–Partial transcript, dissenting opinion,
Floor of the Third Governance, 290 a.f.
One darkness moved within others. Rain gusted through the broken glass, spreading a puddle across the dusty tile floor.
Except for a few scraps of broken shelving, the room was empty–an ancient, barren box long since picked clean of anything the Dogs might be able to use, or sell. Fluorescent bulbs flickered in the patterned ceiling. The boy was shadow.
He moved through the half-light into the teeth of the window, tasting alkali rain and something else. Moisture cooled his bare skin for an instant before beginning to burn. It was a familiar pain, one he’d born a hundred times. He bore it again knowing he had to see with his eyes what he already knew with his head.
He extended his hand to the glass and found the sharp edges had already begun to dull and stretch. By morning the hole would be completely resealed, the window nearly perfect–only a glass-ripple of scar tissue left to show it had ever been broken. The windows in the prison levels were always slow to heal.
The boy gripped the warped edges of glass and slid his head out into the wind. Matted brown hair spun around him in soggy clumps as he squinted into the rain and darkness. There was no end to it, only the roaring drum of rain against steel and polycrete. He waited for lightning, and when it came, a knot cinched in his stomach. In that instant-flash he saw one kind of death picked out from all the others: their last sill garden had been raided.
It wasn’t just the root bulbs. That would have left some hope. Everything had been picked clean. Every leaf. Every shoot. He extended his arms, disbelieving, leaning far enough out the window to feel the hard bottom of the potter with the palms of his hands. Even the precious dirt was gone. There was nothing left–an empty bucket hanging from a rope, useless as an empty eye socket.
The boy closed his eyes in the prison darkness. He thought he’d been so smart, so careful, but he’d been neither. The proof lay suspended an arm’s length below him. Someone must have followed him. A scout from one of the gangs. What would he tell his mother? That the window hadn’t been deep enough? That maybe they could never be deep enough?
He collapsed back inside and rolled away from the window, wiping acidic wetness from his face with the side of his vest. His stomach ached in hunger–another familiar pain he’d learned to endure. But this pain was different–less immediate, but in many ways, more frightening. He’d never been a large boy, but soon there would be nothing left of him for hunger to take. Nothing but his life.
#
He sat in the flickering gloom until the storm finished beating itself out against the side of the world. Then he sat a while more, listening. Storms had a way of lending their energies to the gang factions, keeping them restless and awake to roam the corridors and wage their little wars. Cage had seen it often. Storms were dying times in the prison levels. Sometimes after a storm, the halls were littered with corpses. Good for scavenging, if you could find one who’d crawled out of the way somewhere–down a stairwell, or into one of the abandoned quarters where prying eyes didn’t reach.
That’s how he’d found the oversized vest he wore–re-sewn along the side and stained in blood, a fine-tailored button-down from some unlucky newdrop. The guy hadn’t survived his first night, and Cage had found him bled-out from a dozen wounds, hiding in a closet in one of the central habs. Cage wore the vest open, knives tucked upside-down just within reach. Only a fool-child wore something he couldn’t slide out of quickly if grabbed, and Cage had learned early that a hand gripping an empty vest was a hand that couldn’t also hold a knife. Or parry one. Not all the blood on the vest belonged to the original owner.
Sometimes when picking through the dead, Cage even found food tucked into a pocket or hidden in a seam–the ultimate treasure. But such scavenging work required luck, and Cage wasn’t feeling lucky tonight. Something told him if he ventured too far on this night, he’d be one of those bodies found dead and naked the next day.
He waited for the first weak glow of morning before standing and stretching his legs. He smelled rain; and from beyond the open doorway, he smelled the prison levels, the complex reek of moldering ceiling panels and decaying carpet–the stench of three thousand men and women scattered among levels that could house ten times that number, and feed a third.
Once started, he moved quickly, taking the wells down six flights. He stopped with his back against a pair of dented steel doors, listening. From the other side, distant scraps of conversation, the voices deep and male:
“–and Naw’s still looking.”
“That his business.”
“So what you gonna do?”
Voices like nobody Cage recognized. Laughter, then more talking.
“…seen it…blood down her legs like she dying.”
