by Rose Francis
As Christine breathed the lifeless air, she remembered her first venture into the Foundation, the abandoned structure supporting their cloud-surrounded city. A boy named Sanjay dared her, and she hadn’t had the heart to tell him no, even if it meant ignoring her father’s warnings.
Besides, she wanted to prove herself, with so much extra pressure on her from David’s absence. Sanjay swore he’d been there before, that anyone could be truly happy there. She needed that so very badly. Even the chance of a minute’s relief from her father’s pain and the gap where the family’s missing members should have been was enough to galvanize her to leave the slum streets, follow him through dusty corridors, down a brittle stairwell, and into the devil’s mouth.
At first, the air was empty, and that emptiness was frightening after the odors of the Block. But as they moved and stirred up dust that hadn’t been shifted in decades, the taste of decay crept in. She gagged, and made to turn back, but he pulled her forward, his arm warm around her shoulders, like David’s when she had crawled next to him after a nightmare.
Two more flights down, the air took on a thick taste. She couldn’t place it, and was afraid to ask her guide. She began to breathe heavily, and realized that some of the pipes that had sustained this floor must have been salvaged, leaving the inside exposed and lessening the air’s ability to nourish—she tasted it more, but it satisfied her less.
She caught Sanjay sucking air through his teeth while he held onto the wall for dear life. Perhaps it should have concerned her that even her guide was having such difficulties, but instead she felt relief to see that she wasn’t the only one panting like it was summer solstice. A moment of weakness took her knees out from under her and stirred up more dust.
Sanjay giggled, his voice thinner than usual. She’d stirred up dust, and with it, the scents it concealed. “C’mon,” he said, picking her up, carrying her deeper into the belly of the Block.
Another flight down, he stopped. “Did you see that?” She looked, but there was nothing. Just decaying ceiling tiles the scavenging teams had missed, and graffiti, the remains of people like her. People left unmourned once their bodies had been granted their rest in the world at large, sectioned into parts that could be used by the community, and the remainder dumped down a chute that the teachers swore had once allowed people to progress from one floor to another in seconds.
Every time a new floor was added, the shaft was preserved, a one-way ticket to return to the earth that had once spawned them. Select organs, bones, and tissue were removed to help nourish the hydroponic garden or be recycled into mineral stipends. Fuel was too precious to waste on pyres, and there was obviously no space for graves, not with the Earth thousands of feet below them, more an idea than a physicality. Perhaps their ancestors’ selfishness in death had been what caused the world itself to sicken and turn against humanity.
Brain and spinal cord were sacred, the person’s soul and virtue, and were returned to the earth down the chute. Those who defied that and ate those parts went mad and died, the soul of the consumed stuck in the eater’s body. But the calcium and collagen from their dead’s bones kept them healthy, not containing a strong enough impression of their former owner to hurt.
Christine didn’t know more than the words, but she’d seen the fragility and sickness that affected those who could not work hard enough to earn their mineral stipends for long periods. Her mind reeled at the contradiction that people could be so valuable and powerful dead, but so disposable alive. But the thought that she was here, in the home of her great-grandmothers, with even a portion of their essence still in her and in her community, was comforting.
She picked up the pressed chalk she kept in her school bag and attempted to sketch her brother’s portrait on the wall. She didn’t know how to write his name. Sanjay bowed his head as a matter of respect. As he muttered the traditional comforts said after someone’s Cycling rite, another voice joined his, laughing uproariously. She jumped, but they were alone, and the voice’s tone changed as she directed her attention at it.
“So that’s you then, eh?” Sanjay said. “That’s our cue to start back up. Want to be able to pass out without losing ourselves or suffocating, right? I saw mine a floor up.” She looked at him with a little concern and wondered why he had let them go deeper. Did he want to die here, where their bodies would decay in selfishness?
“Yeah, that’s me. That’s it? That’s all to see down here?”
