by Perrin Briar
The other team leaders looked like scared children, unwilling to face their fears.
“It’s safe,” Sturgess said. “There’s no one else here. We’re alone.”
They were apprehensive, and for obvious reasons. It wasn’t every day you took an express elevator, to find yourself in the world’s biggest Gravitas warehouse. The miners were out of their element. There was nothing remotely similar to the mines they were used to harvesting.
They edged forward with shuffling steps in the small pools of light cast by bright lights on the ceiling.
“Those must be some of the brightest candles I’ve ever seen,” Old Man Marley said, cupping his hands over his eyes and looking up at where the light emanated from.
“I don’t think they’re candles,” Sturgess said. “There’s no flicker.”
“Then what do you suppose they are?” Old Man Marley said.
“Something else,” Sturgess said.
“They could do a lot of good in the mines, don’t you think?” Old Man Marley said.
“That they could,” Sturgess said.
They were playing for time, discussing things they all felt comfortable with. But they needed to press on, into the darkness and the unknown.
They walked between the huge mounds of Gravitas on either side of them, emerging out into a large open space. Sturgess turned to find Old Man Marley staring at the mounds.
“These are our rocks,” he said. “These are the Gravitas rocks we dug up.”
“More than just what we dug up,” Sturgess said. “There are rocks from mining camps all over the world, all brought here, to the biggest room in the world, and then left… But for what purpose?”
“None by the look of it,” Old Man Marley said.
Then an idea occurred to Sturgess.
“Do you know what this means?” he said.
“That I’ve wasted my life doing something for no particular reason?” Old Man Marley said.
“We knew that already,” Robin grumbled.
Sound carried in the warehouse. Old Man Marley glared at Robin, whose eyes went wide.
“No,” Sturgess said. “It means we might be able to reverse everything we’ve done. If we can get these rocks back to the surface, we could replace them in the world’s walls, bury them, and everything will be as it was. Gravity will return to normal. And with time, maybe even the animals will come back.”
“Or maybe nothing might happen,” Old Man Marley said.
“Maybe,” Sturgess said. “But it has to be worth a try.”
“Going back, undoing all our good work,” Old Man Marley said, shaking his head.
“It doesn’t matter anyway,” Robin said. “We can’t exactly take it with us.”
“We can,” Sturgess said. “But first we need to figure out just what’s going on here.”
“I say we get out of here,” Robin said. “We’ve seen what they do with the Gravitas. Let’s go.”
“We came all this way,” Sturgess said. “The least we can do is get some answers to our questions. You can go if you want. But I’m staying.”
That comment brokered no argument. A miner never left a fellow worker behind.
Sturgess pressed on into the darkness, moving in a random direction. It was as good as any direction, he figured. He wasn’t going to stop until he came to the way out.
He walked for what felt like a long time, but it was probably only a few minutes. Just when he thought perhaps he had better head in another direction, that there was nothing this way, he bumped into something. It was hard and unyielding.
In the mines he could rely on his senses to tell him he was getting close to something, judging by the sounds that refracted off the hard walls, but he wasn’t used to this place yet.
“There’s something here,” Sturgess said to the others.
He hadn’t felt what it was yet, but he sensed it was something large and hard. He held out his hands and felt at the cold darkness. It didn’t yield under his fingertips. He had to keep moving. He flinched, pulling back when his fingertips were impaled by thick splinters. He put his fingers in his mouth, felt his skin with his tongue, seized the splinters, and pulled them out, spitting them to one side.
Sturgess put his fingers back to the tall wall and felt along the grooves he felt there, more careful this time. He was certain it was a door. He pushed and pried at it. The others joined him in his investigation, and identified large lengths of wood that were held in place by metal hooks. They lifted them and tossed the barricade aside. They made hollow thud noises as they bounced on the hard concrete floor.
“Moment of truth,” Old Man Marley said.
They formed a line and pushed at the doors, using every muscle they’d developed over the years. The doors, heavy and unyielding, creaked, finally giving way. Early morning sunlight spilled through the crack, blinding them. They blinked against it.
Nothing could have prepared them for what was waiting on the other side.
27.
CASSIE AND AARON munched on another lackluster meal of tough rat meat and fruit skins. Cassie wasn’t sure if the food gave them more energy than it took to consume it, but it was sustenance of a sort. Aaron sucked the fruit from its skin and lay the empty shells on top of one another.
It was a bizarre-looking fruit, like a banana, but twisted like the fingers of a weeping willow. The fruit had bruises. The strange thing was each mark was reflected on the other side, forming a bruise of equal size, even if both sides hadn’t been struck.
“Why do you think it does that?” Cassie said.
“Huh?” Aaron said.
“The skins,” Cassie said. “Why do you think they reflect the bruises on the other side like that?”
Aaron shrugged. He had his mind on other things.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Who cares?”
Cassie shrugged.
“It just seems weird,” she said. “And it’s boring sitting here watching you work on your jigsaw puzzle.”
