Downsiders

by Neal Shusterman

  “Yes,” he told the boy, and asked about the language he spoke.

  “It’s Russian,” the boy said, and explained that it came from a place called, naturally, Russia.

  “Is it far from here?” Talon asked.

  “Not far enough,” answered the boy.

  And then, with a jolt, the linked cars of the Cyclone pulled forward, ratchetting up the steep incline. As they rose, Talon could finally see the boundless scope of this realm of the sun. He realized that Coney Island wasn’t an island at all; it was just part of the Brooklyn expanse. Through the jagged brush of the winter-bare trees stretched row after row of redbrick homes, intersected by a grid of Topside streets. They vanished into the distance, where faroff towers glistened, dwarfing everything in their magnificent shadow. That, Talon knew, must have been Manhattan. Those were the very towers he had peered at from beneath the city’s grates, but never had he seen them from such a vantage point. How, he wondered, could they puncture the sky as they did, and yet not tear the sky down?

  So many questions filled him now. Too many to consider—but suddenly all those questions were swept away as the coaster cleared the top, and was sent hurtling down that first screaming, insane drop. And in that moment, all past and future vanished for Talon, replaced by a here-and-now that exploded through every nerve in his body. Fear, joy, wind, and wonder had all laid claim to him, and by the time he came to the second drop, any resistance he had was gone. Now he held up his hands like the Russian boy beside him, surrendering himself to the thrill of the ride.

  To say that Lindsay’s life changed because of her jaunt to the Downside was an understatement. It was an event that touched her very core—discovering such a rich and magical place just a few short strata beneath her feet opened up a universe of possibilities. If such a place could exist in the shadows of a sunlit world, then what else might be possible? Her trip to the Downside drew a pall over the ordinary things in her life.

  For the first few days after her Downside excursion, Lindsay was the talk of Icharus Academy—not because she told them anything, but because she didn’t. Becky Peckerling, in her own inimitable way, quickly spread the word that Lindsay Matthias had, without warning, crawled into a drain and vanished for an extended period of time. This was high-grade grist for the gossip mill, and in less than two days people were whispering and giggling in her wake through every hallway. She let her hair go wild and took to wearing the ruby earring Talon had given her. Her classmate, Ralphy Sherman, put forth the claim that she was a long-lost Albanian princess, and that the earring was all that remained of the crown jewels.

  Rather than be bothered by all this, Lindsay enjoyed it— for the more gossip and speculation they milled, the more separate from them Lindsay felt, as if she had ascended to a more enlightened plane.

  By Friday, Lindsay had officially entered the ranks of prep-school freakdom. She even began to attract the really spooky kids at school: girls with so many pierced body parts, they looked like human voodoo dolls, and boys who dressed in black and carried around copies of The Catcher in the Rye.

  But she was not one of them, either, and she began to wonder if there could ever be anyone or anything Topside that could pique her interest anymore. Instead, her thoughts were always drawn back to Talon and his peculiar world. She longed to see him again, explore with him. He filled many of her daydreams. Lindsay realized, had Talon been a Topside boy, they probably would have been snared in that hopelessly nerve-racking Topside ritual called “dating.” But they were already beyond that particular brand of awkwardness. To Lindsay, holding hands while stumbling through a dark sewer seemed far more natural than holding hands in a dark movie theater. Of course it was a sentiment she couldn’t share with anyone else she knew. They simply wouldn’t understand.

  Yet, even though she wanted to lose herself in the magic of the Downside, and accept the marvelous sights without question, there was a part of her that knew that magic was only sleight of hand. Behind everything was that nagging question of how?

  How could the Downside have come to be?

  The old man Talon had taken her to—The Champ— knew something. The name of a forgotten inventor. But Lindsay put those thoughts aside, not yet willing to dispel the magic of Talon’s world.

