Way Down Dark
Authors: J.P. Smythe
Tags: #YAF056000 YOUNG ADULT FICTION / Science Fiction / General
J.P. Smythe is an award-winning author.
Way Down Dark
is his first novel for young adult readers. He lives in London, where he teaches creative writing.
ALSO
BY
J.P.
SMYTHE
(WRITTEN
AS
JAMES
SMYTHE)
The Testimony
The Explorer
The Echo
The Machine
No Harm Can Come to a Good Man
New York ⢠London
Copyright © J.P. Smythe 2015
First published in the United States by Quercus in 2016
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of the same without the permission of the publisher is prohibited.
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Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use or anthology should send inquiries to
[email protected]
.
e-ISBN 978-1-68144-383-6
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Control Number: 2016030129
Distributed in the United States and Canada by
Hachette Book Group
1290 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10104
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual personsâliving or deadâevents, or locales is entirely coincidental.
For A, J, K, T, and Wâbecause knowing you made me want to be better at this.
And for Câbecause of absolutely everything else.
The story goes that Earth was much older than the scientists thought. We had assumed that we had billions of years left, that we would be totally prepared if the worst happened. Maybe that made us complacent. We thought we understood what we were doing to the planet. We thought we had time to fix it.
The first problem was overpopulation: too many people on the planet and not enough room for them. Then there wasn't enough fuel, there wasn't enough power, and we were wasting what little we had left. The planet got full around the same time it started cracking and shaking. The weather changed, becoming warmer and colder at different times, extremes of everything, and we couldn't adapt fast enough. The scientists knew that we were doomed.
The people of Earth scrambled for anything to save themselves. They built these ships in a rushâas many as they could
manage; that's how the story goesâand they loaded them up with people and sent them up into the sky.
I've imagined that so many times: all those ships crowding in the skies. Not everybody could be saved; that's how the story goes. The people sent up in the shipsâthey were the lucky ones.
The ships were launched into the deepest parts of space, trying to find new homes. They didn't find anywhere, so we're still here.
Even when life here is at its worst, I know being on
Australia
means we have a chance. We still might find a place to belong, to set up and make into a home. Things might still get better. And until then, being here is better than nothing.
It has to be.
ONE
After I helped kill my mother, I had to burn her body. She and Agatha had been dreaming up the plan for months when I wasn't looking: when I was asleep or working. They spoke in whispers, but they had always done that ever since I was little. I'd given up trying to understand them. And then, in her last few days, she told me everything. She said that it was to give me a chance to talk it through with them, to understand exactly what needed to be done. I think that was a lie; I think she believed that she would need to persuade me. But when she told me what I had to doâshe was lying in her bed, barely anything more than skin and bones, Agatha at her side, cradling her handâI didn't balk. It was what she wanted. She was in so much pain, and this was the only way I could help her.
“As soon as I'm gone,” she said, “they'll come for you. This is all I can do to protect you now.” I was young; that was her thinking. I was young, and Agatha was old, and soon she would be gone as well. That was the way of the ship: It took everybody in the end. All you did was survive until it was your time. My mother's survival had been incredible, really. It was because she had a reputation. Her reputation meant that I was always left alone, because so many others on the ship were scared of her. Only when she became sick did that change. Not that anybody knew what was wrong with her for sure, but there were rumors. Rumors are nearly worse than the truth, because they get out of control. People started looking at me differently, pushing their luck, sizing me up. They wanted to see just how weak she now was, and how weak I was. The gangs started coming nearer to our berth, sniffing the air and staying quiet to hear whether she was still alive, and they would skulk and wait and brace their bodies against walls, their knives in their hands, ready to make their move. Power is everything on
Australia
. Power is how they rule; it's how they take territory, make parts of the ship their own. But somehow our section of the ship stayed free. Somehowâand part of me wants to lay the responsibility at my mother's feet, though I know it can't all have been her doingâwe stayed out of it. By the time she died, three sectionsâhalf the shipâbelonged to the gangs. But three sections had stayed free.
The night my mother died, it was almost like everyone on
Australia
knew. She had spent ten days and nights in bed by that point, and she coughed so loudly that it echoed. During those ten days, people came to pay tribute: the Pale Women,
the Bells, all the guilds of the free people: the tailors and the merchants and the smiths. I couldn't be with her while they visited. I didn't want to be. I stayed outside, and I watched them parade in one by one. She coughed gratitude at them, and they shook their heads as they left. She had done a lot for the ship. Her friendsâall free people, not associated with any of the gangsâthanked her. They all cried. I had never seen so many people cry, because sorrow is such a weakness. Crying's when they get you.
