Way Down Dark

by J. P. Smythe

  I drop to my knees, and Jonah rushes to catch me, to support me. His arm is under mine, his shoulder propping me up.

  “You’re not a killer,” he says. He helps me away from her, back down the gantry, back to the main body of the ship. I lead him to what was my home for so many years, and we sit on the shattered metal frame of what’s left of my old bed, and he helps me with the zipper of my outfit, pulling it down. He can see the wound better than I can. “It’s not as bad as it could have been,” he says. “This”—tapping the armored plates that Agatha sewed in for me—“took most of it. It’ll need stitches.”

  “I can’t see it properly,” I say, and he pushes my hand down, gets close to my skin. He takes his kit from his pocket and finds a needle, then takes some thread and loops it through. It’s wet from the rain, but it’s fine. It’ll do. He doesn’t look me in the eye as he cleans the wound with his ointment and wipes it dry, and then, as he pushes the wound together, he slides the needle into the skin, winding and looping it through, pulling my skin tight. It hurts, but not enough to make a fuss. Not enough to let him know. When he’s done, he bites the thread to cut it, his face close enough now to my skin that I can feel his breath on it. “There,” he says.

  “Thank you,” I say. And then we’re both on that bed frame, still, and it’s uncomfortable but better than standing. He’s warm, and that’s nice; as the coldness of the water that soaked us fades, we sit in the warmth of the darkness, unseen, unlit, and we start to dry. I feel his hand reaching for mine, and I take it.

  We both shut our eyes, and I think how easy it would be to sleep, somehow, even here, even now.

  It takes Jonah standing to break that moment. He helps me to my feet. I’m fine. It hurts, but I know that it’ll heal. I look at the stitches, at how neat they are, and I smile at him as I fasten my suit. “We have to deal with her,” I say. I walk back toward the arboretum, picking up speed until I’m almost running.

  “What will you do?” he asks as we go. The rest of the ship is strangely quiet. I picture everybody who’s left, huddled together, terrified and quiet, praying for the war to be over, the darkness to end.

  “I don’t know,” I say, and I don’t, not now. He was right when he said I shouldn’t kill her. So what happens after that? Maybe we should take her down below, take her prisoner, lock her in a berth, and stop her from getting out.

  But maybe there’s been too much imprisonment. I don’t know where we go if we start down that path. What happens next?

  I can see that she’s gone before we’re even in the arboretum. I stand where she fell, and I hold my head back, letting the rain patter down onto my face. It’s refreshing, cooling. As I’m standing there, it stops, slowing to a dribble, and then there’s just the drops of emptying pipes. I look around, and I see rustling in the bushes, over toward the river.

  “What now?” Jonah asks. As quietly as I can, I track her down. She’s trying to hide, but she won’t. She can’t. She’s underneath the blackberries, trying to recover from the blow the striker gave her. The Lows abandoned her. I reach in, and I find her one hand.

  “Get out of there,” I order, and I pull her out. She doesn’t fight me. She’s too weak.

  “What are we doing with her?” Jonah asks. He pulls his blade out as if he knows the answer. I won’t kill her, he knows, but he could. There’s already much more blood on his hands than there is on mine.

  “We don’t kill her,” I say. “We’re taking her with us.” And that surprises me, to hear my mother’s words come out of my mouth, almost as much as it surprises him.

  “We can’t,” he says. “She’ll . . . She’ll know.” He whispers that, trying to protect our secrets.

  “It’s the best way. She’s not a threat, not anymore.” She struggles, tries to stand. I know she’ll fight us with whatever she has left, but right now that’s barely anything.

  I use the striker once more, this time on her skull. Knocking her out might save us some hassle.

  By the time we get back below the Pit, we’re tired and broken, weighed down and covered in grime. Seven more people came down with us—eight, with Rex: one family of three and four orphaned children. Three of the orphans are placid, maybe shocked by the things they’ve seen; the other kicks and bites when I try to lift him down into the Pit, tearing at me, trying to get free. He’s terrified, and he should be. It isn’t until he sees the lights of the down-below that he calms down, breathing more deeply, relaxing.

