Way Down Dark

by J. P. Smythe

  “I know,” I say, and I stand up and stumble to the cupboard, where I get the outfit down and lay it on the bed. I’m slow to pull it on, but I can’t tell if that’s tiredness or something else. Fear. I don’t want to have to go up there again, not when I’m not completely ready. I’d been planning to hide, to slip around in the shadows, fight only if I was discovered and attacked. But Jonah isn’t cowering in a corner; he won’t be hiding. He’ll be looking for the most dangerous parts of the ship that he can find, hoping that they’ll lead him to the women who brought him up.

  I walk through with Agatha to the control room, past the kids in the kitchen. They’re eating again—they always seem to be eating—and they wave at me as I walk past. They’re happy. They’re not worried about the worst case of what could happen. Maybe I shouldn’t be either.

  “Are you going to be all right looking after them?” I ask Agatha, and she nods.

  “You think I haven’t done it before?” She never had children of her own. I’m so quick to forget how present she was during my own childhood and all the things she did for me. And my mother.

  I bring up the screens, the views of Australia, and I search for Jonah. I can’t see him anywhere, but I do see Rex. She’s sitting in a berth, nursing her destroyed arm, cradling it. It’s wrapped up, and she’s rubbing at the edges of what must be the wound. I’ve heard that it itches like crazy when you lose a part of yourself, when that flesh starts to heal. The end of her arm is covered in a rag, and I can’t see what it looks like, but I’m guessing it’s not pretty. She’ll blame me for what she’s lost, I’m sure, as soon as she knows that I’m still alive.

  “You should go,” Agatha says.

  “I thought you’d be trying to stop me.”

  “Would you listen to me?”

  “No,” I say.

  “Well, then. I’ll watch you. If you need help, signal to me. Like this,” and she makes a gesture, her fingers curled into an okay circle. “Got it?”

  “Got it,” I say, but we both know that I’m not going to ask her to come and save me, to leave the kids. I’m going to find Jonah by myself. She doesn’t come with me as I walk to the hatch, or as I attach my mask, or as I go back up into the Pit.

  On the fiftieth floor, where I once lived, I attack before they can. I hang over the edge of the railing, and I use the striker to take out two Lows who were in the middle of torturing a man I know. As much as possible, I want to save Jonah without there being any more deaths, not even of Lows. Killing makes me no better than the Lows. This striker weapon is far neater than a knife—less blood, less mess, less noise—and it’s not inevitably fatal. The man they were hurting, one-legged and vulnerable, thanks me, his face full of tears. I ask him if he’s seen Jonah. I describe his suit, and when that gets no reaction I focus on the details: his red hair, his green-gray eyes, his pale skin. The man doesn’t know. He’s seen a lot of people, and he starts to tell me a story about how I should be careful, that there are rumors the Nightman is up to his old tricks. I don’t have time for this. I leave him.

  I work quickly. I rush and strike a group of Lows three floors up, right in my path for the easiest route to the top floors of the ship. To them I’m a blur, that’s all. Again, I try to leave them alive: injured enough that they can’t heal within the next few days but still breathing. I just don’t want them coming after me if I can help it.

  I fight Lows when I meet them, and as I’m catching my breath between encounters, I imagine how we might decorate the new berths, making them more personal, putting up pictures that the children have painted. I save a family on the sixty-second floor. The Lows are stringing them up in front of their berth—probably as some sort of warning—and I cut the back of one Low’s tendons and shock the other and then slice through the rope that’s tying the family together.

  As I run, I imagine the cooking that we will do down below, the food that we will prepare. I imagine a school, teaching the children to read books, to write and learn all the stories, the real ones as well as the lies. And we will do that all by ourselves, telling the little ones what we have discovered. Imparting knowledge so that no one will ever forget where we came from.

  On the sixty-fifth floor, I save a little boy who is alone, covered in blood. I do not know what happened to his parents, but there are so many Lows around him, I have to act. They are discussing what to do with him like it’s a game. They are dividing up the pain that they’ll cause him between them. I don’t just save him: I ruin them. I kick one to the floor, jamming the stick into his mouth, smashing his teeth and frying his tongue until he howls in agony; I throw the other to the floor, my knife cutting his thigh deep, his blood a fountain.

