The Nethers

by M. E. Parker

  Behind him, Rounder sped away. In front of him, he faced three maniacs armed with jagged pieces of metal. The captured twin writhed in the dirt, clutching her knees. Myron held the hatchet over his head.

  The Votaries of Starick charged, shrieking angry bursts of Gapi.

  Myron stood his ground, preparing to be run through with a sharp piece of scrap iron. The hatchet, a weapon that had left a mark on his family, would do so again if he could not wield it better than his mother had when the orange shirts came for Myron the day she died.

  He dodged the first jab as the three arrived in a staggered line. His hatchet connected with bone, but not one that mattered—an unclean jawbone, still bearing sinew, hanging from the assailant’s neck. As the three converged on him, Myron swung the hatchet back and forth, backing away. Behind the three marauders, he spotted the twin rushing with a length of wire they’d been using to bind her hands.

  She leaped onto the back of one of the Votaries, looping the wire around his throat, and, with a hard pull, one that puckered her lips, she lessened their numbers by one. Myron tumbled to the ground, taking a blow with a metal rod across the back, losing his hatchet in the process.

  Myron looked up to a welcome sight: an approaching dust cloud and Rounder’s reddening face as he pedaled his contraption into the fray. Myron struggled to his feet and jumped out of the way.

  When he saw the other votary run at the twin, aiming to impale her, Rounder picked up speed, made a close pass, and smacked the attacker in the head with a pipe.

  The other twin let go of her mother’s hand and hopped out of the landship. She picked up the hatchet off the ground and lodged it into the back of the last remaining Votary of Starick. The twins joined hands, as though nothing had happened, and stared at Myron.

  “Think their sacrifices worked to keep Starick from coming for them?” Myron wanted to stay and watch to see what, if anything, Starick would do with his fallen devotees.

  “Chasm, no. If I thought that, I’d’ve tried it,” Rounder said with a grin. “You don’t really believe in all that custodian nonsense, do you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Hurry. We got to get off this flat before the sun goes down. Or them three maniacs’ll be the least of our worries.” Rounder adjusted the load on his landship. “Pull some crazy drack like that again and I ain’t coming back for ya, hear?” When he removed the burlap tarp and repositioned the water barrels, Myron spotted several books protected under a board, but Rounder had them shielded from view.

  Myron glanced at the twins again, clutched by their mother as though they had not killed with such ease moments earlier. Their eyes met Myron’s, but he felt no connection to them. The mother had two fresh trails on her cheeks where a pair of tears had trickled through the dust and grime. She dug through a bag at her feet and pulled out a carved wooden flute and offered it to Myron. She held each of her daughters’ hands and lifted them as if to thank Myron for what he’d done to save them.

  Rounder scoffed and situated the hatchet next to himself on the front bench. “Not takin’ any chance with those two.” He made a whistling sound as he shook his head at the twins. “Ain’t going to sleep with them around.”

  Neither the twins nor their mother had said a word since the incident with the Votaries of Starick, while Myron and Rounder pedaled toward the setting sun. Myron studied the flute the twins’ mother had given him. It bore intricate carvings and the markings of age, with indentations around the finger holes where use had worn away the finish. He put it to his lips and blew, producing a huff of wind with a soft whistle, then he shrugged and tucked it into his smock.

  “I saw some books.” Myron nodded toward the supplies in the back. “Where’d you get them?”

  “Oh no, don’t go asking questions about my stuff. I work hard for it. You hear?”

  “It’s just that I—I used to have some books.”

  “You know how to read?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How’d you learn?”

  “Grandfather,” Myron said. “He was educated.”

  Rounder’s gaze changed from stern to wistful. “The only reason I do this bit”—he gestured toward his passengers in the back—“is so I can find more stuff like that.”

  “Out here?”

  Rounder motioned for Myron to pedal faster, pointing to the sun that had almost dropped behind the gray teeth of the distant mountain range. “Every time I come upon a jumble of Old Age ruins, I dig for books—pamphlets, signs, folders, anything. Maybe I could build a library, you see.”