Aaron nodded with no expression. He was ignoring her again, his mind back on the map. Cassie growled.
“Will you just talk to me for a few minutes?” she said. “Do you really think it’ll make a massive difference if we chat for a while?”
“What?” Aaron said. “What do you want to talk about? Some fruit skins? If you didn’t notice, I’m trying to help us get out of here. I haven’t got time to talk about fruit skins. Maybe they’re two halves of the same coin. Maybe the skins are actually two organisms and it’s their way of communicating with one another. How should I know?”
“I was just curious,” Cassie said. “I’ve been sitting here for ages, and you’ve just been staring at lumps of rock. They probably won’t help us get out of here anyway.”
“But they might,” Aaron said. “You can’t know that. Neither of us can, till we give it a try.”
“Fine,” Cassie said. “You waste away in front of the puzzle while I defend us from the world. Great plan.”
Aaron turned away from her and stood facing the map. He did just as Cassie had said. She hadn’t been serious. She didn’t want him to turn away from her. They were meant to be working as a team, meant to be figuring a way out of there, but instead they were just wasting time.
And then Aaron froze. He was halfway through taking a step and almost fell over. He gasped out loud.
“No…” he said. “It can’t be.”
“What?” Cassie said. “What is it?”
Aaron moved around the map, stepping over it and frowning, turning his head to the side to figure out what it was telling him.
“Aaron!” Cassie said, finally losing her patience. “What is it?”
Aaron looked up. He had a big grin on his face. He approached Cassie, and before she could stop him, he wrapped his arms around her shoulders, squeezed, and kissed her on the cheek.
“Are you freaking crazy?” Cassie said, twisting loose.
“Yes, I just might be,” Aaron said. “Isn’t it wonder
ful?”
“Exulting,” Cassie said. “What have I done to demand such attention?”
“You’ve solve the riddle!” Aaron said. “With your stupid, pointless conversation topic-”
“Easy on,” Cassie said.
“-you’ve solved it!” Aaron said.
“I’ve never solved a riddle in my life,” Cassie said. “How is it I’m supposed to have solved yours?”
“Come and take a look,” Aaron said, hopping back over to the puzzle spread out before them. “I’ve been working on piecing these two maps together, right? Well, what if they aren’t really two maps at all. What if they’re just one?”
“I thought you said they couldn’t be two maps,” Cassie said.
“They can’t,” Aaron said. “But they can.”
“You’re making absolutely no sense,” Cassie said.
“Look at it this way,” Aaron said. “It’s like the fruit skin. Sometimes one side has an effect on the other. If you look at these maps you can see they’re the same. They are a mirror reflection of one another. Where there’s a lake of lava on one side, there’s a fissure on the other. Where there’s a mountain on one side, there’s a small rise on the other. They’re not always exactly the same in size and scope, but they’re always in the same place.”
Cassie frowned. She still wasn’t getting it.
“Don’t you see?” Aaron said. “They’re two sides of the same puzzle! That’s why the map we were building looks like it is made up of two maps. Because there are two of them.”
“How can there be two of them?” Cassie said. “So, one is for the past, the other for more recently?”
“No,” Aaron said. “They’re both recent. The modern day.”
He picked one map up and placed it one on top of the other. He had to be careful. It was still delicate.
“That’s it,” he said.
The two images fit together, but it still wasn’t clear to Cassie what it was meant to be depicting.
“There’s an up and a down,” Aaron said. “When we arrived here, we arrived on one side of the world, on one map. The birds picked us up and carried us toward their nest here, but on the way they spun in the air, do you remember?”
“I remember almost spewing my guts,” Cassie said. “So, yeah, I think I can recall it.”
“That’s it,” Aaron said. “That was why they performed the little spin in the air. The gravity shifted, from one world to the next. From up to down.”
“So, where are our parents?” Cassie said.
Aaron thought for a moment, and then stood up. He looked at the sky, the roof of their world.
“Up there,” he said. “They’re up there in the sky, only to them it’s not the sky, it’s the ground. And to them, we’re in the sky. The world’s gone topsy turvy.”
“You can say that again,” Cassie said.
28.
IT HAD once been a perfect utopia. There had once been beautiful houses here, with lounging lawns and gorgeous water fountains. But they were no longer lived in. They were decrepit and misused. Nature had already begun to reclaim them, slipping its fingers through the heavy ugly concrete human structures. No one had lifted a finger to slow the process.
“They hardly have any guards here,” Robin said.
“Thanks for stating the obvious,” Sturgess said.
“It’s my role,” Robin said with a shrug.
The streets were festooned with horseless carriages that had been left to rust. The miners peered through the windows at this advanced technology, uncomprehending what it was they were looking at, no concept of what it was or how it was used. But they recognised the rocks, rounded and polished to a high shine on the vehicles’ underside. It was Gravitas, and the Merchants appeared to use it at every opportunity they could find.
