by Rose Francis
“If you keep your weight on these, you don’t fall through, and they don’t see you. Stay here and keep quiet, no matter what.”
Eight
Ilsa clung to the beam, stifling sneezes at the vermin-soiled air. She tried not to think of rat feces smearing along her dress. A month or so before, she’d never had any idea this kind of filth was possible; her life had been spent painting repair tape on ventilation pipes or steel-sheet walls so the neighbors wouldn’t think the pipes were dilapidated, or helping with food preparation, childcare and laundry. Her sole source of anxiety was the butterflies when Benito looked at her, and the fear that another family assistant would see her uncouth affection for him.
She cursed herself inwardly. Benito had seduced her, made her believe he held enough power with his clan to make them accept him Partnering with her. But she’d never been more than a dirty little secret, a means to an end. From the moment that she woke up to his hands on her midsection, her stomach filled with blinding pain as he prayed to some strange power to reshape her baby, she had realized she was an incubator to him, nothing more.
She’d overlooked his flirtations with other clans’ women as stuff he had to do, until he had announced his commitment. She made excuses for him, concealed his activities from other family members. And even as he promised he was preparing the announcement of their Partnering and impending child, he was preparing incantations to manipulate her child, without her consent or knowledge.
She remembered the feeling of her child contorting in her stomach and pushed the feelings of betrayal out of her mind.
* * *
Christine crawled forward along her beam until she was looking through a vent, at the room below. Ilsa attempted to follow her, but paused as her efforts caused a creak.
Two Engineers moved below them, shoving debris aside with their batons. She looked at Ilsa and put her finger over her lips, but her attention had snapped back to the grate as she noticed the masks on their faces. They didn’t have the compressed air technology that scavengers used on expeditions, but there was a series of filters over the mouthpiece, for use on the upper Foundation Levels. That would have to do.
“I don’t know why you think they’re lesbians, anyway.”
“I can tell.”
“Yeah, but you ‘tell’ way more often than you’re right, man. Besides, we’re supposed to be careful with them. One of them’s pregnant and we’re supposed to be careful of the baby.”
“Doesn’t prove anything. Even dykes get knocked up.”
“And yet…”
“You get one more word into a sentence about how I somehow managed not to knock my wife up and I will defenestrate you.”
“You got a weird thing about emptily threatening to throw people out of windows. Like maybe it’s a Freudian thing, where people are sperm, and windows are your wife’s unfertilized ova.”
“Not another word.”
“I must be buzzed. I can’t usually give you this much shit sober.”
“Spirits. I will give you a filter if it will get you to put on a mask and shut up.”
“Nah, I think I’m kind of starting to enjoy it.” The other man shuffled his equipment. “Within the course of my duties, dick. What were you going to do, brain me?”
“No,” the other man said hastily. “Come on. They’re not going to find themselves.”
“I don’t know. The lighting, the airborne hallucinogens, if ever there was an atmosphere for finding oneself…”
“If you really start tripping, I will leave you down here…”
Once their voices dulled from the corridor wall, Christine shimmied backwards until she could drop out of the vent. A small cloud of dust rose at her feet, and she fought to hold a cough back. She drew her stilettos, knowing her best bet was to sneak up on them and remove them both as quickly as possible, before they could bring the batons to bear on her. She heard noises in the ceiling and knew Ilsa was disobeying orders. Ilsa dropped from the ceiling. Christine shoved her stilettos in her waistband and reluctantly tried to prevent Ilsa from damaging her element of surprise by catching and stabilizing her as she landed.
“No, no more murder—you can’t do this—” Ilsa refused to let go of Christine’s arm, no matter how Christine shook her off.
“I have to. We need those masks, and they aren’t going to give them up willingly. If they’re patrolling here, they’ll be back, and we can’t survive long down here without them. Do you want to know what the cloud might do to your baby?” Christine wrenched her arm away from Ilsa and peered around the corner. The guards hadn’t made it far, and their backs were to her. She had to take them down now.
