Way Down Dark (18 page)

I think I've got the right floor, but I can't see where the scream was coming from. I walk down the gantry, looking into the berths. Huddled free people, not seeing me or not wanting to. One woman makes eye contact and then turns away, and I know the look in her eyes: fear. She's scared of me. They don't know what I'm trying to do for them. Then, a few berths down, frantic moving shapes. I can't make them out at first, just a mess of the flame-red and yellow and orange
that the goggles show me. They've got a torch lit, so I take the mask off just as I reach the berth.

The Lows have gone, and the little girl is dead. I try to save her—I've seen it done before, people beating their fists on chests, breathing air into lungs—but she stays dead. She can't come back, and I shouldn't even try. The berth is a mess. They've used her blood to leave me a message. A reply.
DIE
, the message says, over and over.
DIE
. A wish, an invocation. Almost a prayer.

I can't leave her body, I know. They'll . . . I don't know. I can't leave it. She's not going into the Pit, though. I can't do that to her. She deserves better than that. I pick her up, and I hold her to me as I climb down the stairwells and as I cross the gantry to the arboretum. I put her down next to the river, which is running black with ash and soot, and I kneel there, where the soil is wet. I dig at it with my hands and with my blade, carving a trough in the ground big enough to put her in, and when it's done, I lay her down. I put the soil over her, back where it came from. This little shape in the ground, barely visible. Through the goggles, I watch the last of her heat die out. Whatever was left in her body is truly gone.

When I get back down below the Pit, I don't let anybody know that I'm there. I go to my berth, and I don't even take my clothes off; I just stand underneath the hot water gushing from the shower faucet, and I try to keep myself together. Because if I don't, I don't see how I can do this anymore. If I don't, I think I might just fall apart.

I hear Agatha in the corridor, telling Mae that it's better to leave me alone tonight, that I need sleep. I need the rest; that's her excuse. My lights are off, and I'm trying to sleep. Trying but failing.

“It's fine,” I shout, and that's enough for Mae, who bundles into my room, all grins and energy.

“I missed you,” she says. She clambers onto the bed and lies next to me. She sucks her thumb. I look at her, and all I can see now is the little dead girl. That can't happen to Mae. It just can't. Agatha follows her, trying to usher her out. It's impossible.

“I saw what happened,” Agatha says. “You couldn't have done anything.”

“I know,” I reply. It's not about that.

“You've done good.”

“Maybe.” I'm glad that she can't see my face in the darkness.

“And now we have to stop,” she tells me. I don't reply. I don't know if she's right. I don't know how I can save everybody else. It's impossible. She leaves the berth, pulling the door closed. I clutch Mae, pulling her tight to me. She smells of soap. The scent of
Australia
—whatever was there before, ingrained in her skin—is gone.

“You're shaking,” she says.

“I'm sorry,” I say, and I try to stop, but I can't.

Mae shakes me awake, grabbing my shoulders and yanking them up and down.

“Wake up, wake up!” she says. “There's somebody at the door.” There's knocking. I didn't hear it. I don't know what time I fell asleep, but I feel awful. Groggy. Aching. I don't want to get up.

“Come in,” I say, and it opens. It's Jonah. He stands awkwardly in the doorway, as if he doesn't quite fit into it; he tilts his head, and his hair—which is clean, I notice, different from when we were living above, changed by the showers and the soap and maybe just the air down here—is soft, slightly fluffy, already showing signs of growing out. He notices me looking at it and he runs a hand through it, suddenly self-conscious, and I look away.

“Agatha wants you. She says that it's important,” he says.

“He's strange,” Mae says after he's gone.

“He is,” I tell her. “But I like him.”

I get changed. I've found my old pants, my top, clean and fresh. I'm not going up above today. Maybe not ever again. There's food cooking, but the smell makes my stomach churn. I can't face eating yet. I yawn. Some of the people we've saved are sitting at the table, eating food that I don't recognize. We're still trying everything, seeing if we can work out what's good and what's not. This meal smells like meat. I wonder if what they're eating was normal breakfast food back on Earth or if maybe we're breaking all the rules.

