Way Down Dark (7 page)

“You want a knife,” he asks, “or a sword?”

“Maybe something in between,” I say. I can't have another blade as small as the last. It feels like I need something a bit more substantial. But a sword? I remember stories Mother used to tell me when I was a kid about knights and dragons and how the knights fought the dragons with swords. “Long
daggers,” she described them as, but they were clumsy. People always seemed to be taking these long, drawn-out swings: nothing nimble to them.

He laughs. “What are you going to use it for?”

“The usual,” I reply. Here, that could be pretty much anything. “How much is a cheap one?”

“Depends on who's buying. So who are you?”

“Chan Aitch,” I say.

“Chan Aitch. Daughter of Riadne?” He smiles. It used to surprise me when people knew her name—knew my name—but not anymore.

“Yes,” I say.

“Your mother was a good woman: very good woman. Kind and fair.” He goes to a crate and lifts the cloth from the top, and he rifles through it, feeling the hilts of various blades until he finds the one he wants. He doesn't touch a single sharp edge as he's doing it; his hands are a mess of old rough-skinned scars where I guess he made that mistake too many times before. He finds whatever he's looking for and pulls it out: a black iron handle, grooved and indented for grip, made from one of the railings here. It's decorated around the hilt, some curlicue carving, and it's quite beautiful. The blade is the same color: thick black metal that looks as if it's barely been used. He holds it out, and I gauge the size of it in his hands: not quite a knife but not quite a sword. It's just in the middle. “Go on, try it,” he says. “I trust you, Riadne's daughter.”

I take it from his hands. It's heavy, far heavier than any weapon I've ever carried before. The metal is cold to the touch,
which is strange. For some reason, I always expect these things to be warm—usually, you touch a blade somebody else has given up and there's blood on it. Blood is hardly ever cold.

“It's a single piece,” he says, “which is good; it won't break at the hilt. There's more heft. Sturdy. You don't want your blade snapping off when you're . . . What did you say you were going to use it for?”

I hadn't. “I work in the arboretum,” I say.

“Okay.” His smile is so wide, I swear it's about to tear his face apart. “So, when you're cutting down fruit or whatever it is you do there . . . Don't want it snapping, like I say.”

“No.” I swing it in the air, and I can hear the noise it makes, cutting through the space in front of me.

“It's good, eh?”

“How much is it?” I ask, instantly wary. I catch myself looking at my shoes, thinking about what they cost—or what they could have.

“What have you got?” I upend my day's haul to the table in front of him, and he touches the vegetables, rolls them around, squeezes them, and he smiles. “So, Riadne's daughter,” he says, “this seems like it's more than enough.”

My new blade is different, and it's going to take some time to become accustomed to it. No more hiding it in my palm when I don't want it to be seen, and I'll need to keep it in my satchel or else make a holder for it, something like that. I put it underneath my pillow and lie down, and I can feel the shape of it against my head: the blade itself right there, like a constant reminder. I wonder if I'll get used to it, but that thought quickly fades.

Of course I will: you can get used to pretty much anything, given enough time.

It's the middle of the night, although that doesn't mean anything. We really have only two times on the ship: day and night. The rest of the time slips by hour by hour, and we only really notice it based on how tired we are. There are some clocks—some of the older people here still keep them, either running them off batteries made from apples or they have the wind-up kind (though I can't believe that they're accurate)—and none of them show the exact same time. They're all just guesses. Still, nighttime is nighttime; that's a constant. Night is when the lights dim. Night is when those parts of the ship with broken lightbulbs don't get the overspill from the brightness of the rest of the time, of the arboretum, of the floors that actually care. Night is when the stories happen: the kidnappings, the Nightman, and now, more than ever before, the Lows.

The Lows come out only at night. They sleep during the day—we watch their sections, I, II, and III, falling quiet and still while the rest of us work to keep
Australia
running. But the night is theirs. I stand on the edge of the stairwell and watch them carrying on the way they have the last few nights: gathering their torches, congregating, small packs of them traveling out into the rest of the ship to do whatever they're planning.

