by J. P. Smythe
But then I remember that this place must have been here the entire time and Agatha has just never told me. There are questions I have to ask, and she’s got the answers.
Agatha is cooking something, and whatever it is, it smells amazing. The room they’re in is strange. There’s a counter and pots and pans heating on something without a flame and then humming machines, all with doors, and a pair of giant metal doors on one side that I see Agatha opening to a hiss of freezing cold air, which bundles out and envelops her. There are tables and chairs made from metal that are neater and cleaner than any I’ve ever seen before. I’m used to cracked cooking pots: thick black things built up with char from years and years of use, burned food on improvised flames. Jonah’s already sitting down, and Agatha tells me to sit next to him.
“This is nearly done,” she says, tasting whatever’s in the pot that she’s got boiling. “Real meat, Chan. You’ve never tasted anything like it.”
There’s meat here?
She puts a bowl down in front of me, and I nudge the broth around with the spoon she gives me. It’s rich and creamy, and there are chunks of vegetables that I recognize from the arboretum—leeks and cauliflower and potato—and something else, white and soft. I take a spoonful, and it burns my mouth, but it tastes ridiculous. Just ridiculous, sweet and spicy in equal measure, and so flavorful, and the taste seems to change as I eat it, starting as one thing, becoming another as it travels across my tongue. Another spoon, and another, one after the other.
“How did you make this?” I manage to ask, the broth dripping out of my mouth and down the front of my blue jumpsuit.
“There are books,” she says, and she passes me one. Every page has a different guide on it, a different thing that can be cooked. All the ingredients and how you prepare it. This is a stew of some sort, and it’s so different from what we have above. The recipe includes herbs and spices and preparations that we’d never dream of doing when cooking in our berths. “And there are more books. Lots of them.”
We eat the rest of the meal in silence. I need answers, yes, but for this moment I need this more. Jonah, Agatha, and I, all three of us eat the scalding hot food, and we love every single mouthful.
“Whose are the bodies?” I ask. “Who are they?”
“They are people,” Agatha says, “normal people. They died here, and we were . . .” She trails off, waving her hand in the air as if it’s all self-explanatory.
“We were what? Where are we?” I ask again. Jonah is piling the plates up on the counter, and he stops when I ask, and he rests his hands on the counter and bows his head. I look to Agatha.
“Tell her,” Jonah says.
“Okay,” she says, nodding at Jonah. “We’re below the Pit. All of this? It’s below the Pit.”
AGATHA
The worst things on Australia aren’t the Lows, Chan. The Lows are chaos and violence, but some people are even worse. You know that. Some people are liars, hiding the dangers that they pose behind stories. Like your father.
Your mother met a man. She met this man, and she was smitten, but she was young and foolish. He was awful—artless and crass—an oaf. I could tell he was a bully the first time I met him, and he didn’t like me, not one bit. He rolled his eyes when I was there and spoke quietly to your mother so that only she could hear. Your grandparents were dead by then, but I still watched over her. When they died, your mother went even more wild. She went to the farthest parts of the ship, and she picked up where she had left off a few years before: pushing herself, taking too many risks. That’s when she met Ellis.
We didn’t recognize him even though we knew pretty much everybody on the ship, but this one day he appeared, these foods in his hands that we had never tasted before. He was wearing a blue suit, head to toe—just the same as the one that you are wearing—and he carried vegetables or chocolates with him. Nothing like the chocolates that we have, that you can buy here, but something so much better. She gave me one once, and it was so rich that it hurt my teeth and my belly to eat it, but I loved it. And that was how he won her: he gave her what nobody else could. And he promised her even more. He promised her the world. He promised her warmth and food. He said—this came from her to me, and I always wondered about the truth of it, but now I know—he said that he could take her somewhere else and that he could offer her a new life. A different place from the Australia that she knew. And what alternative did she have? She thought that she had lost everything. How could she refuse?
He never stayed long, and she never knew when he would be back. He would come to her, and they would hide from everybody in the shadows, and then he’d be gone, and she didn’t know where. She was so in love, she didn’t care about his secrets. I did, though. I watched him and followed him to see where he came from. I never trusted him. I learned that he had a deal with the Lows to pass through their section unscathed. He gave them supplies, clothing, and materials, and they left him alone. He—and his friends, because there were more of them, I discovered—built the Lows up. They fed them and made them stronger. I assumed that they lived with the Lows.
In the end, your mother became pregnant. He didn’t take her with him, though. Even as she grew week by week, he told her to wait, letting her grow larger and more tired and then bringing her food, as if that was all she needed to get by. But she’d never listen to me about him. His promises were stronger than any truth she already knew somehow.
