Way Down Dark (21 page)

I take my mother's knife and kneel down, ready. Prepared. One short, sharp push up into her skull. That's the fastest, cleanest way. Agatha told me that once.

I press the blade against her skin. She keeps her head perfectly steady.

“Now kill me,” she snarls. “Show me that you can. Kill me.” She wants me to, and too much. It's all that she's got now: being defeated.

“No,” I say. “You're already done.” She is in so much pain. She's devastated, ruined. I do not need to lower myself to murder.

Agatha was right in the end. You can make your own story. And this is my story. You can be better than they are.

I stand and throw the knife away and walk off.

“I know where you are!” she screams. “I will come and find you, and I will kill you! I will heal, and I will come for you, Chan, daughter of Riadne!”

“You can try,” I say. But I'll be somewhere else. I hear her screaming my name as I walk away, but I know that the war is over.

It has to be over.

Looking up, as I get to the gantry, away from the remains of the arboretum—where I spent some of my happiest moments, the only place of tranquillity on this whole ship—I see that Rex's Lows are nearly done. They don't know what's happened, and they're too far in to stop. The orange sparks of their work fly off around them, and I can see the metal splitting: giant jaws of jagged iron starting to tear themselves wide. I can hear the metal groaning and feel the ship shaking. Won't be long, and we can't be here when it happens.

I'm running to the gantry when suddenly something gives. The arboretum shifts, tilts. I slip, falling backward, land on
my shoulder, howl, cry out. I start sliding, going down. The gantry wrenches away from the fixtures that hold it in place on the berth floors, a scream of metal as it tugs itself apart. The whole arboretum is shifting, pulling away from the sections of the ship. I fall, slip, slide, managing to hook my fingers into the grated iron of the floor at the edge of the arboretum, my good arm holding me as the whole thing tilts.

I look up. One of the Lows made it through their support, splitting apart the metal, and the other bracing struts have buckled. They creak and moan, the same moans that
Australia
has always made but a million times louder. The Lows fall, colliding with the floor of the arboretum, bouncing off the slope, and tumbling down into the Pit below.

I watch them go. I can't see Rex, but I know that she'll be taken along with all the other detritus. I can't worry about her.

The whole thing shifts slightly, dropping a foot, creaking and moaning. I need to move, I know, and fast.

It must have seemed like such a good idea to give us all of this: these trees, these plants, this water. I can imagine the creators of this prison thinking that this was in some way being kind. A garden is a simulation of nature. They were giving us something that we would miss from our lives. But it's never been that. It was always just another story. And now? Now it's collapsing, tearing itself down. The trees are uprooting themselves; the water is spilling from the river, rushing over the dead ground, washing away the burned remains of the plants and fruit and crops that we were growing; and the earth is falling out in clumps of sodden char.

And me: I'm there, hanging on to the edge as the arboretum starts to fall apart. Chunks of earth, water, and plants fly down, tumble off, nearly hitting me. I have to get off this, I know, or something will take me and I'll be done. I watch the detritus fall down, past me, into the Pit. It suddenly doesn't seem as far to fall as it did before.

I look behind me, and I can see the creaking remains of the part where the gantry once was attached to section IV. It's far, but I might be able to reach it. If I swing out enough, if I can get enough force when I push off.

I've never jumped that far before, but I guess I've never had to.

Three. Two. One.

I push off, kicking away, forcing myself into the air, letting go of the edge as I reach for the other side.

It's only when I'm in the air that I realize I don't know if I can make it. And I think, then this is it. This is how I break the promise that I made to my mother.

Then my arm hits something, and I hook it as well as I can. It's the forty-sixth floor, the railing along the edge of the gantry. I feel my shoulder—my good shoulder—pop, the bone slipping from the socket. The noise is almost as powerful as the pain. But I can't stop to think about it. As I haul myself up and over, suddenly safe—as safe as you can be here—I look back, and I see that the water is hurling itself down now, pouring off and down into the Pit. It isn't stopping. I don't know how much water there is in the systems, but it's not done yet.
Australia
is flooding.

