Way Down Dark (16 page)

But he's not on this floor. Nobody is. All the people from before, the sick and injured, they're gone. The berths are burned out, destroyed, and even in the green light of my goggles it doesn't look any less terrible. The people who lived here won't have been able to protect themselves, I know that much. I wonder what sort of pleasure the Lows took from killing the woman I put ointment on before. She was in so much pain, every single movement she took hurt her more than anything I can even imagine.

I wonder if they cared. I wonder if they even relished it.

I go back to the stairwell, and I climb up. The last time I was here, I nearly died. Last time, I could copy what Jonah did as we climbed. If I didn't have my mask, I'm not sure that I'd be able to do this. But now I can see the parts I should cling to, even in the darkness. I look down, and there's a clear drop for six or seven floors. I fell there once and survived it. Not sure the same thing would happen again. That's enough to focus me, and I take it slowly: hand by hand, foot by foot. It feels darker suddenly. Colder, maybe. Doesn't hot air rise? Isn't that what's meant to happen? That's not how it is, though. Even
with the lights gone everywhere else in the ship, somehow I think that the darkness here is darker. Like it has settled in. It's made the top of
Australia
its home.

I don't announce myself. I don't know what's waiting up here for me. The Lows: they could be here still. Maybe they're catching up on their reading, staring at the writing on the walls. That makes me laugh, and I have to hold myself back, and that makes it worse. Don't laugh, don't laugh, but I can't help it, picturing them all lined up, reading the words on the walls as if they're in class. I snicker, and that turns into a full laugh, a single “Ha!” that echoes all around me. Get it together, Chan. Get. It. Together.

He's not here. There's nothing here. The ninetieth floor of the ship is the only part where you can see all the way along, with no berths to interrupt your line of sight. Nothing but gantry. There's nobody up here, not a single soul, and no possessions, no blankets, no beds. There's blood on the floor in places—remnants of the fight from before—and scraps of torn fabric, a few twisted, bent pieces of weapons. But no sign of Jonah or the woman he called Sister.

I sit down. I'm tired, and I have to. I stare at the walls, at the writing that's there—even in the darkness I can see it in green on the black walls. Some parts of it are clearer than others; some of the scratches are deeper. I read it: it tells the same story as the
Testaments
, about the making of man and animals and Earth (the same Earth that, at the end of the story, would be torn apart). “
The Father made a garden in the East
,” I read.

A garden. The arboretum.

It's not meant to be dark in here. Trees, fruit, vegetables, crops; they thrive in the light of the artificial sun that hangs above all of us, and now that that's off, this place feels wrong. All the trees seem to loom over me, the same green as everything else through my goggles. There's a fire burning on one side of this place; some of the crops have been set alight, their thin stalks now fizzing into ash. And then I see Jonah in the distance, by the apple trees. Somehow, having read their book, I should have known this is where he would be. He's not alone. I can see another shape with him, its colors less distinct, less bright through the mask's view: a body, cradled in his arms.

“Jonah. It's me,” I say as I get close and see him tensing at the sound. “I came to find you.”

“She's dying,” he says. She's propped up against the tree, her head lolling. It's the Sister. It's a miracle she's still alive. “I don't know what to do for her.” He's got his ointment in one hand, and he's daubing it onto her skin. I take my mask off to see as best I can. She's lit in the flames of the burning crops, and I can see how bloody her gown is, soaked through with darkness. Her neck is cut, but not badly enough to just end her. This is a slow death. “Rex did this,” he says. “She did this, and she . . . It isn't right.”

“I know,” I reply. I know that my words are meaningless. That doesn't mean that they won't be what he needs to hear, what I need to say.

“All of this. Sister wanted to help people. She wanted peace.”

“And she found it.” The stories about who they were faded over time: the Pale Women of old were a story more than a
reality. We don't know if the stories were ever true. Probably doesn't matter, not anymore.

“Maybe she was wrong. Maybe death is . . . Maybe that's better. What Rex deserves.”

