Way Down Dark (5 page)

At the very beginning, none of the gangs had names. The Lows, for example, weren't called that. They were just people until they became something more structured. They lived at the bottom of the ship, so the name got bandied around by those who were afraid of them, and over time it just stuck. Apparently, the worst of the worst banded together, and they decided to try to run the ship the way they saw fit. Evil likes evil, Agatha used to say when I asked about them. I'm sure that I asked about them a lot. It's natural to want to know more about what you're afraid of. Originally they took a part of the ship, section II, and turned it into their own private hell. And over time that hell grew.

Some people—the Pale Women mostly but some others with their own faiths (whatever they might be)—think that this ship is a hell anyway. That in time it will be revealed
that we died in whatever happened to the Earth and that this is our punishment. I don't believe that. I think that we'll get somewhere eventually. We have to.

The Lows assimilated anybody who wanted to side with them. I couldn't understand why anybody would want to, but Agatha said that it was because they offered protection of a sort. She said that after a while, everybody they took in began to dress the same and act the same. After a while, they sort of lost who they were before. They lost who they were and became something else. Seeing them now, it seems like conformity came pretty naturally to those they took. They survived, for one thing. You put up a fight, there's a good chance you'd be dead already.

I'm good at waking up when there's something wrong. Noises, people in the berth, even just a change in the atmosphere—I'm good at sensing that, my brain kicking me out of my dreams. Now I wake up after only a couple of hours of sleep. They're coming. There's something in their breathing that's distinctive, individual to the Lows. They inhale in these abrupt little gasps, short bursts of sucking in air, and they cough their breath out. They always wheeze. It's because of where they live. There are six oxygen generators—one in each section—but where we've tried to maintain ours, they've abandoned theirs, leaving the air to choke its way out in darkened plumes. And they live so close to the Pit, which is nearly as bad. The fumes from it—the gases—must affect them. It's still breathable, just; doesn't matter what it does to them. And for the rest of the ship, the side effects are useful, because thanks to
their screwed-up breathing, you can always hear them coming. I hear them and it wakes me: that nasty cough, rattling to signify that they're close.

They're closer than they should be, as well. There are unspoken rules about their territory. They've taken half the ship now, and that's theirs. Nothing we can do about it. Others have tried over the years—about five years back, the Bells attempted to take another section for their own and failed, and that was only one of who knows how many attempts. And still the Lows grow. And yet this part of
Australia
is ours, not theirs. It belongs to those of us still trying to survive.

The trespassing Lows are somewhere directly below me. Cough, cough, that's all I can hear, and then, also, crying: a man, a child's voice. I strain to listen. I was wrong: two children's voices.

I sit on the edge of my bunk and pull my new shoes on, and I rub my head, the back of my neck. I'm aching, which isn't a good start. Sometimes—doesn't matter how much sleep you've had—you can wake up and feel amazing, like you can take the whole ship on. And other times you're stuck with a pain in your skull and a feeling that all you want to do is lie on your back and not move an inch. My hair is growing out, I realize as I run my hand over the stubble. I need to shave my head again before the lice get me.

The crying gets louder, and the coughing keeps collapsing into laughter, which then turns to coughing again. A cycle.

Somebody get involved, I think. Somebody else, please get involved.

I pull my knife out from underneath my pillow, and I lift up one of the boards that I've got covering the floor. Through the thick iron grating underneath, I can see right through. Two Lows—nothing special about them. Furs and skins and thick red tattoos on their faces, their hair shaved blunt and fast to their heads. Their targets are the man who lives below me and his sons. I don't know what the Lows are doing here, and I don't care. They shouldn't be here.

One of the Lows is holding the man's youngest child. I don't know where their mother is. She's never apart from them. I like her. We say hello, and sometimes I give her fruit that I can't eat before it goes rotten, and she turns it into whatever she can, things that she can preserve and eat over time. I love the smell that comes from their berth when she's cooking.

