Way Down Dark (14 page)

I watch the pictures for hours. I don't even know how long. Finally, I hear someone else awake, coming toward me. I know it's Agatha without even having to look at her. I don't say anything. She walks close to the screens and peers into them. I'm reminded that her eyesight isn't what it once was. She fixates on one screen in particular, and I move over to see what she's looking at. I know it. It's the berth that I lived in with my mother. It's been destroyed, torn apart. Amid all the war and carnage, I hadn't noticed it until now. I can see that it's full of Lows, and there's a body with them, somebody they've killed. Even from here I can see that they've torn the neck open. They're dipping their hands into the blood and writing on the wall, and we watch them until they're finished, until they stand back and admire their handiwork as if this is art to them, as if this is something to be proud of.

There is no ghost
, the writing says.

“Can you see the Pale Women?” Jonah asks then. I didn't realize he'd come in. We look for the Pale Women, but there's no sign of them: not of their floors or even any of their outfits.

“They might be in one of the darker sections,” I say, “and some parts we can't see.”

“They won't have survived,” he says. “I should have stayed and fought for them.” I don't say it, but I'm glad that he didn't. If he had, I might be dead now and we wouldn't be here. This is a second chance, maybe. It's a chance to do something, certainly.

I just don't know what.

I start to feel sick. I try to tell myself that it's the ice cream, that I've eaten too much, but I know it's not that. What I feel is a different kind of ache, a gnawing deep inside me that feels like it's trying to force its way out. I watch people being murdered, killed for territory or—it seems—for fun. All of this seems so
wrong
. All anybody here did was be born in the wrong time, the wrong place, punished for crimes that somebody in the past committed. That's so deeply unfair. These are innocent people, and children, and—

I spot her in one of the darkest corners of the ship: the little girl I met before, way up high, throwing her brother's dolls into the Pit. She's covered in bruises, right across her eyes. I don't know what she escaped from, but something—someone—tried to hurt her. She's got one doll left, and she's hugging it to her chest as she cowers next to an abandoned berth. I look at the screens around hers, and there are Lows everywhere. They haven't found her yet, but they will.

I get up and go into the kitchen. “How do I get back up there?” I ask.

“What?” Agatha stands up and looks at me. “No,” she says.

“I'm going,” I tell her, and I'm sure that I say it in a way that suggests I'm not messing around. But she slams her hand onto the table and shuts her eyes. She looks so old and so tired.

“You can't, Chan. I made promises to your mother—”

“So did I,” I say. “So did I, and I'm not going to break them. I told her that I wouldn't die, and I won't. Not yet. Now,” I say, walking down the corridor, away from the kitchen, “tell me how I get up there.”

“Why?” she asks. “Give me one good reason.”

“I'll show you,” I say, and I drag her into the control room. The girl is still on the screen, still terrified. The Lows are closer. They'll find her soon, and this will end just like every story here does: in blood.

“I'm going to find her,” I say.

“And what will you do when you get to her?” Agatha asks gently, like she's trying to talk down a hysterical child.

“I'm going to save her,” I say. “I'll bring her down here.” I haven't thought it through, but that's what comes out of my mouth, and so that's what I'll do. That's the answer. We have somewhere here that's safe and protected, where she won't be threatened. I can give her what I never had.

“No,” Agatha says.

“I never knew you were so selfish,” I reply. It hurts to say that, and it hurts her more to hear it even if she doesn't show it.

“It won't end with her,” Agatha says, and she's right. Even as she says it, I know that's the truth. We can't be alone; I know that. I've been so selfish. I look at Jonah, trying to be good, even succeeding, and I feel guilty. I've wasted so much time trying to protect myself. But I'm stronger than that. I'm stronger than someone who has to sit back and watch. I can make a difference, and I will. I know that now.

“Does that matter? If I bring others down here, what difference does that make?”

“You can't save everybody. You have to look after yourself. You promised your mother. You promised her that you would look after yourself.”

