Way Down Dark

by J. P. Smythe

  The roof of the pod comes out in the middle of the Pit, and as soon as it’s open, the mulch starts to pour in over my face and shoulders. Even with the mask on, I close my eyes and hold my breath, because I’m so worried about what it will be like if the breathing apparatus fails—and because I don’t much like the idea of seeing exactly what’s underneath the surface of this, what’s sunk to the bottom of the Pit after so many years—decades or centuries, I don’t know—of bodies. It’s hard to push against it because it’s so much thicker than the water of the arboretum’s river. The Pit itself is like a bowl, deeper in the middle than at the sides, and so the wading is even harder. I am afraid to take a breath and don’t until my lungs are screaming, but the device works perfectly. That helps me calm down, and I push through the Pit until I can stand. I keep my eyes shut. I don’t want to see this.

  When I reach the side, I heave myself up. I don’t know what section this is, and that worries me, but I’m ready for whatever happens. It’s quiet for a second, and then my ears clear and the rush of the rest of Australia comes flooding back to me: the noise of it all, and the smell, and the darkness. It takes a second for my eyes to adjust, and then I hear a whizz, a noise in my face, and suddenly I can see. The mask shows me what’s around me. It looks just like the pictures in the down-below: grainy and slightly vague, tinged with greenish gray. But I can see.

  I’m in section IV, the numbers marked in pale, faded, worn-away print on the wall. I’m relieved that I didn’t wind up on the Lows’ side of the ship. I get up, walk to the nearest stairwell, and start to climb. There’s a long way to go, and I have no idea how much time I’ve got before the Lows find the girl.

  Getting to her means hiding, skulking, creeping my way through the chaos. I am focused, but I can’t ignore what I see. I can help people. I can fight. And when I’ve fought, maybe there’s something I can do to stop the Lows from ever getting to the people who I’ve helped again. There’s a whole part of the ship that they don’t know about.

  On the thirtieth floor, the market floor, I meet my first bunch of Lows. There are crates and boxes and fragments of fabric hanging from rafters. They are moving in, bringing their possessions over from their territory to here. I don’t know what happened to the free people who used to live here.

  The Lows are jittery. I get close enough to hear them wheezing, talking.

  “Rex wants this done,” one says to the other. His voice trembles; he’s terrified. They never call her by whatever her name was before: now she is just Rex, some ancient king come to wreak havoc and destroy everything we have. Rex wrecks, like some bad joke.

  I get closer and see that the berth they’re moving into isn’t empty. There’s a family inside; I recognize the father from the arboretum. He’s crying, begging for his life. Not his family’s life, just his own. The children are crying as well, but his wife isn’t; she holds firm, because she has to. He is gutless. Selfish. She can see that now. He doesn’t resist when the Lows step toward them.

  “Spare me,” he begs, asking only for his life. It doesn’t matter what happens to the rest of them. His wife doesn’t plead. She screams at the Lows, defending her children, and she lashes out, but they sidestep her. One of the Lows kills the father, gouging out his throat with some hacked-up half-broken knife. The man’s blood washes out of his body. The children stare, noiseless and terrified. I check my weapons in my hands, make sure that my grip is good. As I’m moving in to do something, they kill the mother. I thought that they would leave her until last, but I was wrong. I can’t—and don’t—hesitate.

  The first Low goes down with the striker to the back of his neck. It fizzes, and he falls, his eyes rolling back in his head. The other takes a second to register what’s happened. He starts to say something to me, but I don’t wait to hear it. I kick the first to one side and drive the striker into the face of the second, letting the blue electricity roar into his skull. He screams, and the children scream. The Low drops to his knees, smoke pouring from the socket where his eye used to be. He’s breathing, but only just. Whatever happens, he’s not a problem anymore. He’s not dangerous.

