Way Down Dark (9 page)

“Peter,” she says, “my son. They've got him.” That kicks me awake. My pain will go. My injuries aren't so bad that I won't heal. I can still breathe, and I can still move.

I push myself. “They took him?”

“He's not here!” she yells, and she beats the ground. No, not the ground: one of the Lows, unconscious, barely breathing. As my eyes start to clear and everything stops blurring together, I focus on him. I should end this, stop him from waking up, exacting revenge. Something from the Pale Women's
Testaments
leaps out at me:
kill or be killed
, one of the commandments that their god passed down.

In the
Testaments,
all of the stories have morals. Thinking about it, every story does.

“Where did they take him?” I ask, but she only shakes her head. “Bess, you have to tell me,” I say, and I try to get to my feet, but the movement makes my head swim, and all I want is my bunk, but there's no time for that. Later. Now I have to help. I have to make up to Bess what she lost because of me. I promised to
be selfish,
so I will be. If I don't help Bess, the guilt will probably be the end of me. “I'll get him back, but you have to tell me what happened.”

She explains through heaved sputters of tears. They appeared, and they burst into my berth, and they dragged her out. She told Peter to hide, but she didn't see where he went, and now he's gone.

“You didn't see them take him?”

“No,” she says, shaking her head. “But they must have. They must have.”

“He'll be hiding,” I say, and I want to tell her to help me look for him, but she's in no shape to do anything. She'd be a danger to me like this. The Lows are still roaming the ship, and there's no way I could protect her if we were jumped again. I couldn't even protect myself in the shape I'm in, my ankle hurting and my side bleeding.

“I'll find him.” She helps me stand, and she pulls me closer to her and cries into my shoulder, putting her weight on me. I don't tell her that I can barely hold myself up, because she
needs me to be strong. And she hasn't said it, but I'm sure it's on the tip of her tongue: this is my fault. And it's true. I told them to wait here. I told them that they would be safe. “I'll get him back now, okay? You go home and stay quiet.”

As I'm walking away, she speaks again. “They were looking for you,” she says. I stare at her. “They said your name, Chan. They wanted to know where you were.”

“Okay,” I say, and I watch as Bess rolls the Low to the edge of the gantry and then heaves him over.

This is all my fault.
The words ring in my ears as I climb through the ship, calling his name when I know I can get away with it, hiding when I know I can't. I'm good at apportioning blame.

I start by heading down and keep going all night, avoiding trouble as much as I can. Everyone's scared and quiet, so there's not much trouble to be had. I don't know what might happen to Peter if he's not found. He has to be somewhere. He can't have climbed far. Down is easier than up, that's a firm rule here, so this must have been the way he went. As I search, I watch the Lows skulk away, their damage done, and then I can see what they've wrought. More bodies, more chaos, and more terror. More expansion.

I check everywhere. I have never explored
Australia
so much as in this one night. Peter wouldn't have gone to the Lows' side of the ship, so at least there's that. If he did, I'll never get him back.

Nobody will.

On my way back up, I drop by Bess's berth to make sure he hasn't returned on his own, and I hear her sobbing, and I think about the story that Agatha once told me about how my grandparents asked her to find my mother when she went missing. She didn't give up. She said that she couldn't go back to them empty-handed.

That it would have killed them.

So I have to go up and up again. On the sixty-fourth floor, I think I see him, but it's another kid: same tone of skin, same slightly outgrown hair. On the seventieth, somebody tells me that there was a little boy here, running around, no parents. They tried to stop him, but the kid bit them, and the man telling me the story shows me the tooth marks on the webbed bit between his thumb and finger, and all I can think is that his hand must have been over the mouth of whichever boy did this and that I'm glad that boy got away from him. On the seventy-sixth—and there's no way that Peter could have gotten up here, not without some help, because every stairwell this high up is gutted to the point of being barely existent, one of the hardest bits to negotiate in the whole of the ship—there's a woman who looks suspicious when I ask her, refusing to talk to me, running off.