Expansion, that's what Agatha said. They aren't growing in number—God knows, the population on the ship is shrinking over time, with people less willing to have children than they were before, simply because of how hard it is to lose a
child. But still, they want space. They want every single inch of
Australia
.

I want to find the girl I saved. I don't know why exactly. I want to make sure that she's okay, and I realize that I want to help her, give her some lessons in self-defense, in case I can't be there next time. I take my new blade—the guy who sold it to me was right; it's certainly not just a knife—and I climb down to the forty-eighth floor, quiet as anything. She won't be in her berth, I know, but it's as good a place to start looking for her as any.

I'm outside the girl's berth when I see a Low coming toward me from their half of the ship. I look to the edge, to the stairwell between the sections, and there's a makeshift gangplank lowered across, and the stockpiled barricade has been tossed over the edge, leaving only fragments. Of course it didn't stop them.

There's a mace in one of the Low's hands, and my bruises ache, remembering the last time I met one of them. In the light of his torch, the glass shards on the mace head look even more brutal. I was lucky to get hit by only the side of the last one. Take that in the gut and you might as well throw yourself into the Pit. Some wounds there's no coming back from.

I step back into a berth. There's a family inside—some people I know who work in the arboretum. They're good people: a husband and wife and their daughter. She's so young, she's barely walking yet. I raise my finger to my mouth, telling them to be quiet.

“Sorry,” I whisper. They nod at me. We all stay quiet as the Low approaches and as he walks past this berth to the
now-vacant berth of the girl they tried to kill. There's no noise. She won't be there.

I listen. There's the sound of his footsteps on the metal; then they stop, and there's a creak. His weight as he lies down on the bunk. I pull open the curtains at the front of this berth and peer down: The torch is propped against the wall, the flame lighting the doorway. I can't see him. What's he waiting for? She's not there.

What were the words that Agatha used?
Incursion. Expansion.

He's taking the berth for his own.

I leave the family, smiling at them, poking their daughter's nose—that makes her gurgle this laugh at me, which her mother instantly silences—and I go back to the stairwell. I climb up only one floor. I need to see what he's doing in there.

I find the berth directly above the girl's. The curtains are open. There's nobody here, but it's not vacant. I can see the remains of a stew pot, the contents long since burned, and drawings tied to the walls with fragments of rope. The pictures have been done in chalk or ash straight onto fragments of fabric, and they're quite beautiful. They're of imagined places, worlds that are maybe like Earth was: hills and seas and cities, things that have been described to us, that we've never actually seen. You'd think it would be hard to tell without the color in them—the blue of the water, the green of the grass—but it's not. They're how I've imagined them myself.

The floor is like every other berth: thin sheets of dark metal over the grating, not fastened together but fitted with one another to form a solid floor. Some berths are missing the
flooring, because it's another resource, but the grating beneath wears hard on your feet. You get used to that, but for some it's about more. It's what makes a berth a home. As quietly as I can manage, I lift one of the panels, sliding it over its neighbor. Once that's done, I can see right through.

The Low is on the bed, lying back. His eyes are shut, but he's not sleeping. The mace is resting on his chest; the mess of spiked glass rests by his shoulder. Dangerous, that: he could cut himself.

He's waiting for something. I just don't know what.

This berth feels familiar yet totally alien. They all take on unique identities depending on who lives in them, which is amazing given how similar they actually are. I'm in a space exactly like my own but so different.

I watch all night, peering out from this berth at the Lows' side of the ship. They amass in the middle, right in the center of section II, about twenty floors up from the Pit, just as they did last night. There's a huge group of them, riling one another up. Someone's shouting—I strain to listen, because maybe there's a hint in those voices being carried across the Pit, behind the thrum of the engine and the noise of everybody else on the ship, something to tell me what they want and what they're doing—and they pump their fists in the air, and they howl and scream when whoever's speaking to them is done. I look at the other parts of the ship. There's movement everywhere. Everyone's awake. Everyone's listening.