“Maybe.” I kneel next to him. “You have to let her go,” I say. I brush the hair from the Sister's eyes. Brown eyes, almost the exact same color as her skin. She doesn't focus her eyes on me or on anything else. She's all but gone already.

“I can still try to help her.”

“No. I don't think you can,” I say. I put my hand on his back and then around him, and I pull him close to me. He stops touching her, stops rubbing the ointment on her wounds. It won't help, anyway, that ointment. It's just another lie, I think. She's in terrible pain, and it's only going to get worse.

We're sitting, quiet, in the dark, when I hear the voice: Rex's voice, preceded by the hissed throats of the Lows she brings with her.

“Keep quiet,” I tell Jonah even though he hasn't said a word, and I move us behind the tree, behind the Sister's body. I put the mask back on and watch them coming in from the opposite side of the arboretum, behind the burning crops. They won't see us, I know. It's too dark, and we're hidden by the bright light of the fire that lies between us and them. That means I've got the upper hand. Now it's just a matter of what I do with it. “Wait here,” I tell Jonah, and I creep forward, close enough that I can hear what they're saying.

“We're nearly finished,” Rex says. Her voice is more broken than I remember, her speech slowed down, slurred. She
rubs at the stump of her hand, itching and pulling at it, wincing as she does so. I really hope that it's infected. I hope that it turns and rots and that the fever sets in.

“The ship is nearly ours,” she says. “The rest of them can try to fight back, but we'll kill them. This arboretum,” she says, stumbling over the word, “is already ours now. They'll have no access to food. Let them hide or wait. They'll have nothing. They'll starve or join us.”

She's chaos, pure and simple. I watch as she takes an unlit torch and dips it into the dying flames at her feet. “This is how we take our freedom,” she says, as if they've been oppressed, as if they haven't been terrifying the rest of us for as long as anybody can remember. The flame takes, and she carries it to the trees. She stands under one and holds it to the trunk, and the bark starts to crackle. Her Lows throw things high into the trees: small vials that explode, the liquid that's inside them running down, catching fire as it goes. The tree is lost in seconds, the flames up to the very top of the branches. The colors seen through my mask are almost too vibrant, too bright. I pull it off. I've climbed that tree. I've spent hours in that tree. When I was younger, I would climb it and hide and read the fragments of whatever books my mother had managed to salvage for me. I watch now as the branches snap and fall, as the Lows light the next tree and the next. They'll burn it all down. The trees give us oxygen and food and I'm sure work harder than the almost-broken air generators that have kept us alive for so long. The Lows are going to damn everybody. They're going to kill us all, even themselves. I have to stop them, I know, but I don't know how.

Then the water starts. From above us—right in the roof of the ship—it comes, spitting, gently at first, and then it flows faster and faster, water gushing from all around, spraying everywhere, hitting everything. It's just like the shower down below but on a much greater scale. It's rain. I've never seen such a thing before. I have always known that the plants irrigate from below, from the river. This must be for emergencies, and it's amazing: water flows in great clattering sheets. The Lows are terrified, shouting, panicking, watching their flames sputter and die, watching their light disappear.

This is my chance. Mask down, I run. Blade in one hand, striker in the other, I plow into them. They don't even hear me coming, because the rain is so loud, and we're soaked, pounded by it, drenched. I slam through them one by one, and they scream and howl, and I get two of them down before the others even realize it's not just the water that they're screaming about. A third one hits me, a lucky accident, but I can see him and he can't see me; I duck, and I get behind him, and I discover what happens when you use a striker on somebody who's wet: The effect is amplified.

Through the grainy vision of my mask, everybody looks the same. I suddenly worry about Jonah, but then I see him waving his arms around, hear him shouting my name so that I know where he is. He's helping. He's in the fray. There are ten of them, I think, maybe more, and only two of us. But I don't care about any of them apart from Rex. I search for her, trying to get a glimpse of her half-shaven head, her scars. I worry that she's gone, that I've lost my chance.

And then I spot her. There's only one person here missing a hand. That makes her easier to identify: a space in my vision where there's usually something. She sees me across the melee, strides to me, pushing other Lows out of the way, unstoppable. My legs shake. I plant them in the soil, which is turning to wet mud, and try to brace them. I can't shake. I can't balk, not now. She's got one good arm, but I've got two. That surely gives me an advantage.