She's probably dead already, I know. That's how the Lows work. They pick you apart, and they separate you from everyone else, and eventually you go the same way as everybody else.

The man is sobbing. I've never seen him like this. He's one of the people in charge of the arboretum, and he's strong. He's a good fighter as well. One time I saw him kill a Bell who was trying to steal from somebody, and he did it pretty efficiently. He's not a man who's easy to scare. But to see him now, you'd never be able to tell that.

“Please,” he begs, “please let them go, please let them go. Take me instead.” He's on his knees, shuffling forward, his hands held out. There's no use in begging, I know. Hell, he
knows that. But he's overwhelmed. That's what comes from having people to care for. My mother made me promise to be selfish for exactly this reason. “You'll be okay,” he says to his son, the one being held by the Low, and he sounds like he believes it. I wonder if he actually does. The other boy is behind him, cowering. If they tried—if they let the Lows have the one child—they might be able to escape. I'm impressed that the father hasn't tried to run already. He could, he totally could. He could take his other son, find somewhere safe. That's what most people in his situation would do. They'd cut their losses and start again.

That's what I'd do.

I put the panel back on the floor. They can't be helped now, and this is not my fight. Mother's rules, and her voice in my head as if her ghost is actually here with me, whispering into my ear:
Stay out of trouble. Be selfish. Don't die.

I remember Agatha's story about finding my mother. I hear the child crying. I hear the Lows wheezing.

Be selfish.

I promised her I would be, but then . . . I need to sleep. And I can't sleep with that noise happening. I can't sleep unless I know how this ends.

Screw it. I have to do something.

I leave my berth and run to the closest stairwell, and I jump down to the forty-ninth floor. I could try to distract the Lows, give the man a chance to grab his boys and run. They might make it. Or I could pile in, fight them. Maybe that would give the father the confidence to join in, and maybe we
could beat them. I wait, hiding in the shadows, watching them. I'm breathing hard, so I try to control that. Don't want them to hear me; that would ruin any chance I have of taking them by surprise.

I don't know what the best choice is. I can't tell.

I don't get the chance to decide. It all happens in an instant. The Low who's holding the boy laughs and throws the child over the side of the balcony. The kid screams as he goes, and the father rushes forward, charging the Low. There's a sickly crunch, a blade going through flesh—through bone—and then the father stops crying. I see him fall forward, his face smacking the gantry floor, his eyes already empty. That just leaves the other boy, and he screams in one terrifyingly loud burst before falling suddenly silent. I can't see what happens to him, and I don't go any closer. They're done.

I was too slow.

I shut my eyes for a second and try to calm down, holding my breath until my heart stops hammering, and when I open my eyes I'm calm. I climb back up to the fiftieth floor and I'm in my berth, on my bunk, listening. Usually you can hear your neighbors moving, talking, having sex. But now no one is making a sound, and the ship's engines, the sounds that are all there always, they fade into the background, fade away completely.

The silence that's left is so deep, it's overwhelming.

It's morning. Agatha listens to me talk about what happened and doesn't say a word. She isn't one for interrupting. When I'm finished telling her about the family I didn't manage to
save, she sits down on the grass. In her hands there's a basket of berries. We've been picking them together. I don't like picking berries—it's time-consuming, and there's no peace, swarms of people around the bushes—but I wanted to speak with her. From the minute I woke up this morning—and I'm amazed that I managed to get back to sleep after what happened—I didn't want to be alone. She scoops a handful of the berries out and examines them for damage, finding an overripe one and popping it into her mouth. She hands another to me.

“They were gone when you went to sleep?”

“The Lows?” Stupid question, I think, as the words leave my mouth. That's another thing she hates. Of course that's what she meant. “They were gone, yes. No sign of them.”

“Had they taken anything?”

“Didn't look like it. I don't know what they had before, but their stuff all seemed to be there.” Everything was as neat as I'd ever seen it. The mother's name was Courtney. I remember standing in that berth and taking the containers of stewed fruit from her when she was done and thanking her. I can't remember her children's names. She must have told me them. Must have. And now, as quickly as they're gone, I've forgotten them.

