Way Down Dark (13 page)
Authors: J.P. Smythe
Tags: #YAF056000 YOUNG ADULT FICTION / Science Fiction / General
We eat the rest of the meal in silence. I need answers, yes, but for this moment I need this more. Jonah, Agatha, and I, all three of us eat the scalding hot food, and we love every single mouthful.
“Whose are the bodies?” I ask. “Who are they?”
“They are people,” Agatha says, “normal people. They died here, and we were . . .” She trails off, waving her hand in the air as if it's all self-explanatory.
“We were what? Where are we?” I ask again. Jonah is piling the plates up on the counter, and he stops when I ask, and he rests his hands on the counter and bows his head. I look to Agatha.
“Tell her,” Jonah says.
“Okay,” she says, nodding at Jonah. “We're below the Pit. All of this? It's below the Pit.”
The worst things on
Australia
aren't the Lows, Chan. The Lows are chaos and violence, but some people are even worse. You know that. Some people are liars, hiding the dangers that they pose behind stories. Like your father.
Your mother met a man. She met this man, and she was smitten, but she was young and foolish. He was awfulâartless and crassâan oaf. I could tell he was a bully the first time I met him, and he didn't like me, not one bit. He rolled his eyes when I was there and spoke quietly to your mother so that only she could hear. Your grandparents were dead by then, but I still watched over her. When they died, your mother went even more wild. She went to the farthest parts of the ship, and she picked up where she had left off a few years before: pushing herself, taking too many risks. That's when she met Ellis.
We didn't recognize him even though we knew pretty much everybody on the ship, but this one day he appeared, these foods in his hands that we had never tasted before. He was wearing a blue suit, head to toeâjust the same as the one that you are wearingâand he carried vegetables or chocolates with him. Nothing like the chocolates that we have, that you can buy here, but something so much better. She gave me one once, and it was so rich that it hurt my teeth and my belly to eat it, but I loved it. And that was how he won her: he gave her what nobody else could. And he promised her even more. He promised her the world. He promised her warmth and food. He saidâthis came from her to me, and I always wondered about the truth of it, but now I knowâhe said that he could take her somewhere else and that he could offer her a new life. A different place from the
Australia
that she knew. And what alternative did she have? She thought that she had lost everything. How could she refuse?
He never stayed long, and she never knew when he would be back. He would come to her, and they would hide from everybody in the shadows, and then he'd be gone, and she didn't know where. She was so in love, she didn't care about his secrets. I did, though. I watched him and followed him to see where he came from. I never trusted him. I learned that he had a deal with the Lows to pass through their section unscathed. He gave them supplies, clothing, and materials, and they left him alone. Heâand his friends, because there were more of them, I discoveredâbuilt the Lows up. They fed them and made them stronger. I assumed that they lived with the Lows.
In the end, your mother became pregnant. He didn't take her with him, though. Even as she grew week by week, he told her to wait, letting her grow larger and more tired and then bringing her food, as if that was all she needed to get by. But she'd never listen to me about him. His promises were stronger than any truth she already knew somehow.
Being pregnant is hard. It makes you slow, and being slow makes you a target. So I protected her, because I couldn't do anything else for her. I cooked for herâthis is when I began working in the arboretum, so we had more fruits and vegetables than we had ever had beforeâand I watched over her. I found her the berth you grew up in and helped her move in there. Before that, she'd lived higher up. This new one was easier. I never told her what I paid for it, and she never asked. She was just grateful that I was there when he wasn't.
But he was gone so much, and he didn't have excuses. Maybe she started to see him for what he was. I knew what he was already, of course. I followed him, and he did things that, when I told her, your mother refused to believe. There were other women, Chan, and he got them pregnant as well. He treated them the same and gave them the same promises. It was like a secret that they all shared. He told them the same thing he told your mother: that when they gave birth, he would take them somewhere better. He would take them somewhere safe.
I watched one of those other girls give birth a few days before your mother was due. She was living two sections over. The man was there for the birth, and he helped her. He gave her drugs that I had never seen to help with the pain. The birth
was hard, and the child was stillborn, and when he saw that, he left, left the mother lying on the floor of her berth, bleeding. I had suspected, but then I knew: the mother was nothing to him. I tried to help, but it was too late, and she died, crying for her child.