I don't know what I'm expecting, but when she's close enough, she leaps. She takes off, and she comes at me, the stump at the end of her ruined arm extended toward me. I hold my ground, because the impact will hurt her more than it hurts me. I ready my blade, and she hits me but slips and falls to the ground, and I swipe as she goes, getting her on the back, and she lands on her knees in front of me. I once saw the Lows worship her the way she is now, in front of me.

She laughs, and that's when the pain hits me. I reach up and knock the goggles off my head, and I look down at where her stump is pressed against my side. She's still laughing. She pulls her hand back, and I see what my goggles missed: that my mother's blade is fastened to her stump, embedded in the flesh, pushed in deep and firm. Tightly wrapped gauze runs round it, holding it in place. I'm sure that it must hurt her just to have it in there. But as she pulls the blade out of me, she only laughs harder.

Jonah slams into her from behind, tackling her, pushing her away, but she's on her feet right away, slashing at him. Through the rain, I only catch glimpses of them as they fight. I put my hand to where she cut me, and I feel for blood but
feel only the wetness of the rain. The wound aches but doesn't hurt as much as I imagined it would. I step forward. The pain is manageable for now. I pick my mask up from the mud and wipe it off, and I put it on. I can see them fighting, almost a dance between them, back and forth.

Rex doesn't see me behind her and doesn't hear me. She only hears the sound of the striker warming up, the fizz of the rain as it hits the blue lightning wrapped around it, and then the sound of her skin crackling where I slam it into her neck.

She crumples like a pile of ash to the floor, still breathing, eyes wide open.

“You're hurt,” Jonah says, his face drenched.

“It's fine.”

“You're bleeding.”

I look down at Rex, and I see it now. My blood is mixing with the rain, running down me and pooling at my feet.

“You need—”

“I need to finish this fight,” I say. I draw my blade. I can do this, I tell myself. She's a bad person, a terrible person. I've tried to avoid killing where I can, tried to incapacitate. But she wouldn't give me the same consideration. She wouldn't hesitate to kill me, just as she hasn't hesitated to kill so many good people on this ship. If good people die, why shouldn't she? My mother, the Sister; they were good people. They were . . .

I drop to my knees, and Jonah rushes to catch me, to support me. His arm is under mine, his shoulder propping me up.

“You're not a killer,” he says. He helps me away from her, back down the gantry, back to the main body of the ship. I
lead him to what was my home for so many years, and we sit on the shattered metal frame of what's left of my old bed, and he helps me with the zipper of my outfit, pulling it down. He can see the wound better than I can. “It's not as bad as it could have been,” he says. “This”—tapping the armored plates that Agatha sewed in for me—“took most of it. It'll need stitches.”

“I can't see it properly,” I say, and he pushes my hand down, gets close to my skin. He takes his kit from his pocket and finds a needle, then takes some thread and loops it through. It's wet from the rain, but it's fine. It'll do. He doesn't look me in the eye as he cleans the wound with his ointment and wipes it dry, and then, as he pushes the wound together, he slides the needle into the skin, winding and looping it through, pulling my skin tight. It hurts, but not enough to make a fuss. Not enough to let him know. When he's done, he bites the thread to cut it, his face close enough now to my skin that I can feel his breath on it. “There,” he says.

“Thank you,” I say. And then we're both on that bed frame, still, and it's uncomfortable but better than standing. He's warm, and that's nice; as the coldness of the water that soaked us fades, we sit in the warmth of the darkness, unseen, unlit, and we start to dry. I feel his hand reaching for mine, and I take it.

We both shut our eyes, and I think how easy it would be to sleep, somehow, even here, even now.

It takes Jonah standing to break that moment. He helps me to my feet. I'm fine. It hurts, but I know that it'll heal. I look at the stitches, at how neat they are, and I smile at him as I fasten my suit. “We have to deal with her,” I say. I walk back toward the arboretum, picking up speed until I'm almost running.