Way Down Dark (10 page)

I pause before going in. I always expect the worst in every situation—we all do. That's how you survive. So I don't know what I'm going to find inside, but I brace myself, because I'm not sure I'll be able to take it.

Her berth is empty. She's not here. Everything is gone: the pictures that Peter drew that had been fastened to the walls, all her clothes, her trinkets, anything that she cared enough about to cling to. It's totally empty. You'd never know that anybody had ever lived here.

I step onto the gangway and call her name a few times, but she's gone. It's nearly morning now. The Lows have retreated back to their half of the ship. There's something like calm in the air, but it doesn't feel real. It's so delicate that it could just tear apart.

I don't know what else to do, so I go back to the eighty-eighth floor. It takes me a long time. I have to rest every few floors, and there's a point where I sit down and feel like I could just shut my eyes and maybe let sleep take me, but I would regret that. I don't want to sleep. I want to do something. When I get to him, the envoy doesn't seem surprised to see me. He hands me a cloth and a small flask of a sour-smelling ointment.

“There's a woman who needs help in the next berth,” he says. I go to her, and she's lying on her back, looking as though she's asleep, but she isn't. She doesn't respond until I touch her, and then she recoils from me, arching her spine, her limbs locking into position.

“Shh,” I say, trying to calm her. I dip the cloth in water and then lay it on her head, and I pull back her sheets—she tries to stop me, but she's too weak—and I see where she's wounded. Her skin is a mottled patchwork of what it once was, ripped apart by some sort of rust-brown rot. It smells rancid, and I have to stop myself from gagging. I take the ointment and
I drizzle it over the wound. Almost immediately she's calmer, the pain subsiding. The ointment seems to fizz on her wounds, and I imagine it should sting, but it evidently doesn't. She manages to look at me, and she can't speak, but I know what she's thinking.

When I leave her, I see the envoy standing at the edge of the gantry, looking out over the ship. He doesn't turn as I approach, but he tenses. He knows that I'm there.

“She's going to die,” I tell him.

“I know,” he replies. “Most of these people are dying, and faster than the rest of us.”

“So why do this? Why spend so much time here?”

“Because they're sick. Because they're in pain.” He bites his lip, thinking about what he's going to say next. “When I was a baby, I didn't have parents. The Pale Women took me in. They found me, and they saved me, and they didn't care who I was, where I came from. I was sick, coughing up blood. They didn't believe that I had long to live. Some didn't want to accept a male into their faith no matter how long I was likely to live. Better to put me out of my misery. But one Sister fought for me. She wanted to make sure that my life—what was left of it—was as good as it could be.” He still doesn't look at me. He stares out over the nothingness, over the drop down to the Pit, looking at the other sections of the ship—a ship that somehow abandoned him. He's telling his story to the ship, it seems, not just to me.

“The way she tells it, that's what saved my life. She says that the Father gave me the strength to fight for myself, just as she fought for me.”

“And now you're here,” I say.

“Yes,” he says. And he smiles. “I help them because I can. Because I think I should. Because I owe the Women my life, and it's right.”

“I never helped anybody,” I say. “Until two days ago, I didn't help anybody at all.” I hate myself for saying that as soon as the words leave my mouth. Stupid. “I promised my mother that I would be selfish,” I tell him, trying to make it better. “Then she died. But I promised her.”

“And she'd be proud, I'm sure,” he replies, and then he turns, still looking not at me but back to the berths behind us. “I should get back to them.” He doesn't wait for me to reply; he just starts walking to the next berth.

“What can I do now?” I ask. Then he looks at me, and he smiles, the corner of his mouth rising just a little.

“There's a man two berths down who has forgotten who he is, where he is. You could talk to him,” he tells me.

“I can do that,” I reply.

I stay on the eighty-eighth floor until the envoy leaves. I don't ask him his name, and I tell myself that I have to next time I see him. Then I go down, back to my berth, bone-tired, and I fall onto my bunk. I don't remember falling asleep.

When I wake, I can hear voices. Somebody new is moving into Bess's berth. I have new neighbors. I listen as they shift their belongings: a woman and her children—a boy and a girl—lugging everything they own in slow, arduous trips. There's a gap in my curtains, and I watch them dragging mattresses taken from their old bunks. I think about telling them
that the berth is occupied, that Bess will come back, but I can't. I'm pretty sure that's not true.

It takes me what feels like forever to get up. I've never hurt so much. Every muscle in my body feels like it's been pulled, yanked into some new position. Every step makes me ache, and I have to bite my lip to stop myself from hissing when I bend down to tie my shoelaces.

I pull back the curtains to see the woman who's moving in better. She's lithe, her body a rippling display of muscles. She may be the most muscular woman I've ever seen. Where Agatha hides everything underneath her cloak, this woman wears her body like a badge: the scars on her skin that run around her entire body; the missing toes on her feet, a mark of some torture or other; the burn marks on her face, across her left eye, running up to her scalp, that mean she can't grow hair over half of her head, that mean her eye is a cloudy gray-white color. I try not to stare. People don't like it when you stare. It's only when I see her back that I know more about her and how she got like this. The scars on her back give her away, their patterns and designs, carved and almost delicately arranged.

She used to be a Low.

I watch her as she tells her children—both younger than me but only by a few years, and maybe they're twins, that's how alike they look—to unpack their belongings as they try to make Bess's old berth a home. It's obviously smaller than where they've come from, from the kids' moaning about it, but the woman has a power about her that you rarely see here. A control. She's completely even-tempered, never losing her patience. Her children are dreadful. They're already lost.
They will join a gang, if they're not already in one, or form one of their own, and soon they'll be somebody's nightmare. I can see that their mother knows this and despairs, but for now she's still got some control over them.