  “Old Age books?”

  “I’m guessing they are. I haven’t learned reading yet. But I will.” Rounder shoved a wad of billet thistle into his mouth until his cheek poked out from his face. He offered some to Myron, who grabbed a pinch of the dried leaves from the outstretched pouch. He welcomed anything to dull the pain in his head from the past few hours.

  “Why do you collect books if you can’t read them?” He accidentally swallowed some of the billet thistle, which caused him to retch almost immediately over the side of the landship.

  “What concern is it of yours? Don’t matter to you what I do.” He pointed a finger at Myron. “’Cept the fact that I saved your buzzard-food ass out there on the flat.”

  “Can I see your library? I can read the books for you and tell you what they say.”

  “Chasm, no. The only way I survived this long out here is not trusting no one.”

  Myron held the back of his hand out to remind Rounder of their kinship to the Industry Administration. “Can you at least help me find some books?”

  Rounder’s jaw clenched as he shook his head.

  Up, down, around, Myron pedaled until his legs threatened to pop the way a rubber drive belt breaks when it gets too hot. The idea of a library, even one constructed by an illiterate Rounder, transformed the hostile landscape of the Nethers into a place of wonder. He gazed in all directions, imagining Old Age leftovers, structures and vehicles that harbored books with clues to the life the Old Agers led and why it all went away, why Myron had been cheated from the marvels of technology that they enjoyed.

  She never said as much, but Myron had been sure that Sindra didn’t believe a lot of what Myron claimed about the Old Age. They were as mysterious as the Great Above, the way they lived, the marks they left, and the way they had disappeared.

  • • •

  Myron and Sindra sat beside each other on the front pew of the chapel. Sindra stared at the steep side of Iron’s Knob through the window as though the stained glass were still intact enough to divide the monochromatic landscape into a kaleidoscope of color. Myron tried to see what she saw, but his eyes wouldn’t leave her face. She hadn’t said much since he’d promised to take her with him to Bora Bora, except that she didn’t want to be an extra burden on his flying machine.

  “Once, when me and my grandfather were going to escape together,” Myron lowered his head, “he told me a saying. That if you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

  Sindra cocked her head. “Old Nickel said something like that too, out on the rails. The reason we were a band of railwalkers instead of a passel of lone walkabouts. ‘Scatter to survive. Come together to live.’”

  “Makes sense.” Myron nodded. “We’ll make it. It may take us years to reach Bora Bora, but—”

  “And what if there isn’t a Bora Bora?”

  “We’ll follow the tracks. Just like you did.”

  “The tracks? From one heap of broken shat to the other. I’ve been out there, Myron. There’s nothing like what you describe.” Sindra stood up and kicked a stone into the crumbling front wall of the chapel. “If the Old Age was so great, why isn’t anything they built still working?”

  “My grandfather said that, in the Old Age, they replaced all their books with machines. When the machines failed, everything went poof.” He opened his fingers like an explosion. “But there are books still somewhere out there. My grand
father had some. When we get out of Jonesbridge, we’ll find some. Most of them are fanciful stories, but you never know what they’ll show us.”

  Sindra took Myron’s hands. “I love that you’re so full of hope. But getting out of Jonesbridge…I don’t think that’s possible.”

  • • •

  Sindra’s words haunted him as he recalled her flight into the clouds above the Gorge and how much preparation and time had gone into building the airship. It wasn’t possible to escape Jonesbridge without a lot of know-how and a good deal of luck.

  “How did you get out of Jonesbridge?” Myron asked, as he eyed Rounder’s tattoo.

  Rounder rubbed his neck with a sour look on his face. “That was a good ten, maybe twelve years ago, kid. Time doesn’t really exist in the Nethers.”

  “But how?” Myron insisted.

  “How’d you do it?”

  “You saw me, shackled to a dead man.”

