Way Down Dark (15 page)

This is a delay to finding the little girl: taking these two down to the bottom. Agatha will be furious that the first people I've saved aren't even the ones I came up here for. I look down the gantry, seeing everything in my shades of green and black: more Lows heading here to find out what the commotion is. They don't know what's happened yet, but they will, and they'll be angry.

“Come with me,” I say, and I take their hands, and I start toward the stairwell. I have to be quick.

“I'll take them,” Jonah says. I whirl around in surprise. He's on the floor below, looking up through the grated flooring, dressed in one of the blue suits, a mask on his face. His hood is down over his face, coated in a slick layer of blood from the Pit. But through my own mask, it looks almost pure white, like fire. “Pass them down,” he says. I nod and look at the boys' faces again. I hold a finger to my lips to tell them to be quiet. They mimic me. This is a gesture that they recognize. Jonah takes them as I lift them down, setting them gently on the floor by his side. Then, holding their hands, he turns to go. “Be safe,” he whispers up at me so quietly that I barely hear it, and then he's gone, stepping off the edge, taking the children with him. I pause for breath, but only for a second.

When I finally reach the floor where I once found her, where I saw her on the videos, there is no sign of the little girl. The Lows have been through here, and they've done what they do. It's empty, almost terrifyingly quiet. When I softly ask if there's anybody here, my voice echoes around in whispers. It makes me think of the ship's ghosts, the stories people tell to scare children. Here it feels as though they're everywhere, yet I know they've never been real. My mother's ghost, the ghosts in the Pit—which I now realize must have been based on the truth of the guards—the ghost of my father and whoever else lived there with him. I never believed in them.

This emptiness is the closest I've come to believing in them myself.

Then I see the little girl's rag-and-bone doll lying on the floor, or at least its torso. The head is missing and one of the legs. I tell myself to move on, that I cannot become fixated on finding her. She's gone, and I have to abandon any hope of rescuing her. I can't dwell on this. The longer I stay out here, the more dangerous it is for me.

As I turn to go back to the stairwell, I notice a shape tucked in a corner behind a ripped-up mattress. It's her, as close to the wall as she can manage. I kneel down and pull off my mask so that she can see my face. No sense in terrifying her any more than she already is.

“Don't panic,” I say. “I'm here to help you.” She looks toward me, and through my mask I can see her face, terror giving way to relief.

“It's you,” she says. I push the hood back from my face and hand her the remnants of her doll. She clutches it to her chest with both hands as tightly as I've ever seen anybody grip anything.

“Where are your parents now?”

“I don't know,” she says. They're long dead, most likely. Probably they've been dead for a while.

“Okay. I want to take you someplace safe. Would you like that?”

Her lip twitches. “Not here?”

“Somewhere else. You won't have to hide, okay?” She nods, and then she starts crying. Real, huge, racking sobs. She crawls toward me, bawling her eyes out, and she puts her arms around me. I shush her, holding her to me. She buries her face in my chest, and I beg her to be quiet because her tears will bring the Lows if she's not careful. “I don't know your name yet, anyway,” I say, trying to distract her from the tears. “I'm Chan. Can you spell? See-aitch-eh-enn.” I trace the letters out in the air. “What's yours?”

“Mae,” she says, her voice so quiet that I can barely hear, but it works, and the tears start to dry up and she sniffs.

“Mae. That's a beautiful name,” I say. I take her hands and squeeze them. “It'll be okay,” I tell her.

She doesn't say a word after that. She clings to me, wrapping her arms around my neck, clutching me so tightly that I couldn't shake her if I tried. The climb down is hard, and it's tough to hide with her attached to me, but she's good: quiet
when she needs to be, not panicking when I scratch my hand on the metal of a stairwell and we slip, nearly falling. By the time we reach the bottom I've almost forgotten that I'm carrying her. I've gotten used to her weight.

I stop and put her down, and I kneel in front of her.

“When I tell you to, you have to shut your eyes, okay?”

“Why?”

“Because I said so.” Because, I think, there are some things you shouldn't have to see. And maybe now she can go her whole life without ever seeing them. “And you have to hold your breath. You know how to do that? You breathe in—” I do it, and then I don't let it out, pulling an exaggerated face, then finally puffing out, and we both laugh. “You breathe in, and you hold it. Don't breathe until I tell you. Okay?”