She crept towards them, focusing on raising as little dust as possible and avoiding any loose debris. A creak sounded behind her, and the first Engineer turned around. She plunged the stiletto into his neck, and let it go as she swung the other blade. The second Engineer was already turning, but he fumbled getting his baton loose. Christine pressed her advantage. Ilsa grabbed her knife arm at the last minute, and the blade veered off track, cutting through the layers of fabric across the Engineer’s mouth, drawing blood. She realized that the mask was ruined and swore. Who cared who heard, now?
She had to down him as soon as possible, before he got the baton up and broke someone’s bones. She threw herself at him and Ilsa fell with her. Their combined weight flew into him, and he overbalanced, knocking his head against the wall on the way down. While keeping her weight on his shoulder, Christine reached for a piece broken from a brick. “We can get the masks already,” Ilsa protested, but Christine wouldn’t take any chances. She smashed his head with the brick. Ilsa slumped back against the wall and cried as Christine righted herself. She didn’t offer Ilsa a comforting word or a hand up.
She ripped the mask off the first guard’s face and shoved it into Ilsa’s hands. Just to be safe, she checked the second mask, but her impression had been right; neither intact piece would be enough to shield her mouth and nose. She threw it to the side. Ilsa clutched at her and stuttered apologies, but Christine was livid. Wasn’t it enough that Ilsa had metaphorically signed her death warrant? Did she have to do it literally, too?
She ignored the woman and started going through the guard's pockets. “What are you—” Ilsa got out. Christine noticed a circular indentation on one of his pockets and produced an extra filter.
She examined it. “It's new,” she said. She checked the other man's pockets and found a similar container. This one's seal had been broken. It had been partially used, which probably meant someone sold him a dud. She pocketed it anyway.
They heard more voices in the corridor. Christine grabbed one of the fallen batons and the stiletto in the first guard’s neck, before they fled down the grand stairway on the other side of the hall. The place had probably been some Poca’s palace once, but now it was the gaping maw of hell: the Foundation.
Nine
When the Engineers’ voices faded, Ilsa rounded on Christine. Christine stared at the floor around them. There were several holes rotted in it, amplified by the fragments of material torn away by rodent scavengers for their nest. Some sections of the floor were covered in what had once been nice clay tiling. Even in its abandonment, the space was formal, regal.
“We hid just fine,” Ilsa said. “We didn’t need the masks.”
“Ratshit we don’t. The Lower Level kids play deeper in the Foundation than that. If they’re still looking for you, we’re going to have to push deeper, where none of them will find us.”
“Everyone knows that the Foundation is death. There’s no way that people will go this far.”
“I did.” Christine gestured at chalk markings on the wall, partly worn away by the wind from a broken window. “My first time down here. And I went several Levels deeper every time I explored after that.”
Ilsa blanched and put the mask on.
“But it's late. We should rest. There's definitely a rat nest nearby, so I might be able to catch us somet
hing to eat—provided we can stay in the area for a while. You should try and sleep. I know today will have been harder on you. And tomorrow will be, too. So rest.”
Ilsa sat against the wall, and Christine rigged a box-and-stick trap from the rubbish on the floor a short distance away from them. Ilsa stirred once when Christine laid down beside her, and again when she shifted and rested her head on Ilsa's thigh. It reminded her of Benito, back when he was sweet to her. She touched Christine's cheek, and the sleeping woman started, but not enough to wake.
* * *
When Ilsa woke again, Christine was sitting several feet from her. “We can’t trust that we’ll be able to go up and redeem meal chits. But hey, at least there’s rats down here. Meat with every meal. We'll be eating like a Poca for once.” She traced a stick through the dirt absently.
Ilsa looked over the chalk picture and the trap. They made an equal lack of sense. “Did you want to die?” she asked. “Why would you leave the Block if you didn’t?”
