Way Down Dark (12 page)

It's not until I've made it up a few more floors in their half of the ship that I look back at where I came from. I pause, breathe for a second. Strange to think that it's quieter here, that I'm safer where I should be more terrified. But this part of the ship is empty. They're all in the free sections, waging their war.

I don't know how they became so lost, so willing to act like this. Something, once upon a time, triggered this. I have to believe that it's got a reason, or else . . . Or else it's just in them. It's in them, and maybe it could be in the rest of us.

Not far to go until the Pale Women. I can't rest now.

So I climb.

There's a noise ten floors from the top of the ship. I mean, of course there are noises. There's nothing but noise. Up here, the engine rumble seems somehow louder, and still, the echoes
from the other half of the ship seem to drown that out, and these sections, which seem abandoned, creak and moan as I travel through them, as I run along the rusting metal of their gantries. But there haven't been any Lows for a few floors, not until right this second.

He's above me: just a large, dark shape in the darkness. He doesn't have a torch, and the light of mine will only alert him that I'm here. He stands right near the edge of the stairwell, swaying, like there's something wrong with him: I can see the shape of his body rocking back and forth.
Don't die,
my mother says.

“All right,” I say under my breath, “I get it.” I snuff the torch out and start to climb as quietly as I can. One Low, that's all, and he's in my way. I can do this. I'm level with the gantry, close enough that I can touch him. I can take his ankle and pull him, hopefully over the edge. At the very least he'll end up facedown, giving me an advantage. It's only as I reach out that I see the bodies lit by some flame far away. My eyes have adjusted to the darkness now that I don't have the torch, and I can see their shapes: their heads tilted toward me, their eyes dead and staring. My fingers touch the Low's ankle, and his body tenses. He spins and looks down at me, and there's a blade—no,
two
blades—slashing out at my hand, and I flinch away. I hang on, barely, as the Low's body flies past me, off into the Pit. Then I see another face, peering down at me: it's the Pale Women's envoy.

He kneels at the edge and reaches down, and he clamps his fingers around my wrist. I see his knuckles go white as he holds me, as he starts to heave me back up to the floor.

“What are you doing here?” I ask him. He looks down at the bodies around him: all Lows, all with their throats cut. There's a lot of blood, and I'm grateful I don't have more light to see by. I wouldn't want to be able to see how much.

The envoy doesn't answer. He's cut, I see, across the side of his face, a tear that's swollen and thick with redness, glistening in the dim light. I reach out to touch it, and he flinches. “Don't,” I say. “This needs cleaning.” He might be dangerous, I think, but he killed them. What is it that they say? The enemy of my enemy is my friend? And he's killed Lows.

“It hurts,” he says. I'm not surprised, but I don't say that. He puts a hand to it and brings it away and looks at his palm, which is covered in blood. The wound is pretty bad; anybody could tell that.

“You need help,” I say. “I can clean it for you.” He nods and hands me his satchel, the rags and ointments he was using to help the sickly on the eighty-sixth floor, and he pushes his hood back to his shoulders. His collar is still on, the spikes nudging against the scars on his skin. I take out a strip of fabric and soak it with the ointment, and I press it up to his face, washing off the blood that's there. Some is from the cut, but some definitely isn't.

“Hold still,” I say, and he does. I press the cloth to his skin, and the water soaks through it. It runs down his cheek, taking the blood with it. I press again, harder, and then drag the cloth along the cut itself, trying to make sure it's clean, that there isn't a shard of anything stuck in it. He flinches.

“What's your name?” I ask.

“My name?” He sucks in air, a hiss of pain through his teeth. “Jonah,” he says.

“Jonah,” I repeat, trying it out. “That's from your
Testaments
.”

“It's an important name,” he says, as if that explains everything, and in some ways it does. Makes sense they'd use those books for naming. They use them for everything else.

“Why were you here?” I ask him.

“This is what I do,” he says. He opens his hands at his side—the knives he had, they're missing now, secreted somewhere in his cloak—and he indicates the bodies. “They were a threat, and they . . .” Again he stumbles over the words, and he breathes in deeply. This time I'm not hurting him. This time it's something else. “They were judged, and I carried out their judgment.”

“Judged,” I say, and he nods. He's carrying himself differently than he did before: Where his head is usually bowed, now he's tall, his shoulders back and tense. He takes my hand and pulls it away from his face.

“I have to go,” he says.

“I was trying to get up to find you,” I say. I correct myself. “To find the Women. I'm being chased.”

