The Knowing

by Sharon Cameron

  But now that my eyes are more open, and after talking to Grandpapa, I can see why I’ve been getting safely back and forth Outside. Our way is being smoothed for us. I Know where the supervisors are supposed to be, though there’s always a chance that one won’t go where they should, and for that reason, I think, the blond young man who was playing toss stones is on the lookout a little way ahead. And there’s a girl hanging behind, hardly more than a child, who’s made every turn that we have. And there is a woman, her undyed dress cinched with a braided belt, keeping step with us on the other side of the street. Has this been happening every time I come Outside? I was almost always with Nita, and never thought to look.

  I see the woman with the braided belt pause, and then I realize that Beckett is not beside me. The beat inside my chest doubles, and I turn, but he’s only a few meters back, standing stock-still in front of the loom house, a few heads turning to look at him as they pass. I hurry back, threading through the people going the opposite direction, confusing our escort, and grab his hand, trying to pull him away. But he whispers, “Wait. Please.”

  The weavers are singing down the looms. It’s a song about the end of work and life, the thump of the looms coming into a common rhythm, softening as one by one, each weaver finishes a row and drops away. Annis is in there somewhere. There’s only one left by the end of the song, the last loom slowing to a stop.

  “Thanks,” Beckett says, the word hardly spoken. But the smile is a gift. He hasn’t let go of my hand. I don’t let go, either. And then we start down the street that way. Together. I feel warm. Connected. Two ends of a rope braided together. And it hurts inside my chest.

  Our escorts pick up our path, scouting and clearing our trail, and then I take a quick turn onto Potter’s Street, to avoid a supervisor, then a detour down an alley, to avoid the supervisor due there. Only the little girl is still shadowing us now. We hurry between the houses of the diggers and fuelmakers until we hit the tumult of the Bartering Square.

  Beckett isn’t nearly as noticeable here. Everyone is craning their necks, straining to catch glimpses of the displayed wares—all scraps and discards from the requests of the Underneath—looking for a last-minute trade before the resting. The activities in the Bartering Square are not exactly sanctioned, but as long as the requests of the city are filled, as long as what goes out on the tables is inferior, or unusable, then the supervisors turn a blind eye. Stealing is different, and the reminder is in the very center of the square, the one place clear of people, where a single wooden post stands before the small tower of the water clock that straddles the fountain. The pillar is scarred and stained, ugly, a set of shackles hanging from its top.

  Beckett’s hand is still warm in mine as I navigate him through the calling and shouting of the crowd, most of it good-natured, some of it not. He leans close to my ear and says, “What are they using for money?”

  I have no idea what he’s talking about.

  “For currency?” he asks, as if that might clarify.

  I pull him a little faster, to make him stop talking, past the last table, laid with rows of necklaces made of misshapen beads. We leave the square for the quieter Dyer’s Lane, and make a quick turn onto Gates to avoid the route of the patrol.

  We’ve come to the nearest arm of the mountain now, rising up on our left. And there is the black-arched entryway of my city, a yawning hole blazing light like a star in a sloping black sky. Two heavy gates, solid, the metal engraved with a sun and three moons, stand open on either side, and Outsiders are filing out between them, the launderers and kitchen workers and family help, passing beneath the gaze of a supervisor. The supervisor is Himmat, counting and matching faces, making certain that all who went in are coming out again, before the gates are shut and locked at the resting bell. I wonder if it was Thorne who told him to lie to Annis about Nita coming out through the gates. Or Craddock.

  I keep Beckett on the far side of the street, well out of the lamplight, until we come to a row of rough shacks, the nearest with its rafters showing through holes in the thatch. We step to one side with our connected hands, into the dark between two houses.

  “Can you see if there’s anyone inside that hut over there?”

  He glances at it, slips a hand inside his shirt, and slides on the glasses. Then they’re off and put away again. He shakes his head. “No one.”