“Okay,” she says, still smiling.

“So you're ready?” She nods. I pick her up, and I push her head into my shoulder, her eyes into the cloth of my outfit, and I hold her head there with one hand and climb down with the other.

And then we're in the Pit, and I'm wading, and the mess is up around my waist, then my shoulders, and she wriggles but I hold her tight, and I tell her to take that one big deep breath, and she does, and we're suddenly under. With my free hand I feel for the lever, and then we're in the hatch, in the space between the Pit and safety, and then we're on the ladder and down below.

“You can open your eyes now,” I say to her, and she does.

Agatha talks quietly to me as we cook. In the other room, there's noise: Jonah sitting and talking with the children, then the quick transition into some game. I can't remember ever having heard anything like this: the voices of children—and happy voices, at that—without the backdrop of everything else.

“How does it feel?” Agatha asks, pulling pots from the stove.

“Like we can do more,” I reply. She sighs. I know what she's thinking and that she's right: We can't help everybody. It's impossible. And if we tried, what would we do? Bring them down here? There's not enough room. We would lose this place as it is now; it would be swallowed by the rest of the ship. There's only so much food and only so many beds.

But then dinner is ready, and Agatha takes it to the table, and I forget about the rest of the ship for the moment. The
children swarm over to us. It's strings of something in a sauce. According to the cooking book, this is spaghetti with tomato sauce. We eat it with our hands, spooning it up in our palms and sucking it down, sauce everywhere. It looks like a massacre. The kids don't stop even when they should be full. They're overeating, and they'll all have bellyaches tonight, but that's probably okay. They're all so skinny, and I imagine them as they might be in the future, always full and content. When no one can eat any more, the three of them slope off, hardly able to move from the feeding. Mae is the most hesitant; she doesn't want to be away from me, it seems. It'll take a lot to teach her that she's safe now.

Agatha, Jonah, and I do the dishes. We stand in a line at the sink, and Agatha empties the remnants into a trash chute, Jonah dunks them into hot water, and I wipe them dry. It feels nice, comfortable. I'm content for a second with all of this.

“I have to know if the Pale Women survived,” Jonah says out of nowhere. “If they're alive, then I would like to save them. To bring them here.” He breaks the work line, leaving his current dish soaking in the water, his hands dunked in up to the wrists. “They were good to me, and I—”

“It's okay,” I say. Agatha waits for me to tell him that we can't go looking for them, but I won't, so I just leave his last words hanging in the air, and I reach over and pull the dish out of the sink for him, and I dry it and leave it on the side.

While everybody else sleeps, I make myself a suit.

I've got materials taken from three different uniforms, along with tools and weapons. I tear apart the different
materials, and I size them against my body. The suit I've been wearing barely fits, and it's clumsy. It'll snag, or I could trip over the too-long trouser legs. I cut the fabric apart and sew the new parts together.

There's a knock on my door. “Come in,” I say, and it pushes open. It's Agatha. I don't know why, but I sort of expected Jonah. I maybe hoped for Jonah. She looks down at what I'm doing, at me sitting cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by all this stuff.

“You look like you could use my help,” she says. She's better with a needle than I am, and she sits next to me and goes over every seam that I've already sewn, and she makes them all stronger. I watch her, and sometimes I notice that her fingers are shaking and she breathes and tries to steady them before carrying on again. She doesn't want me to see that, and she pauses, stops sewing when she notices me looking, then resumes when I go back to my own work.

“Your hands,” I say the third time I notice it, and she tries to hide it from me. “Are you okay?”

“I'm not what I was,” she says. I don't know if she's ill or if it's just tiredness. But after that she stops hiding it.

When we're done, I stand up and she helps me into the suit, and we check the measurements and that I can still move in it. I need to be able to run and climb and duck without having it fall apart on me. When we're satisfied, I take the outfit off and we start decorating. And this part? It's pretty fun. It feels like something from before, when Agatha and Mother and I would sit together and make our clothes beautiful with beads and whatever else we had that could brighten up the
fabrics. Now Agatha also adds straps, sheaths for my blade and for the striker, and she adds pockets, getting me to hold the fabric as tight as I can while she sews them. They're big enough for me to carry anything I might need. Then she adds protection (armor, she calls it): thick plates of what feels like metal under taut, coarse material. We cut it apart and attach the pieces to the chest and to the thighs. We tweak the hood, adding a drawstring so that it's held down over my face rather than being in any danger of falling off.