I start to move, heading to a stairwell. Fastest route down, no stopping. I can't afford to stop. My shoulder is dislocated,
but I can fix that; Agatha taught me how, back when I was a kid. I take a run at a wall, hurling myself at it to try to fix it, to get enough force to pop my shoulder back into place.

The first attempt burns with pain, worse even than the knife hole in my other shoulder.

The second time—when I open my mouth and scream as I do it, because that feels like it'll give me an extra burst of strength, maybe, just enough—it works. Thud, clunk; this shoulder feels like it's going to burst, but it works again.

One day I won't be in perpetual pain, I tell myself. One day soon, all of this—the fighting, the hurt, the ship—will all be over.

I start to climb down, faster than I think I've ever climbed before. I hope that Jonah and Mae made it down before the water started. I hope that they're safe inside the ship. I picture the button on that screen, the temptation of our destination, and that pushes me faster and faster. The arboretum tears itself apart, the pieces falling as the structure rocks and creaks. I can hear the Pit filling.

So I begin dropping floors as much as possible, covering as much ground as I can without killing myself on each floor I go down. I can't use my arms properly—my bleeding shoulder is nearly useless, and the other hurts when I do too much—but I know that I have to get to the bottom of the ship before it's too flooded for me to make my way to the hatch and then back to Jonah, to Mae, and to that big button that is going to take us home.

By the time I get down to the Pit, it's a mess: bits of the arboretum piled up, water that's run down, making the level of the mulch rise to nearly lap up against the first floor. And it's getting deeper. It's too deep to wade through easily now, that much is clear. I run to the edge of the gantry and look out over the flooded Pit. Anybody left—Lows, free people, whoever—they're panicking. People are swarming up the stairwells even as I climb down, and there are fresh bodies in the water: Lows fallen from the higher levels and lost to it.

But this is just the start. Sooner or later, the parts of the arboretum will stop falling, and then it's only a matter of time before the rest of the structure follows. Above, I can see it creaking, swinging, shaking on its moorings.

Even if it doesn't break the ship in two, the loss of the arboretum will be fatal to whoever's left on
Australia
. No fresh food, no fresh water, only this bloody diseased mess in the Pit to drink. Being here, without those things . . . That's a death sentence. Even the people who sent our ancestors into space weren't that cruel.

I look up at the ship that is my home, all I've ever known, and see that everybody around me on these floors—whoever they are, frees and Lows alike—is looking down at me. They don't want to die.

They watch me. Faces, all the way up the ship, as far as I can see. Fires burn in every section, seemingly on every floor. We're lit up again, as bright as we've ever been.

I stand on the edge of the gantry, and I let them watch me. I shout, because I have to, because I can't just leave this be.

“There's a way off this ship,” I yell, “a way to get somewhere safe. Follow me.” I let my voice echo up, the flood making it sound like it's spoken from underwater somewhere. But it carries. It reaches a few of them, and they spread the word. They start coming then, another flood, this time of people.

And then it all gets so much worse.

The arboretum squeals, a terrible noise of metal grinding against itself, and it shifts again. Another support strut gone, and now the arboretum is hanging almost vertically, a plate balancing on its side. There's a creak, and then something else in the air above me: darker, heavier, solid, coming right down.

It's a tree, bigger than anything that's fallen before. This is one of the hard-rooted trees, the bigger ones. Maybe you would survive a smaller one colliding with you. This one? Not a chance.

It falls faster than I can see, and it smacks into the surface of the Pit, creating waves that crash across the gantry where I'm standing. The roots jut upward like fingers reaching out.

After that, everything is chaos: Every other part of the arboretum follows it, everything that used to be fixed and secure, spilling into the dirty black water of what used to be the Pit.