Being pregnant is hard. It makes you slow, and being slow makes you a target. So I protected her, because I couldn’t do anything else for her. I cooked for her—this is when I began working in the arboretum, so we had more fruits and vegetables than we had ever had before—and I watched over her. I found her the berth you grew up in and helped her move in there. Before that, she’d lived higher up. This new one was easier. I never told her what I paid for it, and she never asked. She was just grateful that I was there when he wasn’t.
But he was gone so much, and he didn’t have excuses. Maybe she started to see him for what he was. I knew what he was already, of course. I followed him, and he did things that, when I told her, your mother refused to believe. There were other women, Chan, and he got them pregnant as well. He treated them the same and gave them the same promises. It was like a secret that they all shared. He told them the same thing he told your mother: that when they gave birth, he would take them somewhere better. He would take them somewhere safe.
I watched one of those other girls give birth a few days before your mother was due. She was living two sections over. The man was there for the birth, and he helped her. He gave her drugs that I had never seen to help with the pain. The birth was hard, and the child was stillborn, and when he saw that, he left, left the mother lying on the floor of her berth, bleeding. I had suspected, but then I knew: the mother was nothing to him. I tried to help, but it was too late, and she died, crying for her child.
I woke your mother up, and I dragged her to that poor girl’s berth, and I told her to look at the body. It felt cruel, but it was all I had. After that, she made me promise that I would not leave her during the birth and that I would not allow him to do the same to her. I swore it. Maybe I gave her too much, but she meant everything to me. She was a daughter to me.
I told her that we had to move, just as her water broke. We went to my berth, closed it off with as many rags as we could find, and stayed there, hoping that he would never find her. But he did, and too quickly. We assumed that somebody gave her up, told him where we were. He asked her if it was time. She said not yet, and she smiled through the pain as best she could manage. I hope it comes soon, she said; I just want it out of me. Soon, he promised, and he said that he would be back. As soon as he was gone, we tried to move forward with your birth, and she bit down on rags to muffle the screams. Birth screams are different from any other that I have heard. They come from somewhere else in the body. When she was done, it was your turn; you came out, and you howled. Of course you did: imagine your first taste of air being t
he air of up there. At first you held your breath, so I slapped you, and then you gulped it in. You screamed, and so I took you and I hid you. That was what I had promised: to hide you from him.
But he’d found us once. So to protect your mother, we needed a lie. We needed a baby to hand to your father, to appease him.
I went to the bottom of the ship, to the Pit, and I waded out into that mess. There had been other children, other babies. I would need to find one, and we would have to pass it off as your mother’s. There was little other choice, and sometimes you have to do the worst thing you can imagine to stop something even more terrible from happening.
I still have nightmares about that search. What it took to find the baby’s body . . . As I was leaving the Pit, I saw him: your father. He was climbing down into the Pit from the Lows’ section. Nobody was watching him—apart from me. I sank down low and held my breath as long as I could. He looked all around but didn’t see me, and then he put something over his face—covering his eyes and mouth, a mask of some sort—and he disappeared underneath the mess. I saw him moving into the middle of the Pit, and then he was gone. He didn’t resurface, and I didn’t have the time to investigate him there and then. I had to take the body back to your mother, and I didn’t know when he would next appear.
I held that cold, dead body and handed it to your mother while you were up with the Pale Women, being kept quiet. They owed me a favor, and I called them on it. Your mother’s face, Chan . . . You cannot imagine it, because she wanted to be holding you, and she had the corpse instead. He came up that night to check, and she presented it to him: his dead heir. It was days old, blue and reeking from the Pit, but we swaddled it and hoped that he wouldn’t look too closely. And he left. He said nothing, just abandoned her.
Of course, your mother wanted you back, but I told her to wait. I told her that it wouldn’t be safe. I had to make sure that it was, that he wasn’t watching or suspicious. She didn’t know what I planned, only that I told her that everything would be all right in the end.
I followed him again that night to check what I had seen the first time around. He was angry. He went down to the bottom again, through the Lows’ section, and he put that mask onto his face, and he pulled a blue suit identical to the one he was wearing from a berth and put it on over his clothes, and he went into the Pit. After a minute, I followed him. I went out to the middle, where it was so dark I could barely see what was around me. I dove down and felt the floor for something—anything—that might indicate where he had gone. I found a lever, and I gripped it and pulled it, and something whirred: a stir of machinery that would be lost in the noise of the rest of the ship. By feeling around I discovered that the lever had opened a door to a vestibule. I climbed in, and the door shut. I was in a pod just barely big enough to stand up in, surrounded by the mess that had followed me in. I wiped my eyes and saw a vent in the wall, a fan, and it spun so quickly, and most of the mess was sucked out, pulled into it, leaving only the objects too big in the pod. Bones, rags of clothes. And I saw another lever, which I pulled without even hesitating.