“Where are they?” I ask, and one of the people points to the control room. They don't go in there. We didn't make that a rule or anything. They just don't. Maybe it makes them feel guilty to see everyone else still up above. Live down here,
pretend that the rest of the ship doesn't exist anymore. That's easiest.

I wonder if I can do that.

I open the door to the control room. Agatha is sitting in the chair, touching screens, moving them between views. She stops and looks at me.

“You've got a message,” she says, and she points to the screen right in the middle. I can see a Low there, and I get closer to see better. It's Bess. She's sitting cross-legged in a berth. I'd know that berth without any indicators: It's mine, my mother's. And behind her, scrawled on the wall, one word, begging me to come, to find her.

Chan
, it says. I think that's the first time since my mother was alive that I've actually seen my name written down.

“Has she done anything else?”

“She's just sitting there,” Agatha says. “Nothing else. And she's alone.”

“Okay.” I stretch, reaching down to touch my toes, bending back to crack my shoulder bones. “I'd probably better go and see her, then.”

I go to the section over from mine to get a vantage point. Through my goggles, I can see the distant scramble of the rest of the ship's inhabitants, all fighting, moving, scurrying. I don't care about them, not right now. I care about Bess. The entire floor is deserted now; everybody else has moved on—one way or another. She's on the fragments of the bed, and she's waiting for me. It doesn't feel like a trap, I tell myself. But then, I suppose traps never really do, not until they're sprung.

I slip into the berth right on top of hers, and I check around us again. There's nobody around, not that I can see. The Lows don't know about the goggles, so they can't protect against them. This isn't a trap.

“Bess,” I say, standing at the edge of the gantry, and she looks up.

“You came,” she says.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes,” she says. “Yes. I . . .” She fumbles the words, twists her hands against each other. She coughs, her voice with that slight wheeze behind it. “You said that there was somewhere safe.”

“There is.”

“I want to be safe,” she says, and then, “Please.” She steps forward until our heads are pretty much even, and she looks right up into my eyes—past the goggles, past everything. “I'm so scared,” she tells me. “I've got nothing left.”

That's true. She's a good person, confused and lost, that's all. She went to the Lows because they were there, because they might have had her son. But she hasn't found him and never will. We both know it.

“Come with me,” I say.

She stands at the edge of the Pit, and she recoils as I wade into it. She may be a Low, but she hasn't fallen so far as to be comfortable with this, not yet. We both know what's in here, and what's unspoken is that Peter may be here as well. Maybe she'll see him as we trudge through it.

I pull off my mask and hand it to her.

“Wear this,” I say. “It'll help. And you can breathe with it.” I can hold my breath, I know. I take her hand and I move forward, toward the center, and she follows. I have to pull to keep her moving. She doesn't make a sound, and I don't want to look at her. If I stop, if I let her think about what we're doing, she might panic.

When we have to go under the mulch, I just do it, and I don't let go of her hand. She doesn't struggle, and I pull her after me and yank the lever, and then we're in the hatch, and then we're out of there, down below.

“You can take the mask off,” I say, spitting the blood away from my mouth and then going into the closest berth and grabbing one of the towels that I've put there for this very reason. I wipe my face. “You're okay now.” I watch her pull the goggles from her head and try to take this all in. This first room is basically nothing, not in the grand scale of what we've got here, but still, it's clean and light and open and safe, and she's never seen that before.

“What is this place?” she asks. I pass her the towel.

“Better if I just show you,” I say. I lead her down the corridor, past the bedrooms, their doors open. The kids in them stop and look at her, balking when they see her. She's what they've been told to be afraid of. Another Low, and how do they know what makes her different from Rex? “Wave at them,” I say. “Let them know that you're not a threat.” She does, a halfhearted shimmer of her hand. I can tell that it's painful for her to look at these young faces. In another time, she would have been here with Peter. Maybe they could have
lived here, and he would never have been taken. That must hurt her, imagining that. I see Mae and call her forward, and I kneel down and whisper to her. “This is Bess,” I say, “and you should be nice to her. She's scared.” Mae nods, knowing. We've all been there. Scared is something that we all share.