“Body like that, a shame to mess up, you know?”
“Should of only took one eye, that way she could see what he doing.”
Laughter again, fading down the hall. Cage sprinted in the other direction, and then the wells took him down. He came across no one–no other voices, nor did he expect to this low down in the world. This low down in the world, the levels belonged to ghosts, and to men who risked becoming them.
Cage had long ago made a habit of not returning home the same way twice. Such precautions were a big part of why he still lived and breathed. And why other children didn’t.
Today he let his legs carry him through one of the great marble halls, bounding into the sudden, surprising expanse. He stopped against a central column and held his breath, letting his eyes and ears work the room. Two heartbeats. Three. Nothing moved. Nothing followed. Only stillness and a great, dark emptiness–ceiling arching high over rows and rows of empty, rotting seats that seemed to go up and back forever. Silence. And then he was running again, soundless on the balls of his feet, breathing in quiet gulps of fetid air.
#
The world had four sides, and endless levels.
It took a man a full day to cross the world, side to side, from one bank of windows to the other. Cage could shave a few hours off that if he had to. He could move like the wind blew–this was his talent. One of his talents, anyway, the old man had called it, this speed of his. But then the Dogs had cut the old man’s tongue out, and afterward, he called it nothing at all.
Cage had seen the sun rise up through the clouds on one side of the world, and he’d seen it set the same day from on other: red-gold light spilling into the mists that forever cloaked the horizon. Cage had seen the deeps. During the last days of the Deej ra, he’d seen the stairwell that lead up to the exchange zone. He’d seen the eyes of free-levelers across the hundred-foot empty. He’d seen terror on the faces of well-fed newdrops, and he’d seen them die. Or live. He’d seen women torn from their clothing and pinned screaming thrashing bleeding under whole wilding gangs of men. And afterward, if the women could still move, he’d seen their vacant eyes as they crawled away naked, trailing viscous fluid across the tile, these women who lacked even the power to be whores.
And he’d seen worse things. Things in his dreams that might never have happened. Or might happen still.
The old man had told him. The old man had said much, before he said nothing at all.
#
The light was dull and gray in the window when Cage finally slumped at his mother’s side. It seemed lately that his mother preferred these quarters at the periphery, with their two small rooms and two glass walls. This far down, all the peripheral habs were the same.
Cage liked the central suites where there were no windows–where he could pretend the outside didn’t exist, where that swirling gray, so like his mother’s eyes, wasn’t always there in the glass to remind them of what they had to do to survive.
His mother had been sick lately, and Cage worked hard at not wondering why she wanted to be near the sky. He lifted her blanket and crawled beneath, molding his body against hers. She was a small, pale, wiry woman; but he was smaller still.
“Cage,” she mumbled, coming awake beneath his arm.
“Go back to sleep,” he said.
She turned to face him. “You were gone long.”
“I’m fine.”
She coughed, rattling somewhere deep. “Did something happen?”
“The sill gardens are gone.”
“Not all of them?”
“Yes.”
She said nothing for a long while. Then she sighed, and that was worse than the silence.
“I’ll find something,” he said.
Her gray eyes answered that she didn’t believe, but her mouth didn’t speak it. Instead, she rolled on her side again. He wrapped his arms around her, feeling her fever now. Feeling the rattle. Disease was everywhere in the prison levels, and several weeks ago, it had come for his mother.
They slept, and Cage woke to gnawing hunger. His mother coughed long and wet, but her eyes didn’t open. She breathed and slept on.
He walked to the kitchen, crouched, and opened the sink cabinet. With his other hand, he pried up the linoleum inside along the bottom. His searching fingers found the cloth bundle and lifted. He unwrapped it carefully. There was only one piece left. He lifted it to his face, inhaling the dank aroma. The crescent of pea bread barely filled the palm of his hand. It was the last of their food. He stuck his tongue to it, wetting the hard crust with his saliva. His mouth gushed. He looked over at his mother still sleeping in her pallet against the wall. Beds were rare in the peripheral habs. The gangs had traded everything to the free-levels a generation ago. He wrapped the bread again and tucked it into his vest.
He closed the door softly when he left, listening for the catch on the lock. There were no keys. There were never any keys.