The vehicles hovered a foot off the hard black tarmac, unmoving and silent. Doors had been thrown open and whoever had been the former owners were now nowhere to be seen. By the look of the city they might not be found anywhere. The miners brushed against the vehicles, causing them to drift forward, like slippery butter on a hot plate.
The miners continued on down the road. Shops lined either side of the streets, full of items none of them had ever seen before. Everything appeared to be made using Gravitas as a chief component.
Did the residents here know where the Gravitas came from? Did they know what it cost the miners? Did they even care? It was hard to believe anyone could know such things and continue with their lives. Surely someone would have let the truth be known, would have spread the word so everyone knew others were being exploited. But there was no evidence of that, only the opulence and utopian lifestyle people were used to living here.
Soon, the detritus-ridden streets gave way, and the miners passed through them like extras in a post-apocalyptic movie. It got worse, with blood splatter explosions over walls and house fronts. There was little that wasn’t damaged. Newspaper pages blew over the vast empty expanses.
The morning light was beginning to catch up to them, but the sky was still an attractive deep ocean blue. The stars winked at them, bright and twinkling. And now that Sturgess looked at the stars, his brow drew down into a frown.
The stars were altogether different to those he saw from his village. But how could that be? He searched the sky for the constellations he’d grown up with, but couldn’t locate them. It was puzzling.
Finally they came to a building, larger than the others, with a huge ‘G’ on its front. Underneath it was written, ‘Gravitas: Meeting All Your Energy Needs’. The miners recognized the Gravitas company emblem as the same etched on the platform they piled with Gravitas every day.
The Gravitas building at least looked shiny, new, and well taken care of. It was constructed of metal and plate glass, a construction the miners had never seen before. They were drawn to it, not least because it had been their backs that supported the foundations of this magnificent building. It was their hard work that had built it.
Some of the glass plates had been smashed, tiny star-like fragments glinting on the floor. The metal was bent, twisted, and melted. Some of the Gravitas vehicles had smashed their way into the building.
The miners shared uneasy expressions. They expected for this world to be advanced and sophisticated, to be untouched and without blemish—it was where the Merchants lived after all. How could they live in such squalor?
“We ought to turn back,” Robin said.
“Turn back?” Sturgess said. “We’re almost there.”
“There’s not going to be anybody here we can speak to,” Robin said.
“We won’t know unless we look,” Sturgess said.
“How do we even know the person we want to speak to is here?” Robin said.
“We’re in Gravitas headquarters,” Old Man Marley said. “It’s the ideal place. And if it’s not, someone here might know where we should go.”
“The whole town is gone,” Robin said.
“We’re going to do what we set out to do,” Old Man Marley said. “We’re not turning back now.”
That ended the argument.
They ascended the stairs to the top floor. It was a long way, and they were out of breath by the time they got there. Their bodies were hard and muscular, used to pushing themselves. They could have scaled the stairs of any large building, but this place, at least, was something they could all cling to. Despite being exploited by the company, they were at least familiar with it. It was a part of them.
They came to a huge office that took up the entire top floor. It belonged to the CEO. His name was Ratchett Duke. There were drawings and impressive works of art on the walls, with futuristic blueprints. They brought a sense of excitement to the space. They fluttered, disturbed by the broken full-length window behind the oak desk.
“What did I say?” Robin said. “No one here. Just like I said there wouldn’t be. Now can we go?”
“And who, may I ask, are you?” a voice said.
They turned to
find a heavyset smock-wearing man with wobbling chins. He was rotund and balding and hadn’t shaved in a month. The majority of his whiskers were grey.
“We’re the miners,” Sturgess said. “You must be Mr. Duke. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“Ratchett,” the Merchant said without thought. “The miners?”
His eyes had a faint and distant cast to them.
“Miners from where?” he said.
“From the north wall,” Sturgess said.
“The north wall?” Ratchett said. “You’re miners from the north wall?”
“Yes,” Sturgess said, gesturing to his body.
It would have been pretty obvious to anyone Sturgess was telling the truth if they had just taken a moment to look down and check out Sturgess’s getup. Finally Ratchett did look down. His eyes registered surprise. He recovered himself, but it was too late to hide his shock.
“I see,” he said. “Would you care for a drink?”
It was such a strange thing to ask that Sturgess didn’t know what to say at first. He let the question wash over him. He didn’t know what he was supposed to say. Then he nodded.
“Please,” he said.
“Your friends?” Ratchett said.
“Please,” Sturgess said.
He’d been prepared to hate the Merchants. They took with no remorse, and no hint of giving back. Instead he’d found a vaguely likeable man. He was old, older than perhaps even Old Man Marley, but the miles didn’t show up so obviously on his face.
Living to an old age was a sign of skill and hardiness in the pits, where you might get squashed or destroyed at any moment. There was no knowing when your last breath might be, and so you tended to savor each one as you drew it into your body.
Ratchett moved to a drinks cabinet and poured them each a cut glass of whiskey. He handed one to each man and invited them to sit on the sofas in his office. They did, sinking into the most comfortable seats they had ever rested their behinds on.