Way Down Dark

by J. P. Smythe

  When we have to go under the mulch, I just do it, and I don’t let go of her hand. She doesn’t struggle, and I pull her after me and yank the lever, and then we’re in the hatch, and then we’re out of there, down below.

  “You can take the mask off,” I say, spitting the blood away from my mouth and then going into the closest berth and grabbing one of the towels that I’ve put there for this very reason. I wipe my face. “You’re okay now.” I watch her pull the goggles from her head and try to take this all in. This first room is basically nothing, not in the grand scale of what we’ve got here, but still, it’s clean and light and open and safe, and she’s never seen that before.

  “What is this place?” she asks. I pass her the towel.

  “Better if I just show you,” I say. I lead her down the corridor, past the bedrooms, their doors open. The kids in them stop and look at her, balking when they see her. She’s what they’ve been told to be afraid of. Another Low, and how do they know what makes her different from Rex? “Wave at them,” I say. “Let them know that you’re not a threat.” She does, a halfhearted shimmer of her hand. I can tell that it’s painful for her to look at these young faces. In another time, she would have been here with Peter. Maybe they could have lived here, and he would never have been taken. That must hurt her, imagining that. I see Mae and call her forward, and I kneel down and whisper to her. “This is Bess,” I say, “and you should be nice to her. She’s scared.” Mae nods, knowing. We’ve all been there. Scared is something that we all share.

  “Do you want to play?” Mae asks, holding out the broken doll that she just won’t let go of.

  “Maybe after I’ve cleaned myself up,” Bess says. Her voice trembles. We move on into the kitchens. Agatha and Jonah are there, along with the other adults, and they stare. One stares in open-mouthed horror.

  “It’s fine,” I tell them. “This is Bess, and she’s a friend.” Agatha knows her. She comes over and looks Bess in the eye, not smiling, ruthlessly sizing her up, and Bess starts to cry. I hold her, putting myself between her and Agatha. “It’s fine,” I say. That doesn’t stop the tears.

  I help her with what happens next: showing her how the showers work, giving her new clothes from the quickly diminishing pile of blue uniforms. We all look the same down here now apart from Agatha. She refuses to change, washing her old clothes instead, waiting naked in her berth until they’re as close to dry as she can stand, and then putting them on again. Bess isn’t as fussy. I take the remnants of her clothes and throw them into the trash, and I hand her a towel. She’s not shy about her nudity, and I see her body as she gets dressed: the bruises and marks that cover almost every bit of her skin. They all look fresh. That’s how quickly the Lows infect you.

  “What’s happening with the Lows now?” I ask when she’s sitting in a chair and I’m behind her, shaving her hair where it’s started to grow out. We don’t have lice here, not yet, and it would be nice to never get them. Maybe I’d like to grow my hair long one day. I’ve never tried it. I wonder what I would look like.

  “They’re the same as they ever were,” she tells me. She stares straight ahead, watching her own face as I cut away the hair. Now that she’s clean, she can see what she looks like. This is part of the ritual we’ve created for new people: clean them, shave them in front of a mirror, let them see themselves clearly for the first time. “Maybe worse. They’re uncontrolled.”

  “They lost their leader.”

  “Yes,” she says. “They think she’s still out there. She was strong.” She looks at me, straight into my eyes. I stop cutting her hair. “You killed her, though.”

  “I didn’t,” I say. “I brought her down here.” I watch her face shift.

  “She’s here?”

  “Not like you are. She’s a . . .” Prisoner. She’s a prisoner. We’re all prisoners. I can’t stand to tell the others because of what it might do. For now, they’re all still free. Our history—the lies that we’ve been fed for generations—is still a truth. Earth was destroyed. We escaped.

  Good for us.

  “She’s dangerous,” Bess says.

  “Not here she’s not. She’s in a room. It’s locked.”

  “I want to see,” she says, and she stands up. “Please.”

  In the kitchen, before the cold storage where Rex is, Bess touches the door. “She can’t get out?”