  I walk us past the row of shacks and through an alley, coming up from behind the hut to sidle through a broken board in the back. It’s inky dark inside, with only the barest hint of the streetlamps coming in through the roof holes.

  “What is this place?” Beckett whispers.

  “An old supply hut. Careful. There’s an open shaft in the middle of the floor.”

  I feel Beckett moving, and realize he’s put on the glasses. “So the Outside sends goods down the shaft to the city?”

  “This one leads to a set of upper-level kitchens that aren’t being used anymore,” I reply. There aren’t as many Knowing Underneath as there once were.

  “Are you sure? There are boxes in here. Marked ‘apple’ and ‘silvercurrant.’ ”

  We go together to the stack of boxes. He’s right. I’ve never seen anything being stored in here. It makes me worried.

  Beckett must be looking through the dark at the stone-paved platform around the shaft now, because he whispers, “Should we have brought the gear?”

  “No. The shaft is at a slope. It’s supposed to be locked on the other end, but it only looks like it is.” Thanks to Nita. “We’ll have to wait, though. Curfew Outside is earlier than resting for the Knowing.” And we do not want to go down before the Knowing are in their chambers.

  We settle with our backs to the boxes, out of sight of the door, just in case. The bells are ringing, and Beckett still hasn’t let go of my hand. I don’t think he intends to. He has it between both of his now. I feel the ache in my chest. A pleasant kind of pain.

  “Are you watching?” I ask him. I feel him nod, his shoulder against mine. And then I say, “There’s something I haven’t told you.”

  He waits. And I wait. Because what I’m going to say is ridiculous. I take a breath.

  “I remember you.”

  He doesn’t say anything. But I feel him listening.

  “Because I dreamed you. When I was a baby.”

  He still doesn’t say anything.

  “I Knew you as soon as I saw you in the Cursed City. It doesn’t make any sense.” I pause. “But I do remember you.”

  “Sam,” he whispers slowly, “what do babies dream about?”

  I don’t Know what to say.

  “Come on,” he coaxes, “what do babies dream about, when they’re not dreaming about me?”

  Now I’m smiling. “Things they understand. Hunger, faces, warmth, cold. The dreams are fuzzy at first, but they get clearer and clearer before they stop.”

  “What do you mean? When do dreams stop?”

  “When you’re three, when your memories come. You only dream what you Know after that. Only what has really been. Not … imaginings.”

  Beckett is silent, and his thumb is stroking mine, light and slow. I’m not sure he even knows he’s doing it. My ache is becoming need.

  He asks, “How old was I, when you saw me?”

  “Almost as you are now. How old are you?” I can’t believe I haven’t asked before.

  “Eighteen.”

  “What season is your birth?”

  He hesitates. “Late in the year, the last season.”

  I’m older than him. “Where were you born?”

  “Austin, Texas.”

  “How far away is … Austin, Texas?”

  I think I can hear him smile. “Thirty-nine trillion kilometers.”

  The thumb runs light along mine. How could he be here, across all that space?

  “Sam, you couldn’t have seen me when you were a baby, not like I am now.”

  “I Know.” Except that I did. Everything but the eyes. And then he stiffen
s.

  I tense. Wait. And he says, “Someone’s coming.”

  “Can we make the shaft?”

  He doesn’t answer, we are just moving, and I follow him this time, because I think he can see. He goes straight to the stone platform and the edge of the hole. Then I hear what the glasses must have already shown him. Voices, very soft, coming around the back of the hut, like we did. Beckett is already halfway inside the shaft.

  “Brace yourself against the sides,” I whisper, “so you don’t slide … ”

  He disappears lower, hand reaching up to help me in, scooting down to make room for me, and then they are inside the hut, two of them, one whispering, “Stack that one behind the others.”

  It’s Annis. Annis, who is a weaver, who has no business being in a supply hut that leads to the kitchens, even if it was being used. And she doesn’t have a light. And the next voice I Know, too.

  “We shouldn’t be using it. They’ve looked in here once since the last time she came up … ”

  That is Angela, Michael’s mother, and the only “she” coming up through this shaft has been me.

