Way Down Dark

by J. P. Smythe

  She’s in the corner farthest from the door, pressed into it, her arms stretched out and almost clinging to the walls. There are scratch marks down the walls around her, and through the dug-out color I can see that the underneath is metal: cleaner metal than upstairs, shiny and polished rather than the dull black. The fingers of her good hand are bleeding, and the blade—my mother’s blade, I remind myself, another thing that she left me that came back to haunt me—is blunted, the metal bent. It’s still dangerous, maybe more than ever.

  “Riadne’s daughter,” she says. “Chan.” I don’t know that I’ve heard her say my name before. I don’t say her name. I don’t know it, not the one she originally had. Nobody does anymore, I wouldn’t think. She’s Rex. I wonder if she even remembers her name, or if this new one has taken all the space she had for it.

  “You can’t escape,” I tell her.

  “I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you and all of these people.” But as she says it, I can see she’s lying. I was right. She’s terrified. Take her away from her people, from the ship that she knew better than anybody else, that she was on the verge of ruling, and she’s just like me. She’s only a bit older than me, I think: a year older, maybe. Hard to tell through the scars, but her eyes are young still. I can see her better here in this light, and everything that was frightening about her is clearer to me. Her scars aren’t marks of power now. They’re pain. She’s had chunks taken out of her over and over. The name on her chest is the same as all the rest. It’s healed up in puckered slashes, uneven, and it still looks so sore, and there’s a bit on the R, where she started her journey, where the line wavers, where the cut isn’t as deep as the rest. She was unsure about it. She regretted it as soon as she did it, maybe. It hurt too much.

  “You’re not with your people anymore,” I tell her. “You’re alone, with us. And you’re safe here.”

  “So you’re going to keep me here?” Her wheezing is already better, I realize. A few days away from the air filters on the Lows’ side of the ship and already she’s sounding closer to normal. “Where are we?”

  “We’re somewhere safe.” I can’t believe that I’m saying that. Weeks ago, safety—real safety—would have seemed an impossible dream.

  “Nowhere is safe,” she says.

  “Who are you?” I ask.

  “I’m Rex.” She says it in a slightly different voice, the tone that she takes when she’s their leader. Defensive and defiant at the same time.

  “Your real name?” She smirks. She won’t tell. Not that it matters. She scratches at herself, at her scars. No, at one particular scar, the one on her belly that runs across the top of her pelvis. Only in this light can I see that it’s actually neater than most and not scratched or torn. It’s a medical scar. “You’re a mother?” I ask, and she immediately stops touching it and moves from the wall, coming toward me. I step backward with one foot, worried, stick my striker out in front of me, squeeze the handle. The blue flame tears up the stick, and she balks.

  “You don’t know anything about me,” she says, “and you can’t, and you won’t. I will kill you, and I will kill the old woman, and I will kill every single one of you who stands in my way. And I will take this place.”

  “No, you won’t,” I tell her. “Because I won’t let you.” I swing the striker, and it hits her on the arm. She collapses, and I shout for help.

  “What are we doing with her?” Jonah asks, walking in and looking down at Rex’s unconscious body.

  “We’re putting her in the cold rooms,” I say.

  We move everything out of one of them, piling it into the other room. The door is sturdier, and there’s no handle on the inside, no way for her to get herself free. There’s a dial on the wall to change how cold it is. I turn that up. It’ll still be cold but not too cold. I hope. We’ll still need to give her clothes to stop her from freezing to death.

  If we ever land, I think, I’ll set her free. I’ll let her go, see what happens if she’s given a chance. Here you never have a chance. But then, we’ll never land. We’re prisoners; we’re not looking for a home. We’re out here waiting to die.

  When it’s empty, I drag her down the corridor. The children stand in the doorways and watch, and their parents—or the few adults who are here, looking after them, taking them on in immediate and chaotic adoptions—try to get them to turn away. They say that she’s something to be scared of.

