Way Down Dark (11 page)
Authors: J.P. Smythe
Tags: #YAF056000 YOUNG ADULT FICTION / Science Fiction / General
On the other side, at the edge of section III, I suddenly notice the Lows. They have torches: thick rods of metal soaked in something that burns so brightly that the flames are almost white. They stand and they breathe their sick huffs, and they scream.
And then I see her: Rex, their leader, the woman who was there the night my mother died. She's more scarred now, that's for certain, with fresh welts running across her chest and face, and I'm sure that her hair is singed in placesâshort to the scalp on one half of her head. She looks at me and then at the fallen gantry around us all. She has no expression on her face as she looks at the chaos.
And then she says, “Take them.” I can see her lips move; I know that's what she says even through the noise all around us. And at this, the Lows hoot and howl and drop ladders and planks across the stairwell and onto the creaking mess of metal around us. I watch, frozen, and she stares back at me, and she smiles. I'm sure of it.
There are too many of them. We back off, those of us who were trying to help the trapped and fallen, because they outnumber us. Ten, fifteen, twenty I count, piling over the gap. We can't save the others and ourselves. We retreat, because there's nothing else that we can do.
Agatha was right. The incursions of the nights before weren't war.
This is.
Your mother was a pain in the backside. I think that's fair to say. She was a nightmare, and your grandparents couldn't control her, so they asked me to help. I was treated as a part of the family after I rescued herâmaybe a distant relative, coming every so often for food and companyâand they needed help. She was inquisitive. Here, people change, but she was different. There used to be a saying: a leopard never changes its spots. You've seen drawings of tigers? A leopard was like them, but spots, not stripes. That was your mother. She was twelve or thirteen, and she wanted more than
Australia
could offer her. She wanted some degree of freedom, which . . . She managed to forget what she was like, I think, when she was dealing with you. You were your own person and yet so like her.
She was going out a lot in the mornings and then not coming home. Your grandmother wanted to teach herâthey had
bargained for books, and they wanted to give her something like an education, as much as they could manageâand she refused. She had better things to be doing, she told them. So they asked me to watch over her, to make sure she was all right. What they meant was: find out what she is doing. They were worried. People should worry; it's a sign that they care.
So I followed her, and she had no idea. I'm good at it. I know the ship like the back of my hand, and I know where to hide. I knew what paths to take to be able to watch her as she went without being seen, and I got to watch everything that she did. Meeting with her friends, talking, sitting. The games they played, daring each other to go to places in the ship where they weren't supposed to go to. Climb high, visit the Pale Women; walk into Bell territory and tell them a joke; go into the Lows' section and steal something. The dares got worse and worse, the children pushing themselves as far as they could go. One of them was caught by a Low one time and killed. I didn't intervene. I stood back and watched their horror, and I thought, this will be the lesson. This will be what stops them.
Of course, it didn't. You know what your mother was like: you told her not to do something, and she proved as stubborn and defiant as anybody's ever been. They didn't stop the games. Quite the opposite. I had to watch as they put more pressure on each other to perform, to outclass one another. Her friends . . . eventually they grew up, got scared, learned to be afraid. But not Riadne.
Anyway, one day I stopped her. I grabbed her, because they were throwing knives that they had stolen from somebody, tiny little things, sharp spikes with fins on the side. They stole
them, and they made a game of it: trying to hit targets below by dropping them through the grating of the floor, to watch them plummet and stick somebody who didn't see it coming. I grabbed her and pulled her to one side, and I told her to stop.
She refused. Of course she refused, because I was just like her parents. Couldn't have been more similar in her eyes. I made things worse then, because I slapped her. I'm not proud of that, but there it was, and she was shocked, and she slapped me right back. So she took my criticism of her and then went further. She pushed harder.
This would have been the first time she went down to the Pit. Everybody goes down there eventually, and I don't mean in some hazy, mystical way; I mean, to see what it's like down there. There are bodies, and everybody has to see it. I know about the first time you went down, even. It's a secret, a dare. We make it into a rite of passage. But it's a test.
Your mother dared her friendsâfour of them, I remember: three girls and one boyâto go down there, as they had done before. But this time, they were going into it. Not sitting on the side, not looking away as whatever grisly mess floated toward them, actually setting foot in it. She told them that she would go first. I tried to stop her once I caught wind of what they were planning, but she wouldn't listen to me. They went, climbed down and down, and they ended up on the bottom floor. I don't need to tell you what it's like down there. It's dark, and the ship seems to shake more than anywhere else, and the smell makes you retch. There's a kind of mist above it, from the bodies. That's why the stories about the ghosts came about:
because down there people swear that they hear voices. Your mother? She wanted to meet a ghost. That's what she said the dare was about. Go down there, into the Pit, and meet one of the ghosts.