  “They’ve looked in here every day,” Annis replies. “But Henry got permission to put in extra food stores, so nothing will be amiss if they glance through the door.”

  “And if they open the boxes?”

  If Annis answers that question, I can’t hear it. There’s shuffling, the sound of sliding crates. My leg muscles ache. The silence settles back in.

  “Gone,” Beckett whispers. His head is somewhere below my feet. “Should we go back up?”

  I mark the time. “Down,” I tell him.

  We inch our way along the shaft, like a very slow, very controlled slide, pushing side to side against the walls of black rock. I’m worried for Annis. But then again, I have a feeling that what I’m doing is more dangerous.

  I start measuring my breaths. The shaft seems smaller with another person inside, with someone else setting my pace. And I’m beginning to feel the weight, my mind telling me just how many tons of rock there are in the mountain, and just how trapped I will be if it falls. Like every time I come back to the city from open air. I didn’t feel this way in the caves, though. I feel this way coming home. Panic untwists in my middle. And then I bump into Beckett’s hand. Or maybe it’s his head.

  “I think we’re at the door,” he whispers. “And someone’s shoes are down here.” Those would be mine. From the last time, the day Nita died. They must have slid down from the top. Then he says, “Wait.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “There’s something in front of the door.”

  “You mean it’s blocked?”

  “No … ” Then he says, “Are you wedged in? Can you stay where you are?”

  I can, but I don’t want to. Panic is bringing memories, tentacles stretching up from the deep places of my mind, trying to drag me down. And suddenly I can feel the ache in my lungs, just before breaking the surface of deep water. My father trying to pin me still when I thrashed while Adam burned. The black dress I wore at the last Changing of the Seasons that felt too, too tight. I breathe, and breathe …

  “Stay with me, Sam,” he whispers. “I’m almost done … ”

  I hear the soft squeak of the metal door lifting upward, and the passage below me clears. I slide out after him.

  We’re in a storage room with four rock walls, square, barren but for the shaft door and empty lantern sconces. I only Know this because I’ve been in here before. With a light. I can smell the perfume of the Underneath.

  “Someone was expecting you,” Beckett whispers. “Look.”

  A faint glow appears at the corner of the glasses, a narrow beam of light in the darkness. He takes them off and aims the light at the metal door, and then I see that he’s holding a thread across his palm.

  “It was strung across,” he says, “so it would break when the door was opened. Simple, but effective. I was looking with the glasses, just in case, and for a second I thought it was a spiderweb, but—”

  “What’s a spiderweb?”

  He smiles. “Never mind.”

  I touch the thin string, still wrapped around a tiny tack wedged between the rock and the metal frame. “It’s suture thread,” I say. What I would have used on Michael if Beckett’s technology hadn’t been better. I think of Marcus Physicianson, chasing me through the ruined city. Or Reddix.

  “If you’d come through as usual, you would’ve never realized it was there,” says Beckett. “But someone wanted to Know when you were back in the city. Not stop you. Just Know. Unless you think other people are climbing down the shaft.”

  I doubt very much that someone else is climbing down this shaft.

  “Who knows you come this way, Sam?”

  Only Nita. I thought it was only Nita. “We should go,” I whisper.

  “Let’s put this back first, don’t you think?” He finds the other tack in the faint glow from the glasses, winding the string back around it.

  “Wait. How many times was that thread wrapped?”

  Beckett pauses. “I don’t know.”

  “If one of the Knowing did it, they’ll Know how many times.”

  I watch him think. “Then I’ll do the same number as the other side.”

  That will have to do. I step back, hand over my face. If fear can make a bad memory stronger, then smell brings them on more quickly. Nita’s memory is here, waiting, and Adam, too. A thousand others. And I’m already feeling like we’re nearly caught, and that I should have never, ever brought Beckett Rodriguez down here.

  He finishes the thread and stands, then takes a good look at me. “Are you okay?”