When it's all done, I stand in the mirror and look at myself as I pull the outfit on again. I look ready, and I'm pleased by that. I'm not sure for what yet; I don't know how far I'm going to go down this path. I can save more people: innocent people. Maybe I should focus on the children. There are a lot of them, many orphaned and lost. They'll be taken by the Lows, and if they are, their futures are all but decided for them. But I can save them.

I pull the hood down over the stubble of my hair. The hood is peaked at the front to set it rigid over my forehead. I can barely see my face in the mirror now: only the bottom of my chin, my lips. When I speak, trying out words, I can hardly make out my mouth moving. Agatha stands back and watches me as I breathe in and out. The outfit's dark, which will help me stay hidden, but if somebody should see me—one of the Lows, even Rex—I want them to stay away from me.

I look like I should be feared.

I look like something out of the stories we tell on this ship: the Nightman, the ghosts. The stories get told because we fear them. And the Lows are going to fear me.

I'm lying on the bed in my room, the suit hanging up in front of me, and I'm watching it, staring at its shape. It looks almost full even when there's nobody inside it. I hear my door creak just as I shut my eyes, and my hand darts to the pillow to grab my blade, reflex kicking in before I can even think.

“Chan?” Mae asks.

“Hey,” I say. I relax. “Hey, come here.” She pads across the carpet and clambers onto the bed and immediately lies down next to me, draping her arms around my neck. I'm so tired and achy that it hurts, but I don't let on.

“I can't sleep,” she says. I checked on her earlier and she was flat out. Still, she's woken up now, and I know all too well what sorts of dreams she might have been having. “Can I sleep here?”

“Of course you can,” I say, and I lie there with her, stroking her hair. It takes only a few minutes before I feel her body settle as she goes under, and I shut my own eyes and breathe.

Just as I'm drifting off, I think that I can hear footsteps outside my berth, outside my door, but they fade, just like everything else does.

Agatha wakes me, gently shaking me. I don't know how long I've been asleep, but Mae is gone and I'm alone. I hear Agatha's knees creak as she kneels down.

“Jonah's gone,” she says. “When I woke up, I couldn't find him. I've checked the screens, and he's out there. He's looking for the Women.” I sit up, rubbing my face. I'm groggy, and my body feels like it's weighed down by something that I can't see,
my muscles rebelling against my trying to make them move. It's been a long, long time since I've slept like that. I'm not sure that I ever have before.

“Where have you seen him?” I ask.

“All over, searching, first on the top floors, then working his way down.” She hands me something, a cup of something hot. “This is called coffee,” she says, “and it will help.” I take a sip, and it's scalding and foul and bitter, but I persist. She knows best about these things. “He won't find them, Chan. They're dead, or they're hiding. He'll get himself caught.”

“I know,” I say, and I stand up and stumble to the cupboard, where I get the outfit down and lay it on the bed. I'm slow to pull it on, but I can't tell if that's tiredness or something else. Fear. I don't want to have to go up there again, not when I'm not completely ready. I'd been planning to hide, to slip around in the shadows, fight only if I was discovered and attacked. But Jonah isn't cowering in a corner; he won't be hiding. He'll be looking for the most dangerous parts of the ship that he can find, hoping that they'll lead him to the women who brought him up.

I walk through with Agatha to the control room, past the kids in the kitchen. They're eating again—they always seem to be eating—and they wave at me as I walk past. They're happy. They're not worried about the worst case of what could happen. Maybe I shouldn't be either.

“Are you going to be all right looking after them?” I ask Agatha, and she nods.

“You think I haven't done it before?” She never had children of her own. I'm so quick to forget how present she was
during my own childhood and all the things she did for me. And my mother.