I don't know how old she is. Maybe she's the same age my mother was, but it's difficult to tell; she has lived harder, a fighter rather than somebody who tried to stay away from trouble. But she cares for her sons. She tells them off, but she watches over them while they work. She's protective. I recognize it and miss it.

The Lows don't believe in family, not in the way that the free people do. They treat everybody as part of the whole, every child a Low rather than a son or a daughter. If they don't have enough of their own, they take ours. Children are swallowed by them, raised to be monsters. You have a kid when you're a Low, that kid is basically screwed, no chance for anything else. Probably a reasonably good chance those kids won't even see adulthood. Maybe they were able to be good once. Maybe they would have been able to do something other than be a Low, but they aren't given the chance. I can't be sure, but I'm betting that my new neighbor wanted her children to have that opportunity: the opportunity not to be monsters.

I go and stand at the entrance to my berth as I pull my shoes on, thinking that I might introduce myself. It can't hurt. While I'm waiting for the woman to notice me, I spot Agatha at the far end of the gantry. She's sitting on a crate, head down, trying to go unnoticed. I would say that she's not very good
at it, but I know that's a lie. She just wanted me to see her. I ignore her and finish getting myself ready.

By the time Agatha gets up and comes over, I've got my blade tucked into my pack. I don't want to be without it, not anymore.

“Living here is getting more dangerous,” she says. “You should move upstairs with me.” There are no stairs, not anymore, yet we still say that. We really need new words. “It's what your mother—”

“She's dead,” I say, and that's the end of the conversation. She can't go anywhere else with it.

“The Lows are starting a war. They're trying to take this section, this part of the ship. They want it, so they'll take it.”

“Let them try,” I say.

“You don't understand. They've done this before, and they have always succeeded. They've pushed people out, and they've killed anyone who has tried to resist them. This is just them warming up. This is preparation, and it will get so much worse.”

She suddenly looks old and scared, and I think back to yesterday—the quiet and the darkness of the eighty-eighth floor, laying that wet cloth across the forehead of a sick woman, talking to that old man whose mind was gone. Even looking for Peter—just doing
something
—was better than nothing.

I am tired of doing nothing. I like doing something. I've spent my whole life doing nothing. I don't care about the danger. Agatha does. She's scared, and I don't know why, but I'm
almost ashamed of her. She shouldn't be. She's given up. “If we fight them, they will kill us.”

“Then you won't be in any danger, will you?” I say. That stings her, I know, and it's nasty of me. But she's standing back. The Agatha my mother used to talk about would never have stood back and let this chaos—this violence—happen around her. That Agatha wouldn't have hidden in the dark. She would have done something, helped people.

That Agatha would have helped me.

“I can't protect you if you stay here,” she says.

“I know,” I say. And I want to say so much more to her, but the words don't form in my mouth, and then Agatha turns and leaves, and it's too late.

It seems as though everybody starts screaming at once. The noise of it clangs around the ship, waking me up. I don't know how long I was asleep for, but it wasn't long enough. I'm amazed that I managed to sleep at all. I remember lying in my bed and trying to pretend that I was somewhere else. I've done it before: taken myself away, in that space between sleeping and waking. I've found a haven where we're not here, not on
Australia
. The fantasy of it is always so strong, because my mother is always alive in these dreams and I can talk to her about everything. I have so much I wish to say to her. And we're always safe. We're never running or hiding. That's the last thing that I remember.

But the noise of the screaming—which is monotonous and repetitive, like an alarm—is too loud. I open my eyes, and everything is black. I think it's me at first, but it's not: shapes
start to make themselves known in the darkness, and the layout of my room emerges in dim outlines. I stand up and stumble to my curtains and pull them apart. It's not just my room: something's happened to the lights all over the ship. In every other berth, there are the sounds of panic, of people telling their loved ones not to be afraid.

I can't see anything.

“What's happened?” I ask into the darkness. Next door, the ex-Low lights a candle and the light floods out. Such a small flame, yet the difference it makes is amazing. It's so bright.

“They've cut them,” she says. “They've found a way to turn out the lights.” She points somewhere over toward section IV. “There are wires behind the walls. Cables. They must have found the right one.”

“It's so dark,” I say.

“You're scared?” She moves away from the candle, and I can't see her face anymore. Her boys stir in their makeshift beds on the floor. “I wouldn't have thought you'd be scared of anything. I know about your mother. I know who she was.” She comes toward me, through the darkness. I can see her silhouetted against the flicker of a flame behind her. “And I know about you,” she says, and I can see that she doubts the stories that have spread about me.

I'm about to say something back to her—to defend myself—when there's a sound from section IV. It's colossal: a crash, the sound of metal collapsing onto metal, of screaming and terror, worse than before. I can't see what it is, but I have to. I pull on my clothes, my shoes, get my blade, and I run.
Despite every ache in my body, every painful muscle screaming at me to rest, I run.

On the forty-third floor, at the edge of section IV, the gantry has collapsed in on itself. Too much has been taken away over the years, too many of the support beams that hold it in place have been chipped away for weapons or whatever. Apparently, whatever the free people had done to stop the Lows from crossing was the last straw: a few too many things taken from the edge to widen the gap, or maybe whatever they piled up to use as a barricade was just too heavy. Either way, the contents of three berths have spilled out, the gantry bent down to the floor below. There are people trapped down there, a mixture of Lows and others, and the only way that we can see what's going on is in the flickering light of candles and torches reflecting off the dark metal.

I climb down and start helping as the free people from this section of the ship pull off the metal, yanking it away from where it's fallen, trying to free those who are trapped underneath. Nobody notices who I am, and nobody asks about the blade that I have with me, and nobody says anything about my mother's ghost or what I might want. We don't even talk unless it's to coordinate lifting up the metal and pulling out the people trapped beneath it. Time passes. I don't know how much.