“Wanting to die is different than not caring if you do.” Christine looked down angrily, as if she didn’t appreciate the judgment in Ilsa’s voice. “Venture down off your high horse sometime, and you might see the way the rest of us live. There isn’t much difference between dying slow and dying quick. And if the faster death feels less painful, why would you fight it?”
“But dying down here, it’s… it’s selfish. You’re separating from the community, and commanding others to die painfully without your participation in the Cycle.”
“So? Why should a slum kid care if his bones keep a Poca alive, while he starves every day and sees his family dragged away, one by one, at the order of the Pocas? When you have no other way to fight, it can seem like the only way to fight is to use your death to hurt the system as much as you can. For a lot of us in the Lower Levels, exploring the Foundation is the only thing that makes us feel alive.”
Ilsa shivered. Her life in the Upper Levels hadn’t been easy; maids were a sufferance, and had to earn every bit of their keep through labor and verbal abuse. She knew it was better than the Middle Levels, where some of her relatives who only did repair work lived. But even they were comfortable. She smuggled food down to them because her meal chits bought more than theirs, and the food tended to be fresher in the Upper Levels.
Christine kept walking. Ilsa said nothing, keeping her eyes down.
“Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Just...keep your eyes up. Look around.”
Ilsa didn’t argue.
Christine sighed. “And look around for some wood. We need a fire.”
Ilsa bit her lip. The look on Christine’s face stung. She padded away and glanced behind a half wall, then went around again. She tripped over something and cried out.
She rubbed the throbbing dent in her leg. Being treated like an idiot frustrated her, and only made her feel more like maybe Christine was right to treat her like a child. Then she saw what she had fallen over.
It was beautiful. The angles, the bits of paint and pigment scratched on it—a perfect model of a rabbit in one of the mythical fields inside a box. The shadows made the grass look like it was moving.
“Christine! You have to see this!”
“Firewood. Perfect. Let’s take it over and start prying it apart.”
“You can’t do that. It’s art.”
“It’s kindling,” Christine said coldly. “And we need the warmth more than we need culture.”
Christine walked about, pulling on loose boards and shattered planks.
“Won’t they notice a fire?” Ilsa asked.
“On the contrary; the Engineers avoid them,” Christine said. Ilsa frowned, waiting for her to explain. “Down this deep, there are pockets of gas that get trapped. With a mask on, the Engineers don’t notice when they’re standing in something that could engulf them at any moment.”
“You’re not worried about the gas.”
“I’m not wearing a mask. And I know the difference between the flammable gasses down here and the ones that’ll just get you good and fucked up.”
“So you’re high right now?”
“Little buzzed—nothing more than the jolt from a few cups of overbrewed tea. But that’ll change— it’ll get worse the deeper we go and the longer we stay.”
Ilsa looked at her with something close to panic. “Are you going to be all right?”
“Sure. It’s a free show. You ever see the one—‘of all the bars in all the world...’”
“—‘She had to walk into this one,’” finished Ilsa, grinning. “I miss going to the movies. When I was little, my family went several times a year. Birthdays, and at Christmas. But more and more, the families bought up all the prints and projectors, and with fewer theaters in the Middle Levels, the prices went up. We couldn’t afford it this year, and I know… next year will be even further from our reach.”
“You went several times a year?” Christine asked. There was mockery in her tone Ilsa didn’t understand.
“Yeah,” she said. “Why?”
“I’ve been once. Dad traded his food chits for the better part of a week. I remember he was nervous that they were going to kick us out of the theater because of the growling of his stomach.”
“Where was your mom?” Ilsa asked.
“They took her a couple of months before; she was a Three. And Dad… they bought stuff that they could have paid off with Mom working, but… Dad was a Two. They were going to give him another strike if he didn’t pay. He knew we couldn’t, that David and I…we weren’t old enough to survive without him, and the rest of his family had wasted away, no one else to take over our care. So he sold David's Service to one of the Poca families. I cried for a whole week. And Dad didn’t eat. It was so he could take me out to see a movie, to try and put what little right that he could. I don’t remember what it was called that we saw, but it wasn’t what was supposed to play. We ended up watching something with James Cagney in it.”