  “Not a chance,” I tell her. Bess already looks so different. The change in her being clean . . . She looks just like the rest of us. Orphaned, kicked out of our homes, wearing what we can, finding somewhere new.

  “Good,” she says. She stands in front of it, pushes it, testing to see that it’s shut. She’s scared of Rex even here, even through thick metal and a lock that can’t be broken. “Can I see the children now?”

  “Of course,” I say, and she goes down the corridor to the room where Mae and the others are playing. I hear her introduce herself, giving them a chance to take in the new version of her. When I turn back, Agatha’s staring at me. “She’ll be fine,” I say. “I’m sure of it.”

  Bess handles the children at dinnertime. She asks Agatha if she can cook for them. Agatha doesn’t mind and stands aside, handing Bess the utensils. She’s probably grateful for the night off. Bess looks at the books, picks one out and finds a picture of a delicious-looking stew, then pauses, touching the image with her fingertips.

  “I can’t read,” she says quietly, but that’s okay. She shuts the book and cooks by instinct, taking food out of the cupboards, raiding the freezer next to the one where we’re keeping Rex, and she chops and tastes and puts things into a boiling pot. She uses everything she can, and it smells amazing and then overpowering, but she’s excited. When it’s done, she dishes it up into bowls, and I taste mine. It’s almost too much, too many flavors going on at one time. I grin at her.

  “This is wonderful,” I say, and she’s so happy to hear that. We’re all served, all eating quickly, as if the food is going to disappear if we don’t get to it quickly enough. I notice another bowl on the side, steam coming off the top.

  “It’s for Rex,” Bess says. “Do we feed her?”

  “Yes,” I say, and I reach for the bowl to take it over. “Open the door for me?” I ask, and she nods. She does it slowly, methodically, the heft of the door making her struggle a little. Inside, Rex sits at the back, cowering under her blanket. The cold has been turned off, but she’s still feeling it. Her breath comes out in puffs of steam. She shivers.

  “I’ll hurt you,” she says, her mouth tense, her teeth snapping together between the words. “You can’t keep me here forever.” I hand her the bowl. If only she knew. She takes it, because she thinks that she needs her strength, and I back out.

  “Shut it,” I say to Bess. “She stays locked in there.” Bess doesn’t hesitate.

  Then it’s like that moment never happened. Bess leads the children from the table, takes them to a berth, sits on the floor with them; then she plays just as they do, inventing stories, making up characters, joining in as if this is the easiest thing in the world for her.

  “She’s adapting well,” Agatha says to me as we stand watching them.

  “We all are.” I want her to tell me that I was right. That it is possible to help people.

  “You must be tired,” she says.

  “Only as tired as you,” I tell her. “You’re doing so much down here.” That makes her laugh. She reaches over and puts her hand on my back, up by my neck. We move together without thinking, like she’s hugging me, like when I was young. It’s so comforting, and I let my head rest on her shoulder for a second, and I shut my eyes and listen to the laughter coming from the kids and from Bess.

  The darkness of the ship means that only glimmers come through on the screens. Only when there’s fire somewhere nearby can you see anything, and then it’s patchy, grainy, and gray. Shapes and movement are pretty much all you get. I can’t sleep, so I sit in front of them and I watch. There’s something almost hypnotic abo
ut the screens, watching the Lows rampaging still. We’ve saved twenty-seven people if I include Rex. Twenty-seven people—mostly children—who would have been punished, tortured, probably even killed, and now they’re safe. I wish it could be more. I wish that I could save every single person here. But I can’t; I know that. I’m more powerless than I would like.

  On the screen I watch somebody struggling to get away from a lone Low, watch as she kicks out, as the Low reaches for her, swipes a knife, misses, but doesn’t give up. It’s a constant pursuit that won’t end until something more drastic happens. Maybe taking Rex out of the equation was a good first step, but that’s all it was. There’s still so much suffering.