Looking back on it, I was so reckless. I didn’t know what would happen when I pulled that lever or what I might find. I was so cautious in those days, even more so than now. Below me, another door slid open. There was a ladder, and I climbed down it. Suddenly I was in a place I had never seen before, a chamber with pictures on the walls and a soft rug that ran from wall to wall on the floor. I was down here. I was scared and I was still dripping from the Pit, and I was angry: with Ellis, with his promises and stories and lies, and with what he was hiding from the women he made promises to. I started forward. I had a weapon and I drew it, and I went to find your father.
He was in one of the berths, removing the suit he wore over his cleaner clothes, bundling the bloody ones he’d worn to climb through the Pit into a pile. I caught him unawares, and he noticed me in the doorway only when he turned to leave.
“Oh,” he said, and his face was terrified, as if he knew what I meant. I had a knife with me, and I dealt with him, and I left his body on the floor of that room. There was no ceremony to it. I wiped my knife clean on his clothes.
When I left the berth, there were other men in the hall waiting. Six of them, all ages: some younger than him, two of them very old. They all had weapons in their hands, and they attacked me. I was better than them, and I killed them all. They nearly overwhelmed me, but . . . They didn’t know how to fight. They were reliant on their weapons, and they hadn’t lived the life that I had. They’d never had to fight, not really.
But one of them I didn’t kill.
I had questions.
7
“What did he say?” I look at Agatha and then Jonah. He’s angry now and growing angrier, his teeth gritted, his brow creased.
“Chan—” Agatha starts to say, reaching across and taking my hand, but Jonah doesn’t let her finish her sentence.
“He was a guard. They were all guards,” he says. “This ship—Australia—is a prison.”
I know the stories, because we all do. We all know about the floods, and about the fires, and about Earth tearing itself apart. My whole life, full of stories about what was before. But we’ve never had any pictures, and we’ve never had details. The Pale Women have their story about the loading of the ark and how the animals went into it in twos: two of every creature. That’s something. Our story: We loaded ourselves two by two into our own ark, and that ark was the Australia, and we went into space to find somewhere else. Somewhere better. And some day we will. That’s our story. We’ve never questioned the story, because there has never been any reason to. Because why would anyone choose to live like this? Why, for any other reason, would anybody live like this? Being here has to be for the distant hope of a better life.
“The last guard bargained. It’s human nature to try to live, to do whatever we can. It was what he could offer me. He told me everything, and I didn’t even have to ask him. I didn’t have to press my knife to his throat: he was simply too terrified of dying. He told me about this place. Our ancestors were sent up here before, on this ship. They weren’t fleeing: they were criminals, the worst of the worst. This was a way of keeping them out of sight.”
“But Earth was destroyed,” I say. My voice is quiet. Everything is wrenched away from me, everything that I ever believed. The closest thing I can equate it to is the feeling of sitting there with my mother’s knife in my hands, her body bleeding out. Agatha shakes her head.
“It wasn’t,” she says. “Only for us. The guards were prisoners themselves, but fraudsters, not murderers. This was a way of giving them their life back. They were free to do as they chose. They lived here, as best I can tell, and they did as we did. They just had more control.” She smiles as she says that. I wonder what control it was that meant that they felt it acceptable to treat people—my mother—as they did. “They did what they wanted, and so did we. We fell apart.”
“It wasn’t always like this,” Jonah says.
“No,” Agatha agrees. “It used to be locked down. At some point, we overthrew the guards. At some point . . .” She shrugs. “At some point, we changed the story. We started lying to ourselves.”
She stands up and leads us into another room, just off the kitchen. “This is where they watched us,” she says. There’s a chair here—one solitary chair—in front of a series of black boxes, shined and glossy, stacked on top of one another. On a table at the side of the room, there are books of handwritten names and details, ledger #1, #2, #3 printed on the front of them in delicate writing. I open them and flick through entries for men and women and then hastily scrawled details about their children, about their families, and crimes, and where they’re living. These books are old. I don’t recognize any names. I look for myself, and I’m not there. I look for my mother, and she’s not there. I look for Agatha, and she’s not there.
I close the book I’m holding. I don’t understand yet.
“What do these do?” I ask her,
pointing at the screens.
“They show the rest of the ship,” she says. And she presses one of them, strokes it with her fingers, and they burst into light, each one suddenly showing a picture. It takes me a second to work out what the pictures are, because they’re grainy and not in color and they’re small, each picture split into four sections showing different things. But I know them all, what they show. Each of them has a small part of the ship on display, all the sections. Some of the pictures are a wash of gray, but most of them are showing something. This is the ship, the rest of the ship, and what I’m seeing is what’s happening up there right this second.
“How?”
“I don’t know,” Agatha says. “I’ve looked, but I can’t find out.”
“What happened after?” I ask. “When the guard told you all this?” I can’t stop looking at the pictures. They’re showing exactly what the ship is like: the chaos, the madness. From down here, clean and—suddenly, somehow—safe, it almost looks unbelievable.
“He died. He died, and I left.”