I woke your mother up, and I dragged her to that poor girl's berth, and I told her to look at the body. It felt cruel, but it was all I had. After that, she made me promise that I would not leave her during the birth and that I would not allow him to do the same to her. I swore it. Maybe I gave her too much, but she meant everything to me. She was a daughter to me.
I told her that we had to move, just as her water broke. We went to my berth, closed it off with as many rags as we could find, and stayed there, hoping that he would never find her. But he did, and too quickly. We assumed that somebody gave her up, told him where we were. He asked her if it was time. She said not yet, and she smiled through the pain as best she could manage. I hope it comes soon, she said; I just want it out of me. Soon, he promised, and he said that he would be back. As soon as he was gone, we tried to move forward with your birth, and she bit down on rags to muffle the screams. Birth screams are different from any other that I have heard. They come from somewhere else in the body. When she was done, it was your turn; you came out, and you howled. Of course you did: imagine your first taste of air being the air of up there. At first you held your breath, so I slapped you, and then you gulped it in. You screamed, and so I took you and I hid you. That was what I had promised: to hide you from him.
But he'd found us once. So to protect your mother, we needed a lie. We needed a baby to hand to your father, to appease him.
I went to the bottom of the ship, to the Pit, and I waded out into that mess. There had been other children, other babies. I would need to find one, and we would have to pass it off as your mother's. There was little other choice, and sometimes you have to do the worst thing you can imagine to stop something even more terrible from happening.
I still have nightmares about that search. What it took to find the baby's body . . . As I was leaving the Pit, I saw him: your father. He was climbing down into the Pit from the Lows' section. Nobody was watching himâapart from me. I sank down low and held my breath as long as I could. He looked all around but didn't see me, and then he put something over his faceâcovering his eyes and mouth, a mask of some sortâand he disappeared underneath the mess. I saw him moving into the middle of the Pit, and then he was gone. He didn't resurface, and I didn't have the time to investigate him there and then. I had to take the body back to your mother, and I didn't know when he would next appear.
I held that cold, dead body and handed it to your mother while you were up with the Pale Women, being kept quiet. They owed me a favor, and I called them on it. Your mother's face, Chan . . . You cannot imagine it, because she wanted to be holding you, and she had the corpse instead. He came up that night to check, and she presented it to him: his dead heir. It was days old, blue and reeking from the Pit, but we swaddled
it and hoped that he wouldn't look too closely. And he left. He said nothing, just abandoned her.
Of course, your mother wanted you back, but I told her to wait. I told her that it wouldn't be safe. I had to make sure that it was, that he wasn't watching or suspicious. She didn't know what I planned, only that I told her that everything would be all right in the end.
I followed him again that night to check what I had seen the first time around. He was angry. He went down to the bottom again, through the Lows' section, and he put that mask onto his face, and he pulled a blue suit identical to the one he was wearing from a berth and put it on over his clothes, and he went into the Pit. After a minute, I followed him. I went out to the middle, where it was so dark I could barely see what was around me. I dove down and felt the floor for somethingâanythingâthat might indicate where he had gone. I found a lever, and I gripped it and pulled it, and something whirred: a stir of machinery that would be lost in the noise of the rest of the ship. By feeling around I discovered that the lever had opened a door to a vestibule. I climbed in, and the door shut. I was in a pod just barely big enough to stand up in, surrounded by the mess that had followed me in. I wiped my eyes and saw a vent in the wall, a fan, and it spun so quickly, and most of the mess was sucked out, pulled into it, leaving only the objects too big in the pod. Bones, rags of clothes. And I saw another lever, which I pulled without even hesitating.
Looking back on it, I was so reckless. I didn't know what would happen when I pulled that lever or what I might find. I
was so cautious in those days, even more so than now. Below me, another door slid open. There was a ladder, and I climbed down it. Suddenly I was in a place I had never seen before, a chamber with pictures on the walls and a soft rug that ran from wall to wall on the floor. I was down here. I was scared and I was still dripping from the Pit, and I was angry: with Ellis, with his promises and stories and lies, and with what he was hiding from the women he made promises to. I started forward. I had a weapon and I drew it, and I went to find your father.