  “I’d like to take a walk today,” Lindsay told Todd as they stepped out of school on Friday, “and get to know the city a little better.” For three days, according to their father’s wishes, Lindsay dutifully returned home from school with Todd, and each day, he complained in an endless harangue about how having to baby-sit her had ruined his life and made the world a lesser place. Her desire to seek out Talon and the Downside grew with each day. All she wanted was an afternoon free from Todd’s oppressive thumb to prod the niches where no one went, in search of entry to that elusive place. “Just a few hours by myself...”

  “Out of the question,” said Todd. Then he added, “If it’s so important to you, you can ask Dad’s permission when you get home—that is, if he answers his page.”

  But chances were, he wouldn’t answer his page. He claimed to be at a crucial part in his big project, and since her fateful return from her late-night adventure, her father would leave for work before Lindsay awoke and come home after she had gone to bed. Lindsay wondered if the work was really that demanding or was it just an excuse to avoid dealing with her?

  “He’s sorry you came to live here,” Todd told her. “He thinks you’re a freak, just like everyone else.”

  And although most of the things Todd said could easily be deflected, this one hit her hard, because she knew that it might have been just the tiniest bit true.

  As it turned out, it was a good thing Lindsay went straight home today, because the package waiting at her front door was far more interesting than anything else in the city.

  When Lindsay and Todd got home, there was a bum sleeping on their stoop, wearing a bulbous Gortex parka, with the fur hood zipped all the way up, like an Eskimo.

  “Oh, great,” said Todd. “What is this, the Stoop of the Damned? Y’know, someone oughta invent a bum-zapper. They come up to your door, and ZZZZT!—they’re fried!” Todd roused him awake with a rough shake of the shoulder, and the vagrant quickly got to his feet. “Move it, pal, this is private property!”

  Lindsay realized who this “bum” was by the way he moved, even before she caught sight of his face nestled within the shadows of the hood. It was the one time Lindsay was thankful for the fact that Todd saw the same basic face on all of the city’s homeless, and didn’t bother to look at this one any closer.

  Talon turned to Lindsay and opened his mouth to speak, but she quickly cut him off. “Charlie!” she said. “I almost didn’t recognize you!”

  “Huh?” said Talon.

  She turned to Todd. “This is Charlie, from my math class. I took notes for him today, on account of he was...under the weather, right, Charlie?”

  “Huh?” said Talon.

  “Gesundheit,” said Lindsay. She grabbed him with one hand, and with the other quickly turned the key in the lock. “Why don’t you come inside?”

  She barged past Todd and to the stairs, with Talon in tow. “Come on up, Charlie, and I’ll give you the notes.”

  “Dad won’t like you having a boy in your room,” warned Todd, but Lindsay already heard the TV on in the living room, which meant that Todd wasn’t going to push it. She ignored him, and spirited Talon up the stairs.

  “I rode the Cyclone!” Talon said cheerfully.

  “Shh!” They hurried down the second-floor hallway, but instead of going into her room, she took them over the threshold between the two conjoined buildings and up another flight of stairs to the gutted third floor of her father’s newly acquired brownstone—a mess of molting plaster and wires that twisted like snakes through holes in the walls where the fixtures should be. Only here, as far away from Todd as possible, did Lindsay feel safe enough to talk. “What are you doing? Are you nuts?”

  “I rode the Cyclo
ne!” he said again. “And I took a taxi, and I rode in a ferry-ship, and I stood in the face of the great green lady, and I ate a paternity-on-rye!”

  Lindsay’s head began to swim, and she couldn’t help but laugh. “Slow down...you’re telling me you’ve been Top-side?”

  Talon was like an anxious puppy, practically bouncing off the unfinished walls. “For two days now!”

  “But...but what about the Downside? What about the rules?”

  “They can stick their rules where the sun don’t shine,” he told her. And then he proudly added, “The driver of the taxi taught me that one!”

  Talon went on to tell her about his first sight of the ocean, and the old woman who had helped him. He told her how, when night had fallen, he took refuge. “The street-beds in the park were too cold,” he said, “so I found a green-room that wasn’t being used.”