I waited two floors above and watched them. I didn't want to make her do anything that might actually result in her harming herself. And defying me? That could have been what pushed her over the edge. Her friends were nervous. I don't want to say that they were more sensible than she was, but they knew to be cautious. Your mother, though? She went in. She sat on the edge and she put her feet in, and then she went for it. She waded out waist-deep in that mess, and she grinned as if she had achieved something truly great. She was the first person she knew who had done what she just did, and she was proud.
She was also foolish. She didn't see the Lows at the lip of their section, stepping in. They forage from the Pit, and they always have, trawling it for anything that they can use. Weapons and clothes end up down there, and . . . There have always been stories. They don't eat from the arboretum, at least not that we know. Some people must trade with them, and they steal things, but there are enough of them that most of their food must come from somewhere else. The bug protein can't be enough to sustain them; we all know that. They take what they can get; that's always been their way. Your mother didn't see them, but I did. I was willing to bet that they wouldn't care what they found in there, living or dead. They don't tend to make the distinction at the best of times.
She waded out backward, facing her friends, and then they saw the Lows coming, and they pointed, and your mother turned and saw them too and tried to run, but the Lows ran faster.
She should have been able to make it out, but she tripped and fell, and that was enough. Down and under she went, under the blood and the bodies. You've seen it; you know what it's like down there. It's never been any different. She tripped, and then she screamed. Her foot was caught on something.
Her friends abandoned her. They didn't wait even a moment, didn't offer her any help. They ran, because they didn't want the Lows to turn on them when they were done with her. She was aloneâor she would have been if I hadn't been watching her.
I went in after her, and I dealt with them. They didn't make it out, but she did. And I dragged her home, coughing and spluttering, and I cleaned her off before her parents saw her, and I told her what we would say to them: that she was done with going off alone and wanted to help them out more. She was going to be the ideal daughter, I told her, and she agreed. No more going off on her own. No more lying. No more secrets.
But she lied. She lied to them and to me. She would always have her secrets, even from me.
First they destroy the Bells.
The Bells are . . . There's a story. There's always a story. This one goes that the Bells came from experiments before we left Earth. They were soldiers, modified by doctors back then, bits of their brains limited to focus them. That's how wars were fought, with people turned into single-minded killing machines. On
Australia
, though, that kind of focus isn't useful, not without anybody to tell them what they should be doing. Here they're nothing but muscle, driven by impulses rather than anything like logic. They're violent and they're angry, but they're also malleable. Get into a fight with them and you're dead, but it's pretty easy to talk your way out if you're able to think on your feet. They're harmless.
Or they
were
.
The Bells live below the collapsed part of section IV, those floors way beneath. Once we're all scared awayâby their numbers, more than anythingâthe Lows move down, flooding into the twenty or so floors that the Bells call home, using the darkness to their advantage. And they tear them apart. The Lows bring their torches with them, and I can see the fighting. I watch as Bells are thrown into the Pit, as the Lows cut them with weapons, as they throw firebombs to burn them up, to drive them out. Before? That wasn't expanding. That was just the Lows flexing their muscles. This is the Lows expanding.
I stand at the gantry railing to watch, and the woman who now lives in Bess's berth joins me. She rolls her shoulders as she approaches, and she snorts rather than saying anything, nodding to acknowledge me.
“Are you scared of them?” she asks. Her voice is throaty and hoarse, like they all are. She can't lose that, I suppose.
“Yes,” I say. Better to be honest.
“There's no end to this,” she says. She pauses, seeming to weigh the words before she says them. I try not to stare at the burn marks on her face. “They won't stop, and what happens then? When they've taken the ship for their own? Then we're all Lows.”
“You've been one before,” I say, the words out of my mouth before I can even think about how they might sound. “I'm sorry,” I say, backtracking.
But she smiles almost, the corners of her lips tilting slightly. “I was,” she says, “when I was much younger. My parents were.” So that was how she grew up. But she left . . . I wonder
why. But I don't ask any other questions. She seems nice, I think. I haven't seen her before, but that's often the way here. If you want to hide, you can. This ship is good for keeping secrets.
“The Bells will fight back,” she says, “but they'll lose. The Lows will take as much of the ship as they want, and nobody will stop them.”
“But that'sâ”
“They'll hunt down anybody who threatens them, and when the only people left are the weak and sick and scared, they'll take the ship. Don't fight. Stand back and watch, and pray that you don't get in their way.”