He was in one of the berths, removing the suit he wore over his cleaner clothes, bundling the bloody ones he'd worn to climb through the Pit into a pile. I caught him unawares, and he noticed me in the doorway only when he turned to leave.
“Oh,” he said, and his face was terrified, as if he knew what I meant. I had a knife with me, and I dealt with him, and I left his body on the floor of that room. There was no ceremony to it. I wiped my knife clean on his clothes.
When I left the berth, there were other men in the hall waiting. Six of them, all ages: some younger than him, two of them very old. They all had weapons in their hands, and they attacked me. I was better than them, and I killed them all. They nearly overwhelmed me, but . . . They didn't know how to fight. They were reliant on their weapons, and they hadn't lived the life that I had. They'd never had to fight, not really.
But one of them I didn't kill.
I had questions.
“What did he say?” I look at Agatha and then Jonah. He's angry now and growing angrier, his teeth gritted, his brow creased.
“Chanâ” Agatha starts to say, reaching across and taking my hand, but Jonah doesn't let her finish her sentence.
“He was a guard. They were all guards,” he says. “This shipâ
Australia
âis a prison.”
I know the stories, because we all do. We all know about the floods, and about the fires, and about Earth tearing itself apart. My whole life, full of stories about what was before. But we've never had any pictures, and we've never had details. The Pale Women have their story about the loading of the ark and how the animals went into it in twos: two of every creature. That's something. Our story: We loaded ourselves
two by two into our own ark, and that ark was the
Australia
, and we went into space to find somewhere else. Somewhere better. And some day we will. That's our story. We've never questioned the story, because there has never been any reason to. Because why would anyone choose to live like this? Why, for any other reason, would anybody live like this? Being here has to be for the distant hope of a better life.
“The last guard bargained. It's human nature to try to live, to do whatever we can. It was what he could offer me. He told me everything, and I didn't even have to ask him. I didn't have to press my knife to his throat: he was simply too terrified of dying. He told me about this place. Our ancestors were sent up here before, on this ship. They weren't fleeing: they were criminals, the worst of the worst. This was a way of keeping them out of sight.”
“But Earth was destroyed,” I say. My voice is quiet. Everything is wrenched away from me, everything that I ever believed. The closest thing I can equate it to is the feeling of sitting there with my mother's knife in my hands, her body bleeding out. Agatha shakes her head.
“It wasn't,” she says. “Only for us. The guards were prisoners themselves, but fraudsters, not murderers. This was a way of giving them their life back. They were free to do as they chose. They lived here, as best I can tell, and they did as we did. They just had more control.” She smiles as she says that. I wonder what control it was that meant that they felt it acceptable to treat peopleâmy motherâas they did. “They did what they wanted, and so did we. We fell apart.”
“It wasn't always like this,” Jonah says.
“No,” Agatha agrees. “It used to be locked down. At some point, we overthrew the guards. At some point . . .” She shrugs. “At some point, we changed the story. We started lying to ourselves.”
She stands up and leads us into another room, just off the kitchen. “This is where they watched us,” she says. There's a chair hereâone solitary chairâin front of a series of black boxes, shined and glossy, stacked on top of one another. On a table at the side of the room, there are books of handwritten names and details,
ledger #1, #2, #3
printed on the front of them in delicate writing. I open them and flick through entries for men and women and then hastily scrawled details about their children, about their families, and crimes, and where they're living. These books are old. I don't recognize any names. I look for myself, and I'm not there. I look for my mother, and she's not there. I look for Agatha, and she's not there.
I close the book I'm holding. I don't understand yet.
“What do these do?” I ask her, pointing at the screens.
“They show the rest of the ship,” she says. And she presses one of them, strokes it with her fingers, and they burst into light, each one suddenly showing a picture. It takes me a second to work out what the pictures are, because they're grainy and not in color and they're small, each picture split into four sections showing different things. But I know them all, what they show. Each of them has a small part of the ship on display, all the sections. Some of the pictures are a wash of gray, but most of them are showing something. This is the ship, the
rest of the ship, and what I'm seeing is what's happening up there right this second.
