Unwelcome Bodies (27 page)

Only, he did.

It meant no more broadcasts. They’d have to go back to their old ways after so many decades of worshiping their home planet from afar.

This was a good thing, wasn’t it?

He looked up at the timer running in the upper right corner of the Wall. It was nearly Dark Night Bells.

No time to put on a new face.

He caught the next crawler to Old Town and made his way to the familiar warren of Masked Quarter alleys. As the moons slowly tracked across the sky, he brushed off three propositions from bored Adorned boys and was just about to leave when he felt a hand on his arm. “Seph.”

He turned and gazed into perfect pale blue eyes.

“I wasn’t going to come, but I have news.” Roland pulled him deeper into the darkness and murmured, “They’re going to be closing your department any day now, then closing mine a week or so later. It’s not official yet, but from what I’m hearing, word will be coming down from the twentieth floor in a matter of days.”

Could the Masked really hear up to the Unadorned levels? “Roland, what’s going on?”

Roland leaned in close and whispered, “There aren’t any more transmissions coming in from Earth,
ever
.”

“So the cloudscrapers are cutting us off.”

“No, I mean the
transmissions
have stopped. Look, I don’t know the details, but we’ve been hearing rumors on the eighth floor for a couple of weeks now. That’s why we’ve been stretching our work out.”

What was going on that it was being kept even from the Adorned?

“Seph, once we’re no longer working together…” Roland raised his eyebrows meaningfully.

Seph narrowed his eyes. “What about your impending future husband?”

“Fuck him. As little as possible.”

“I’ll be here the night I get fired.”

Roland smiled, the dim light of the alley twinkling off of his lip rings. “It’s a date.” He cupped Seph’s painted cheeks with his hands, and planted a long, hard kiss on his mouth.

When Seph opened his eyes again, he was alone.

But he could still feel Roland’s lips on his.

* * * *

Order didn’t inform Seph that his office was closed for the day until after he’d finished painting his face.

He stepped out of the washroom to see Lenore lounging on the sofa, playing with a new set of Russian nesting dolls that had been painted to look like famous plastic surgery disasters of the 21st century. “You look chipper,” she said.

“I might be losing my job,” Seph said.

Lenore raised her eyebrows. “And that’s a cause for celebration?”

“If Roland and I are no longer coworkers—”

“Ah, say no more.”

Rather than spend the day wading through Lenore’s clutter, he decided to venture back into Old Town, to Mauro’s shop. Once the door was securely closed behind him, he said, “Your friends were right.”

Mauro peered out the curtains, then lead Seph deeper into the shop. “What have you heard?”

“An Adorned…coworker tells me that my department’s closing. He says that the transmissions have stopped.”

“That’s what I’ve heard too,” Mauro said. “My friends won’t tell me why, though. Sit. Have some caffe.”

“Thank you.”

As Mauro warmed two bulbs in the hot box, Seph wandered through the shop, running a gloved finger along a counter and flicking the thick pad of dust from his fingertip to the floor. The brushes didn’t look like they’d been properly cared for. He picked one up, tugged down his collar, and ran the bristles across a patch of bare skin on his collarbone. No. Too scratchy. He’d need to replace them all if he landed this job.

Mauro handed a warm bulb to Seph with one metallic hand and asked, “So, are you here about the job, or are you just here to figure out why you might need it?”

Seph took a sip of the sweet, dark liquid, and swirled it around his mouth while he considered his answer. “Let’s start with the job. Do you really think there’s any chance of Order assigning me here?”

Mauro set his bulb down on a nearby counter and picked up a dried-out vial of red paint. “No. Order isn’t issuing any new commerce licenses, and old ones are being revoked every day. I think you’d have to take this on as an after-hours thing for barter.”

Did Seph want to give up his evenings?

Then again, if he only worked between Evening and Dark Night Bells, he’d just be a short walk away from the old Masked Quarter every night. He took another sip from his bulb and walked deeper into the store. “So, if I take this as a second job, I’ll inherit this store from you. All of it.” He stopped outside the entrance to the back room and looked at the metal door in the floor.