  “Shut up,” I tell one man who hisses at her like she’s a character from one of the plays that the Shopkeepers used to put on when I was young. I don’t want people to be scared to be down here. That’s not what holding her prisoner is about. I pull Rex through the kitchen and into the freezer, where Jonah is putting spare blankets inside. It’s already thawing, the ice that had formed around the shelves dripping down, making the air damp. She might catch a cold from that, but she’ll survive. I push her to the end, up against the wall. She’s limp. Out of the corner of my eye, looking back at the door, I see Mae clutching the remains of her doll. It’s a pretty good likeness, I think, looking down at Rex now. She’s broken.

  She’s done.

  Jonah and I sit in the control room and look at the screens, trying to find anybody else we can save. I’m focused, looking for children. They seem the easiest targets, both for the Lows and for us.

  “What about him?” Jonah asks, pointing to a man on one screen being beaten by two Lows. They’re taking it in turns, punching him with weak fists, gently kicking him. It’s attrition rather than anything more brutal: stretching out the torture so that he lasts longer. The man is bruised and bloodied, but he’s awake and he’s struggling. “He’ll heal better here, if they let him live.”

  It’s the Shopkeeper who tried to sell me my shoes. He’s a bad man; I know that. What he wanted from me . . . I don’t want him down here. The Lows are doling out something that’s almost like accidental justice. Part of me hopes that they kill him. So I don’t look at Jonah, but I shake my head.

  “No,” I say, “not him.”

  “He needs help,” Jonah says.

  “He’s a bad person.” I look at the other screens, trying to find somebody so that I can move this on.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because he is,” I say. I don’t want to get drawn into an argument.

  “He needs saving.”

  “You don’t know what he would have done to me. Just because he’s—”

  “People can change,” he says, his voice wavering.

  “Not all people,” I say. Jonah keeps quiet. He doesn’t want to fight, and neither do I. I change tack. “We’re getting full. There won’t be enough food. We’ll have to go back up there sooner if we’re not careful.” I’m not going back up there. I won’t do it. “We save people who can’t save themselves, who need saving. That’s it.”

  “Chan—”

  “No!” I say, and I slam my hand onto one of the screens.

  “Look at them! None of them can save themselves. That’s why we’ve had to step in, why you’ve had to take charge.” He’s just as angry as I am. But I am in charge. This is on me. The kids, bringing them down here, fighting back against the Lows: it’s all been at my urging, and I will defend my choice until the end.

  Jonah cycles through the screens, showing the parts of the ship that we haven’t gotten to yet, where the Lows are still waging their war, where the free people are still hiding, trying to fight back, trying to survive. “There’s still so much to do,” I say, and Jonah doesn’t disagree.

  Outside the arguments, Jonah and I make a hell of a team. We’ve got a language between us that doesn’t need to be spoken. He distracts the Lows, and I swoop in, saving whoever needs to be saved, and then we deal with the Lows together; or I pile in, taking one out, he takes another, and we fight around the children, screaming at them to keep out of the way of our weapons; or we pick the Lows off one by one without them noticing. I hang from the floors above and strike the backs of their necks, knocking them out, while Jonah climbs
up from below and pulls the incapacitated Lows out, sending them down to the Pit. Killing comes easier to him, but he still hates it. Taking a life hurts him. I catch him praying once or twice after he’s done it, mumbling words with tightly pursed lips.

  The Lows are easier to deal with now that Rex is gone. They’re shaken, missing their leader. There’s still no new Rex so far as we can tell, nobody who’s risen up to take that mantle. Maybe they don’t know she’s gone for good. Maybe they’re waiting it out, hoping she’ll be back.

  “Shall I take it down?” Jonah asks when we find a baby, terrified, mewling with fear. I wonder how it knows to be scared, if the fear is ingrained in a newborn.

  I nod. “I’ll stay here. See if I find any more.” This is how it is: We watch for where to start, then we come up and we do what we can and then repeat that, over and over. Until we’re full or until we’re done, whichever comes first.