This is bad. I can feel the tension—whatever is going to happen—hanging in the air, drifting through the space between the sections. It's not like you could ever argue that
Australia
is a good place to be, but it's our place. We're used to it.

Now something's wrong.

In the berth below me, the Low gets up and walks outside and picks up the torch. He stands on the edge of the gantry, and he waves his torch left to right. Across the ship, I can see the same thing happening, other Lows answering the call. Sections IV, V, and VI are free. They've been free as long as I've been alive. I run to the gantry myself, and I crane my neck to see. Above me, across from me, I count fifteen, maybe twenty torches, all being swung the same way by other Lows who have expanded the way this one did. I look back at the massing of Lows in their section, but they're not there anymore. They're moving.

We have a few other forms of life on the ship. We used to have pigs for food, but they were killed and eaten. We were too impatient to let them breed. There were fish in the river once, but they're gone as well, and whether you believe the story about the Pale Women poisoning them or not, that's a shame. But we have insects: ticks and lice, bugs and gnats and ants that get sucked into the systems and turned into the protein jelly we're meant to eat. It's easier if you don't think about what you're eating while you're doing it.

But insects are exactly what the Lows remind me of now. Insects scurry when there's food dropped, something that they can scavenge. The Lows run with the same desperation, spreading out, heading for the lights of the torches, scavenging. I watch them reach their gangplanks and walkways, ladders and bolted-together sheets of metal that they swing down
to attach the free sections to theirs. I watch as they pour across in small packs, heading to different parts of the ship.

I watch as the first group of Lows climbs to reach one of their number (someone like the Low below me) waiting in a berth that they've taken. They greet each other, almost clubbing their fists together. The people in the berth next to where they're standing are terrified: two men who back away, starting to leave. One manages it; the other gets tangled in the thick red curtain that they've draped over the front of their home, almost tripping. The Lows turn from their greeting to pounce. They cut him, and they drag him to the edge, and they hold him over the Pit, two of them gripping him by his ankles, shaking him. His body smacks against the iron railing, and he screams for a while until he suddenly stops, and he stops struggling. He's passed out or already dead, and they let him go.

Better to die like that: not being able to see the Pit coming.

The Lows move on, scaring the family on the other side, watching them scatter before them. The family members clutch at each other, the mother swinging her fists to keep the Lows back. They're seizing two berths for every one they've already taken, one on either side of the original.

It's happening all over the ship.

The noise of the engines is lost under the screams and yells of the scared free people on this—on
my
—side of
Australia
. Below me, the solitary Low in the girl's berth waits. This is my chance.

I grab the railing at the edge of the gantry and climb over and prepare myself. I'm going to grab the railing and swing down and drop onto the next floor. I have to do it silently. I
have to do it without slipping, without letting go. I have to do it without dying. And I have to do it one-handed. My new blade is in my satchel, but I might have to fight the Low the moment I land. I don't want to be fumbling with the weapon. So I take it out, and I clutch it in my left hand, and I breathe. I rock up and down on my toes. I've done this before.

When I was a kid, we used to have a game. There were some other children who lived near us, and my mother knew their parents, and so we were allowed to play together. We came up with this thing that we did when our parents weren't looking, like a dare. We would climb over the railings, and we would dangle ourselves out over the Pit to see who could hang there the longest. It wasn't about strength; it was about nerve. One time I slipped, because I knew that I was strong and brave and that made me lazy. For a second, as I fell, I was sure that I was going to die. You fall faster than you can ever imagine. Somehow I caught the railing on the floor below, though, and I dangled there until my friends came and pulled me up and over. I told them that I did it on purpose. I have no idea if they believed me, but I tried to convince them. Maybe even tried to convince myself.