Way Down Dark (2 page)

“Riadne's daughter!” the Lows shouted, all three of them in some twisted harmony. “Riadne's daughter!” They didn't know my name. They knew me only in the context of her. As they came closer, stalking along the gangway toward my home—as my mother's body burned its last—I told them my name.

“Riadne is dead,” I said as loudly as I could manage. “My name is Chan.” Saying my mother's name hurt. It was the first time I'd said it since she had died, and already it felt like she wasn't real anymore, like she was just a dream that I remembered vaguely hours after waking. The Lows stepped onto our section, and I looked along the gantry—for Agatha, for anybody willing to help me ward them off—but there was nobody. I was alone.

“Your part of the ship is ours now, yes?” the leader said, coughing the last word, wheezing to draw breath back in. On his skin was a tattoo: his title, his name, scored across his chest. The letters were somehow almost delicate, at odds with
the damaged, scarred rest of him. “And you? You are ours as well?”

“No,” I said, “none of this is yours.” I held up my hands, which were covered to the elbows in my mother's drying, browning blood. I heard my mother's voice come through me: the voice that she used when she spoke to people who she wanted to fear her, a put-on falsehood of rage. She had power; everybody knew that. She was feared, and she was respected. She had earned that. I had to persuade them that I was just like her, that I had taken her power. And her ghost, I reminded myself. That wasn't real, but they were superstitious. I could persuade them.

“If you come closer, I will kill you,” I said. I believed that I would, as well, or I would try. But my words weren't about starting a fight. Really, I was just trying to make sure that I wouldn't have to.

“You've never killed a man.” Rex licked his lips, his tongue stumped at the end, fixed by a crude patchwork of stitches. The scars on his body were so numerous that I couldn't have counted them if I had wanted to. Pieces of him were missing: fingers, lumps of flesh, an ear. That was how he had become their king: by clawing, scratching, fighting his way to the top and surviving all challenges. Power follows death. He was powerful, and he bore the traces of death about him.

“I killed Riadne,” I said. “I burned her so that she'll protect me. I have her power, and still she watches over me.” I said it with false confidence; I didn't believe the lie, but he had to. I had to sell it.

And then he laughed at me, this roar that came from nowhere, but I could see behind it. He was nervous. He believed in the facts: I had killed her, and I had burned her. That much couldn't be disputed thanks to the blood on my hands and the embered corpse on the floor. The two female Lows with him stared at me: One of them was afraid—or getting there—but the other? There was nothing in her eyes at all. No fear, not of me, not of anything. She didn't believe in the story I was telling. Their leader, though, he wondered. His head tilted in curiosity. He stepped toward me, moving his head from left to right, as if it were loose upon his shoulders, and he slid in close. He didn't see my hands, because he was fixated on my face, on my mouth. He didn't see that I had lifted the blade from my mother's body, that I was holding it in my hand, my fingers tightly closed around the hilt, which was slick with still-warm blood from my mother's body and the fire that had consumed her.

“That is where she died,” he said when he was close enough that I could smell him—the dirt on his skin, the sickly metallic stink of old blood—and he looked over my shoulder at my berth. “Nothing less than she deserved,” he said. “But now she's gone. Ghosts are stories for little children. You don't really believe in them.”

That was when Agatha dropped the smoke pellet from above. It plumed as it fell, and I will admit that in that second it felt supernatural, as if it were magic almost—my mother's ghost, there to protect me. The leader panicked, rushing to me, as if that would end this faster. He was quick, but I was
quicker. My mother and Agatha had trained me my whole life to protect myself, and I wasn't about to stop now.

I jabbed upward with my mother's knife. I jammed it into his neck, and he howled in agony, coughing, blood gurgling into his mouth, tumbling around, throwing the smoke in all directions. It happened so fast that the others didn't have time to react. I didn't even know that I was going to stab him there before the knife was in his throat, my hand covered in his blood. He staggered backward, out of the smoke, away from my berth, clutching at his neck as the blood gulped out. “Bitch,” he gasped, his eyes wide, his voice shaking. I don't know if the choking smoke or the wound I had inflicted affected him more, but suddenly he was scared of me.

Actually afraid.

He stumbled away, falling to the gantry floor and then pulling himself up, clinging to one of the other Lows. He motioned to the side, telling them to go back the way that they had come. One of the Women—the one who hadn't met my eyes—stroked him, soothing him, trying to tend to him until he swatted her away as they retreated. The other, though, she didn't stay at his side. She didn't support him as he walked. She stared at me as she had from the beginning. She was looking me over through the now-clearing smoke, searching for weaknesses. Her body was a mesh of scars as well, but they were different from Rex's: They weren't all from fighting or torture. There were delicate cuts all down her shoulders and across her chest and neck, her legs. Across her belly, a puckered scar curved from one side to the other like a grimace.