“How?”
“I don't know,” Agatha says. “I've looked, but I can't find out.”
“What happened after?” I ask. “When the guard told you all this?” I can't stop looking at the pictures. They're showing exactly what the ship is like: the chaos, the madness. From down here, clean andâsuddenly, somehowâsafe, it almost looks unbelievable.
“He died. He died, and I left.”
“We could have come here,” I say. I think that I should speak up, that maybe I should be angry about this. I spent my life up there, and this was here the entire time.
“This place is a lie,” she replies. “Up there is the truth. It's where we come from, who we are. We weren't meant to be down here.”
“But this place is safe,” I say. It's empty, and it's warm, and it's clean. I imagine having grown up here instead of up there. What my life might have been like, with showers to take and food to eat and no worrying about the threat of somebody trying to kill me, all day, every single day of my life. I wonder what that might have been like.
I wonder if it somehow might have stopped my mother from dying.
“It wasn't safe, not then. There were things that I didn't understand here, Chan. I didn't know what this place was, and I didn't feelâ”
“You should have told us!” I scream at her. The anger has swollen up in me, and it bursts. “You should have brought us down here, and we could have . . . We could have lived here.” I'm in tears. This hurts so much, to know that this was here the entire time.
“I couldn't,” she says. “I couldn't.”
“But why?” I ask. She doesn't have an answer for that. She just looks away from me.
I'm sitting alone in my room when there's a noise outside, in the corridor. I stand up and open the door, and Jonah is there, waiting. He seems almost surprised to see me, as if he hadn't planned to come in.
“Can I sit?” he asks, and I nod. I can't hear Agatha now, and I don't know what she's doing. I don't care. I'm so angry at her. I don't really want to talk, that's for certain, but he does. He was there for me, and I owe him for that.
“It's cruel,” he says out of nowhere. “There's something almost cruel about finding this place.” I nod, because that's all I can manage. He slides his finger underneath his collar and pulls it away slightly to give his neck room. “Being on
Australia
was never something good, not like the Women said. Everything we live throughâthe hell of it all, the chaos, and the nightmares, and there was never a reward owed to us.”
“A reward for what?” I ask. Keep him talking and maybe I won't have to think about my own problems.
“For living. Life here was purgatory, and we were on our way to be rewarded with a better world. After the revelations
on Earth, we ascended. We were going to find heaven.” There are tears in his eyes as well, and that stings me, too, for some reason. At least I haven't been living my life expecting a payoff in the end. I've lived day by day, not hoping for the future. But he hasn't. His whole life has been about that: about the promise of what comes after. In some ways, he's lost more than I have by learning about this place. “We were meant to be finding somewhere better.”
“Maybe we still are,” I tell him. If we landâif we're alive when we find a place to landâthere will at least be a planet. A new home. We can start again.
“Doesn't matter,” he replies. “Look what we come from.
Who
we come from. What sort of person is so dreadful that they're sent away, imprisoned and exiled? In
The Book
, only the worst . . .” His voice fades off. The
Testaments
of the Pale Women: they mean nothing now. His finger runs around underneath his collar, stretching it. He's sweating, and it hurts him.
“Wait there,” I say, and I leave the berth and head to the kitchen. Agatha is sitting at the table, her hands clasped around a cup of something steaming and sweet-smelling.
“You can't know what it was like to make the choices I had to make,” she says, looking up, her face ravaged with grief.
“No,” I tell her, “I don't. I was never given the chance.” I take a knife from a drawer and head back to Jonah, slamming the door to the kitchen behind me. This knife is small but almost impossibly sharp. Looking down the blade, I don't dare run my finger along it to test it. I know that it will just give me another scar I can't get rid of.
He looks up as I show it to him, tensing his body, suddenly on his guard.