#
Cage crouched in broken glass. He was many hours from his mother, and lower in the world than he’d ever been before, lower than he’d ever heard of anyone going. The light outside was weak, dusky–a damp cloud poured in through the window. Fluorescent bulbs hummed, throwing off a sick, fluttering glow. This window had been a lucky surprise: already crushed open, already cleared of loose jangles of glass. Somebody had put a lot of work into it. It might never reseal.
He listened with his back to the wall, cool moisture spilling across his thighs. The clouds outside were thicker this far down in the world.
Cage unwrapped the cloth in his hands and leaned his body out the window. He placed the small piece of pea bread on the corroded lip of polycrete. And then he waited. And waited. Gray daylight nearly faded to black before he heard it. A soft coo, a flutter. It circled. He could see it in the mists, a dark shape. Cage smiled as the fat pidge landed next to the bread.
He pounced, pulling the bird and bread inside with a quick swoop of his sack. The sack jumped and bobbed for a moment until he tightened the slack, pinning the bird at the bottom. His fingers found the neck through the rough fabric, and he twisted. The snap was louder than he would have thought.
When he opened the sack and looked in, the bird’s dead eyes glared up at him, two shiny brown beads. How do they get so fat, he wondered. The pidges were always fat. What did they eat out there in all that gray nothing?
At least–smiling to himself–he knew what ate the pidges. He knew one woman who would eat better than she’s eaten in months. With delicate fingers, he retrieved the bread before the pidge could foul it.
A sound caught him.
Small, soft, a little crunch from somewhere behind him. He did not turn to look. He did not move at all, gave no sign he’d heard, but his mind ran through his options. They weren’t many. The skin over his ribs searched for the familiar length of steel and felt it. The knife was there, tucked into its spot in the seam of his vest. It was some assurance. He wouldn’t die without a fight. But if there was more than one of them…
He turned, taking in every detail.
A copper-skinned boy stood in the doorway.
Cage’s face gave away nothing. His posture changed, opening up his stance. He’d seen the boy once before.
The boy in the doorway responded subtly, the map of muscle shifting tension beneath his skin. Had his foot moved? Cage thought perhaps it had, shifting toward the opening Cage had presented. Cage hadn’t seen another boy in years.
Nothing happened in the next second, or the next. Cage took everything in, weighed it, ran his hand over the texture of silence that hung between them. The boy was long and gangle-limbed, but his face looked young. He carried no visible weapons. It was hard to guess his age–the body older than Cage, the face younger–but the sheer size of him meant he couldn’t be overpowered. Copper skin contrasted sandy brown hair that was tied back from his face in a mass of tangled curls. His black eyes sharpened themselves on the sack Cage carried. Dangling from the boy’s long fingers was a finely woven net. This was his window.
Cage considered trying to rush past him but decided against it. There was no room to evade, and the boy was bigger than he was. The doorway was a killslot.
After a moment of thought, Cage stooped to the floor and wiped clean a layer of grime with his knee. He removed the crust of pea bread from his pocket and put it on the tile. He stood.
“The bread is for you,” he said. He tightened his grip on the sack and threw it over his shoulder. “This is for me.”
The black eyes moved to the bread on the floor. Then lifted to Cage’s face. Cage walked deliberately toward the door.
The boy stepped out of the way and let him pass.
#
Later that night, when Cage told his mother what happened, she surprised him. He’d expected her to overreact, to cry, to lecture him about being more careful where he ventured; instead, she looked almost happy. “Another boy?” She asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“The one from before, with hair lighter than his skin?”
“Yes.”
“I thought the boy must have died by now. I thought you were the last.”
“He was in the deeps.”
She pulled the blanket tighter around her on the pallet, a grease spot shining one corner of her mouth–the pidge meat seemed already to have strengthened her. “Life is hard here,” she said. She looked off into the darkness, her eyes focused on something only she could see. “It’s good to have allies. Think about that.”
#
Cage had first seen the boy across the prison’s central court–a broad, open place called the Oi-jon bazaar. The Deej ra had once ruled from the Oi-jon, enforcing a controlled form of chaos on the prison’s population. Back then the corridors were dangerous but not yet insane, the Dogs still just another insignificant dissent faction that roamed the prison’s barren center.