“My mother's dead,” I shout.

“You don't get to make this decision. You're only a child,” she says.

“I'm older than my mother was when she had me.”

“And she was just as
stupid
.” She spits the word out at me, and it hurts. “Being rash—being naive—was how your mother got into her mess,” she says. I stand up and walk away, but she follows me and grabs my arm.

“Get away from me,” I say. I want to scream it, but I can't. It hurts, and I don't want her to know how much.

“All of this would have happened with or without you,” she says. “The Lows were ready to boil over. They have always been violent. Nothing you can do will change that. You're not special; none of us is.” She sighs and leans against the wall. Our argument is taking all her strength. “You're safe here. Maybe you don't understand the value of that yet, but you
will. I was stupid, maybe, not to bring you here before. But now you're finally safe.”

“I might be, but she isn't.” We both look back at the screen. The little girl is terrified. “I have to do something.”

“Why do you?”

“Because my mother was selfish, and it didn't save her. It's not an answer.” That feels defiant: an end to the argument.

“You're a fool,” Agatha says. She is disappointed, her voice tinged with anger.

“I am what you made me,” I reply, and she knows that I mean all of them: my mother; the guard who was my father, Agatha, and
Australia
itself. She lets go of me.

“Go, then,” she says. I do. I walk out into the kitchen, then the corridor, where Jonah is waiting, acting as though he didn't hear the argument.

“Where is it?” I ask him.

“It's down here,” he says, and he rushes ahead of me, down to the far end of the corridor. There's a panel on the wall, and he presses it. A hatch opens in the ceiling, and a ladder drops down, the machinery that powers it sounding rickety and tired. There's rust on the inside of it, all the way down the mechanism. Here, in the shining cleanliness of this down-below, it stands out: an intrusion from the real
Australia
.

“I'll be back soon,” I say, and then I see Agatha behind him, running toward me.

“Wait.” She takes my hand, and she holds it between both of hers. I'm expecting her to plead with me to stay, to give me some reason I shouldn't go up. “Come with me,” she says instead, and she pulls me back down the passageway and into
the berth where she has been sleeping. It looks the same as all the others but more drab, the walls a pale gray instead of the cream that's everywhere else. There's no bed: just her blanket and a pillow on the floor. And the cupboard doors are metal, not the strange material that's everywhere else. She opens one and stands back. “You might want to use these,” she says, and I see what's inside: black and shiny rods with handles, the word
Striker
decorating their sides in small white print.

Agatha reaches in and takes one of the rods. She hands it to me, and I curl my fingers around it. “This is what they tried to use on me when I came down here before,” she says, and I inadvertently squeeze the handle. The black rod fizzes, and a streak of blue electricity runs up and over it. It shakes, struggling against my arm, but I tense and control it. It's dangerous, I can tell. She reaches to the bottom of the cupboard and brings out a mask with two eyeholes and a piece that goes into my mouth. “They wore this when they went into the Pit,” she says. “It let them see where they were going somehow, even in the darkness.” I press the mask to my face, and it suctions onto my skin, the mouthpiece going between my teeth. There are grooves for me to bite on to, and I do, and my lungs fill with air. It's incredible, and it rushes to my head. I stumble, and she grabs me, steadies me. The view through the mask is different, flashing bright before stabilizing into grays, showing me the darkness and light better than it was before. It's disorienting, and I need Agatha's support.

“Thank you,” I mumble, spitting the mouthpiece out.

“Come back,” she says, and I nod.

“I will.” I walk out, striker in my hand. I stop in my berth and grab my blade as well, and then I climb the ladder into the vestibule embedded in the ceiling, and I find the lever that Agatha spoke of, and I tug it. There's no time to waste.