  I nod. My breath is coming short again. I’m not okay.

  “I’m watching, remember?” he says. The irony isn’t lost on either of us.

  He takes my hand again, like it’s the most natural way to travel now, and I lead him through the empty rooms, strange in the false light, past one or two broken barrels sticky with the remnants of biofuel, to the stairwell that goes both up and down, connecting the different levels of the kitchens.

  “Put out the light,” I whisper. It disappears. Now it’s just Beckett’s hand and the blackness.

  We make our way down, fast. Me, because I grew up in the dark. Him, because he can see. Down, to the next level and the next. The kitchens are like a piece of the Outside Underneath, and the Knowing are not supposed to frequent these areas, especially during the resting. We should be alone. When we get to the bottom of the stairs, to the lowest level, there is a wooden door, tall and arched, closed, but not locked. I pause, turn toward Beckett in the narrow space. “What can you see beyond the door?”

  After a moment he says, “A passageway. Empty.”

  I put a hand on the latch, but I don’t push it down. “Beck, we cannot be seen. Not at all. We just can’t be seen.” If we meet someone in that corridor, in the entire Underneath, then this is over. For the Knowing and Outside, Beckett and me.

  He doesn’t say anything, just lifts my hand, the one that’s still in his, and presses his lips to the back of it.

  And that feeling is something I do not want to Forget.

  I push down on the latch, and we step into the corridor of Level One.

  There was a story we studied once, in prewar literatures, in my school complex in Texas. About going down a rabbit hole and finding another world. One minute it was wood planks and dirt streets, fires and roof thatch, the weavers singing at their looms, and now, after a long slide down, I’m standing in a place that is perfume, thick carpet, and flickering silver sconces, polished stone walls reflecting light down the corridor like a deep, dark mirror. I look at Sam, with her amber eyes and black hair. Is this really where she belongs? It’s hard to reconcile it with the Sam of the caves and the Outside. But I am understanding her fear now. If someone comes into this shining tunnel, there will be no place to hide.

  Sam moves fast but she doesn’t run. The quiet is heavy, and soon the polish of the walls
is broken every now and again by a recess with an arched, wooden door. Samara’s hand is still in mine. It seems like she wants it there. I’m not letting go of it. I check the glasses again but there’s nothing. Nothing that isn’t blocked by this rock, that is. But there is the green light of the power source, much stronger now, pulsing in the corner of my vision, somewhere below us. Then Sam stops in front of one of the doors and pushes down the latch. It creaks very softly as it opens.

  The room behind the door is hung with mirrors, lots of them, throwing back images of stone arches and beveled edges that must have taken years to carve. But there’s nothing else. No furniture, no carpets, only musty air and empty space. It’s chilly, a cold that gets in your bones. Sam lets go of me to shut the door with two hands, minimizing the creak. “Where are we?” I whisper.

  “Uncle Towlend’s chambers.”

  She glides across the black floor in that way she has, opens two doors paned with tiny windows, and beckons. I hear the gush of water. Beyond the doors is a terrace, railings overlooking a rushing river, whitecapping and flinging spray. We’re in a natural cavern, and the place is dotted with balconies on both sides of the water, lamps hanging from some of them, points of light in a huge dark.

  “I need to get to my room,” Sam whispers. “Without going through the front door.”

  “Where?”

  She points. “Three levels, straight up. I … ” Then she stops, staring.

  “What’s wrong?” For a second I thought she was going into a memory. But she just says, “My lamps are lit.”

  I lean to look three levels above us. The cavern wall slopes back, and I can just see two lamps shining in the window.

  “Do you see the second balcony over there, same level?”

  I do. Two lamps, hung exactly the same.

  “That was Adam’s room. My father has lit those lamps every night for twelve years. I never thought he’d light a lamp for me … ” She blinks. “He thinks I’m dead.”

  I blow out a breath, use the glasses, and I don’t think there’s anyone in Samara’s room, though with this rock and all the burrowed-out chambers, it’s hard to pinpoint.