“You're strong, little liar,” she said. Her voice was thick and dark, a graveled rasp that emerged from deep within her throat. “Not at all what I expected.”

Then she turned and ran—a sprint, a furious dash past the other berths and onto the gangway between sections to catch up with the other Lows—and when she reached them, she leaped, launching herself into the air, landing on the leader's back and throwing her arm around his neck. My mother's blade: It was still there, dug in, jutting half out of his flesh. I had missed it. I didn't notice.

My mother's blade, gone. But she—the Low—didn't care what it might have meant to me. She grabbed it by the hilt and pushed it farther in. She pushed it in and then pulled it out, driving it into Rex over and over. Her hand moved so much faster than mine had. After a few blows he dropped to his knees, his hands beating at her as she clung on. She didn't stop. The other female howled, but she didn't pause. When the leader was on his knees, she dismounted from his back and slashed at the other female, cutting her, making her step back until she lost her footing and fell backward off the gangway, making no sound as she plummeted into the darkness.

The leader died there on the gangway. As he went—again, I do not know how long it took, only that it was quick—his killer took up my mother's blade and began to carve something into her chest. I watched her face as she worked the sacrificial knife. Her hand shook, from the pain, I'm sure, but she carried on, determined to get the job done. When she was finished, she turned, showing herself off to the rest of the ship,
and she beat at her chest with her arm, making the wound bleed more, forcing the welts to open wider.

She revealed herself to us, and we all saw it: the letters
REX
, etched into her skin, hard and deep. She had killed the last leader and now was carving his name—his title—onto herself. His power was now hers. I watched her return to the Lows' half of the ship, howling and calling out her own arrival, and I watched as the other Lows crept toward her in worship, bowing their heads as she passed them.

The night that I took my mother's power, the Lows gained a new leader.

When the commotion died down, something resembling a more conventional night set in. The lights dimmed, heralding the sounds of people all over the ship: the calls of the vendors and traders fifteen floors down; the prayers of the Pale Women from the top floor of the ship, carrying through the motionless air; the grunts and moans of the Bells as they fought each other for pride or food or whatever it was that they were fighting over; the Lows, laughing and drinking and preparing for more carnage in the morning; and the whirring thrum of the engines that reverberated through us all. I closed the curtains and sat by my mother's ashes, and I finally cried, so quietly that the noise was lost amid the chaos of nighttime aboard the
Australia
.

Today the arboretum is in full harvest. This is when I love working here the most. It's so hot that you can stand to be inside for only a short while at a time, and most people, sweating and on the verge of fainting, give up. They aren't used to these temperatures. But my mother was sensible, and when I was a child she moved us to a berth closer to the engines. The noise is the same as anywhere else on the ship—you can't escape the turbines, which sound like the loudest rumble you've ever heard, constantly behind everything else—but you don't need to make fires when it gets really cold, because the engine is always there. So I've learned to live with the heat. That means I can work in the arboretum even when it gets too hot for everybody else. It's then that I have it to myself.

In the hundreds of years that we've been on
Australia,
nearly all the things that were once beautiful on the ship have
gone. Still, the arboretum has survived. It's central, which is something. Nobody owns it, and nobody has fought wars over it. Everybody on the ship needs it, because without it, we're pretty much screwed. All of us—Lows, Pale Women, Bells, free people—have the same basic needs. We understand that the arboretum gives us our oxygen, which allows us to breathe; that the water purifiers work through it, giving us clean water to drink; and that it gives us crops—the only fresh foods in the whole of
Australia
. That's before we even get to the bugs that the protein machines turn into food for us: they thrive there. It's an ecosystem, is the word. Everything works in conjunction with everything else.

I love fruit; my mother loved fruit, and, from the way she told it, her mother did as well. I work the pear trees today because I'm small and I can climb. I think I get the same things out of it that they did, as well. It's not just the food aspect; it's having time to yourself, time to think. You climb a tree—if you're lucky and get to work on one of the taller ones—and you're suddenly somewhere else.

Nowhere else on
Australia
feels like this. Here, there is grass on the floor, vines on the walls, and trees and plants and crops growing in small patches. In the early days of our being up here, the story goes that they grew the vines around the mesh on the walls on purpose so that you could stand here in the center of the arboretum and be surrounded by nothing but green. Back on Earth, there were places like this everywhere—vast areas of land populated by trees, rivers, vegetation, flora and fauna. So our arboretum is like that, only not as large and it's man-made.