“Don't worry,” I say. “I'm good with one of these. Just don't flinch.” I take the back of his head in my hand, holding on to his scalp with the tips of my fingers, holding his head steady, moving it to one side. The band that runs around his neck is stitched together, the threads thick and hard, with metal staples pushed through. It's tight, and underneath the leather I can see where it's rubbed, scarring his skin. I slide the blade of the knife beneath it, holding it angled against the inside of the strap, where the threads are joined. “I'll try not to choke you,” I say, and I start pulling the knife toward me. The threads fray and then snap, and the collar falls to his lap. “There,” I say, and then I notice that I've cut him slightly where the tip of the blade has dug into his skin. I rub it, and the blood spreads. I lick my finger and wipe it off. The nick on his skin is barely noticeable.
“Thank you,” he says. He turns the leather strap over in his hands, feeling the metal studs with his fingers.
“How long were you wearing that for?” I ask.
“As long as I can remember.” He looks up at me. “It was a reminder, they told me, that man is born in sin. I could look forward to my eternal judgment, when it would finally be removed. They told me how favorably I would be looked upon for wearing it, how it would make up for my being a man.”
“And did it work?”
“Yes,” he says, and he smiles. “I suppose that it did. It made me never forget my potential to sin. Because of it, I've always tried to help people.” It's only the second time I've seen him smile; it softens his face, makes his eyes light up.
“You're a good person,” I say. I don't know what makes me say it, but I think that he needs to hear it.
“Maybe,” he says. “But I don't . . . I couldn't help the Pale Women.”
“You helped me.”
“They raised me. They loved me.” I don't know what to say to that. Nothing I can say will help. “So what happens now?” he asks.
“I don't know,” I tell him. He rubs at his neck so hard that it's even redder now than it was before, but at least, I suppose, he's in control of that.
We stay together in silence for a long time and emerge only much later. Agatha cooks something for us. Bread and meat and cheese on top of it, a recipe that she's found among the pages of the cooking book, the one that's dog-eared from being thumbed too much. She puts it down on the table and doesn't say a word, so neither do Jonah and I.
But it's almost nice, almost comforting, eating in this silence.
I struggle to fall asleep. The bed's too soft, and it's far too quiet. I miss the noise of the engines; of the people being happy and sad and just alive and around me; of the chaos; the heat of the engines, their rumble through the metal, up into the mattresses and through every other part of your berth, to the point where you wonder if your teeth are rattling in your head; the smell that's so distinct that I notice it only now that it's gone; and the taste of metal in the air that you're never sure is iron or blood.
This stillness is wrong in so many ways.
But it's not just that. I sit up on the edge of the bed in the darkness. There's a light that I found down in the wall, plugged in. It's in the shape of an animal's head, I don't know which one. But you flick a switch and it glows orange, a soothing shade that gives just enough light to the berth to let you see that you're alone. The door is shut, and I feel safe. Nobody knows we're here, yet I've still put my blade underneath my pillow, and I was still clutching it as I tossed and turned and tried to sleep. So I get up. I get dressed, and I creep to my door and gently push it open. Agatha and Jonah are in their own beds, and I can hear them both from here: the gentle sounds of their breathing in the night. That's good. I need some time to myself, and now I have it.
I walk to the kitchen, and I open up one of the giant metal doors that the food is hidden behind. There are shelves and shelves of food, all sealed up and labeled, and I barely recognize any of the names.
ice cream
, one says. There's a picture on the tub of a boy and girl grinning, spooning stuff into their mouths. I peel back the lid, and there it is: a cold substance of pink and brown swirls. I touch it. My finger sinks in, and I draw it out and put it to my lips, and I can smell it, and then I taste it, and oh, my.
Oh, my.
I take the container and find a spoon in one of the drawers and go into the control room, where there's the one chair, and I sit in it, and for a few minutes I eat and eatâuntil my teeth hurt and my belly aches. When I'm done, I put what's left in the tub down, and I look at the empty black pictures.
I need to see this. I need to see what it's like up there. I touch the pictures just as Agatha did. They flicker into life in exactly the same way, and they show me what's happening in the rest of
Australia
.
And what's happening is war. It's still going on. The Lows are still attacking, still fighting, still expanding, still taking. Rex is still leading. The free people are losing. Everyone I've ever known, ever so much as spoken to: they're running, or begging, or dying.
Or dead.
I sit back and I watch the war that's happening above, and I feel totally and utterly powerless, more than I ever have before the whole of my life.