“Just you wait…” He led her upstairs. On the third stairwell above them, Sanjay paused. “I, I need to sit.” His eyes darted around, following something Christine couldn’t see.
“Oh, for! Dad’s gonna be mad if I’m this late.” She didn’t trust herself to remember the way out alone, though, so she sat with him. He started crying, rich cathartic tears, and she gave up trying to persuade him to stand. She felt dizzy and laid next to him, right there in the dust.
All of those people, the generations who built this, no more than dirt on a floor. Before her eyes, the dirt began to move, not just shifting with her breath, but forming its own eddies of current, forming shapes. For a brief moment she saw her mother’s face, and she joined Sanjay in his weeping. The face smiled, and peeled itself inside out into a plant that couldn’t possibly exist in a garden pruned for edibility. Colors shifted and shuddered, the plant writhing like an oil slick. She realized she was shaking, but that awareness was cloaked in a fog.
Dark shapes danced at the edges of her vision, forming ghosts, then dissolving. Wars played out before her eyes, their participants no more than animated smears, forming into flowers on long-dead battlefields. Petals dripped blood and ink, soaking the ground. The spatters looked like corpses seen from far above; small, spiky insects. She felt like a god or Poca, given the power to see all, yet unwilling to help ease the world’s suffering in the slightest. She couldn’t decide whether to laugh maniacally or right every wrong she’d witnessed. And she realized that either choice was right, because she made it right. The guilt and terror of day-to-day living in near-starvation, and seeing her family torn apart to prevent it from becoming total starvation moved into the air around her, rather than staining her soul.
She glanced at Sanjay, and the tears on his face glowed. There was so much beauty in that vulnerability. She felt privileged to see it, to feel it, felt that the pain was an integral part of her. Movement out of the corner of her eye startled her. She saw the windows crying too, beautiful luminescent tears that poured down, loosening the grime on the outside of the panes like tears diluting a bedwarmer's makeup. Her eyes itched at the thought. She’d lined her eyes with the burned residue pressed into tiny cakes and sold for the purpose once. Her skin had swelled horribly and broken into painful pimples.
Even as she watched, the tears ate through Sanjay’s skin, and his body dissolved into flakes. She hoped she’d see him like this at his inevitable Cycling, rather than as whoever he might become. She wept for her own short life and his. Maybe if she mourned for them now, being taken, murdered, or wasting away would be less fearful when the time came.
She'd woken up on the floor, worlds lighter, and even her dad’s scolding hadn’t prevented her from going back. From time to time, she’d find others hiding in the Lower Levels, breathing the poisoned air with more enthusiasm than they ever breathed the clean air everyone else worked so hard to provide.
She lost her virginity to Sanjay during a Hal a few years later. At the time, it was a spiritual experience. The day after, when she thought back on it, she realized the parts that had felt spiritual were the foreplay, and she’d simply felt empty and dead when he penetrated her. She reasoned it was a flaw in herself, and never attempted to reignite the connection with him or any other man after that.
During the famine, six years back, so many Lower inhabitants had ventured down to hunt feral rats, potentially toxic or no, that the Pocas assigned Engineers to the entry to the Foundation. Christine had chosen not to chance it—three marks for wrongdoing was a de
ath sentence. Not an immediate death—they might come for you a year later, or ten—but a death sentence nonetheless. She hadn’t returned to the Foundation since they posted guards, not even when her dad received his Three and was taken a few weeks after.
* * *
“How did you know that we could catch that?” The words brought Christine back to the present. She wasn’t interested in playing twenty questions; she just wanted to be alone with her thoughts. But her thoughts were full of people dead to her. Ilsa was alive, and Christine could see in her eyes that she needed her more than her fevered day dreams.
“Years ago, a neighborhood kid used to brag about climbing out to sit on them. Said most of the Levels had them, and not just on our Block. He slipped and fell to his death one day. Well, they said he just disappeared, but he talked about it enough that we knew what happened.”