Mauro stood behind him and said, “Exactly.”

“Did you talk to them before the Caste Police took your hands?”

“A little. I uncovered that access hatch about ten years ago when I tore up the floor to do renovations. It was one of the old feast days, and they were singing.” Mauro stepped past Seph, shaking his head. “I tossed some fruit and flowers down in appreciation. I don’t think they get much of either of those things. Then we started having conversations through the door. It was never anything major. I was just…” He stared at the metal door. “I was curious.”

Seph set his bulb down. “Have you visited them?”

Mauro shook his head. “No. I was too cowardly to go down there before they took my hands. Now, I couldn’t even if I wanted to. My replacement hands only work when I stay in the designated Paintclad levels. But after losing my hands, I started inviting them up.”

From below their feet, a voice asked, “How about extending a fresh invitation?”

Mauro chuckled. “Come on up, Madlie.”

The door swung open, and the pale-faced woman from the night before climbed up and perched on the rim of the hole, her mask hanging down around her neck. “Your department’s closing tomorrow,” she said.

Seph held his gloved hand out to help her to her feet, and she stared at it for a long moment, seemingly baffled, before accepting it. “I hadn’t realized it would be so soon,” he said. “How do you know this?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“You can’t tell me up here, right?”

She crossed her arms over her chest, but there was a meaningful grin gracing one corner of her mouth.

“So,” Seph asked, “will you take me down there?”

Madlie turned to Mauro. “Will you witness that this Paintclad went down below of his own free will?”

“Not only that,” Mauro said, “but I’ll even testify that it was his own suggestion to do so.”

It was a meaningless gesture between these two outcasts, but it still sent a shiver up Seph’s spine. What he was doing could get him punished.

He should have done something like this a long time ago.

“Take off the paint,” Madlie said. “And you’ll want to leave the jacket and gloves topside so you don’t drown in your own sweat.”

A few minutes later, Seph, bare-faced and bare-armed, followed Madlie down the access hole and began his climb down the long ladder. “If you don’t like what you hear, you’d better not change your tune and say I abducted you, ground-walker. You have no idea—”

“I’m fucking an Adorned, so actually, I do.”

“Hunh. Well.”

They climbed further down into the clanking, chugging, gurgling maze of machinery that ran the City. Seph felt his scalp break into a sweat, and the first trickle slithered down his spine, stopped only by the waistband of his pants.

At the base of the ladder, the air was so thick with moisture that it was like breathing through a wet cloth. Madlie stripped off her coverall and mask and slung both over her arm. Beneath, she was wearing drab cut-off shorts that would have fallen off of her bony hips were it not for her rope belt, and a threadbare hammer and sickle shirt that was far from its original vibrant red glory. “We need to get out from under Old Town if we want to hear anything from up high. Come on.” She led him to a two-person tricycle, pitched her discarded clothes in its basket, and took the handlebar as they pedaled through corridors that cut through the City’s machines and the people trapped down with them.

He’d never complain about his blue-tinged existence again.

The corridors were mostly deserted, the few people walking them as gaunt and scraggly as Madlie. He heard a burst of giggles and turned to see a very young child streaking naked out from between two pipes. He smiled at her exuberance, but his face fell as he saw her older sister chasing after her. She couldn’t have been more than three or four years older than the toddler, but in those few years, the child had obviously come to realize how little joy her future held. She looked almost elderly in her despair.

If the Masked ever figured out a covert way to grow their own food and purify their own water down here, everyone topside would be doomed. He couldn’t imagine them continuing to service the castes above if their lives didn’t depend on it.

And if this was what the Makers had truly intended for this caste, then he wasn’t capable of hating them enough.

“Here we are,” Madlie said as she brought the tricycle to a halt several meters from a thick cluster of pipes. There was already a decent-sized crowd around it, each person jockeying for a good position to hear for themselves what was going on above. Madlie winced. “Maybe I should have had you keep on your paint so we could get you to the front of the line.”

“No, this is your home,” Seph said. “I’ll wait my turn.”