  The one little girl who has her parents with her seems to be adjusting faster than the others. But the one who fights me—he’s more scared of what’s happening than the rest of them. Agatha stands and watches them all and then stares as Jonah drags Rex’s body from the hatch, dropping her down from the ladder into our corridor. Her limp body lies on the floor, staining the carpet with the muck from the Pit that’s clinging to her skin.

  “What have you done?” Agatha asks, her voice low, shocked.

  “Find me a berth we don’t use,” I say. “We’re going to keep her in it.”

  “She’s a murderer,” Agatha says.

  “Yes,” I reply, “but I’m not.” I drag her down the corridor myself as she starts to stir, and Jonah finds a closed door, an empty berth. We take out everything that we might want or need—even the sheets and pillow from the bed—and I lay her on the bare mattress, and I think that this is still a better place than any she’s known before. Maybe what we’re doing isn’t fair. In one way, it’s almost a reward for all the dreadful things she’s done.

  “Pull out her blade,” Agatha says. I look down at it, jammed so far into her arm. The flesh is starting to heal, the blade becoming a part of her. Some part of me thinks how apt that is; another wants it back. It was my mother’s.

  “No,” I say. “She might bleed out.” I don’t want her to die, I tell myself, but then I wonder if leaving her with the blade—alone, locked in a room by herself, no way out—is my way of taking that choice away from myself, leaving matters in her hands in some sick way.

  We shut the door, and I take another striker from the cupboard and slide it through the handle so that it locks, so that she can’t get the door open. Agatha grabs me when I’m finished, when I’m standing alone in the corridor.

  “What you’re doing won’t change anything. They’ll find a new leader, as they always do.”

  “Right,” I say, “but it will slow them down. It might even stop the war.”

  “Enough. This is enough now. You’ve done what you can, and you’ve pushed your luck. Soon enough it will run out.” She takes my face in her hands. “You aren’t special, Chan. None of us are.”

  “I’m not special,” I say. “That’s right. I’m really not. Anybody could have done what I’m doing, but they didn’t. So I am going to. Maybe that’s enough.”

  I’m angry with Agatha, with her selfishness. I’m tired of selfishness. Survival should be more. I storm off back to my room. I don’t want to fight anymore. Agatha doesn’t get it, and I don’t have the strength to persuade her. Mae is in my bed again, curled up in the corner, pressed to the wall. I shrug out of my dirty suit and sit on the bed beside her. She turns to me and puts her arms around me, warm against my cold skin.

  “Tell me a story,” she says, shutting her eyes. So I tell her the stories that my mother told me: about ghosts, about Earth, about who we are. They’re lies, but it’s easier to tell them than the truth. How do you explain that we are damned because of a crime that we didn’t commit?

  I don’t notice when Mae falls asleep. It doesn’t take her long, that’s for certain. I’m not tired, though, not yet. There’s still adrenaline running through me, telling me that there’s more I can do. I don’t need to stop yet. I think about Jonah: about how hard everything that’s happened must be for him. He’s gone through a lot and lost just as much as I have. The Pale Women might not have been his blood, but they were everything to him, all the family he had. At least I know where I come from. He doesn’t even know his real
name. I wonder about what might have been if everything here had been different. If we weren’t all so broken. I slip out from underneath Mae’s clinging grip, and I go to the room where we have been keeping all the suits.

  I start to make a new suit for him. I don’t have him try it as I go, guessing at the size instead. I’m sure it’ll fit him when I’m finished. Pretty sure.

  As I’m sewing—and thinking about Jonah’s own sewing, the stitches in my side—I hear noise coming from Rex’s room. She’s murmuring something, and I listen as she walks the room, beating the walls, looking for a way out, and then as she starts to scream for her freedom, as if she had any idea what the word even means.

  In my room, I work all night until I’m so tired that I can barely keep my eyes open, until Jonah’s new suit is finished.

  The next day I waste no time. I wake Jonah as soon as I’m up, barging my way into his room. He’s lying on his bed, no sheet, and it takes me a second to realize that he’s naked. It takes me a second longer to look away. Not that he seems to care.