And then they were all finishedâthis was on the last day, when we knew that it was her last day, because that feeling is like the air itself, a weight of it that stays over your head the entire time. Then it was just the three of us: me, my mother, and Agatha.
“Can I have some time alone with her?” Agatha asked me, and I gave it to her, because I couldn't deny them that. They had known each other longer than I had; they were each other's family, had been since they were young. I was nervous; I knew what was coming, what I was going to have to do. I stood outside the rugs and curtains that made up the walls of our berth and watched the rest of the ship. From our home on the fiftieth floor I could see everything else: five other sections, all surrounding ours. The ship itself was a hexagon of walkways and homes and shafts, over ninety floors high. And in the middleâsuspended from the roof of the ship, attached by gantries to our floor and by a jutting arm that linked it to the water systemâwas the arboretum, a walled box full of grass and trees and plants and bushes. Usually, I would be in there working, picking fruit. (Not everybody has a job here,
but those of us who want to contribute do what we can.) Vines grow up the arboretum walls, covering the sides. Maybe when we left Earth it was totally clear, but now, from pretty much anywhere on the shipâoutside, looking inâit looks like a jungle.
And beneath the arboretum, fifty stories below, was the Pit: a place so dark as to suggest that there was no end to it, just emptiness below us all. We all knew what was down thereâclothes, trash, broken pieces of the ship itself, even her inhabitants rotting in a stinking mulch of decompositionâbut we rarely (never, if we could help it) visited its depths. Stories were made up about the Pit, because that's the way of everything here (stories about ghosts who rise during the night, cloaked in the darkness, come to cause havoc), but those stories weren't real. What was real was the smell of the Pit, pervading everything. Usually you can get used to smells. Not that one. I never looked down there if I could help it, especially not on that day. Instead I concentrated on looking at the rest of the ship, because if I had tried to do anything, I felt as if I would have broken. There would be no work today. The arboretum wouldn't notice that I wasn't there.
It felt like hours before Agatha came out and tapped me on the shoulder, waking me from my numbness as I sat slumped against the walls of our berth. I knew what was coming.
“She wants you,” she said, and that meant that it was time.
Alone with my mother, I said my good-byes. She told me things. She gave me rules: that I was to stay away from the lowest depths of the ship; avoid the gangs because they couldn't be trusted; eat healthily, because malnutrition could get me just
as brutally as the gangs would. She smiled when she said it, because these were things she'd told me before, over and over. She knewâalmost expectedâthat I wouldn't listen to her, but she told me anyway. And then she made me make promises to her, last-ditch attempts to influence me after she was gone: to stay out of trouble, to be selfish and think of myself first and foremost even when it meant potentially hurting others (“Even Agatha,” she said sadly), and then, finally, to not die.
“I can't promise that,” I said. “Everybody dies.”
“Before your time,” she said. She coughed, and I saw fresh blood line her fingertips as she wiped her mouth. “Don't die before your time.” And I thought, Who's to say when my time is? How can anybody know how they're meant to die? But I didn't ask her that. That hardly seemed the point. It was easier to nod and agree to what she asked.
She coughed and clawed at her skin in her agony, and she spit the words out as though they were hurting more than her disease was, going over what I already knew, what I had been dreading. I had to be there when she died. I couldn't allow her to die of her sickness; I had to control the situation. And when she was dead, I had to burn her. The ship understands ritual, because rituals suggest control and control suggests power. The gangs choose their leaders through displays of power over life. They have rituals in which they flex their muscles and their weapons, and somebody dies so that another can take their place.
My mother wanted me to have that power. If the gangs believed I had killed her, they would respect me. They would
fear me, just as they had feared her. Didn't matter that I knew it was a lie: as long as the rest of
Australia
believed it, maybe it would hold.
And then there was her ghost. I had to make them believe in her ghost.
She handed me a knife. I had never seen it before; it had been made for her by one of the forgers. She commissioned it for this, letting it be known among the free people that it was special. It didn't matter what the knife looked like; what mattered was that people talked about it. And then she spoke to me, her voice a thin whisper that sounded almost nothing like the woman I had known for the last sixteen years, telling me that it was time.
We both cried, but I tried to hold back as much as I could. Deep down, I knew that she was in more pain than I was. I helped her move from the bed to the floor. She lay there in the middle of our berth, arms by her side. She looked so small. She pressed the knife hilt into my palm, and she closed my fingers around it for me, and she held my hands tightly. “In case anybody sees us,” she said. She would do this; I would just be there, helping her find the strength. I don't know if I would have been able to do it if she hadn't shown me how.