Through it all runs the river. We use the river for everything. It feeds the trees and the crops, sure, and we drink from it, but we also use it to wash our clothes. And at the end of it, before it goes into the system again, you can even go in and bathe if you want. You wouldn't want anybody to end up drinking from that end, so nobody bathes at the mouth, the clunking bit of metal that the river pours out from, but at the end, where it drains off and goes back into the water to be recycled, that part is always busy, people wading into it to wash their bodies and their clothes. We used to have running water in the berths, that's what we're told, but that stopped a long time ago. Some of us still care about cleanliness. If others don't care about stink, that's their business. Maybe if you live on the lower floors there's no point. Maybe the smell of everything—of the Pit—is absorbed into your skin anyway, to taint you forever. But I love how it feels so good to be clean. I can't get enough of it.

Pears taste wonderful. This is the best part of working here: the unspoken rule that you can keep the fallen, damaged fruit for yourself. Today I eat one, and it's perfect. It tastes almost powdery in my mouth and so sweet. Better than what usually passes for food here. Some of the old protein machines still work, turning bugs into these lumps of gray jellied biscuit. We eat those for health reasons. Some people make stews, and maybe the taste isn't so bad then. It's at least tolerable.

When I'm done and I've weighed the rest of the day's harvest—nearly fifty pears, handpicked (which is as good a day's work as I've had here in a while), and a further seven
damaged pieces of the fruit for me to keep for myself—I see Agatha at the berry bushes, and I go over to her. We don't talk much these days. Since my mother died—it's been nearly a full year now, or as close to a year as I can guess it's been—she's kept her distance. I remind her too much, I think. I've tried to understand that, but it hurts.

“You look tired,” she says, but that's not an invitation for me to tell her my woes. She doesn't want some long story, because she's been alive so long that she's heard it all before. She wants me to nod because I agree with her. Yes, she wants to hear “This is tiring.” Being here. Being alive.

She's more tired than I am, anyway. I have no idea how old she is. I haven't asked, and she wouldn't tell anyway. She's older than my mother by some way, that's for sure. When my mother was a child, Agatha rescued her once. She went missing one playtime, and Agatha had to go and get her back. That's how they met. Agatha told me the story when my mother was sick. Told me a lot of stories. Not everything—she's guarded, and she acts like her secrets are somehow more secret or important than anybody else's—but we all have secrets. And I get it. It's easier to not tell others your secrets. Easier to take them to your grave, where nobody can use them against you.

Agatha has hair that flows halfway down her back, long ago turned white. She has never shaved it, not since I have known her—not like most of the rest of us. Somehow she manages to keep the lice away. Everybody on
Australia
is a little afraid of her, I think; maybe the lice are scared as well. Her hair covers most of one side of her face, draped down over her
left eye. She has a scar there, dug in through her brow and down, straight across the puffed-up eyelid. The hair hides it. That's not like anybody else here either. For the gangs, scars are like a sign that you've survived. People show them off. But not Agatha. Agatha's bottom lip is entirely scar as well, it seems, and it moves like rope when she speaks, slack and then taut. She doesn't make any attempt to hide that one. Harder to, I suppose.

I hand her one of my damaged pears, and she nods thanks. She pulls a knife from her pack, slices a piece off, and eats it, and her crumbled rope lip folds itself down as she chews. It looks odd, like her face is starting to crumple in on itself with every bite.

You get used to that.

Before my mother died, when she was lying in her bed in her last few days, Agatha would talk about what she remembered from when she was growing up. She told me about how her childhood was trial by fire; that she lived wild, or as wild as you can here; and how she doesn't remember her parents. She lived with people who were abandoned by a lot of the rest of the ship, the elderly and infirm and rejected. I think that she lived with the Pale Women for a while, even. She's still got a lot of time for them.

There comes a point here when you join a cult or you don't, and she nearly did. She never tells me why she didn't, but they were good to her; I know that much. She finds it easier to talk about my mother than about herself. But today she doesn't want to talk at all, which is fine. She wants to stand here under the tree and eat her pear, and when she's done, she nods a
second time—thanks again—she returns to her own picking, and I go home.

Everything on
Australia
revolves around stories. They're all we have to entertain us and all we've got to keep the little bits of who we were before we left Earth alive. We're told them from the moment we're born, and we keep them alive until the day we die. We create them, and we destroy them. The stories keep us safe, and they keep us scared. Sometimes, it seems like you need one to feed the other.

