don’t; then I climb again, and again, five floors in one go, and the coast is clear, so I leave the stairwell and run along the gantry, and suddenly there are more Lows; it’s so hard to see anything, because I’m relying on my gut instincts, on the occasional torch that’s been left somewhere, on the reflections of fire in the metal walls that make up the berths. But I know that the Lows have light, they have fire, so that’s what I stay away from, I decide, and then, on the sixty-sixth or sixty-seventh or maybe even the seventieth floor—I can’t tell because I’ve been moving and not worrying where I am, just trying to stay alive—there’s so many of them that I have to find another way, so I look for one, but I can’t get past them, and they look down at me, and they see me, not knowing who I am but knowing that I’m running, and maybe also catching the glint of my blade. So they start to come for me, and I turn and I run again, back in the direction I came from. But I can’t go back down, because there’s nothing for me there but Rex, and I hear her, screaming my name, somehow still on her feet, somehow coming for me, which means that she’s done with Agatha, however that particular fight ended. So there’s only one path left, and that’s across the ladder bridge that they used to get to this section, over into section I, so I rush across it, into Low territory, right into where they have come from, where I have never ever been before.
There’s a torch lying on an abandoned bunk, and matches. It’s dangerous: the rest of this side of the ship is empty, and lighting it will make me a beacon. But I have to. I’ve got no idea what I’ll find here. At least it’s empty. Or it looks like it’s empty. I hold my breath and I strike the match, hold it to the fabric that is knotted around one end. The torch takes.
I’ve spent time staring at the Low sections before. You can see them from anywhere on the ship but not closely enough to pick out details. You don’t know what it’s like until you’re in it, until it’s lit up close by the yellow brightness of a flame. There are bones on the gantries and ripped rags of fabric on the walls, all manner of colors and sizes. Pieces—remnants—of the people they’ve killed. They have weapons here: blunt and broken but probably usable. And there’s so much blood. It stains the metal of the floor, and it stains the walls and the ripped mattresses inside the berths that they sleep on.
It’s not until I’ve made it up a few more floors in their half of the ship that I look back at where I came from. I pause, breathe for a second. Strange to think that it’s quieter here, that I’m safer where I should be more terrified. But this part of the ship is empty. They’re all in the free sections, waging their war.
I don’t know how they became so lost, so willing to act like this. Something, once upon a time, triggered this. I have to believe that it’s got a reason, or else . . . Or else it’s just in them. It’s in them, and maybe it could be in the rest of us.
Not far to go until the Pale Women. I can’t rest now.
So I climb.
There’s a noise ten floors from the top of the ship. I mean, of course there are noises. There’s nothing but noise. Up here, the engine rumble seems somehow louder, and still, the echoes from the other half of the ship seem to drown that out, and these sections, which seem abandoned, creak and moan as I travel through them, as I run along the rusting metal of their gantries. But there haven’t been any Lows for a few floors, not until right this second.
He’s above me: just a large, dark shape in the darkness. He doesn’t have a torch, and the light of mine will only alert him that I’m here. He stands right near the edge of the stairwell, swaying, like there’s something wrong with him: I can see the shape of his body rocking back and forth. Don’t die, my mother says.
“All right,” I say under my breath, “I get it.” I snuff the torch out and start to climb as quietly as I can. One Low, that’s all, and he’s in my way. I can do this. I’m level with the gantry, close enough that I can touch him. I can take his ankle and pull him, hopefully over the edge. At the very least he’ll end up facedown, giving me an advantage. It’s only as I reach out that I see the bodies lit by some flame far away. My eyes have adjusted to the darkness now that I don’t have the torch, and I can see their shapes: their heads tilted toward me, their eyes dead and staring. My fingers touch the Low’s ankle, and his body tenses. He spins and looks down at me, and there’s a blade—no, two blades—slashing out at my hand, and I flinch away. I hang on, barely, as the Low’s body flies past me, off into the Pit. Then I see another face, peering down at me: it’s the Pale Women’s envoy.
He kneels at the edge and reaches down, and he clamps his fingers around my wrist. I see his knuckles go white as he holds me, as he starts to heave me back up to the floor.
“What are you doing here?” I ask him. He looks down at the bodies around him: all Lows, all with their throats cut. There’s a lot of blood, and I’m grateful I don’t have more light to see by. I wouldn’t want to be able to see how much.
The envoy doesn’t answer. He’s cut, I see, across the side of his face, a tear that’s swollen and thick with redness, glistening in the dim light. I reach out to touch it, and he flinches. “Don’t,” I say. “This needs cleaning.” He might be dangerous, I think, but he killed them. What is it that they say? The enemy of my enemy is my friend? And he’s killed Lows.
“It hurts,” he says. I’m not surprised, but I don’t say that. He puts a hand to it and brings it away and looks at his palm, which is covered in blood. The wound is pretty bad; anybody could tell that.
“You need help,” I say. “I can clean it for you.” He nods and hands me his satchel, the rags and ointments he was using to help the sickly on the eighty-sixth floor, and he pushes his hood back to his shoulders. His collar is still on, the spikes nudging against the scars on his skin. I take out a strip of fabric and soak it with the ointment, and I press it up to his face, washing off the blood that’s there. Some is from the cut, but some definitely isn’t.
“Hold still,” I say, and he does. I press the cloth to his skin, and the water soaks through it. It runs down his cheek, taking the blood with it. I press again, harder, and then drag the cloth along the cut itself, trying to make sure it’s clean, that there isn’t a shard of anything stuck in it. He flinches.
“What’s your name?” I ask.
“My name?” He sucks in air, a hiss of pain through his teeth. “Jonah,” he says.
“Jonah,�
�� I repeat, trying it out. “That’s from your Testaments.”
“It’s an important name,” he says, as if that explains everything, and in some ways it does. Makes sense they’d use those books for naming. They use them for everything else.
“Why were you here?” I ask him.
“This is what I do,” he says. He opens his hands at his side—the knives he had, they’re missing now, secreted somewhere in his cloak—and he indicates the bodies. “They were a threat, and they . . .” Again he stumbles over the words, and he breathes in deeply. This time I’m not hurting him. This time it’s something else. “They were judged, and I carried out their judgment.”
“Judged,” I say, and he nods. He’s carrying himself differently than he did before: Where his head is usually bowed, now he’s tall, his shoulders back and tense. He takes my hand and pulls it away from his face.
“I have to go,” he says.
“I was trying to get up to find you,” I say. I correct myself. “To find the Women. I’m being chased.”
“You won’t be welcome,” he tells me. “You shunned them when they gave you the books, when they made their offer for you to join them. Sister says—”
“Then I take it back. I take back what I said, and I’ll listen to their stories.”
“It’s not as easy as that.” He pulls his hood back up. “We’re nearing ascension, Sister says. It’s too late for you.”
“They’ll kill me.” And he looks sad; I swear that he looks sad. He knows I don’t deserve whatever’s coming. “Their leader’s been hurt, and she’ll want me. She won’t stop.”
“Come and talk to Sister,” he says then, and he moves without pause, running down to the stairwell and leaping up from the edge to clutch the lip of the floor above. He doesn’t look back. I climb up after him, and we go up there together.
He doesn’t talk, which really annoys me, even more than when Agatha is silent. I try; I ask him about what he was doing down there, why those Lows were dead at his feet, why he wears the collar. Everything is met with grunts or, if I’m lucky, the justification that “it’s in the book.” I’ve read the book, and it doesn’t say anything about collars or knives. It’s nothing but old language and mystery and inconsistent characters.