As we watch, the Bells are decimated. Some of them run for their lives, scattering to other parts of the ship to nurse their wounds and mourn their dead friends. The Lows have separated them. But they're done. One night and they're all but destroyed, and nothing anybody can do now can help them.
And suddenly, as if we blinked and it happened, fast as anything, half of section IV belongs to the Lows: every floor from the Pit up to 50. It's over just like that, and we've lost more of the ship. And now we're unbalanced; the rest of section IV starts dragging their wounded and dead and sick and young over to section V, crowding in. We lost the lower half to war; we'll lose the upper half to abandonment. The Lows will take the entire section.
They now have more than half of
Australia
.
In our section, we make room and we let others in. I find a man and his daughter, scared and wandering, turned away from other places, and I take them to the berth on 85 that
Agatha had suggested that I move into, and I tell them that it's theirs now. They're grateful.
I go looking for Agatha. I check her new home, but she's not there. I want to stay and wait for her, but I can't. Because there are more people who need help. If I can't help them, I ask myself, what can I do?
The morning means nothing here in the new darkness. Some people with clocks might try to read them, but there's no sense. It's strange: when the lights were on all the time and we made it night, you could feel the difference. Now? For some reason, the distinction is no longer there.
I sit in my berth and I talk to myself or to my mother, I'm not really sure which. I tell the darkness in front of me about what's happening, talking it through as if that will change anything. Maybe it will; I don't know. Maybe hearing it out loud will make it all make sense.
I'm so tired. My body is so drained, and I feel like I've barely slept the last few days. What's it like to not be here? What would it be like?
“Mother,” I say, but she's not there, and in the darkness, it makes me wonder if she ever was, or if all those years with her looking after me were only some dream I had.
I wake up. I can't remember ever having slept so heavily. There is a noise coming from outside my berth: breathing, the sounds of violence. The curtains are drawn closed. I don't remember doing that, but they are. I don't know what time it is, how long I've been asleep for, and I can't see how many Lows are out
there, waiting for me or about to burst in. I sit up as quietly as I can manage, and the bed stays as quiet as I need it to. This feels like routine now: shoes on, blade in my hand, ready. I don't think about anything else.
Don't die
, my mother's voice says again and again. It rattles around my head, and I can't get rid of it. If only she knew that it wasn't as easy as it once might have been.
But they're not for me, not right away. It's the woman next door. I've been woken up by the tail end of them destroying her and her family. I don't know how I slept through it, but I did. Who she isâwho she wasâdoesn't mean anything. She defected, and now she's here, and she's a threat. They call her a traitor, and she tries to defend herself. She tells them that she was granted pardon. She begs. They don't care. She throws around names of Lows that she knows, that she was friends with, and she shows them her scars, says that she got them in fights with the same Lows who are there now, torturing her. She begs again, saying that their leader spared her life, that she's free now. They laugh. The leader who spared her is long dead, they tell her.
Don't die.
I peek through gaps in the fabric. There are so many of them out there, spilling out onto the gantry, lit only by the torches that they're carrying. A pack of them: ten or so, maybe more inside the berth. They would kill me. I'd never make it through them alive. They haven't killed her yet, and I don't know why. They're keeping her alive. I can see an arm on the floor, and I assume it belongs to one of her sons. The other, I have no idea. Hopefully he wasn't with them when the Lows arrived.
Then the Lows fall silent. All I can hear is their breathing and the gasps for air coming from my neighbor. There's the sound of feet on the gantry in the distance. Metal soles on the shoes, the solid thud that they make as she walks. It's Rex, and she's here.
“Kill the rest of them,” she shouts. I remember her voice: so strangely monotonous, like there's nothing there behind it. It's terrifying, worse than the voice of any other Low.
I have to leave. I have to get out of here. I look down at my hands, and I see that my new blade is shaking, and it takes me a second to realize that both of my hands are shaking, that my whole body is. I should be stronger. I should be trying to help my new neighbor. She might have done wrong once, but not anymore. She wanted to get away from them. I have to believe that she's a good person and that what's being done to her isn't fair.
But I don't want to help as much as I want to live. I'm scared, and right now there's nothing that I can do.
The Low who was my neighbor screams. The more noise she makes, the better chance I'll have to escape. I peek through the curtains, and I can't see Rex. Maybe she's in the next berth; maybe she's left, gone somewhere else. I can't tell.
When my neighbor howls againâlouder this time, and it makes me feel sick to my stomach to hear, because it's so loud and so painedâI open the curtain slightly, and I step out, ready to break into a run.
I don't get the chance.
Rex's hand clamps onto my throat, her nails digging in, tight and sharp. I don't want to scream, and I don't want to
shut my eyes. She's so close to me. We're the same height, but she's stronger than I am. The muscles in her arm jut and swell as she grips me tighter. I wonder in that second if she might be able to lift me clean off my feet.