  The wheels of the contraption bobbled over rougher terrain as they left the flat behind them and entered the hills. Rounder bit his cheek. “One day, a few of them ghosts held me down and dropped a squat—right here,” he pointed to his nose. “The smell of that ghost shat worked me into a hard boil. I ain’t proud of what happened after that.”

  “But how—”

  “Look, kid, motivation is sometimes its own reward.” He held up his hand just as Myron’s mouth opened. “Don’t speak of it again.”

  As the orange hues of evening faded to purple, Rounder steered the landship between two rock formations and pulled the brake. He barked something in Gapi, and the twins and their mother climbed out of the landship. Myron followed. Rounder rotated a lever by the front bench, and both benches flattened to form a bed. He untied the sail and draped it over the contraption, where it fit snugly around the corners to form a tent. From the supplies, he reached for a metal can full of wax and lit the wick with a flint striker. Shadows from the flames rose up the triangles of fabric on all sides, following a tendril of smoke that wafted through the hole at the top.

  Rounder held a cup under the water barrel spigot and turned the valve. A trickle of water filled the cup. He handed it first to the mother of the twins, then to the twins in order from left to right. He refilled it and handed the cup to Myron. The water stung Myron’s throat when he threw his head back to get every drop in the cup.

  After Rounder took his drink, he fished a hard loaf of bread from a burlap sack and broke it into fifths, handing everyone a share. With a flat spoon, he dug into a tin and wiped a smear of green gelatin on the bread rations, starting with the twins.

  “This here is a bit of hoof pass and buckle mint.” Rounder continued adding the green mixture to the mother’s bread and then to Myron’s.

  Myron sniffed the part of the bread covered in hoof pass. He withdrew by instinct when the odor hit his nose.

  “It don’t smell like much, but it’ll give you the breath of a bull. You’ll need it for pedaling over that god-forgotten Sad Mind range tomorrow.”

  Rounder gave instructions to the mother and twins in Gapi. He turned to Myron. “You’re going to keep first watch. Keep a sharp eye for any movement out there—and watch them twins. No telling what they’re up to.” He snapped his fingers. “And if you have to squat or weddle, do it downwind from camp. The smell might attract…things.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “I don’t know.” Rounder handed Myron a strip of sharpened rebar and lifted the fabric of the sail for him to step out.

  The full moon illuminated the towering rock formations situated between the mesas on either side. The quiet struck Myron. No turbines spun, no wind blew, no one spoke, no coyotes howled, no bombs exploded, no orange shirts yelled, no overloaders released steam pressure. The crunch of his foot on the sand and sharp stones broke the silence, and Myron figured he could hear the snap of a shin pine branch if it happened twenty hects away. He sat down on a boulder that resembled a chair and waited for something to happen, for nothing to happen, for his turn to sleep.

  Staring into the Nethers, a landscape as beautiful as it was dead, the rock formations mesmerized him. They alternated heights, taller to smaller, as if to march across the horizon. Myron pulled out the flute the twins’ mother had given him. He’d grown accustomed to the staccato melody of the pings and pangs of hammers on iron, what passed for music in Jonesbridge, but he loved the sound of a horn or the strum of a crate banger, the guitars people in Richterville created by cutting holes in wooden boxes and spanning them with taut strings.

  He put the flute to his mouth and blew, covering the holes one by one with his fingers, producing a whistle no better than steam piston. He played until the cloth on the landship rippled, assuming it was Rounder coming to relieve him. Instead, one of the twins slipped under the fabric alone and sat beside Myron on the boulder.

  She pointed a finger to her chest. “Gah-té,” she said, patting herself. “Gah-té.” She turned her back to Myron, lifting her shirt to reveal a jagged scar that ran the length of the left side of her torso.

  “Gah-tah?” Myron gestured toward her.

  “Gah-té.” Her lips pressed into a flat line approximating a smile, giving him a nod. She reached out for the flute, placed it lengthwise on her palm, and turned it in the opposite direction, indicating that Myron had been blowing through the wrong end. “Fauta.” She tapped the flute.

  “Fah-tah,” Myron repeated.