  “Get dressed,” I say from the darkness of the doorway to his room, and I throw his new suit onto the bed. “We’re going hunting.” He picks it up, and he looks surprised. When I see him next, he’s wearing it. It’s a little tight around the chest—that’s the armor, I’m sure of it—but it fits. It’s quiet in Rex’s room. She kept the noise up for hours, then went totally silent. Maybe she’s tired herself out.

  Or maybe she’s killed herself, lying on the floor, waiting to be saved. I don’t have the time to check now, or maybe I just don’t have the inclination. I can’t be sure.

  Jonah and I don’t talk as we climb up into the Pit and then, floor by floor, up through the ship. We’re looking for trouble. On the thirty-second floor, section IV, we see a little boy being thrown by a group of Lows like he’s a toy. One drops him, and he tumbles to the gantry and skids toward the edge. Jonah and I know what to do without having to say it. I ignore the Lows and go for the boy, and I grab his arm just as he goes over, gripping him tightly, but there’s a click and a howl from him, and then he goes limp, passed out. Jonah goes for the Lows, hitting one, knocking the other back. That’s the best way to fight them: divide them, then deal with them one by one.

  I haul the boy up and push him to one side, getting him out of the way of the fight, and I join Jonah. We’re back to back, dealing with them. This is fine, two on two, and then I see them coming for us, more of them. Tens of them. We don’t balk, because we can’t. We do as we should: cut through them, divide them, knock them down where we can. The Lows seem confused. They must know Rex is gone by now. I wonder why none of them have risen up to take her place.

  That confusion makes them sloppy. We fight enough of them to make a dent and then grab the boy and run. Jonah and I pass the kid between us, taking turns at mowing through them while we carry him. It makes getting down through the ship easier. We pass him off to Agatha, who waits at the bottom even though we didn’t tell her we were leaving, and then make our way back up again. We’ve got a system now, and it works. No sense messing with that.

  We save a family on the sixty-third floor. They’re all injured in one way or another, the smallest—three or four months old, nothing more—infected with something, probably only a week from death. We incapacitate the Lows, and then the family backs away from us. They ask me if I’m the Nightman, come to take them away. They’re scared, but I reassure them. I’m not going to hurt them; I’m going to save them. Jonah escorts them to the path to the bottom of the ship. I write a message on one of the walls, aimed at the Lows: stay away.

  We save a young couple, younger than us. Thirteen, fourteen years old, maybe, living on the seventieth floor. She’s injured so badly that she can’t move, and we stop them as he’s about to kill them both—something about living in paradise together—but I tell him that there is no paradise; there’s only below the Pit. He carries her down. He’s an idiot, but it’s kind of sweet.

  We save a tiny kid as his family cowers at the edge of the gantry into Low territory. We grab him as he’s running right up to a sleeping group of murderers who are still coated in the blood of the people they killed last. I use the striker on them as they sleep. It would have felt wrong to leave them there. I return him to his parents and then send the family down, telling them about the Pit. Telling them to be careful but there’s somewhere else.

  “You don’t need to be scared anymore,” I say to them.

  In the kitchen, I see how many we’ve saved so far. We’re busy, the tables full, the floor cramped. There’s only room for thirty or so people here, and that’s assuming we sleep crammed into the small rooms, sharing beds. I look at the food in the cold storage compartment, counting how much we’ve got. What’s the plan? I haven’t thought past today, not really. How long are we here for? What happens when we run out of food? What happens to the arboretum now that it’s burned and dark?

  And then the bigger questions: If there’s no food, do we just wait it out down here for the Lows to die? What about the people I don’t save? There are free people up there, innocents. There are, and we—I—can’t do anything. I lean against the back wall inside the cold room. I push against it, feeling my muscles stretch against the freezing wall. I’ve never felt this cold before.

  “It’s hard,” Agatha says from the doorway. “You have to make choices harder than you’ve ever had to make before.”

  “How long will all our supplies last?” I ask her.

  “A year if we’re clever, if we don’t bring any more people down here. If,” she says, “we don’t feed her.”