  “Green-room?”

  “You know: square, wheels on the bottom—”

  “A Dumpster? You slept in a Dumpster?!”

  He smiled, proudly repeating the word: “Dumpster. Yes! It was good, because I could see the moon—did you know that it’s sometimes round instead of curved?”

  She laughed. “It only looks curved when part of it is in the dark.”

  She could see him reeling as he tried to absorb the information, as he must have absorbed everything else over these past few days. In the brief time Lindsay had known him, she had never seen him act like this—he was always in such stiff control, rigidly reflecting the Downside way. It both tickled and troubled her that a few days Topside could change so much about him. She wasn’t sure which Talon she liked more—the stoic, self-assured Talon who knew his way in the dark, or the wide-eyed boy who made sleeping in a Dumpster sound like a night in paradise.

  Although Lindsay could not know it, this truly was the first time in Talon’s life he had ever let his emotions take flight. It was Talon’s choice not to tell her about his ejection from the Downside, for shame had no place in his life now. So he paced the room, speaking in rapid, shotgun speech, like a Topsider. He barely recognized his own voice, and he liked that. There was that other voice, however, still deep in his thoughts, reminding him of the Downside’s golden rule—that the two worlds must never come into contact—but here he was; the two worlds had touched and they had not been destroyed. So who was wiser now: he, or the Advisors who had sent him on a one-way trip to Coney Island?

  At last all his wild ranting left him out of breath and light-headed from his own excitement, and as they stood there, grinning dumbly at one another, it seemed that the many walls that had once been between them were gone, leaving nothing but empty space to be filled. So Talon stepped forward and put his hands on her shoulders. “I want to know what you know, Lindsay—see what you’ve seen. I want you to show me everything there is to see on the Topside.”

  She laughed. “That’ll take an awfully long time.”

  He pointed down to the Rolex on his ankle. “Time is of low importance.”

  Then, finally, he broke the last Downside rule left to break. The one rule he wanted to break more than any other.

  Even though she was a Topsider.

  Even though no one had given approval.

  Even though his mother still knew him.

  Talon leaned across the space between them, and stole a kiss...and before long, he realized that Lindsay was more than happy to steal it right back.

  Whether or not it was the perfect kiss, neither could say, because neither had experienced any other to compare. But it must have been close, for in that moment something fell into place, and for the first time in either of their lives there was no doubt that everything was now right with the world.

  Meanwhile, not too far away, work on the Westside Aqueduct’s primary shaft had reached a fever pitch. The project was three months behind schedule—of course it had been three months behind schedule last week as well—but Mark Matthias, the bigwig city planner whose project this was, had just about gone ballistic this week, for reasons unknown. He came down hard on the foreman, who came down hard on his workers.

  The result was a frenzied speedup.

  Dirt and pulverized bedrock was hauled from the thirty-foot-wide hole as quickly as the crane could haul it up, and it was all loaded into an endless stream of dump trucks that would drive up to the edge of the gaping hole to receive their load.

  What no one knew was that Mark Matthias’s mind was not on his work. In fact, his harsh attitude had little to do with the aqueduct, and more to do with his daughter and her unusual behavior. It would be fair to say that if Lindsay hadn’t traveled to the Downside, driving her father to distraction, things would have happened much differently...

  ...because, had the workers not fallen victim to Mark Matthias’s personal frustration, then maybe that dump truck wouldn’t have lurched so recklessly forward to receive its load of rock....

  There was only one person in the Brass Junction today. A faller. One who had not yet been named. A faller who had once held the Topside name of Robert Gunderson. He stood on a scaffold, happily cementing old subway tokens to the ceiling, repairing the various spots where the tokens had come loose. He sang to himself, enjoying the way his voice resonated and filled the solemn chamber. He had reason to sing: In just a few short weeks, he had gained respect for himself and his work. He was appreciated here, and that was more than he could say for the world he had left. This great resurrection of hope was almost enough to outweigh the sorrow he felt at hearing of Talon’s execution. Railborn, he was told, would take over the task of naming him—and it didn’t thrill the faller one bit, because he had heard that Railborn was partial to the name Flake since they had found him during a snowstorm.