  I kneel by the two boys and snap my fingers. “Listen to me,” I say. “Do you have any other relatives? Is there anybody else you can go to?” They don’t reply. They don’t even seem to register what I’m saying. “Okay,” I say, “I have to take you somewhere else. You need to come with me, and I’ll make you safe, okay? We have to go now, and you need to be quiet.” I guess at their ages: under five, certainly. The younger one is sucking his thumb now, and I worry that he has blood on it from what I did. His older brother has no shoes on. I can save these kids as well.

  This is a delay to finding the little girl: taking these two down to the bottom. Agatha will be furious that the first people I’ve saved aren’t even the ones I came up here for. I look down the gantry, seeing everything in my shades of green and black: more Lows heading here to find out what the commotion is. They don’t know what’s happened yet, but they will, and they’ll be angry.

  “Come with me,” I say, and I take their hands, and I start toward the stairwell. I have to be quick.

  “I’ll take them,” Jonah says. I whirl around in surprise. He’s on the floor below, looking up through the grated flooring, dressed in one of the blue suits, a mask on his face. His hood is down over his face, coated in a slick layer of blood from the Pit. But through my own mask, it looks almost pure white, like fire. “Pass them down,” he says. I nod and look at the boys’ faces again. I hold a finger to my lips to tell them to be quiet. They mimic me. This is a gesture that they recognize. Jonah takes them as I lift them down, setting them gently on the floor by his side. Then, holding their hands, he turns to go. “Be safe,” he whispers up at me so quietly that I barely hear it, and then he’s gone, stepping off the edge, taking the children with him. I pause for breath, but only for a second.

  When I finally reach the floor where I once found her, where I saw her on the videos, there is no sign of the little girl. The Lows have been through here, and they’ve done what they do. It’s empty, almost terrifyingly quiet. When I softly ask if there’s anybody here, my voice echoes around in whispers. It makes me think of the ship’s ghosts, the stories people tell to scare children. Here it feels as though they’re everywhere, yet I know they’ve never been real. My mother’s ghost, the ghosts in the Pit—which I now realize must have been based on the truth of the guards—the ghost of my father and whoever else lived there with him. I never believed in them.

  This emptiness is the closest I’ve come to believing in them myself.

  Then I see the little girl’s rag-and-bone doll lying on the floor, or at least its torso. The head is missing and one of the legs. I tell myself to move on, that I cannot become fixated on finding her. She’s gone, and I have to abandon any hope of rescuing her. I can’t dwell on this. The longer I stay out here, the more dangerous it is for me.

  As I turn to go back to the stairwell, I notice a shape tucked in a corner behind a ripped-up mattress. It’s her, as close to the wall as she can manage. I kneel down and pull off my mask so that she can see my face. No sense in terrifying her any more than she already is.

  “Don’t panic,” I say. “I’m here to help you.” She looks toward me, and through my mask I can see her face, terror giving way to relief.

  “It’s you,” she says. I push the hood back from my face and hand her the remnants of her doll. She clutches it to her chest with both hands as tightly as I’ve ever seen anybody grip anything.

  “Where are your parents now?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. They’re long dead, most likely. Probably they’ve been dead for a while.

  “Okay. I want to take you someplace safe. Would you like that?”

  Her lip twitches. “Not here?”

  “Somewhere else. You won’t have to hide, okay?” She nods, and then she starts crying. Real, huge, racking sobs. She crawls toward me, bawling her eyes out, and she puts her arms
around me. I shush her, holding her to me. She buries her face in my chest, and I beg her to be quiet because her tears will bring the Lows if she’s not careful. “I don’t know your name yet, anyway,” I say, trying to distract her from the tears. “I’m Chan. Can you spell? See-aitch-eh-enn.” I trace the letters out in the air. “What’s yours?”

  “Mae,” she says, her voice so quiet that I can barely hear, but it works, and the tears start to dry up and she sniffs.

  “Mae. That’s a beautiful name,” I say. I take her hands and squeeze them. “It’ll be okay,” I tell her.

  She doesn’t say a word after that. She clings to me, wrapping her arms around my neck, clutching me so tightly that I couldn’t shake her if I tried. The climb down is hard, and it’s tough to hide with her attached to me, but she’s good: quiet when she needs to be, not panicking when I scratch my hand on the metal of a stairwell and we slip, nearly falling. By the time we reach the bottom I’ve almost forgotten that I’m carrying her. I’ve gotten used to her weight.