  I take the boy with me just as I carried Mae, and I don’t even think about the burden, because if I didn’t do this, he would die. Simple as that. On 70, I save a family, but I don’t fight the Lows who are advancing toward them. There are far too many of them. It would be suicide. I pull the family by their hands and tell them to stay quiet. I lead them into the darkness, away from the Lows. As we run, the woman slips and falls, trapping her foot in a hole I didn’t see in the grating, and she screams. Her ankle is broken, and I can see the bone jutting through her torn skin. I don’t have time to save her, because her screams tell the Lows where we are. I put my hand over the mouth of one of the boys to stop him from calling out his mother’s name, and the man does the same thing to the other one, and we carry them into the darkness, leaving her. We wait, and we hear what happens: the sickening sounds of death. And then I signal to Agatha, into the nothingness, hoping that she’s watching, knowing that she’ll be angry with me—three more little mouths to feed and the first adult let in—and I send the motherless children down to the bottom of the ship in the care of their father, along with the boy I saved before.

  I keep going; I keep trying.

  On the eighty-eighth floor, I look for Jonah. I remember meeting him for the briefest of moments, working here with him, trying to help the people who can’t help themselves.

  But he’s not on this floor. Nobody is. All the people from before, the sick and injured, they’re gone. The berths are burned out, destroyed, and even in the green light of my goggles it doesn’t look any less terrible. The people who lived here won’t have been able to protect themselves, I know that much. I wonder what sort of pleasure the Lows took from killing the woman I put ointment on before. She was in so much pain, every single movement she took hurt her more than anything I can even imagine.

  I wonder if they cared. I wonder if they even relished it.

  I go back to the stairwell, and I climb up. The last time I was here, I nearly died. Last time, I could copy what Jonah did as we climbed. If I didn’t have my mask, I’m not sure that I’d be able to do this. But now I can see the parts I should cling to, even in the darkness. I look down, and there’s a clear drop for six or seven floors. I fell there once and survived it. Not sure the same thing would happen again. That’s enough to focus me, and I take it slowly: hand by hand, foot by foot. It feels darker suddenly. Colder, maybe. Doesn’t hot air rise? Isn’t that what’s meant to happen? That’s not how it is, though. Even with the lights gone everywhere else in the ship, somehow I think that the darkness here is darker. Like it has settled in. It’s made the top of Australia its home.

  I don’t announce myself. I don’t know what’s waiting up here for me. The Lows: they could be here still. Maybe they’re catching up on their reading, staring at the writing on the walls. That makes me laugh, and I have to hold myself back, and that makes it worse. Don’t laugh, don’t laugh, but I can’t help it, picturing them all lined up, reading the words on the walls as if they’re in class. I snicker, and that turns into a full laugh, a single “Ha!” that echoes all around me. Get it together, Chan. Get. It. Together.

  He’s not here. There’s nothing here. The ninetieth floor of the ship is the only part where you can see all the way along, with no berths to interrupt your line of sight. Nothing but gantr
y. There’s nobody up here, not a single soul, and no possessions, no blankets, no beds. There’s blood on the floor in places—remnants of the fight from before—and scraps of torn fabric, a few twisted, bent pieces of weapons. But no sign of Jonah or the woman he called Sister.

  I sit down. I’m tired, and I have to. I stare at the walls, at the writing that’s there—even in the darkness I can see it in green on the black walls. Some parts of it are clearer than others; some of the scratches are deeper. I read it: it tells the same story as the Testaments, about the making of man and animals and Earth (the same Earth that, at the end of the story, would be torn apart). “The Father made a garden in the East,” I read.

  A garden. The arboretum.