The roof of the pod comes out in the middle of the Pit, and as soon as it's open, the mulch starts to pour in over my face and shoulders. Even with the mask on, I close my eyes and hold my breath, because I'm so worried about what it will be like if the breathing apparatus fails—and because I don't much like the idea of seeing exactly what's underneath the surface of this, what's sunk to the bottom of the Pit after so many years—decades or centuries, I don't know—of bodies. It's hard to push against it because it's so much thicker than the water of the arboretum's river. The Pit itself is like a bowl, deeper in the middle than at the sides, and so the wading is even harder. I am afraid to take a breath and don't until my lungs are screaming, but the device works perfectly. That helps me calm down, and I push through the Pit until I can stand. I keep my eyes shut. I don't want to see this.

When I reach the side, I heave myself up. I don't know what section this is, and that worries me, but I'm ready for whatever happens. It's quiet for a second, and then my ears clear and the rush of the rest of
Australia
comes flooding back to me: the noise of it all, and the smell, and the darkness. It takes a second for my eyes to adjust, and then I hear a whizz, a noise in my face, and suddenly I can see. The mask shows me what's around me. It looks just like the pictures in the
down-below: grainy and slightly vague, tinged with greenish gray. But I can see.

I'm in section IV, the numbers marked in pale, faded, worn-away print on the wall. I'm relieved that I didn't wind up on the Lows' side of the ship. I get up, walk to the nearest stairwell, and start to climb. There's a long way to go, and I have no idea how much time I've got before the Lows find the girl.

Getting to her means hiding, skulking, creeping my way through the chaos. I am focused, but I can't ignore what I see. I can help people. I can fight. And when I've fought, maybe there's something I can do to stop the Lows from ever getting to the people who I've helped again. There's a whole part of the ship that they don't know about.

On the thirtieth floor, the market floor, I meet my first bunch of Lows. There are crates and boxes and fragments of fabric hanging from rafters. They are moving in, bringing their possessions over from their territory to here. I don't know what happened to the free people who used to live here.

The Lows are jittery. I get close enough to hear them wheezing, talking.

“Rex wants this done,” one says to the other. His voice trembles; he's terrified. They never call her by whatever her name was before: now she is just Rex, some ancient king come to wreak havoc and destroy everything we have.
Rex wrecks,
like some bad joke.

I get closer and see that the berth they're moving into isn't empty. There's a family inside; I recognize the father from the
arboretum. He's crying, begging for his life. Not his family's life, just his own. The children are crying as well, but his wife isn't; she holds firm, because she has to. He is gutless.
Selfish
. She can see that now. He doesn't resist when the Lows step toward them.

“Spare me,” he begs, asking only for his life. It doesn't matter what happens to the rest of them. His wife doesn't plead. She screams at the Lows, defending her children, and she lashes out, but they sidestep her. One of the Lows kills the father, gouging out his throat with some hacked-up half-broken knife. The man's blood washes out of his body. The children stare, noiseless and terrified. I check my weapons in my hands, make sure that my grip is good. As I'm moving in to do something, they kill the mother. I thought that they would leave her until last, but I was wrong. I can't—and don't—hesitate.

The first Low goes down with the striker to the back of his neck. It fizzes, and he falls, his eyes rolling back in his head. The other takes a second to register what's happened. He starts to say something to me, but I don't wait to hear it. I kick the first to one side and drive the striker into the face of the second, letting the blue electricity roar into his skull. He screams, and the children scream. The Low drops to his knees, smoke pouring from the socket where his eye used to be. He's breathing, but only just. Whatever happens, he's not a problem anymore. He's not dangerous.

I kneel by the two boys and snap my fingers. “Listen to me,” I say. “Do you have any other relatives? Is there anybody else you can go to?” They don't reply. They don't even seem to register what I'm saying. “Okay,” I say, “I have to take you
somewhere else. You need to come with me, and I'll make you safe, okay? We have to go now, and you need to be quiet.” I guess at their ages: under five, certainly. The younger one is sucking his thumb now, and I worry that he has blood on it from what I did. His older brother has no shoes on. I can save these kids as well.