I bent down to kiss her good-bye. Her lips were so dry. That's the last thing I really remember about her: how they felt like she was almost already gone.
For a second, I was somewhere else. For a second, none of it was real. We weren't on
Australia,
our ship, the dark and noisy home of our ancestors, ruined by time and violence; and my
mother wasn't dying from a tumor that she had no hope of fighting; and I had a childhood like people used to have, never too terrified to sleep or breathe. The stories that we were told about the time beforeâbefore
Australia,
when Earth was still whole and people could live thereâthey were the truth. This was just a story. I could breathe in and smell the air. I could feel the grass between my toes even as I felt the knife penetrate. Even as I felt warm blood, felt her chest rise and fall too quickly, and then as it slowed, until the last time, when it just didn't rise at all.
When I finally opened my eyes, she was dead, the blade in her chest, right through where her cancer was. I don't know how it happened. I don't remember it.
“It's done,” I said loudly enough for Agatha to hear. My voice cracked as I spoke, and I knew that I would have to fix that. I couldn't let weakness in again. There could be no tears, no shaking. I had to be as strong as my mother had been; I had to wear the power that she had created for me; her armor was now mine.
Agatha came in, pulling back the curtains for the rest of the ship to see the body: the rest of the ritual. She lit candles and placed them around us, and she took the knife from meâprying it from my fingers, exactly the opposite of my mother's last actionâand laid it on top of my mother's body. “We don't have much time,” she told me.
“Okay,” I said. I wanted to be weak again. I wanted to hold my mother and have what had been done be undone. But that would never happen. She had asked me to do the ritual, my
final act for her, and I had made a promise. I wouldn't break that promise.
Days before, I had been told to go down to the markets to make a trade for fuel. But the free tradesmen are canny and ruthless, and I got very little for what I had to pay for it. I was sure my mother would have managed to get twice as much. I had enough for only one attempt: a jar of thick glue that we were to spread over her body. That felt like the worst part. She was already cold. I had been near enough bodies in my life to know that I was wrong, that she would be warm for hours. But then, my fingers on her skin, she felt so cold, she could almost have been dead for days.
“This has to be done by you,” Agatha said. She handed me a match, crudely whittled, the head a thick black crust, and she made sure the curtains were pinned back as wide as they could be. I could see lights in the darkness twinkling from distant parts of the ship, below, above, and through the glass walls and trees of the arboretum, and eyes glinting in candlelight as people watched what I was doing. It seemed like everybody knew what was coming. I wiped my hands of the fuel, I took a breath that hurt, and I struck the match on the rough metal of the exposed grated flooring of our home. It flickered, and it took.
I said good-bye and dropped the match onto her body, and she burned like I have never seen fire burn before.
In the days that followed, the others around where we lived would talk about it: about the smell, the crackle, the noise that I made as her body turned to ash, burning so hot and so bright that it hurt to even look at it. But I heard none of that. Agatha
and I stepped back, away from the body, and we watched, and I thought about what my mother had done for me, and I thought about how I was silhouetted against the flames for the rest of
Australia
to see. They all knew what had happened and what I had done.
Now it was just a matter of waiting to see how they reacted.
It didn't take long to find out. My mother was still burning when I saw another flame spark up three sections over, deep in Low territory. They were coming.
“I don't think that they'll make a move now,” Agatha told me. “They're just sizing you up. They want to see that she's dead with their own eyes.” Ten, twenty, maybe more: Even in the darkness I could see them swarming to the ends of their gantries, watching. But only a few approached, crossing the gangways that connected the different sections of the ship. “Just don't let them see that you're afraid,” Agatha murmured.
“I'm not,” I said. And I wasn't. Right then, I felt nothing at all. I watched them circle the ship, clambering and climbing like cockroaches, the flame that was consuming my mother's body lighting their way. They were carrying torches, bringing their fire to meet mine. As they came closer, I saw them better. The sick runt of a man who led them was the ruler of the Lowsâtheir kingâand he was known only by his title: Rex, a word passed down from before. With him were two female Lows, both of them with eyes down, teeth gritted. All of them covered in their blood tattoos, the flames of their torches reflecting on the slickness of their skin. As they came closer, they called to me, their voices bouncing off the walls,
the cruel rasp of their breathing preceding them. Their leader was watching me, his eyes glittering in the dying firelight. One of the Lows accompanying him avoided looking at me, but the other raised her head and stared directly into my eyes. Her gaze was like a challenge.
“You need to be here by yourself,” Agatha told me. “They won't fear you if they think you're hiding behind me.” She turned and slunk off into the darkness. She would be watching, I knew; she had to be. But right then, that barely seemed to offer me any comfort.