I bring up the screens, the views of
Australia
, and I search for Jonah. I can't see him anywhere, but I do see Rex. She's sitting in a berth, nursing her destroyed arm, cradling it. It's wrapped up, and she's rubbing at the edges of what must be the wound. I've heard that it itches like crazy when you lose a part of yourself, when that flesh starts to heal. The end of her arm is covered in a rag, and I can't see what it looks like, but I'm guessing it's not pretty. She'll blame me for what she's lost, I'm sure, as soon as she knows that I'm still alive.

“You should go,” Agatha says.

“I thought you'd be trying to stop me.”

“Would you listen to me?”

“No,” I say.

“Well, then. I'll watch you. If you need help, signal to me. Like this,” and she makes a gesture, her fingers curled into an okay circle. “Got it?”

“Got it,” I say, but we both know that I'm not going to ask her to come and save me, to leave the kids. I'm going to find Jonah by myself. She doesn't come with me as I walk to the hatch, or as I attach my mask, or as I go back up into the Pit.

On the fiftieth floor, where I once lived, I attack before they can. I hang over the edge of the railing, and I use the striker to take out two Lows who were in the middle of torturing a man I know. As much as possible, I want to save Jonah without there being any more deaths, not even of Lows. Killing makes me no better than the Lows. This striker weapon is far neater
than a knife—less blood, less mess, less noise—and it's not inevitably fatal. The man they were hurting, one-legged and vulnerable, thanks me, his face full of tears. I ask him if he's seen Jonah. I describe his suit, and when that gets no reaction I focus on the details: his red hair, his green-gray eyes, his pale skin. The man doesn't know. He's seen a lot of people, and he starts to tell me a story about how I should be careful, that there are rumors the Nightman is up to his old tricks. I don't have time for this. I leave him.

I work quickly. I rush and strike a group of Lows three floors up, right in my path for the easiest route to the top floors of the ship. To them I'm a blur, that's all. Again, I try to leave them alive: injured enough that they can't heal within the next few days but still breathing. I just don't want them coming after me if I can help it.

I fight Lows when I meet them, and as I'm catching my breath between encounters, I imagine how we might decorate the new berths, making them more personal, putting up pictures that the children have painted. I save a family on the sixty-second floor. The Lows are stringing them up in front of their berth—probably as some sort of warning—and I cut the back of one Low's tendons and shock the other and then slice through the rope that's tying the family together.

As I run, I imagine the cooking that we will do down below, the food that we will prepare. I imagine a school, teaching the children to read books, to write and learn all the stories, the real ones as well as the lies. And we will do that all by ourselves, telling the little ones what we have discovered.
Imparting knowledge so that no one will ever forget where we came from.

On the sixty-fifth floor, I save a little boy who is alone, covered in blood. I do not know what happened to his parents, but there are so many Lows around him, I have to act. They are discussing what to do with him like it's a game. They are dividing up the pain that they'll cause him between them. I don't just save him: I ruin them. I kick one to the floor, jamming the stick into his mouth, smashing his teeth and frying his tongue until he howls in agony; I throw the other to the floor, my knife cutting his thigh deep, his blood a fountain.

I take the boy with me just as I carried Mae, and I don't even think about the burden, because if I didn't do this, he would die. Simple as that. On 70, I save a family, but I don't fight the Lows who are advancing toward them. There are far too many of them. It would be suicide. I pull the family by their hands and tell them to stay quiet. I lead them into the darkness, away from the Lows. As we run, the woman slips and falls, trapping her foot in a hole I didn't see in the grating, and she screams. Her ankle is broken, and I can see the bone jutting through her torn skin. I don't have time to save her, because her screams tell the Lows where we are. I put my hand over the mouth of one of the boys to stop him from calling out his mother's name, and the man does the same thing to the other one, and we carry them into the darkness, leaving her. We wait, and we hear what happens: the sickening sounds of death. And then I signal to Agatha, into the nothingness, hoping that she's watching, knowing that she'll
be angry with me—three more little mouths to feed and the first adult let in—and I send the motherless children down to the bottom of the ship in the care of their father, along with the boy I saved before.

I keep going; I keep trying.

On the eighty-eighth floor, I look for Jonah. I remember meeting him for the briefest of moments, working here with him, trying to help the people who can't help themselves.