Then I hear the cry. It's sad and small, high-pitched—definitely a child—and coming from only a few floors above me. I wait for a second to hear if it stops. I don't want to go much higher—that's too close to Pale Women territory—but the noise doesn't stop. The cry is almost like a mimic, almost fake.

So I go to find it. I've got to.

When I get to the eighty-second floor, where the noise is coming from, I see that it's nearly abandoned. We're directly above the top of the oxygen purifiers, and they cough out a smell that's almost unbearable. It's rotten, dirty as anything, the smell of the rest of the ship pushed as far as it can go before you start to gag. Instead of living here, people have stripped the floor of everything, ripping out the metal walls, the bunks, the floor tiles, the light fittings, the plumbing. It's not fit for use anymore. With everything gone, you can see the ship totally laid bare: just one empty box in a series, all linked together, on and on, almost as far as you can see.

The emptiness does mean that I can see where the crying is coming from, though. I see a shape, small and nearly curled into a ball, crouched at the edge of the gantry, overlooking the Pit. I get closer and see that it's a girl, not Peter. They're about the same size, same age, I reckon. An easy mistake to make. I crouch next to her. Nobody rushes over, no parent. She's up here alone. She stares up at me with these big dark eyes. Her skin is gritty with some sort of condition, eczema or something, bright red where she's been scratching at it.

“Hello,” she says.

“Hello,” I say. She looks at my hair, which has maybe grown out too much. It's longer than hers, certainly. She reaches up and touches it, and I can feel my hair under her fingers: unclean, wiry against her skin. She doesn't care, doesn't ask permission or anything. She is younger than I ever remember being. “I'm looking for a boy,” I say. “He's named Peter. Have you seen him?”

“No boys up here,” she says. She has a pile of dolls between her feet. They make them in the markets: fabric and bone bundled together to create this thing that looks only slightly human even if you're being generous. “These are my brother's toys,” she says.

“Did he give them to you?” I ask.

“No,” she says. “He died, so I took them.” She holds one up and dangles it over the edge.

“You should be careful,” I say. “You might drop that.” She ignores me, the doll swinging between her fingers as she holds it by the hair. “You sure you haven't seen a boy?” I ask.

“I haven't,” she says.

“Okay. Do you have parents near here? Your mother?” I ask, and she shakes her head. I can't worry about her now. I can't. Whoever's responsible for taking care of her must be somewhere close, I'm sure.

I call Peter's name one more time and then go back toward the stairwell. When I reach it, I hear the noise again: the scream that I thought was Peter. The little girl drops the doll she's been holding, and she leans forward and watches it fall down the stairwell, eighty-two floors to the Pit below, and she makes the noise again. She's mimicking the scream of a person as he plummets.

She's probably heard it enough. We all have.

Limbo, the Pale Women's floors: the last place to check before I'm forced to give up and have to go back and tell Bess that I couldn't find her son. I don't want to be up here; I know that much. The eighty-eighth floor is where the ship becomes
almost oppressively dark, no light trickling in from the floors with better lighting. The darkness settles like mist up here. I don't know. The darkness is not exactly tangible or anything, it's just
here
. Things get darker and darker, and then here it is: pitch blackness. It's a strange sensation, heading up and into the black.

It's also harder to hear the engines here. I can still feel them, perhaps even more than anywhere else—the vibrations of them that run through every inch of the ship, shaking against my feet when I stand still—but the sound sort of falls away. I can hear the gaps in it more, and the echoes of the noises of the rest of the ship. And then, as I get closer to Limbo, there's something else: like a humming. I can't pinpoint where it's coming from or what it is. It's not from this floor. There are people living here, but they're all broken: sick or old, too tired and sad to protect and defend themselves. They're here because there's nowhere else for them.

My mother used to bring food to these people. I haven't done that since she died. I haven't even considered doing it. It's easy to forget that they're even here, that people still live in this part.
Look after yourself,
she told me.
Be selfish.