  While he pondered a life being known as Flake, there came a vibration from high above. He had grown used to the many groans, echoes, and vibrations that rang through the Downside, the way one grew used to crickets and the rustling of leaves in the countryside—so he didn’t think much of it, at first. But as the rumble grew louder, he began to feel concerned—because the tokens were beginning to drop from the roof all around him, tinkling on the floor.

  With growing unease, he began to climb down the scaffold, sensing a sudden and all-too-literal “gravity” to the situation that he could not explain—until a moment later, when the dome above him exploded with a massive crash of shattering stone, destroying the scaffold and hurling him to the ground in a shower of stone and tokens.

  Dazed from his fall, he dragged himself out from under the debris and sat up, peering through the settling dust. It took a full minute of staring at the sight before him before he could convince himself that this was truly what it appeared to be.

  There, lying in the center of the Brass Junction, was the crushed remains of a huge yellow dump truck that had somehow pierced the Downside like a missile. It lay there, now a barely recognizable hunk of twisted metal—and far above, through the gaping hole in the Brass Junction ceiling, came the distant hint of daylight.

  Without a moment to lose, he took the closest tunnel and raced off to tell the Wise Advisors of this disaster, and that the unspeakable had happened. A hole had been torn in the World.

  The Null Tunnel

  Had the Great Shaft Disaster been your typical big-city catastrophe, it would have been in and out of the news in a single day, a few heads would roll, and the city would move on. But the discovery of an unmapped chamber beneath the aqueduct shaft made it more newsworthy—and reports that the chamber was paved with fifty-year-old subway tokens erased any doubt as to the nature of this event. This was no catastrophe at all—it was a major archaeological find!

  In a few short hours, Mark Matthias went from an unknown civil engineer to an urban Indiana Jones, heralded by the media as the discoverer of some lost world.

  Work on the shaft immediately ceased, and the top archaeologists and historians were called in from NYU and Columbia University to examine the site. They were quick to discover that this chamber was actual
ly the junction of two intersecting tunnels—and furthermore, sonic resonant testing revealed a Big Old Tunnel that ran somewhere beneath the mysterious chamber’s floor. Reports were made, more experts were consulted, and what began as a construction accident evolved into a full-fledged expedition into the unknown, its spin reversed from tragedy to fortuity.

  Through all of this Talon watched in horror, his eyes glued to the images on the Matthias’s living-room television that night. As he was not accustomed to jarring cuts from one image to another, it made the whole thing seem all the more nightmarish.

  This, thought Talon, as he watched the first team of academics descend into the shaft, must have been how The Champ felt at Pearl Harbor—this most certainly heralded what would soon be a full-scale war.

  Talon had no need to hide in the Matthias home now, because Todd, sensing that his father had suddenly become important, rushed to his side as a show of support, but mostly to bask in his unexpected limelight. This left Lindsay and Talon alone to view the unfolding events.

  “This is my fault,” Talon muttered over and over again.

  “How can you say that? You weren’t even there,” reminded Lindsay. She stood beside him, but each time she tried to get close, he paced to another corner of the room.

  “I broke the law,” he declared. “The Fates brought me to the Topside to test me. I failed the test, and now the worlds will end.”

  “That’s stupid superstitious nonsense!” snapped Lindsay. “Look around you. Think about the things you’ve seen—the places you’ve been over the past few days. Do you really think it’s all going to end just because we found the Downside?”

  Talon pondered this well, weighing the old prophecy with the new perspective these few days in the sun had granted him. “You’re right,” Talon admitted. “Your world will survive.” He glanced at the TV, where they interviewed Lindsay’s father yet again, his words and expressions so exact that Talon began to wonder if they had actually captured time and were playing the same thing over and over and over.