She led Ilsa deeper into the hall, following a tract of natural light that cut through an open window. A rat crept by. Ilsa jumped, latching onto Christine’s forearm, only to let her go in shock as she felt the massive scar. “How’d you get that?”
Christine stopped walking, confused by the question. She glanced at her arm. “What, you mean none of your districts scar their transgressors?”
Ilsa’s eyes widened. “No, no! We use tattoos, like your other arm, but in a circle.”
“Well, go down a level or two and they’ll cut you or burn you if they don’t want to waste the ink.”
She turned white, and when she could muster words, mumbled, “That’s awful! What happens if it gets infected?”
“You grow a carapace and are taken to the hydroponic garden to chew on leaves with the rest of the insects. Obviously, the limb comes off, or you die. Really the same if you think about it, since an amputee can’t compete for work. My uncle was a Two, lost his hand when a section of piling fell on it. Because the other two marks were still visible, they took him as a Three.”
Ilsa bit her lip, turning even paler.
Christine felt bad for destroying some part of her innocence, but still marveled that the girl had maintained it for so long. She hadn’t known enough people from the Upper Levels to know how much better their lives were. The smell of the dust here brought back so many memories, and she had to remind herself that she wasn’t the same scared teenager who last smelled that soil.
She heard a crunch underfoot and picked up a dead leaf. Christine had heard of the plants, seen them illustrated in exceedingly rare textbooks, but had never seen a living one. Ilsa took it out of her hands and looked. “Looks like basil or oregano. They had some in the community garden for all the houses on the Upper Block.”
“There’s a community garden there?” Christine usually preyed on the Middle Levels, a few floors below the Upper Block, and couldn’t conceive of plants offered to people simply because they lived near enough to enjoy them. She flashed a look at Ilsa and began walking again to hide her agitation. Ilsa hurried to catch up, her hips swaying and reminding Christine again that Ilsa’s waist was as thick as Christine’s hips. She’d never encountered an idea so womanly.
Ilsa tripped over a piece of rubble, and Christine caught her. The other woman’s hands were soft, with barely any callouses. Beneath the grit of their travels, Christine noticed how elegant her neatly trimmed fingernails were, how long her fingers were. Her arms were pristine; not a scratch, scar, or tattoo to be seen.
Christine shivered. Whoever Ilsa was, and whyever they wanted her, she wasn’t a Three. She hadn’t done anything wrong.
Seven
Christine and Ilsa walked, almost hypnotized by their surroundings. Ilsa had never seen anything like the decaying grandeur below them, and squealed like a schoolgirl every time she found a particularly ornate tile that looters hadn’t managed to pry up off the floor for extra chits. Though the area was familiar to Christine, she was largely lost in her own thoughts, and couldn’t muster the wherewithal to give Ilsa a guided tour of what she knew.
She wondered what she’d stumbled onto. The entire moral structure of the City was based on true justice. Admittedly, sometimes that varied, depending on whether you met an Engineer on the wrong day and what Level you hailed from. But this sort of…wrongful punishment was anathema. Who could they trust in the City, if not each other? Humans are weak, deceitful creatures. the City looked after everyone, and was just.
A bitchy part of her brain wondered why her cynicism had never extended that far before. After all, she knew how unjust things could sometimes be. But she’d never heard of Engineers hounding an innocent girl like this over a first offense—even if she had stolen from Aureum.
They found a pool of water next to a broken window, and Christine felt safe enough to pause for a drink. It was probably fairly safe; they were only a little bit below the Lower Levels, so it was only marginally less clean than the water she had splashed on her face that morning.
On their way back away from the window, she kicked something and looked down to see a very heavily scuffed and mostly rotted doll. The porcelain face, though—what had possessed someone to drop it here? She scraped rotted fabric scraps away from the cool doll’s skull, and jerked remnants of hair—probably real human hair—away. It might be worth something when they could sneak back into the City to trade, and its lifeless painted eyes reminded her of Sharon. The doll’s hands and feet were porcelain too, but shattered from the remnant of the wall around them. Damn shame.