  I watch him carry the baby, gently climbing down level by level. It doesn’t cry while he’s holding it. I watch until they’re so swallowed by the darkness that my goggles can’t pick them out anymore.

  I hear a scream. Section VI, probably five or six floors up. It’s a young voice, a kid. I climb as quickly as I can manage. Could be nothing; could be a child afraid of the dark. I’ll get there and her parents will be holding her, telling her that it’s all right, that there will be light again soon, somebody will fix it and then everything will be okay. She screams again and again, and soon it’s just one long burst, stopping only when it makes her voice croak and cough. She’s struggling. Come on, Chan. Faster.

  The screams have stopped. I don’t know what that means.

  I think I’ve got the right floor, but I can’t see where the scream was coming from. I walk down the gantry, looking into the berths. Huddled free people, not seeing me or not wanting to. One woman makes eye contact and then turns away, and I know the look in her eyes: fear. She’s scared of me. They don’t know what I’m trying to do for them. Then, a few berths down, frantic moving shapes. I can’t make them out at first, just a mess of the flame-red and yellow and orange that the goggles show me. They’ve got a torch lit, so I take the mask off just as I reach the berth.

  The Lows have gone, and the little girl is dead. I try to save her—I’ve seen it done before, people beating their fists on chests, breathing air into lungs—but she stays dead. She can’t come back, and I shouldn’t even try. The berth is a mess. They’ve used her blood to leave me a message. A reply. DIE, the message says, over and over. DIE. A wish, an invocation. Almost a prayer.

  I can’t leave her body, I know. They’ll . . . I don’t know. I can’t leave it. She’s not going into the Pit, though. I can’t do that to her. She deserves better than that. I pick her up, and I hold her to me as I climb down the stairwells and as I cross the gantry to the arboretum. I put her down next to the river, which is running black with ash and soot, and I kneel there, where the soil is wet. I dig at it with my hands and with my blade, carving a trough in the ground big enough to put her in, and when it’s done, I lay her down. I put the soil over her, back where it came from. This little shape in the ground, barely visible. Through the goggles, I watch the last of her heat die out. Whatever was left in her body is truly gone.

  When I get back down below the Pit, I don’t let anybody know that I’m there. I go to my berth, and I don’t even take my clothes off; I just stand underneath the hot water gushing from the shower faucet, and I try to keep myself together. Because if I don’t, I don’t see how I can do this anymore. If I don’t, I think I might just fall apart.

  I hear Agatha in the corridor, telling Mae that it’s better to leave me alone tonight, that I need sleep. I need the rest; that’s her excuse. My lights are off, and I’m trying to sleep. Trying but failing.

  “It’s fine,” I shout, and that’s enough for Mae, who bundles into my room, all grins and energy.

  “I missed you,” she says. She clambers onto the bed and lies next to me. She sucks her thumb. I look at her, and all I can see now is the little dead girl. That can’t happen to Mae. It just can’t. Agatha follows her, trying to usher her out. It’s impossible.

  “I saw what happened,” Agatha says. “You couldn’t have done anything.”

  “I know,” I reply. It’s not about that.

  “You’ve done good.”

  “Maybe.” I’m glad that she can’t see my face in the darkness.

  “And now we have to stop,” she tells me. I don’t reply. I don’t know if she’s right. I don’t know how I can save everybody else. It’s impossible. She leaves the berth, pulling the door closed. I clutch Mae, pulling her tight to me. She smells of soap. The scent of Australia—whatever was there before, ingrained in her skin—is gone.

  “You’re shaking,” she says.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, and I try to stop, but I can’t.

  Mae shakes me awake, grabbing my shoulders and yanking them up and down.

  “Wake up, wake up!” she says. “There’s somebody at the door.” There’s knocking. I didn’t hear it. I don’t know what time I fell asleep, but I feel awful. Groggy. Aching. I don’t want to get up.