  I stop and put her down, and I kneel in front of her.

  “When I tell you to, you have to shut your eyes, okay?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I said so.” Because, I think, there are some things you shouldn’t have to see. And maybe now she can go her whole life without ever seeing them. “And you have to hold your breath. You know how to do that? You breathe in—” I do it, and then I don’t let it out, pulling an exaggerated face, then finally puffing out, and we both laugh. “You breathe in, and you hold it. Don’t breathe until I tell you. Okay?”

  “Okay,” she says, still smiling.

  “So you’re ready?” She nods. I pick her up, and I push her head into my shoulder, her eyes into the cloth of my outfit, and I hold her head there with one hand and climb down with the other.

  And then we’re in the Pit, and I’m wading, and the mess is up around my waist, then my shoulders, and she wriggles but I hold her tight, and I tell her to take that one big deep breath, and she does, and we’re suddenly under. With my free hand I feel for the lever, and then we’re in the hatch, in the space between the Pit and safety, and then we’re on the ladder and down below.

  “You can open your eyes now,” I say to her, and she does.

  8

  Agatha talks quietly to me as we cook. In the other room, there’s noise: Jonah sitting and talking with the children, then the quick transition into some game. I can’t remember ever having heard anything like this: the voices of children—and happy voices, at that—without the backdrop of everything else.

  “How does it feel?” Agatha asks, pulling pots from the stove.

  “Like we can do more,” I reply. She sighs. I know what she’s thinking and that she’s right: We can’t help everybody. It’s impossible. And if we tried, what would we do? Bring them down here? There’s not enough room. We would lose this place as it is now; it would be swallowed by the rest of the ship. There’s only so much food and only so many beds.

  But then dinner is ready, and Agatha takes it to the table, and I forget about the rest of the ship for the moment. The children swarm over to us. It’s strings of something in a sauce. According to the cooking book, this is spaghetti with tomato sauce. We eat it with our hands, spooning it up in our palms and sucking it down, sauce everywhere. It looks like a massacre. The kids don’t stop even when they should be full. They’re overeating, and they’ll all have bellyaches tonight, but that’s probably okay. They’re all so skinny, and I imagine them as they might be in the future, always full and content. When no one can eat any more, the three of them slope off, hardly able to move from the feeding. Mae is the most hesitant; she doesn’t want to be away from me, it seems. It’ll take a lot to teach her that she’s safe now.

  Agatha, Jonah, and I do the dishes. We stand in a line at the sink, and Agatha empties the remnants into a trash chute, Jonah dunks them into hot water, and I wipe them dry. It feels nice, comfortable. I’m content for a second with all of this.

  “I have to know if the Pale Women survived,” Jonah says out of nowhere. “If they’re alive, then I would like to save them. To bring them here.” He breaks the work line, leaving his current dish soaking in the water, his hands dunked in up to the wrists. “They were good to me, and I—”

  “It’s okay,” I say. Agatha waits for me to tell him that we can’t go looking for them, but I won’t, so I just leave his last words hanging in the air, and I reach over and pull the dish out of the sink for him, and I dry it and leave it on the side.

  While everybody else sleeps, I make myself a suit.

  I’ve got materials taken from three different uniforms, along with tools and weapons. I tear apart the different materials, and I size them against my body. The suit I’ve been wearing barely fits, and it’s clumsy. It’ll snag, or I could trip over the too-long trouser legs. I cut the fabric apart and sew the new parts together.

  There’s a knock on my door. “Come in,” I say, and it pushes open. It’s Agatha. I don’t know why, but I sort of expected Jonah. I maybe hoped for Jonah. She looks down at what I’m doing, at me sitting cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by all this stuff.