“You won't be welcome,” he tells me. “You shunned them when they gave you the books, when they made their offer for you to join them. Sister says—”

“Then I take it back. I take back what I said, and I'll listen to their stories.”

“It's not as easy as that.” He pulls his hood back up. “We're nearing ascension, Sister says. It's too late for you.”

“They'll kill me.” And he looks sad; I swear that he looks sad. He knows I don't deserve whatever's coming. “Their leader's been hurt, and she'll want me. She won't stop.”

“Come and talk to Sister,” he says then, and he moves without pause, running down to the stairwell and leaping up from the edge to clutch the lip of the floor above. He doesn't look back. I climb up after him, and we go up there together.

He doesn't talk, which really annoys me, even more than when Agatha is silent. I try; I ask him about what he was doing down there, why those Lows were dead at his feet, why he wears the collar. Everything is met with grunts or, if I'm lucky, the justification that “
it's in the book
.” I've read the book, and it doesn't say anything about collars or knives. It's nothing but old language and mystery and inconsistent characters.

So as we climb, and as the Lows' part of the ship becomes something more like what I'm used to, as we get higher, I stop asking him questions. No sense. Sometimes he breaks into a run, and he tries to move fast enough that it's almost as if he wants to lose me, but there's no chance of that. My hands hurt and my body aches, but I keep following. I can't stop now.

When we're a couple of floors below Limbo, he stops climbing up and instead takes off toward our half of the ship. You almost wouldn't know what was going on below from here. Things seem to have quieted down; the echoes of sound from down there have faded away. The sick, the injured: the Lows haven't made their way up here yet. Maybe they know
that this is the part of
Australia
that will offer them the least resistance. Might as well leave it until after the harder work is done.

“Sister will ask you what you believe,” he says as he walks. I almost miss it because he moves faster than I can comfortably keep up with.

“And I'll tell her,” I say.

“That's how she'll give you sanctuary,” he says. “That's what they work on. You'll abandon who you were and take up our cause.” Their cause? As far as I can see, they stay in the darkness of the top floors and pray over their old books. The only one of them I've ever seen actually doing something is Jonah. “That's the only way that she will offer you protection, you know.”

“Okay, sure,” I tell him. He's preachy. It's annoying. I don't understand why they wouldn't just help me because it's the right thing to do. Even in their book, that's the suggestion: You do what's right and just and fair. You shouldn't have to swear allegiance to them to get that. “Agatha should be here as well,” I tell him. “She said she would meet me.”

“The old woman?”

“Yes,” I say, and that makes me smile. I'm not sure she'd like being talked of in that way. Something burns me then: the thought that she might not be here. I don't know what happened between her and Rex after I ran. But she must be okay. She's always okay.

I suppose that's the one truth of life that always holds, though: you're always okay until suddenly you're not. What if this time is the
suddenly
?

“Here,” he says, pointing up to the ninetieth floor. The ninetieth floor is a lie; it's actually the ninety-first, but there's a floor missing in between. One day, over a hundred years ago, it collapsed down onto the eighty-ninth. The floor itself was salvaged for metal, the people who lived on or below it dead, crushed or fallen down to the Pit. So the climb up to Limbo is harder: it's not a case of looking for the next floor, of finding some way to reach it and then hauling yourself up; it's more like finding handholds in the side, actually having to scale something that's dangerous. And the Pale Women stripped the stairwells of stairs, ladders, everything. There's no immediate sign of how you climb this. No one knows how the Pale Women get in and out. So I copy Jonah, putting my hands where his have been as we climb. He knows the way, but I can see he's still cautious. He keeps pausing, listening to the ship, trying to tell what's happening.

There's something wrong, and we both know it. We climb onto the gantry of the eighty-ninth floor, and we hear the noise from above and see the flames and the flashes of weapons through the floor above us. We climb again, faster, Jonah almost furious in his movement. I can feel the shake of the feet on the ninetieth floor as I put my hands onto the edge of the gantry, as the fighting explodes around us.

I've never seen the Women fight before, but they're vicious. I only catch glimpses of them in the darkness in the brief moments when they're directly lit by the flames of torches, but they're brutal and relentless, tearing throats and throwing knives. The stories about them said as much, but I never really believed it, not until now.

This whole area is a mess of Lows and blood and weapons, and Jonah and I stand on the lip of the gantry and watch them. He clenches his hands, I notice, opening and closing his fists.