  It’s not meant to be dark in here. Trees, fruit, vegetables, crops; they thrive in the light of the artificial sun that hangs above all of us, and now that that’s off, this place feels wrong. All the trees seem to loom over me, the same green as everything else through my goggles. There’s a fire burning on one side of this place; some of the crops have been set alight, their thin stalks now fizzing into ash. And then I see Jonah in the distance, by the apple trees. Somehow, having read their book, I should have known this is where he would be. He’s not alone. I can see another shape with him, its colors less distinct, less bright through the mask’s view: a body, cradled in his arms.

  “Jonah. It’s me,” I say as I get close and see him tensing at the sound. “I came to find you.”

  “She’s dying,” he says. She’s propped up against the tree, her head lolling. It’s the Sister. It’s a miracle she’s still alive. “I don’t know what to do for her.” He’s got his ointment in one hand, and he’s daubing it onto her skin. I take my mask off to see as best I can. She’s lit in the flames of the burning crops, and I can see how bloody her gown is, soaked through with darkness. Her neck is cut, but not badly enough to just end her. This is a slow death. “Rex did this,” he says. “She did this, and she . . . It isn’t right.”

  “I know,” I reply. I know that my words are meaningless. That doesn’t mean that they won’t be what he needs to hear, what I need to say.

  “All of this. Sister wanted to help people. She wanted peace.”

  “And she found it.” The stories about who they were faded over time: the Pale Women of old were a story more than a reality. We don’t know if the stories were ever true. Probably doesn’t matter, not anymore.

  “Maybe she was wrong. Maybe death is . . . Maybe that’s better. What Rex deserves.”

  “Maybe.” I kneel next to him. “You have to let her go,” I say. I brush the hair from the Sister’s eyes. Brown eyes, almost the exact same color as her skin. She doesn’t focus her eyes on me or on anything else. She’s all but gone already.

  “I can still try to help her.”

  “No. I don’t think you can,” I say. I put my hand on his back and then around him, and I pull him close to me. He stops touching her, stops rubbing the ointment on her wounds. It won’t help, anyway, that ointment. It’s just another lie, I think. She’s in terrible pain, and it’s only going to get worse.

  We’re sitting, quiet, in the dark, when I hear the voice: Rex’s voice, preceded by the hissed throats of the Lows she brings with her.

  “Keep quiet,” I tell Jonah even though he hasn’t said a word, and I move us behind the tree, behind the Sister’s body. I put the mask back on and watch them coming in from the opposite side of the arboretum, behind the burning crops. They won’t see us, I know. It’s too dark, and we’re hidden by the bright light of the fire that lies between us and them. That means I’ve got the upper hand. Now it’s just a matter of what I do with it. “Wait here,” I tell Jonah, and I creep forward, close enough that I can hear what they’re saying.

  “We’re nearly finished,” Rex says. Her voice is more broken than I remember, her speech slowed down, slurred. She rubs at the stump of her hand, itching and pulling at it, wincing as she does so. I really hope that it’s infected. I hope that it turns and rots and that the fever sets in.

  “The ship is nearly ours,” she says. “The rest of them can try to fight back, but we’ll kill them. This arboretum,” she says, stumbling over the word, “is already ours now. They’ll have no access to food. Let them hide or wait. They’ll have nothing. They’ll starve or join us.”

  She’s chaos, pure and simple. I watch as she takes an unlit torch and dips it into the dying flames at her feet. “This is how we take our freedom,” she says, as if they’ve been oppressed, as if they haven’t been terrifying the rest of us for as long as anybody can remember. The flame takes, and she carries it to the trees. She stands under one and holds it to the trunk, and the bark starts to crackle. Her Lows throw things high into the trees: small vials that explode, the liquid that’s inside them running down, catching fire as it goes. The tree is lost in seconds, the flames up to the very top of the branches. The colors seen through my mask are almost too vibrant, too bright. I pull it off. I’ve climbed that tree. I’ve spent hours in that tree. When I was younger, I would climb it and hide and read the fragments of whatever books my mother had managed to salvage for me. I watch now as the branches snap and fall, as the Lows light the next tree and the next. They’ll burn it all down. The trees give us oxygen and food and I’m sure work harder than the almost-broken air generators that have kept us alive for so long. The Lows are going to damn everybody. They’re going to kill us all, even themselves. I have to stop them, I know, but I don’t know how.