“They attacked others last night,” she says. “A few different people.” She lies back and stretches out her knees. They click as she unbends them, something in her bones and muscles grinding away inside her. I wonder if they hurt or if she's used to it now. “Maybe they're looking to expand. This happens.” She waves her words away as if they don't matter. “It's
a cycle: This has happened before, and it will happen again. We're powerless, so there's no sense in fighting it. You should move.”

“I tried to help,” I say. “I went down there, and I was . . .” I don't know how to finish that.
I dawdled. I stood back. I let it happen.

“You shouldn't have done anything,” she tells me. She doesn't look at me when she says it, though. “These things will happen, and the best you can do is to stay away from them.” She sits up. “We should get back to work. Life doesn't stop just because we do.” And then she's up on her feet and she's back at the bushes, plucking the berries out and dropping them into her basket. She doesn't wait for me to join her.

The day goes slowly, as it always does, and I can't stop thinking about the missing Courtney and her dead husband and sons and how there might have been something that I could have done. I wonder what Agatha would have done in that situation.

I wonder what my mother would have done.

At night I try to sleep, but the ship is shouting. It seems louder than usual, the noise of the Lows echoing through the gulf in the middle of the ship. All around me people are worried. I don't know how this happens: something in the air, I suspect, that sets everybody on edge. I'm scared, and I don't mind admitting that. There was a time when I thought that it was enough to have my mother and Agatha here with me, that they would protect me and I didn't need to worry about shutting my eyes. Now I sleep so lightly that anything—the slightest rustle, the faintest patter of feet on metal floor—can
wake me up. Tonight there's no way that sleep's coming in the first place. It's chasing ahead of me and I can see it, but it's out of reach. I squeeze my eyes shut, but that makes them water. It makes everything worse.

So I picture the things that have made me feel safest. My mother's face: her eyes, which were so dark that they were nearly black; her hair, the same as mine, tight dark knots constantly fighting to grow out of coarse stubble; and the touch of her soft skin on my face when she held me and told me that this would all be all right. That was her mantra, a song that she used to sing, like a hymn, passed down.
Everything's gonna be all right. Every little thing's gonna be all right.

I sing it to myself under my breath, so quiet that only I can hear it. It's a lie, I know. As the noise from the Lows' half of the ship gets louder and louder, it's suddenly harder to believe that song than it's ever been.

“Chan?” Somebody says my name, and that makes me sit bolt upright, my hand darting to my pillow, to my knife. “Chan, are you awake?”

“Yes,” I say, and the cloth drape serving as a door to my berth is pulled back with a musical tinkle from the metal scraps I've hung. It's Bess, the woman who lives in the berth next to mine. She's holding her son in front of her, and his eyes are a bitter red mess of tears, snot covering his chin.

“We're scared,” she says. “Can we come and sit with you?” I shuffle to one side of the bunk and pat the space I've left behind.

“Of course,” I say. Peter shuffles forward, and I help him onto the mattress. He's only three, maybe. If he's older, he
doesn't seem it. “Don't cry,” I tell him, as if that will help. I've never been much good with kids.

“He's fine,” Bess says. “He just can't sleep. He always gets like this.” She strokes his head, smoothing his stubbled hair down, his cheeks damp with tears. She holds him to her chest and looks out through the gap she's left in the curtains. “They're bad tonight.”

“Yes,” I say.

“But we can't do anything.”

“No,” I agree. Then we sit there in silence. We all shut our eyes, all three of us. This reminds me of the past. That's comforting in itself.

Screaming. Not from Bess or Peter but coming from farther away. Still, it's close enough, and it's so full of fear that it sinks into the air around us and won't fade. I've still got my knife in my hand, and I slip my feet into my shoes and wrap a cloak around me. I think about the children the Lows killed last night and how scared they were and how I didn't do anything. I can't do that again. I won't do it again.