  “Fah-oo-tah.” Gah-té took Myron’s hand and blew on his skin. “Así.” A light stream of air hit his flesh as if she brushed it with a feather. She then blew as hard as Myron had been doing, so he could see the difference, and wagged her finger. “Nop.”

  Gah-té closed her eyes and put the flute to her lips. Her song began with a string of notes that persisted without hiccup or pause until the tune lulled Myron into visions of stars and flying, unaided by machines, with wings for arms. It conjured images of green fields of clover withering into a sea of dry stems beneath him. Her music transported him to a different time and place, not a better or bleaker place, but unfamiliar, and he didn’t want it to stop.

  As she finished her song, the flap on the landship flipped open again. The other twin joined them on the boulder. “Mah-ré.” Gah-té pointed at her twin. Mah-ré turned her back to Myron and showed him her scar that ran the length of the right side of her torso, the opposite of Gah-té’s.

  Gah-té joined her hands together, nodding at her twin, and then ripped her hands apart. She repeated this action, this time pointing first at Mah-ré’s scar. She joined her hands again, fingers interlocked, and pulled with a scowl on her face, her fingers holding onto one another until she wrenched them apart. She did this again and again, each time with her face more distressed until Myron finally made the leap that the twins had once been joined together, separated by a surgeon’s knife. Though the thought of such a creature gave Myron a knot in his stomach.

  “Mah-ré.” Gah-té spoke her sister’s name and swooned, acting as though she’d died, after which she spoke her own name and came to life. She gestured with her hands, repeating.

  Myron’s interpretation of her actions changed several times, but he finally surmised that mah-ré in Gapi meant death, and gah-té life, but he also thought it might have meant tired and energetic—or asleep and awake.

  Mah-ré pointed at Myron, placing her finger on his chest. “Haash yini?”

  “My name?”

  “My name?” Mah-ré repeated.

  “No. Myron. My name is Myron. My-ron.”

  Both Mah-ré and Gah-té spoke his name at the same time as they returned to the landship and settled beside their mother. Minutes later, Rounder relieved Myron of watch so he could sleep, but thoughts of Sindra kept him awake, the question that etched his soul. Was the wind sandblasting her bones clean somewhere in the Nethers?

  When light struck the red and yellow mineral striations that skirted the rock formations, Rounder rousted Myron from half-sleep. He prepared the contraption for
travel in a matter of minutes without saying a word. They made quick time in the morning as Myron and Rounder peddled toward Mesa Gap. Unlike the day before, when Rounder had been up for conversation, he didn’t even acknowledge Myron’s presence or his effort on the pedals.

  The clack of the supplies on the wagon bed and the crunch of dried earth under the wheels were the only sounds until they arrived upon a paved trail, a wide, Old Age highway pocked with cracks and holes, washed out on one side. A battered road sign hanging from one post read:

  BARSTOW 35

  VICTORVILLE 67

  The highway stretched all the way to the horizon in both directions, a marvel of Old Age engineering, but instead of heading southwest, continuing their journey to Mesa Gap, they turned up the highway in the other direction. The mother of the twins stood up. “Nop. Nop.” She wagged her finger, shouting in Gapi as she urged her daughters off the moving landship.

  Myron cut his eyes to Rounder for an explanation.

  Rounder and the mother exchanged a few heated phrases, ending when the mother spat toward the northeast.

  “She’s cursing me for going the wrong way, but I’ve gotta get some supplies.” Rounder dug through his stash, moving the water barrel and resituating the load before pulling out a shotgun. He broke it open where the stock met a pair of barrels, showing the empty barrels to Myron. “Don’t want to travel this road without shells for my strong arm. And there’s only one place I know to get them.”

  “We have to have them?”

  Rounder swung the shotgun toward the southwest, toward Mesa Gap, and chuckled. “Never know what we’ll find down that way. I sure as Chasm don’t want to go without some insurance.”

  Gah-té left her mother’s hand and approached Myron and Rounder. She pointed up the road opposite of Mesa Gap, toward the northeast. “Myron?”