  “You’ve been doing something good,” Jonah says. He comes to my side and leans against the wall. I think it’s the first time I’ve seen him looking truly comfortable and relaxed. It doesn’t come easily to him. “It’s helped; you know that. You should be proud.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I reply. “It’s more that it’s the right thing to do. My mother told me to do what was right.”

  “Agatha says that she also told you to be selfish.”

  “The two can’t coexist. I had to pick one.” I smile at him. “She also told me not to die. That one I’m planning on sticking to.”

  “I wish I’d known her.”

  “She would have liked you,” I tell him. “She liked faith. She always said that it was good to believe in something, whatever that was. That’s the Lows’ problem: they only believe in themselves, only believe in power. That’s why—” I nearly tell him what I did, about the part I played in my mother’s death, about my being complicit in it. I haven’t thought about that in so long. Feels like a lifetime ago, that night in our berth, holding the knife . . . The guilt I feel about that act, which now has been somehow replaced by something else entirely.

  He asks me something. I don’t hear it. I’m picturing my mother and her final few moments.

  “What?”

  “Do you have faith?” he asks again.

  “I believe in this,” I say, looking around the room. “I believe in us, here and now.” I watch him reach his hand to his neck to rub at the skin there. It’s rough but healed, no longer the sore red that it was before. “I think it’s the same as what you believe in, really. Something good.”

  “I don’t know what to believe,” he says. “Everything was lies, wasn’t it? Why we’re here, who we are. We’re not blessed. We’re not ascending. We’re drifting.” He smiles, but it’s not coming from happiness, more like acceptance. “There’s nothing left.”

  On the screens I see another kid, just a fragment of a tiny shape, crawling around somewhere on the thirty-fourth floor, in the Lows’ section. Maybe she’s the child of a Low; maybe she’s been kidnapped. I don’t know either way, but she’s scared, scrambling around, trying to escape from something that I can’t see.

  “I should go,” I say. I pull the zipper up on my suit, adjust the hood onto my head.

  “Do you want me to come?” he asks.

  “It’s fine,” I say. “I’ll be back soon enough.” And then, as I’m leaving the room, as the door to the kitchen is open, this small control room flooded with light, he grabs my arm gently, holding me. I turn and look at him.

  “I believe in you,” he says.

  I’ve never felt like this before, like my skin is singing where he touched me as I go to the hatch, up into the Pit, climbing out, as I save the little girl and bring her back, telling her that it’s okay, that she can stop crying now. And then seeing him there when I towel the blood from her face, waiting for me. Smiling.

  When I go to my room, Mae isn’t there. She’s in the next room over with a couple of the other kids. They’re all curled up on the bed, holding one another. That’s better for her, I think. I pull the door shut behind me as I leave them in the darkness. I want to be alone with this new thing that I’m feeling, anyway.

  I hear screaming, and it makes its way into my dreams so that I’m not sure if the noise is real or a part of whatever’s happening to me as I sleep. Everything slips into everything else.

  But it persists, and I’m pulled awake by it, so I throw myself out of bed and rush to the door. The screaming is from everybody—adults and children both—and full of panic and danger. Something is happening now. My door won’t open. It’s shut somehow, locked tight. I struggle with the handle, but it doesn’t move, so I beat on the door with my hands.

  “Please!” I shout, hoping that somebody will hear me. There’s the sound of struggling. They’ve found us, I think. I have to be out there. I hear the voice of a little girl—Mae; I know that it’s Mae—and out of nowhere a scream, louder than anything I’ve ever heard. A scream so terrible that it’s terrifying; it echoes everywhere.

  After that there’s only the faint rumble of the hatch door opening and closing and then silence. No more voices. Just a hush.

  I hit the door harder, throwing my shoulder into it, but it doesn’t give, so I take up my striker, and I beat the handle with it over and over. Eventually the handle snaps, showing me the insides of the door, and I reach in, pulling the lock mechanism back. There’s a click, and I pull it open.

  I see Agatha. She’s on the floor, blood pooled around her. Jonah is holding her, pressing his hands to her side. His hands are soaked red.

  She looks at me, her eyes flitting closed, rolling back. “Rex,” she says. Just that. Jonah presses her chest.