“I’m sorry,” Ilsa said, touching her arm.
“It’s not,” Christine wiped her eyes, “your fault. And you didn’t know. Couldn’t. They keep us separated for a reason.” She stared at the fire in silence. “But what about you? What was your favorite?”
“I don’t know,” Ilsa said. “I think for me it was always more about being with my family, and being able to share special moments. But I think the one movie where they almost disappeared, that I just got so absorbed into, was China Town.”
“Was it in color?” Christine asked.
“Yes,” Ilsa said, and frowned, not understanding.
“The Pocas hoard the color films. Not for any practical reason, it’s just… because it makes them more special. Like they’re better. The movie my dad took me to was supposed to be the Wizard of Oz. The projectionist didn’t realize, but then…suddenly everything was in color; it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. For the first time since they took David, I stopped crying, and I was happy. The munchkins were still singing when Engineers burst into the room and dragged the projectionist and the print away. His business partner put on the Cagney film in its stead; it was about a dark place, filled with bad people. I started crying again, but quietly, so I didn’t get my dad in trouble, and eventually I fell asleep. And I always, I guess a part of me always felt like Dorothy was still trapped in Oz, since I never got to see how it ended.”
“She gets home,” Ilsa said. “And she kills the witch with water. By accident.”
“You’ve seen it?”
She shook her head. “I read the book to the children of the family I served. There’s got to be dozens of them.”
“All about Dorothy?”
“Some. Some are about everybody else.”
“Could you,” Christine hesitated, “would you tell me about Oz? I can’t settle my mind. The fumes.” As mad as she was to feel the exposure headache setting in, she didn’t want to hold onto any blame, since Ilsa was the only other person in her worl
d, for the foreseeable future.
Ilsa smiled. “Sure,” she said. Christine curled up in front of Ilsa, who stroked her hair, out of habit as much as to feel some security and to reassure Christine. It was how she read to the Aureum girl. “In Kansas, there lived a girl named Dorothy…” she started. Before she’d gotten to the Yellow Brick Road, Christine was asleep.
Ten
She woke in Ilsa’s arms. She tried to stand up, but the girl clung to her still tighter. Christine enjoyed the softness of Ilsa’s neck against her cheek. She was warm, and she smelled the way few women Christine had ever known could.
Ilsa stirred, and seemed to realize she was practically strangling Christine. Her muscles tensed, and then released. “Sorry,” she said sleepily. “I was cold, and—”
“It’s okay,” Christine said, pushing herself up off the floor. Ilsa pushed another block of wood into the dying embers of the fire. Christine disappeared around the corner. She relieved herself and checked her box trap. There was a rat caught inside. She sympathized, but then her stomach gurgled the way her father’s had.
She carried the menacing little prize back to Ilsa, whose eyes became empty dinner plates. Christine reached inside the box. The rat nipped at her, but didn’t break the skin. She feinted left. It lunged at her, and she got her hand around the back of its shoulders. She pulled and held it out, wriggling, towards Ilsa. Her head ached. She nearly lost her footing, tumbling into the remnants of their fire, but caught herself.
“You hold it as high up around the shoulders as you can with one hand, and as far down around the skull with the other, and then twist.” The creature's spine snapped in her fingers, and Ilsa gasped as it spasmed and shook. “I know it’s tough to see,” she said, “but there isn’t much besides rot and moss to eat down here. And besides, all this meat—it isn’t that bad, right? It’s not as nice as the rats a few floors up. These taste earthier, but it’s something.” She held the rat in one hand and opened her knife in the other, using it to gouge open a hole in the rat’s neck. “We can’t afford to waste anything.” She pushed the rat’s neck to her mouth, and when she pulled it away, her teeth were red as she said, “Not even the blood.”