Limbo isn't safe either. I don't know why I thought it would be. And then, without a word, Jonah disappears into the fray, and he's just another black-robed body in a swarm of them. I don't know what to do. I could get involved, but I'm exhausted, not prepared. Still, I've got a weapon, and I can breathe, and I can move. Limbo isn't a safe place, but it could be, it could—

Then she's there. Again, Rex. She's here with the rest of them, nursing the stump of her arm, which is wrapped in cloth. There's no blood. She's at the other end of the gantry, but I can see her in the light of their torches now that this part of the ship is lit up for the first time in who knows how long. I can also see that there's writing all over the walls: scratched in, clawed in, layers and layers. I recognize phrases from the Women's book.

Rex. Rex; focus on Rex. I look for Jonah, but he's invisible. The Women fall, because there aren't enough of them.

Rex. She lowers her head and looks down the gantry, and she sees me. I'm here, and I'm alone, and as she notices me, as she starts to walk toward me, as she pulls my mother's knife out of her sheath and holds it in front of her, as she smiles, I take my own blade out and I stand firm, because I don't know what else I can do.

So we fight. We fight, and it's over as soon as it's begun, because I'm no match for her. Even one-handed, as full of
anger as she is, she wants victory more than I do. I'm not fighting to beat her; I'm fighting to survive.

I swing my blade, and she ducks underneath it and stabs me. The knife slides into my side, my mother's knife, all the way up to the hilt. And then she twists it, and she tugs it out, doing as much damage as she can. I feel it at first, and then it all fades away. All the pain, it's just gone, replaced with a kind of numbness.

She kicks me off the lip of the gantry, down into the stairwell. I drop a few floors, and then I collide with something—a barricade across gantries—slamming my back into the metal, and the last few things that I see (her peering at me, cradling the space where her hand was, her scars, and then Jonah slashing at her, taking the fight back, doing
something
), those last images slide away into nothingness and blackness, blacker even than the darkness of the ship itself. I turn my head, and I can see down, off the edge, all the way to the bottom of the ship, but I don't know if it's the darkness of the Pit itself or just the darkness of everything else. Still, I think, if that's where I'm headed, at least I know it's only as dark down there as it's always been.

Don't die
, my mother's voice says. I wish I could tell her how hard I'm trying not to.

I open my eyes for fragments of time and nothing more, and I see the fires around me, all around, and—

I'm awake when they drag me down, floor by floor, two of them, four hands, pressing against me, carrying me, but I can't hear what they're saying, their words—

and the sound of fighting, as they put me down somewhere and they—

and it's so wet, all over me, and I cough, and that makes one of their hands come up to my face, and I see—

“Agatha!” I yell, the only word I can actually manage to get out, but—

over and over, falling back into the darkness, and nothing has ever scared me so much as it has, nothing ever, not my whole life, not even the day when my mother told me that she was dying and that I would be—

“Breathe,” she says. Agatha's voice, Agatha's words, which means I'm safe, I know that I'm safe, because I have to be safe if she's got me, and there's the light of a torch, the flames of one, and I look around—

we're in the Pit, oh God, we're in the Pit, how did we get down here—

and there's a hand on my face, over my mouth, and she whispers into my ears, “hold your breath,” and then I'm submerged, and it's like being in the river in the arboretum, like washing, but it is warm and dense and slimy and awful, and I struggle and fight, but she keeps her hand steady—

I open my eyes again, and it's light. Bright, burning light, brighter than I've ever seen before in my entire life, and I can't keep my eyes open because it actually hurts.

“You're safe now,” she says, and I so want to believe her.

My mother and I found moments of peace on
Australia
that only we shared. We would pull the cloth across the doorway of our berth and we would sit on the bed, and she would tell me stories. She remembered books from when she was little, books that her mother had read to her when they were still
available on the ship, before they had completely deteriorated, and she told the stories to me. Every story had a girl about my age in it; every story was about that girl becoming who she should be. I am sure that my mother changed them, because they were never exactly the same from one telling to the next. Every story had an ending, and it always ended with the girl—who was always called Chan, because that made me so happy—winning. It was every night, as soon as the lights dimmed: just me and her on the bed, just her hands on mine, clasped together, her voice whispered and hushed to hide the story from the rest of the world and keep it for me alone.

She said, “One day, you can tell these stories to your children.”

“You can tell them as well,” I said. She smiled. She knew then, maybe. Or maybe she just knew how cruel
Australia
was to the people who live inside her.

When I wake up, I'm alone. I start with my hands: touching—squeezing—the mattress underneath me, which is thicker than I've felt before. I can't even feel the bed frame itself. And it's wider, because I can move my arms out and they don't find the edge or the wall, not until I stretch. That hurts, a pain that runs all up my spine and into my neck and then down through the rest of me.