“Do you want to play?” Mae asks, holding out the broken doll that she just won't let go of.

“Maybe after I've cleaned myself up,” Bess says. Her voice trembles. We move on into the kitchens. Agatha and Jonah are there, along with the other adults, and they stare. One stares in open-mouthed horror.

“It's fine,” I tell them. “This is Bess, and she's a friend.” Agatha knows her. She comes over and looks Bess in the eye, not smiling, ruthlessly sizing her up, and Bess starts to cry. I hold her, putting myself between her and Agatha. “It's fine,” I say. That doesn't stop the tears.

I help her with what happens next: showing her how the showers work, giving her new clothes from the quickly diminishing pile of blue uniforms. We all look the same down here now apart from Agatha. She refuses to change, washing her old clothes instead, waiting naked in her berth until they're as close to dry as she can stand, and then putting them on again. Bess isn't as fussy. I take the remnants of her clothes and throw them into the trash, and I hand her a towel. She's not shy about her nudity, and I see her body as she gets dressed: the bruises and marks that cover almost every bit of her skin. They all look fresh. That's how quickly the Lows infect you.

“What's happening with the Lows now?” I ask when she's sitting in a chair and I'm behind her, shaving her hair where it's started to grow out. We don't have lice here, not yet, and it would be nice to never get them. Maybe I'd like to grow my hair long one day. I've never tried it. I wonder what I would look like.

“They're the same as they ever were,” she tells me. She stares straight ahead, watching her own face as I cut away the hair. Now that she's clean, she can see what she looks like. This is part of the ritual we've created for new people: clean them, shave them in front of a mirror, let them see themselves clearly for the first time. “Maybe worse. They're uncontrolled.”

“They lost their leader.”

“Yes,” she says. “They think she's still out there. She was strong.” She looks at me, straight into my eyes. I stop cutting her hair. “You killed her, though.”

“I didn't,” I say. “I brought her down here.” I watch her face shift.

“She's here?”

“Not like you are. She's a . . .” Prisoner. She's a prisoner. We're all prisoners. I can't stand to tell the others because of what it might do. For now, they're all still free. Our history—the lies that we've been fed for generations—is still a truth. Earth was destroyed. We escaped.

Good for us.

“She's dangerous,” Bess says.

“Not here she's not. She's in a room. It's locked.”

“I want to see,” she says, and she stands up. “Please.”

In the kitchen, before the cold storage where Rex is, Bess touches the door. “She can't get out?”

“Not a chance,” I tell her. Bess already looks so different. The change in her being clean . . . She looks just like the rest of us. Orphaned, kicked out of our homes, wearing what we can, finding somewhere new.

“Good,” she says. She stands in front of it, pushes it, testing to see that it's shut. She's scared of Rex even here, even through thick metal and a lock that can't be broken. “Can I see the children now?”

“Of course,” I say, and she goes down the corridor to the room where Mae and the others are playing. I hear her introduce herself, giving them a chance to take in the new version of her. When I turn back, Agatha's staring at me. “She'll be fine,” I say. “I'm sure of it.”

Bess handles the children at dinnertime. She asks Agatha if she can cook for them. Agatha doesn't mind and stands aside, handing Bess the utensils. She's probably grateful for the night off. Bess looks at the books, picks one out and finds a picture of a delicious-looking stew, then pauses, touching the image with her fingertips.

“I can't read,” she says quietly, but that's okay. She shuts the book and cooks by instinct, taking food out of the cupboards, raiding the freezer next to the one where we're keeping Rex, and she chops and tastes and puts things into a boiling pot. She uses everything she can, and it smells amazing and then overpowering, but she's excited. When it's done, she
dishes it up into bowls, and I taste mine. It's almost too much, too many flavors going on at one time. I grin at her.