  “I’m not letting her starve,” I say.

  “Then we’ll run out that much faster.”

  “Please,” I tell her, and I turn to look at her.

  “You can’t save any more people, Chan. You’re choosing who lives and who dies. You’re choosing who’s saved. That’s—”

  “It’s not even a choice anymore,” I say, and that feels like the end of the conversation. There’s nothing more to be said.

  9

  I’m three floors up in the ship when I see Bess, who once lived in the berth beside mine. How long has it been? She looks so different: a total change in everything about her. She should be dead, but she isn’t. She’s alive, and she’s dressed like a Low. Torn clothes, fresh tattoos on her skin, paint on her face, clutching a jagged metal spike with fabric wrapped around one end, a crude torch. She’s facing the stairwell as I pull myself up. It takes me a second to recognize her. “The Nightman,” she gasps as she sees me.

  “No,” I say as I pull my mask off so that she can see my face. That changes nothing; she doesn’t look any less shocked.

  “You’re alive,” she says.

  “Yes.” I notice a fresh scar on her skin, on her chest: the letter P, carved deep. “I’m sorry about Peter,” I tell her. I’ll never forget losing him and not being able to find him. Maybe it was my fault, maybe it wasn’t.

  “It’s fine,” she says. She coughs, her throat ragged. She isn’t breathing like them yet. She hasn’t had to live in their half of the ship long enough. Whatever happens to the air over there, it hasn’t quite gotten to her yet.

  “They’re destroying the ship,” I say. “They would have killed you. They probably killed Peter.” I see that sting her. I shouldn’t have said it, I know. That was cruel of me. But I want her back. She doesn’t belong there. “How can you trust them?”

  “I don’t. But I don’t trust anyone.”

  “So don’t stay with them.”

  “Being with them will keep me safe,” she says, and she turns away from me and starts to run off.

  “We have somewhere,” I shout, “somewhere safe. If you change your mind.” But I don’t know that she hears me, because she’s gone, up into the darkness.

  The arboretum is all but gone. I look at the remains of the plants, of the crops and grains, of the trees—they’re burned out and dead. Some greenery struggles on, but through my gog
gles it’s all just the same shade of gray.

  But I stay here. I sit on the ground near the river—which still flows, just as it always did, as it always has, part of the ship’s innards doing their job, their cycle of constancy—and I take my shoes off, and I remember where they came from, and I wash my feet in the water because they’re sore and because here, alone, I can. I haven’t had a shower today. I’m not taking proper advantage of it. My mother would want—

  No.

  This isn’t about her, not anymore. This is about me and those kids. And Jonah now. We have something, something that we can build, something that we can do to make this all better. That’s worth concentrating on. That’s what I need to focus on.

  I hear a child crying. I don’t know where, but I don’t wait. I put my wet feet back into my shoes and run toward it, because it won’t stop until I reach it or somebody else does.

  When I get back down beneath the Pit, the child and another family with me, there’s a crowd in the corridor: the few adults I’ve saved, Agatha, and Jonah. Jonah is breathing heavily, his chest rising and falling, sweat on his brow.

  “She broke the door,” Agatha says, and I see that they’re outside the berth that we’ve been keeping Rex in. The door is barricaded, but cracks run down the length of it and the handle is halfway to being snapped off.

  “What did she do?” I ask.

  “She used her body,” Jonah says. “Slammed against it over and over. We heard her.”

  “Jonah stopped her,” Agatha says. He’s bleeding, I notice: a bite mark on his arm, the blood a nearly perfect imprint of Rex’s mouth full of sharpened teeth. “We can’t keep her here,” Agatha says, which means something different from moving her, I know.

  “I’ll talk to her,” I say.

  “And say what?”

  “I’ll tell her that she’s safe now.” She’s scared, I think. We’re all scared. “Get back from here,” I tell them all, directing it at the kids but aiming it at Agatha. I don’t know what Rex will do given half a chance, and I pull my striker from its sheath, and I start moving the barricade to one side. She doesn’t make an attempt on the door, but she’ll be ready, just as I am.