A few people turned to look at the newcomers. Eyes wide, they stepped aside and whispered to the people in front of them, who did the same, until there was a clear path between Seph and the pipes.

Seph looked down at his brand new Sagrada Familia T-shirt and freshly pressed black trousers, then looked at everyone else in their dingy cast-offs from above, and knew instantly how they’d figured it out.

Madlie lead Seph up the cleared path, and he was careful to thank everyone he walked past.

She put her ear against one large pipe, then another, then waved him over. “This one. Quickly.”

He leaned in, pressing his ear against the warm metal, and put his finger in his other ear to block out the murmurs around him.

“…we are still awaiting word from the Skinless Empress, all bless Her name, on what, if anything to tell the lower castes has happened to the Earth. She has made it clear that they are not to know the truth, as they are too emotional to handle the news with the same fortitude as those of us living up above the clouds. Experts believe that She may be waiting for guidance from the Takers, as they were the ones to point Her predecessor to the broadcasts in the first place. Meanwhile, efforts to wean the lower castes away from total media dependence on our former sister planet continue, despite grumblings from below on the darker tone of the repeats being broadcast…”

“
Former
sister planet?” Seph asked.

Another Masked gestured to a nearby pipe, and Seph stepped over and pressed his ear against it.

“…apparently had little warning that the Yellowstone supervolcano was going to erupt, and thus had no way to prepare for its devastating effect on the planet as a whole. Repeated attempts to mine even the faintest messages from Earth have been fruitless, and according to what little scientific data was broadcast in the first hours after the eruption, there seems to be no hope for the survival of the human race on planet Earth. Clearly, the Takers must have seen this coming all those centuries ago when they brought us here in their bid to ensure that the work of the Makers wouldn’t be lost forever if something happened to Earth. All praise to the Makers and Takers.”

Seph pulled his ear away and stared emptily into space for a long moment before asking, “Supervolcano?”

“The cloudscrapers have known about it for weeks,” Madlie said, “but they were sitting on a large enough transmissions backlog that no one below them had a clue anything was wrong. At least, not at first.”

Seph sagged against the pipe and tried to process the news, but it was too big. “Earth’s
gone
?”

“The planet’s still there,” Madlie said. “But we’re probably all that’s left of the human race.”

The people he’d been watching on the Wall his entire life, the planet he’d admired, with its wide open spaces, its unstratified life. Gone.

Billions had died. And all that was left were a few thousand people crammed into a walled City on a distant planet that the people on Earth hadn’t even known existed.

And the cloudscrapers weren’t even going to tell anyone what had happened.

But how could he possibly spread the news far enough to make a difference? They’d capture him long before—

It didn’t matter. He had to do something.

“Take me back.”

Madlie steered again as they pedaled the tricycle back to the ladder. Topside, Mauro’s painted face waited for him. “What did they say?”

“Earth’s dead,” Seph said. “Everyone on it, dead.”

Mauro pressed a bulb of hot mulled juice into Seph’s hands and asked, “What did you hear down there?”

Seph told him everything. “We need to get word out. The people need to know.”

“What, that Earth is gone, or that the castes above are lying to them?”

“I think they already know the latter, but they could use the reminder.”

“You’re right on both counts,” Mauro said. “Leave it to me.”

“No, absolutely not. I’m going out there with you—”

“No. You’ve done your part by bringing me the information. Now let me do the rest.”

“But—”

Mauro handed Seph his coat and gloves. “You can use my Face Maker before leaving.”

“They’ll kill you.”

Mauro held up his metal hands, staring at them with a ghost of a smile on his face. “They started the job a couple of years ago. I can’t think of any good reason not to let them fin
ish it. Go. Stay home. Be safe. The future’s going to need people like you.”

He opened his mouth to protest, and Mauro smiled even wider. “Say hello to your ‘coworker’ for me.”

That did it. He sighed, and let Mauro lead him back to the Face Painter. Then he caught the first crawler back to his apartment block, feeling like the biggest coward in the universe as he sat there silently, not telling any of the people around him the devastating news.