  “Help me,” he says. But I can only stand there. On the carpet around them are the footsteps that Rex left on her retreat.

  “I have to get her,” I say.

  “You can’t, not yet,” Jonah tells me. “She’s got Mae.”

  Bess betrayed us. While we slept, she crept into the kitchen and opened that door, and she let Rex free. I trusted her. I was an idiot. Bess helped Rex down the corridor—the wet footprints from the floor of the freezer attest to that—and then they took Mae. When Agatha tried to stop them, Rex stabbed her; the blade I decided to leave Rex with went right into her gut.

  But they didn’t kill me. They could have come into my room and slit my throat and left me there to bleed out, letting the Lows into this place to take it for their own. But they didn’t.

  She wants me to suffer; I’m sure of it. I’m not going to give her the pleasure.

  I storm into the control room, to the screens, and I flick through them, trying to find out where they’ve gone. Jonah stands behind me as I touch the screens, as I make them turn to other views of the ship. I need to find them. No choice.

  “Chan,” Jonah says, and he reaches for me again. I swat his hand away from my arm.

  “Don’t,” I tell him.

  “She’s in trouble,” he says, and then, realizing he needs to clarify, “Agatha.”

  “She’ll be fine,” I tell him. “She’s always fine.”

  “Not this time,” he says to me, and I hit the screen I’m cycling through harder, faster, smacking it with the palm of my hand so hard that the glass breaks and the picture behind it disappears.

  My hand bleeds. On the cracked screen, there’s a black background, and three words at the top, blinking in white. rebooting, please wait, it says. please wait, like this is any time for patience.

  “You need to go to her,” he tells me.

  “Then you find them,” I say, pointing at the screens. “Please.” He nods, and I go out through the kitchen. Everybody’s waiting there, quiet as they’ve ever been. Rex escaped; the Lows will know where we are, and they will come for us, for this place.

  But first there’s Agatha, and I only have to take one look at her, lying on the bed in her berth, to know that she’s dying and that there’s nothing I can do to save her.

  AGATHA

  Your mother and I stopped talking for a while. That didn’t happen just once, of course. We argued; everybody argues. We always forgave each other. There were only two times that I didn’t think that we would.

  The first was shor
tly after I killed the guards. I killed them all, even the older one I spared at first. But there’s something else you don’t know about what I found down here, Chan. The guards got women from the ship pregnant, and they took their babies. I don’t know how long they had been doing it, but I knew that they would never do it again.

  There was another baby down there, older than you by maybe a year or so. He—it was a boy, bruised and clearly not cared for, not in the right ways—was so quiet he barely made a sound when I picked him up. I couldn’t leave him to die. I didn’t know where he came from, whose child he was, but that didn’t matter. He needed help, and I could give it to him. I could find somewhere for him to be, so I took him back to your mother. I fought my way through the Pit with him, and I felt sick, climbing up the ship, trying to protect this one who was alive, when the last time I had done the trip it had been with the corpse of the poor child we used to fool your father. It’s hard to travel Australia with a baby. Your mother didn’t really leave her berth, not for the first year or so you were alive, and then you were strapped to her back, clinging to her clothes and hair for dear life. But she was a natural with babies. I wasn’t. I never have been.

  I thought for a second of keeping him for myself, but I knew that I couldn’t care for him, not in the way that your mother cared for you. I watched her when I finally reached the floor she lived on: feeding you, making faces at you. The love that she felt, Chan. It was so obvious, so evident. I didn’t feel that for this baby.

  I thought that I would resent him. This little thing that would take my time, my strength. And I wanted to protect your mother and you. He would stop that. And if I gave him to your mother . . . Well, that was another mouth to feed. Another body to defend.

  So I climbed again. I went up farther, up to the highest points of the ship. To the Pale Women—

  Wait. Let me finish.

  They took some persuading, let me tell you. It was not easy for them to accept that taking him was for the best. But I persuaded them that he was pure, that he could be shaped. There, at least, he would be safe.