I walk the gantry and look into their berths, straining my eyes to see into them through the darkness. Bodies in bunks, coughing up
Australia
's air almost as fast as they can breathe it in; groups of people huddled around makeshift stoves; amputees cradling their bodies, knowing how much more dangerous this place is for them. People who some on the ship
have denigrated for not being as normal as the rest of us—whatever that means.

I haven't been here for years. I've had no reason to come here. I didn't remember that it was like this, maybe because I didn't want to. It's easier to forget the things that you just don't want to know exist. I stand outside one berth that's lit by a single candle and watch a mother cradling her son. The boy's body is twisted and his head is too heavy for his neck, and he looks as though he's suffering a pain that will never go away. His mother notices me looking at them, but I don't expect her to talk to me. Seems like there's not much she could say. She looks away from me and back to him, and I know then that this is the worst part of the ship. There are terrifying parts, parts where you shouldn't go, parts where the people will try to hurt you for their own pleasure. But none of them compares to the pain of being here. This is
misery
.

From the darkness at the back of the berth I can see somebody else. He's dressed entirely in black, only the pop of something white at his neck—the spiked collar of the Pale Women's envoys. This one steps toward the sick boy and puts something on his head: a cloth, soaking wet. The water runs down the boy's face. It's the same red-headed envoy who spoke to me in the arboretum.

“You,” I say. The envoy nods. He isn't wearing his hood, and as he steps forward I can just see the color of his hair in the light of the candles. “What are you doing?”

“They need help,” he says, and it feels hard to argue with that. Looking at this boy and his mother, at the other people
relegated to these floors, it's obvious that he's right. We're all alone here, but some are more alone than others.

“I'm looking for a little boy,” I tell him. “He ran away, I think.”

“From where?”

“The fiftieth floor.”

He shakes his head. “He's not likely to be up here.” He stands up, pulling the rag away from the boy's head. His whole body has to move; he doesn't bend his neck at all. The skin of his neck—the scar lines—seems almost to shimmer in the reflections of the flame.

“What about up with the Women?” I ask.

“I don't think so,” he replies. “You could check, but he wouldn't have been able to climb. The top floor is . . . separated.”

“If you see him, can you tell me?”

“I won't see him,” he says. “He's already lost.” He soaks the cloth again in a bucket of water and puts it back on the boy's head, and he turns away from me. The conversation is over, and I've failed.

As I sit on the edge of the stairwell and start to lower myself down to the floor below, I look up. The stairwell leading to Limbo is spiky with the iron rearranged into patterns of railing, spikes that jut out to prevent anybody from climbing up there. It's so dark up there that I can't see past the spikes, and then I hear the humming clearer and louder, coming down from that place. It's the Pale Women, their voices knotted and tripping over one another. The humming is them saying their
prayers over and over and over until the words lose any meaning that they maybe once had.

It takes me forever to get back to my floor. Nothing to do with the ship or the Lows; I'm just terrified of what I've got to say to Bess. I practice the words as I walk, mumbling them under my breath. “I'm sorry,” I say to myself, “but I couldn't find him. Peter's gone. I don't know where Peter is. I can't find your son.” I don't know what sounds best. I've never had to tell anybody news like this before.

I think back to when my mother told me that she was dying, how she decided that it was better to tell me quickly, short and sharp, get it over with. There would be tears, she knew that, and it was better to get them to come quickly. Nobody wants their pain to be drawn out any longer than it needs to be.

So I breathe in, and I try to fix the words in my mind, and I hope that she just knows somehow and that I won't even have to say anything. I stand outside her berth, and I say her name to get her attention. There's no sound coming from it. I say it again, louder.

“Bess, can I come in?” As I say the words, I think about how embedded what I'm going to say to her is, how she can't help but know. Peter would have just run right in. He would have been in her arms before I could tell her that I'd found him.