When I was young, my mother told me endless stories. She told me about her parents, her grandparents, the whole legacy of our entire family, going back as far as she had been told. She said all the time that she didn't know how much of it was true, but that didn't seem to matter to her. I loved those stories: lying underneath the single bunk in our berth, eyes forced shut, knowing that my mother's voice would carry me through until I was asleep. She told me about what happened when we left Earth and how we came to be here, drifting for what seems like forever. She just didn't want to forget the good stuff in the past, the stuff that was probably worth fighting for. Same with the lessons she gave me. She thought that it was important that I took parts of the old times with me: reading, writing, counting. And physical stuff, as well. She taught me how to run: how to control my breathing, focus my eyes to see where I was going, how to not trip over my own feet. With Agatha, she taught me to fight, to defend myself—with my hands and feet and with knives, if it came to that. There are a lot of knives on
Australia
.

My mother wanted me to be able to defend myself. She knew that one day I would have to. She told me stories about when she had been forced to fight, knowing that I might find myself in the same situations, and then she told me how she escaped. That was the lesson. Then, when my mother was dying, Agatha took over the storytelling. She was forced to. But that was fine by me. She had new stories. And it's always good to get another perspective on the things that you think you already know.

When I get home, satchel full of pears, I lie on my bed and listen to the ship. It's endless, the noise: not just from the engines but from everybody else who lives here. There aren't as many of us as there once were. I know this because not every berth is full anymore. Maybe it's harder to survive here than it once was.

I'm tired. It's hard to block the sounds of the ship out. Harder to block out what's inside your head: the thinking about what might have been. Agatha used to say, when I asked her about the time before we left Earth, that it was pointless worrying about what came before. You can't miss what you never knew, she would say. But I can, I think. I can miss silence even if I've never really known what it's like.

I kick off my shoes and feel one of them pull apart as I nudge it off with my other foot. Looking down, I watch as it falls in fragments to the floor. Just what I need! I pick up the pieces and hold them together to see if I can stitch them into a whole again, but the rubber is worn away and the cloth is frayed almost beyond belief. I should be grateful they held up
until now, really. They could have gone when I was climbing a tree, and I don't fancy knowing what sorts of cuts my feet would have ended up with then. The shoes have been patched too many times already. They've outlived themselves. Time to get new ones.

There's only one place to get shoes on the
Australia
: down on the thirty-first floor. That's deep in Shopkeeper territory. The Shopkeepers have a few floors of the ship, and they're somewhat neutral between all the gangs. You give them money if there's something that you want, and there's always something that you want. They make food, and they make medicines, and they make clothes, and on the floor below, there's a few who make weapons. Bartleby is a shoemaker who my mother used to do business with. He's fair, she used to say. Fair and as honest as any of them, so he's who I'll see. I take my satchel up, bundle the pears back into it—no idea if six pears equals the shoes I need, but this is what I've got—and leave my berth, barefoot.

“Good-bye,” I say out loud to my mother's ghost. She doesn't answer back, because she isn't real. But it doesn't hurt that I act like she is.

Every floor on the
Australia
is the same. It's hard to get your bearings at first. It can take years to get the floor plan in your head. Each section has the same number of floors, and almost every floor has the same number of berths. The same thick black iron gantries in front of the berths, the same thick black iron railings on the edge of each gantry, the same thick black iron floor with grates and plates of stiff metal. The
ship is a hexagon, and we all look out at each other across the Pit. The only thing breaking that space is the arboretum.

In another life, maybe the design was intended as something social: all of us facing one another, able to see what everybody else is doing at all times. In reality, it's hard to know where you are. There are few landmarks that we haven't made ourselves. Once there were signs, but they're long gone. I live in section IV, level 50. The floors directly above mine have a chunk taken out of them for the engines. There's no way to see into my berth from above. But the floors below? That's a different matter. To get to them, you use the stairwells.

I watch my step as I go down the stairwells, as I climb over the jagged remains of the steps that were once here and the doors that once sat at the top and bottom of each set. It's dangerous, because people still come and work on the metal for scraps that they can use, leaving each new edge sharp. The stairs are gone, so moving between floors generally means dropping—and that means a climb up when you want to return—but it's faster than walking around to one of the few ladders that people have bothered to build to replace the stairs. I never use the ladders. I like the straight shot down. I sit on the edge and let go, and I brace my knees. Something about it feels more efficient than climbing. If you can take the fall, it's almost always better.

As you get farther down the ship, the floors start to smell of sulfur: a thick stench that's nearly pleasant if you spend enough time with it. You get used to it; that's what the people who live here say. You stop noticing it. This is where the purification systems are for the water and the oxygen (even
though that one barely seems to work anymore), but they don't make it any easier to breathe. You have to hold your breath for stretches, because otherwise, in spots, the stench will make you gag.

You have to cross the fortieth floor to get to the next pathway down, because the stairwell here is blocked up. This is a walk I know well. I pass families who have no choice but to live on this floor, and I greet them all. My mother always said that it never hurts to let others see that you're friendly. Can't hurt, and it doesn't.