  “Come in,” I say, and it opens. It’s Jonah. He stands awkwardly in the doorway, as if he doesn’t quite fit into it; he tilts his head, and his hair—which is clean, I notice, different from when we were living above, changed by the showers and the soap and maybe just the air down here—is soft, slightly fluffy, already showing signs of growing out. He notices me looking at it and he runs a hand through it, suddenly self-conscious, and I look away.

  “Agatha wants you. She says that it’s important,” he says.

  “He’s strange,” Mae says after he’s gone.

  “He is,” I tell her. “But I like him.”

  I get changed. I’ve found my old pants, my top, clean and fresh. I’m not going up above today. Maybe not ever again. There’s food cooking, but the smell makes my stomach churn. I can’t face eating yet. I yawn. Some of the people we’ve saved are sitting at the table, eating food that I don’t recognize. We’re still trying everything, seeing if we can work out what’s good and what’s not. This meal smells like meat. I wonder if what they’re eating was normal breakfast food back on Earth or if maybe we’re breaking all the rules.

  “Where are they?” I ask, and one of the people points to the control room. They don’t go in there. We didn’t make that a rule or anything. They just don’t. Maybe it makes them feel guilty to see everyone else still up above. Live down here, pretend that the rest of the ship doesn’t exist anymore. That’s easiest.

  I wonder if I can do that.

  I open the door to the control room. Agatha is sitting in the chair, touching screens, moving them between views. She stops and looks at me.

  “You’ve got a message,” she says, and she points to the screen right in the middle. I can see a Low there, and I get closer to see better. It’s Bess. She’s sitting cross-legged in a berth. I’d know that berth without any indicators: It’s mine, my mother’s. And behind her, scrawled on the wall, one word, begging me to come, to find her.

  Chan, it says. I think that’s the first time since my mother was alive that I’ve actually seen my name written down.

  “Has she done anything else?”

  “She’s just sitting there,” Agatha says. “Nothing else. And she’s alone.”

  “Okay.” I stretch, reaching down to touch my toes, bending back to crack my shoulder bones. “I’d probably better go and see her, then.”

  I go to the section over from mine to get a vantage point. Through my goggles, I can see the distant scramble of the rest of the ship’s inhabitants, all fighting, moving, scurrying. I don’t care about them, not right now. I care about Bess. The entire floor is deserted now; everybody else has moved on—one way or another. She’s on the fragments of the bed, and she’s waiting for me. It doesn’t feel like a trap, I tell myself. But then, I suppose traps never really do, not until they’re sprung.


  I slip into the berth right on top of hers, and I check around us again. There’s nobody around, not that I can see. The Lows don’t know about the goggles, so they can’t protect against them. This isn’t a trap.

  “Bess,” I say, standing at the edge of the gantry, and she looks up.

  “You came,” she says.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yes,” she says. “Yes. I . . .” She fumbles the words, twists her hands against each other. She coughs, her voice with that slight wheeze behind it. “You said that there was somewhere safe.”

  “There is.”

  “I want to be safe,” she says, and then, “Please.” She steps forward until our heads are pretty much even, and she looks right up into my eyes—past the goggles, past everything. “I’m so scared,” she tells me. “I’ve got nothing left.”

  That’s true. She’s a good person, confused and lost, that’s all. She went to the Lows because they were there, because they might have had her son. But she hasn’t found him and never will. We both know it.

  “Come with me,” I say.

  She stands at the edge of the Pit, and she recoils as I wade into it. She may be a Low, but she hasn’t fallen so far as to be comfortable with this, not yet. We both know what’s in here, and what’s unspoken is that Peter may be here as well. Maybe she’ll see him as we trudge through it.

  I pull off my mask and hand it to her.

  “Wear this,” I say. “It’ll help. And you can breathe with it.” I can hold my breath, I know. I take her hand and I move forward, toward the center, and she follows. I have to pull to keep her moving. She doesn’t make a sound, and I don’t want to look at her. If I stop, if I let her think about what we’re doing, she might panic.