No time. No time. I slip into the water, grabbing the side. It's high enough that it's over my head, and I have to paddle my arms and stand on sunken debris and crane my neck to even hope to keep my face above it. I don't know what I'm doing. I
pull my mask onto my face and put my head underwater, and I can see almost perfectly. I try to push myself down deeper, pulling myself with my hands. It's hard, the water denser than I thought it could be, and I can't get anywhere, so I go back and use the sides.

Something grabs me, and I panic, looking up. I see it through the water: a person. I don't know from here if it's a Low, and I don't care. They grab my ankle, and I reach up, and I take their hand. They pull on me, tugging my bad arm, because they're scared of the water. But I see them take another hand, forming a chain of people, and I tell them to take a breath if they're too short to stand, to cling on to others to help them, to pass the message along. I heave myself face-first into the water, down to the bottom, and then I find the floor, and I do exactly the same, treating it like rungs. I've climbed this ship my entire life, and I've gotten good at this: hauling my weight on handholds and footholds. I go for the middle, for the hatch. I can see the lever.

More. More. I worry that the people behind me will get swallowed, that they won't hold their breath properly when they need to dive down to get out of here. The Lows especially can't breathe well as it is. But they have to manage. This can't all be on me.

The ship is useless, I tell myself. If they stay here, they'll die.

So I do what I can.

I push down, to the hatch. I struggle. It's chaos here, worse than it's ever been. We could die in this. We could drown. This
could be our ending, but I won't let it be. Not now, not after all we've been through.

I find the lever, and I pull it as hard as I can, and I wait. There's no vibration, no rumble of it working, of the hatch opening.

It's as dead as everything else on this ship.

It must be the water. The flooding. I don't know what to do. I'm stuck. I can breathe, but they can't. These people are stuck. I try not to panic, because then they'll all panic.

I pull myself back to the surface and look around, and I see a chain of desperate faces leading up and out of the water, all holding on to one another in desperation and terror.

For this moment we're unified.

I take the hand of the man behind me. “You have to help me,” I say. “We've got to pull this open. Take a deep breath.” I drag him underwater and guide his hands to the door in the floor, and I put his fingers around it. I do the same for the next man and the woman behind him. We crowd around, all of us, as many as can fit, and we pull. I don't have to tell them to do it; they just know.

It starts to give.

The water will flood down if this works. It'll pour into the area down below. But if I'm fast, I can . . .
We
can stop it. Maybe it won't flood. Maybe it won't . . . Maybe there are sluices, something like that. There must be measures.

If I've called this wrong, I'm not just killing us, I'm killing Mae, and Jonah, and everybody else I saved.

Don't die.

I've called this wrong.

I wave my hand for the people to stop, but they don't. It's too late. The hatch is nearly up, more metal being torn apart.

It opens, and still they don't stop. They're going to drown, struggling under this water and desperate. They all know how bad it is. The door is wrenched off, tossed aside.

Underwater, everything moves as if it's been slowed down. The chamber, big enough for one, a squeeze for two, fills immediately, and they start going to work on the part below, wrenching that second door open as well, kicking it in, forcing their way. Suddenly I'm being sucked in, pulled along with the water as it goes. We're all dragged in; everything flows downward.

The water rushes through the corridor and makes it hard to run. I see Jonah in the kitchen as the mulch burbles around our feet. He's holding Mae, and she lights up when she sees me, grinning. He notices my shoulder.

“You're hurt,” he says before saying anything about the flood or asking about Rex. Noticing that before anything else.

“It'll keep,” I say. “We need to do something.” I wade through to the control room. “People are coming down,” I say. “You'll have to help them.”

“Who?”

“Whoever.
Australia
's finished. They need somewhere to go.” He turns back and looks down the corridor. “The water's coming. Find a way to stop it,” I tell him, and he nods. He's about to go, when he stops. He turns and looks at me, right
into my eyes. He's so different from when I met him. I can see all of him now, every part of who he is. Or who he wants to be. I don't know.