“Hello?” I say, and it feels like testing my voice. It echoes, and then it hits me: I can't hear anything else. There's no screaming, no sounds of violence, and no throb of engines.

I open my eyes.

The room is a blur of color and shapes, and it takes my eyes a second to focus on what these things are that are all around me, apparently painted onto the walls. They're animals. I recognize some from books, like elephants and tigers and giraffes. Then there are others, brown-furred things like little half men and things that look like tigers but bigger and solid yellow and almost-dwarf elephants with giant white stumps of teeth jutting from their mouths. Others, more and more. Birds! There are birds in groups, flying across the heads of every other creature, and pools of water, and grass, as green as I imagined it would be. There's very little light in the berth: only a single bar above my head that is soft, muted, tinged with amber.

I move as much as I can, as slowly as possible. My legs onto the floor and then my body to sitting, and I crick my neck. The pain doesn't dull, not even slightly. It's worse, and I try to reach behind me to feel for cuts and bruises, but my shoulder screams. Then I realize that underneath my feet there's something that isn't metal. It's soft and yellow, and it looks like the grass in the arboretum, almost, when it's been cut right back to nearly nothing.

Standing. I need to try standing. I support myself on the wall, and I get up to my feet, and that alone feels like a miracle. Taking a step is harder, because it hurts. I stop, and the pain dulls away slightly. Behind me, the sheet is stained yellow and red and brown in the outline of my body. I wonder how long I have been lying there.

There's a door in front of me, closed. A handle. None of the berths I've seen before have doors. Where am I?

I open it, and the light hits me hard. My eyes sting, and it takes a few seconds for them to adjust. My head is full, it feels like, and it feels so heavy on my neck. When I pull myself together, I'm left staring down a passageway that I don't recognize.

It's like a picture from a book. The walls on either side of the path are solid bright colors, lighter than the gray of the
Australia
's metal. The lights don't flicker. And there's a noise coming quietly from far away: tinny and vague. I tread softly toward it, and it clears up: it's music. I've never heard music like it, but it's music.

Everything else I've ever known on
Australia
feels like a lie suddenly.

Where everything I've known is open, here things are closed: there are closed doors leading off this main passage, and everything is quiet. I run my fingers along the walls; hanging from them are pictures of various things that I do not recognize, shapes and faces and places. Some are so clear, so realistic that I can't even believe them, but they're in front of me, as real as anything else I've ever seen.

There's another door on my left, and I push it open. Right in front of me there's a mirror. They have them in some of the shops, metal that's been polished so bright that it shines and reflects yourself right back as you stare at it, but none of them are as clean as this. None of them have ever let me see myself as I do now. My face and hair are covered in blood; my skin has marks all over it, scratches and bruises, some imperceptible, most dark enough to look as sore as they feel; and my clothes are just as torn, hanging seams and loose threads. But
beneath it all I can see my skin: my mother's skin, and her mother's, and her mother's. I spit on my hand and wipe some of the dirt and blood away from around my mouth and eyes. It barely makes a dent, but it's something.

I go back out to the passage, and the music is louder, and I'm no longer alone, because there's Agatha and Jonah, and in their hands there's a body, and behind them an open door, and more bodies, piles and piles of them.

“You're awake,” is all that Agatha says, and that does me, exhausted and overwhelmed, and I drop to my knees and I cry.

She turns the music off and sits with me, and then she explains a little, but not enough. I want to press her, and I keep interrupting even though I know how much she hates that. I keep asking where we are, but she persists in explaining what happened after I fell, doing things in the right order. I can fill in those gaps, I try to say, but she's so stubborn that she barely pauses.

“You fell, and she”—meaning Rex—“was climbing down to check you were dead. You weren't moving when I got there.”

“I don't remember anything,” I say.

“He saved you,” she tells me, looking over at Jonah. “I watched—I wasn't close enough—as he dragged you away. I thought that you were dead.” I notice that Jonah isn't quite with us in the conversation. He's got his hood down, and he's playing with something around his neck, something on a chain that runs underneath his collar and down into his cloak. “But he took you down and away from her.”

“The Women?”

“Dead, most of them.” Jonah flinches as she says it. “Some will have escaped, more than likely. But the ship—”

“Where are we?” I ask again.

“We're safe,” she says, “and that's all that matters.”

“I've never seen this place,” I tell her.

“No,” she says. “We carried you away from there, the two of us. It took too long, and I was worried. You were breathing, but we didn't know how injured you were, Chan. We just couldn't tell. When we got you here, we thought it was best to let you sleep. We were worried about how bad your injuries were going to be when you woke up.” She smiles. “But you're okay.”