Ilsa came over to look. “Ooh, pretty. I never had one like that—mine was just cloth. The mistress’ daughter did, though. I bet someone could restore this to a dream.” Christine smiled and tucked the porcelain in her pack. The fabric was too rotted, but with a little time, she could make something work.
“We’re okay for now. I guess.”
“Heh. We’re lucky they weren’t very patient. I would have been fired if I was that sloppy,” Ilsa said, and sighed. “Have you ever seen new things?”
“Sure. We make stuff from—”
“No, really new. There were all these...china figures Benito had. Tiny little ornaments.” She traced the air. “Little dogs, little girls, kittens, flowers—they had this beautiful bright paint, and they were so delicate.”
“Weren’t those some ancient thing?”
Ilsa shook her head. “I saw part of an ancient one, once, but these were new.” She exhaled. “Almost new fabric, too. I have to admit, I didn’t know how good I had it.”
Christine was quiet. Such attention to the dolls—perhaps Ilsa hadn’t been able to resist smuggling one home for herself. But forcing the issue wouldn’t tell Christine anything, only put Ilsa further on her guard. “You must miss it,” she finally said.
Ilsa looked guilty.
Christine heard a door slam a dozen feet behind them. It happened all the time, because of drafts—which likely meant another door had opened. She pushed Ilsa into a small alcove and put her hand over her mouth. Then she heard voices, and was certain she was hearing them through her ears and not just in her head.
“Look over there,” said a whiny male voice. They held their breath as footsteps pattered closer. Christine closed her eyes.
“Nah. I’m not seeing anything. Just some bricks,” a man with a deep voice said.
“We could take ‘em up.”
“And carry them how? Not worth it. Keep looking for small moveables.”
“Hold up. I’ve got to take a piss.”
“And you’re just going to piss on the floor?” his companion said in a whinier, higher-pitched voice.
“Whole fucking place is a toilet—and good for not much the hell else. Now stop looking at me. I can’t go with you eye-humping me.”
The sound of his urine spattering into a stagnant pool of water echoed through the hall. Christine found it hard not to make noise just to drown it out. So did the man with the higher voice. “I swear I’ve got a contact high.”
“At this elevation?” the other said. “Even infants don’t get a contact high.”
“I’m telling you, I’m hearing things.”
“Like what?”
“Like dripping. Clanging.”
“Like regular, normal, everyday Foundation noises, mixed in with the sounds of me urinating?”
“No. They’re…Damnit, I’m high right now!”
“Look, if you’re that concerned, put on your damned mask and shut up.”
“You know they don’t pay us enough filters for that.”
“All I know is you bitch more than my ex-wife, and her I pitched out a window.”
“I thought she left you for your old partner.”
“Poor tater, pear taco.”
“You think we’re going to find either girl down here?”
“Unless you think they’ve up and disappeared. If I learned anything from my wife shacking up with my slutty former partner, it’s lesbians can be fucking evil, but witches they aren’t, or I’d have toadstools growing out of my balls.”
Christine could hear boots coming towards the door that had slammed near to them. She looked frantically around for a place to hide. She stood on a crude table that had likely been too unwieldy to move, and tested the ceiling tiles. She couldn’t see signs of water damage that might cause them to stick to their framework. One of them shifted, and Christine shoved the tile aside.
Christine hefted Ilsa into the gap between the tiles and the structural ceiling, and kept her mouth shut as Ilsa’s rounded hips pressed into her face while her feet struggled for purchase. Christine put her hands under Ilsa’s feet and levered her up. She groped the edges of the gap, making sure her hands were on beams rather than on the geometric boarding the tiles rested on, and pulled her own hips up. She slid the tile back into place, as quietly as she could. A dull ache permeated her muscles, but she ignored it to climb along the beam to Ilsa.