I can't breathe, and everything starts to go red. Lit by their torches, everything goes the same color as the fire, and then there's blackness, deeper than the lack of light. I kick out. I somehow put my hands on her arm, and I try to pry her fingers open.
She digs her fingers deeper into my neck.
“Don't cry,” she says to me. “Don't cry.” I didn't realize that I was crying. I somehow manage to take a breath, and I see her clearly for a second: her eyes huge and empty, her title carved into her chest still, now healed over into thick creamy welts that run over the thin skin. In her other hand, I see a knife: my mother's. It's the one that I used to kill her, that Rex in turn used to take her place as head of the Lows. She's kept it, and now she lifts it up to show it to me. She knows that I recognize it. She brings it close to my throat, resting it on the top of her hand, pressing it against my skin. She says something else, but I don't hear it. Her voice sounds like it's coming from another place as the darkness swarms my vision again.
Everything goes black, and thenâ
I drop. I'm suddenly on the floor, on my back, and I'm gasping in air, coughing it straight back up. The lightâas little of it as there isâcomes back, and I can see feet, a struggle of fighting in front of me, and blood, pouring from somewhere, that is hitting the floor in front of my eyes, spattering onto my face. There's screaming again, but this is different. It's angry.
I'm wrenched to my feet, and I barely have time to see what's happened before Agatha is looking into my face. She pulls me close to her.
“You have to run!” she whispers. Behind her, the Lows cluster around their leader, who clutches at her arm. Her head is rocked back, mouth open, teeth bared. Some of them, I see, have been filed down into points. She never bares them, doesn't use them to scare. She's just done it because she likes it.
And then I see her hand on the floor. It's still clutching my mother's knife.
“Where?” I ask Agatha as Rex starts looking around, as the Lows gather their weapons, as they start toward us. I see Rex snatch a lit torch from one of her followers, and she drives her hand into it, screaming as she cauterizes the wound. “There's nowhere safe!”
“The Pale Womenâ” Agatha says, and she's cut off, like she's going to say more but can't, and that's all I've got.
I reach out and grab my blade from the floor, and then I run, like she told me to. I don't know if Agatha is behind me. I'm more scared than I've ever been in my whole life.
I climb up a floor when I reach the first gantry, and again, and then I see Lows, terrorizing the fifty-third floor, so I go along to try to reach the next stairwell, between sections V and VI, past the berths here as the Lows are in them, and I see them, and I think,
Don't die,
and I keep moving, because that's the only way I know to avoid the fighting; and I climb up another floor, and another, and another, and I'm exhausted
and aching and shaking, but I can't stop, so I don't; then I climb again, and again, five floors in one go, and the coast is clear, so I leave the stairwell and run along the gantry, and suddenly there are more Lows; it's so hard to see anything, because I'm relying on my gut instincts, on the occasional torch that's been left somewhere, on the reflections of fire in the metal walls that make up the berths. But I know that the Lows have light, they have fire, so that's what I stay away from, I decide, and then, on the sixty-sixth or sixty-seventh or maybe even the seventieth floorâI can't tell because I've been moving and not worrying where I am, just trying to stay aliveâthere's so many of them that I have to find another way, so I look for one, but I can't get past them, and they look down at me, and they see me, not knowing who I am but knowing that I'm running, and maybe also catching the glint of my blade. So they start to come for me, and I turn and I run again, back in the direction I came from. But I can't go back down, because there's nothing for me there but Rex, and I hear her, screaming my name, somehow still on her feet, somehow coming for me, which means that she's done with Agatha, however that particular fight ended. So there's only one path left, and that's across the ladder bridge that they used to get to this section, over into section I, so I rush across it, into Low territory, right into where they have come from, where I have never ever been before.
There's a torch lying on an abandoned bunk, and matches. It's dangerous: the rest of this side of the ship is empty, and lighting it will make me a beacon. But I have to. I've got no
idea what I'll find here. At least it's empty. Or it looks like it's empty. I hold my breath and I strike the match, hold it to the fabric that is knotted around one end. The torch takes.
I've spent time staring at the Low sections before. You can see them from anywhere on the ship but not closely enough to pick out details. You don't know what it's like until you're in it, until it's lit up close by the yellow brightness of a flame. There are bones on the gantries and ripped rags of fabric on the walls, all manner of colors and sizes. Piecesâremnantsâof the people they've killed. They have weapons here: blunt and broken but probably usable. And there's so much blood. It stains the metal of the floor, and it stains the walls and the ripped mattresses inside the berths that they sleep on.