  Then the water starts. From above us—right in the roof of the ship—it comes, spitting, gently at first, and then it flows faster and faster, water gushing from all around, spraying everywhere, hitting everything. It’s just like the shower down below but on a much greater scale. It’s rain. I’ve never seen such a thing before. I have always known that the plants irrigate from below, from the river. This must be for emergencies, and it’s amazing: water flows in great clattering sheets. The Lows are terrified, shouting, panicking, watching their flames sputter and die, watching their light disappear.

  This is my chance. Mask down, I run. Blade in one hand, striker in the other, I plow into them. They don’t even hear me coming, because the rain is so loud, and we’re soaked, pounded by it, drenched. I slam through them one by one, and they scream and howl, and I get two of them down before the others even realize it’s not just the water that they’re screaming about. A third one hits me, a lucky accident, but I can see him and he can’t see me; I duck, and I get behind him, and I discover what happens when you use a striker on somebody who’s wet: The effect is amplified.

  Through the grainy vision of my mask, everybody looks the same. I suddenly worry about Jonah, but then I see him waving his arms around, hear him shouting my name so that I know where he is. He’s helping. He’s in the fray. There are ten of them, I think, maybe more, and only two of us. But I don’t care about any of them apart from Rex. I search for her, trying to get a glimpse of her half-shaven head, her scars. I worry that she’s gone, that I’ve lost my chance.

  And then I spot her. There’s only one person here missing a hand. That makes her easier to identify: a space in my vision where there’s usually something. She sees me across the melee, strides to me, pushing other Lows out of the way, unstoppable. My legs shake. I plant them in the soil, which is turning to wet mud, and try to brace them. I can’t shake. I can’t balk, not now. She’s got one good arm, but I’ve got two. That surely gives me an advantage.

  I don’t know what I’m expecting, but when she’s close enough, she leaps. She takes off, and she comes at me, the stump at the end of her ruined arm extended toward me. I hold my ground, because the impact will hurt her more than it hurts me. I ready my blade, and she hits me but slips and falls to the ground, and I swipe as she goes, getting her on the back, and she lands on her knees in front of me. I once saw the Lows worship her the way she is now, in front of me.

  She laughs, and that’s when the pain hits me. I reach up and knock the goggles
off my head, and I look down at where her stump is pressed against my side. She’s still laughing. She pulls her hand back, and I see what my goggles missed: that my mother’s blade is fastened to her stump, embedded in the flesh, pushed in deep and firm. Tightly wrapped gauze runs round it, holding it in place. I’m sure that it must hurt her just to have it in there. But as she pulls the blade out of me, she only laughs harder.

  Jonah slams into her from behind, tackling her, pushing her away, but she’s on her feet right away, slashing at him. Through the rain, I only catch glimpses of them as they fight. I put my hand to where she cut me, and I feel for blood but feel only the wetness of the rain. The wound aches but doesn’t hurt as much as I imagined it would. I step forward. The pain is manageable for now. I pick my mask up from the mud and wipe it off, and I put it on. I can see them fighting, almost a dance between them, back and forth.

  Rex doesn’t see me behind her and doesn’t hear me. She only hears the sound of the striker warming up, the fizz of the rain as it hits the blue lightning wrapped around it, and then the sound of her skin crackling where I slam it into her neck.

  She crumples like a pile of ash to the floor, still breathing, eyes wide open.

  “You’re hurt,” Jonah says, his face drenched.

  “It’s fine.”

  “You’re bleeding.”

  I look down at Rex, and I see it now. My blood is mixing with the rain, running down me and pooling at my feet.

  “You need—”

  “I need to finish this fight,” I say. I draw my blade. I can do this, I tell myself. She’s a bad person, a terrible person. I’ve tried to avoid killing where I can, tried to incapacitate. But she wouldn’t give me the same consideration. She wouldn’t hesitate to kill me, just as she hasn’t hesitated to kill so many good people on this ship. If good people die, why shouldn’t she? My mother, the Sister; they were good people. They were . . .