“Yes,” I say. I don't tell her how much I hurt, because there's no point. She knows. We all hurt; no sense making a big deal out of it. “Where are we? And who were those bodies?”

“Tell her,” Jonah says. It's the most passionate I've heard him, the most emphatic. And then, to look at him, he's lost the calm that he held so constant before, and there's anger there behind his eyes. Green eyes, tinged with red, and his skin—now that I can see it in the light—freckled softly, so pale that it's like it's been drawn in chalk. Agatha takes my hands.

“Take a shower, and I'll cook something to eat. And then I'll tell you everything.”

I'm nearly too distracted to enjoy the shower, but not quite. This is a room dedicated to showering, white-tiled and clean and bright. There's a toilet here. I'm used to toilets that are metal bowls plugged into the walls, the ship taking the waste and recycling it. This one is white, in a material that's
like the cups some of the artisan sellers make. There's a seat on it and a lid and, next to it, a door made of frosted glass. Beyond the door, on the wall above my head, there is a spigot shaped like a flower, and there are a hundred tiny holes in the head. I'm used to taking showers in big communal rooms, standing under rusted pipes that drip out cold water. They're always unpleasant, and I've never spent longer than I had to taking one. Now I run the tap, and the water coughs out at first in spurts and then flows, each hole in the flower spigot a tiny stream, as clear as any water that I have ever seen. I taste it, holding my mouth open and sticking my tongue out underneath the stream, and it's warm and beautiful. I strip off my clothes and step into it. The water is too hot, but I don't mind. There's a bar of soap, and it's soft, and it froths up when I rub it between my hands, smelling of something almost indescribably sweet. I've only ever used soap that comes from lye, and it burns the skin until it's washed completely away. The soap I'm used to can scar.

I don't know how long I stay under the water. But I'm there until long after my fingers have wrinkled. When I'm done, I wash my clothes as well. I hold them underneath the water and rub them with the soap, and I watch the filth run out of them. It's disgusting to see dirt like this in this clean white room. Strange, I think, to find it revolting only now. When I'm done, I hang my clothes on a rail—a polished metal rod that's so hot to the touch that it actually stings when I touch it—and I realize that I've got nothing to wear. It's not that Agatha would balk at my nakedness, but Jonah? I don't know. It seems like the sort of thing that would upset him, and I
don't want that. I don't want him to see me so . . . exposed. So I open the cupboards, which are empty, and then go back to the berth that I slept in and explore the cupboards there. There are piles of blue clothes; each garment has a torso and arms and legs all sewn together into one outfit. It takes me a while to find one that fits, but when I do, it's amazing. The fabric is so much softer than anything I've felt before. There's a hood at the back, and I pull it over my head, and then I sit on the floor—the soft floor—and I feel almost dizzy for a second, because this is all so different.

But then I remember that this place must have been here the entire time and Agatha has just never told me. There are questions I have to ask, and she's got the answers.

Agatha is cooking something, and whatever it is, it smells amazing. The room they're in is strange. There's a counter and pots and pans heating on something without a flame and then humming machines, all with doors, and a pair of giant metal doors on one side that I see Agatha opening to a hiss of freezing cold air, which bundles out and envelops her. There are tables and chairs made from metal that are neater and cleaner than any I've ever seen before. I'm used to cracked cooking pots: thick black things built up with char from years and years of use, burned food on improvised flames. Jonah's already sitting down, and Agatha tells me to sit next to him.

“This is nearly done,” she says, tasting whatever's in the pot that she's got boiling. “Real meat, Chan. You've never tasted anything like it.”

There's meat here?

She puts a bowl down in front of me, and I nudge the broth around with the spoon she gives me. It's rich and creamy, and there are chunks of vegetables that I recognize from the arboretum—leeks and cauliflower and potato—and something else, white and soft. I take a spoonful, and it burns my mouth, but it tastes ridiculous. Just ridiculous, sweet and spicy in equal measure, and so flavorful, and the taste seems to change as I eat it, starting as one thing, becoming another as it travels across my tongue. Another spoon, and another, one after the other.

“How did you make this?” I manage to ask, the broth dripping out of my mouth and down the front of my blue jumpsuit.

“There are books,” she says, and she passes me one. Every page has a different guide on it, a different thing that can be cooked. All the ingredients and how you prepare it. This is a stew of some sort, and it's so different from what we have above. The recipe includes herbs and spices and preparations that we'd never dream of doing when cooking in our berths. “And there are more books. Lots of them.”