  “You look like you could use my help,” she says. She’s better with a needle than I am, and she sits next to me and goes over every seam that I’ve already sewn, and she makes them all stronger. I watch her, and sometimes I notice that her fingers are shaking and she breathes and tries to steady them before carrying on again. She doesn’t want me to see that, and she pauses, stops sewing when she notices me looking, then resumes when I go back to my own work.

  “Your hands,” I say the third time I notice it, and she tries to hide it from me. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m not what I was,” she says. I don’t know if she’s ill or if it’s just tiredness. But after that she stops hiding it.

  When we’re done, I stand up and she helps me into the suit, and we check the measurements and that I can still move in it. I need to be able to run and climb and duck without having it fall apart on me. When we’re satisfied, I take the outfit off and we start decorating. And this part? It’s pretty fun. It feels like something from before, when Agatha and Mother and I would sit together and make our clothes beautiful with beads and whatever else we had that could brighten up the fabrics. Now Agatha also adds straps, sheaths for my blade and for the striker, and she adds pockets, getting me to hold the fabric as tight as I can while she sews them. They’re big enough for me to carry anything I might need. Then she adds protection (armor, she calls it): thick plates of what feels like metal under taut, coarse material. We cut it apart and attach the pieces to the chest and to the thighs. We tweak the hood, adding a drawstring so that it’s held down over my face rather than being in any danger of falling off.

  When it’s all done, I stand in the mirror and look at myself as I pull the outfit on again. I look ready, and I’m pleased by that. I’m not sure for what yet; I don’t know how far I’m going to go down this path. I can save more people: innocent people. Maybe I should focus on the children. There are a lot of them, many orphaned and lost. They’ll be taken by the Lows, and if they are, their futures are all but decided for them. But I can save them.

  I pull the hood down over the stubble of my hair. The hood is peaked at the front to set it rigid over my forehead. I can barely see my face in the mirror now: only the bottom of my chin, my lips. When I speak, trying out words, I can hardly make out my mouth moving. Agatha stands back and watches me as I breathe in and out. The outfit’s dark, which will help me stay hidden, but if somebody should see me—one of the Lows, even Rex—I want them to stay away from me.

  I look like I should be feared.

  I look like something out of the stories we tell on this ship: the Nightman, the ghosts. The stories get told because we fear them. And the Lows are going to fear me.

  I’m lying on the bed in my room, the suit hanging up in front of me, and I’m watching it, staring at its shape. It looks almost full even
when there’s nobody inside it. I hear my door creak just as I shut my eyes, and my hand darts to the pillow to grab my blade, reflex kicking in before I can even think.

  “Chan?” Mae asks.

  “Hey,” I say. I relax. “Hey, come here.” She pads across the carpet and clambers onto the bed and immediately lies down next to me, draping her arms around my neck. I’m so tired and achy that it hurts, but I don’t let on.

  “I can’t sleep,” she says. I checked on her earlier and she was flat out. Still, she’s woken up now, and I know all too well what sorts of dreams she might have been having. “Can I sleep here?”

  “Of course you can,” I say, and I lie there with her, stroking her hair. It takes only a few minutes before I feel her body settle as she goes under, and I shut my own eyes and breathe.

  Just as I’m drifting off, I think that I can hear footsteps outside my berth, outside my door, but they fade, just like everything else does.

  Agatha wakes me, gently shaking me. I don’t know how long I’ve been asleep, but Mae is gone and I’m alone. I hear Agatha’s knees creak as she kneels down.

  “Jonah’s gone,” she says. “When I woke up, I couldn’t find him. I’ve checked the screens, and he’s out there. He’s looking for the Women.” I sit up, rubbing my face. I’m groggy, and my body feels like it’s weighed down by something that I can’t see, my muscles rebelling against my trying to make them move. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve slept like that. I’m not sure that I ever have before.

  “Where have you seen him?” I ask.

  “All over, searching, first on the top floors, then working his way down.” She hands me something, a cup of something hot. “This is called coffee,” she says, “and it will help.” I take a sip, and it’s scalding and foul and bitter, but I persist. She knows best about these things. “He won’t find them, Chan. They’re dead, or they’re hiding. He’ll get himself caught.”