The broad court had been the seat of the Deej ra’s power. It was where things happened, the Oi-jon. A tiered chamber nine stories high opening around a dead fountain. It had been a shopping center once, generations earlier, but had become a thing part marketplace, part arena–the prison’s capital, if it had such a thing.
A few floors above the Oi-jon was the exchange zone, the no-man’s land where new prisoners were pushed through, their crimes tattooed to their wrists.
Above the exchange zone were the free-levels, the rest of the world, heaven.
The boy had been crossing the Oi-jon when Cage first saw him, one floor down, hand on the railing, moving centerward toward the spoke. Just a flash of copper skin, limbs like jointed table-legs, then gone.
With a constant supply of fresh women, there were always a lot of newborns in the prison levels. It was the two-year olds you didn’t see many of. And the five-year olds you saw even less.
If a child lived to ten, he did it by learning how not to be seen at all.
#
Cage’s mother never moved far. Above were the gangs; below, starvation. She called it their comfort zone–those levels just beneath the main prison population, but still high enough that the sunlight would support a few stunted plants in their sill gardens. Food was hard to come by that low in the world, but it was better than having to deal with the gangs. A slow death was always preferable to a fast one. But there are more than just two ways to die.
For three days the fever baked her. Cage only left her side to retrieve water, soaking the rag on her forehead while she tossed and turned in delirium. On the third day, she lost consciousness.
Cage held her hand throughout the night. In the first minutes of morning, when the blackness in the window had just begun fading up into gray, his mother’s voice woke him. “I’m so sorry.”
“Sorry for what?”
“For leaving.”
A few minutes later, she died.
It was two days before he could let her go. He dressed her in the better of her two shirts and wrapped her in a thick blanket he’d received in barter from Middle-Man for most of what remained of their food. When he lifted her body, he was shocked at how light she had become. He carried her down the stairwell, the soft tap of footfalls unreal in his ears, the risers unreal to his bare feet. Only her body was real, stiff and empty in his arms. When finally he stepped from the well, the long bright hallway seemed somehow disrespectful.
The room he’d prepared was in the periphery. He swung the door wide, and a blast of cool air struck him. He pulled the blanket back and kissed her cheek, letting the tears wash her face. She wasn’t beautiful, his mother–there were too many scars for that–but she’d been smart, and she’d taught him well. She’d kept him alive. She’d loved him.
When he stepped to the broken window, he peered down. The sides of the world descended for hundreds of levels before disappearing into the swirling clouds below. There was no bottom. He held his mother closely to his chest one final time then stepped up onto the ledge. “Goodbye.”
Then he released her into the embrace of the wind. She tumbled end over end into darkness and mist. He was alone.
Cage’s left foot moved off the ledge, easing out into open space. It would be simple enough to do–transfer his weight to that unsupported leg, and gravity would take care of the rest. He could imagine it. He could imagine uncurling his fingers from the window frame and just…letting go. He wouldn’t scream. Not like some of those he’d heard–flailing streaks he caught at the edge of his vision sometimes when he was near the windows, just a flash then gone, voices trailing them on the way to their next life. No, he’d fall like the dead fell. He’d fall silent, with his eyes open.
His foot wavered. His grip on the frame grew slick with sweat. He closed his tearing eyes and put his foot back on the ledge. Death would wait, he decided. At least for a little while longer.
The next day, he gathered together what belongings he had, and then, with nothing left to lose, set out to find the copper-skinned boy.
#
“Heard of him, yeah,” Middle-man said. The old lice-crab was in the mood to help. The Middle-man was always in the mood, for a price.
“Where can I find him?” Cage asked.
The Middle-man smiled, leaning back in his chair. Behind him, the spoils of his trade lined shelves against the wall. Blankets and clothes–things bartered from the free-levels across the hundred-foot empty. The Middle-man was one of the few unaffiliated who didn’t have to hide from the gangs, didn’t have to move from place to place. He paid well for the privilege.
“And I give you this information, this valuable information, and what do I get from you?”
Cage looked at the man. Trade was sex to him, every transaction an exchange of body fluids. Cage could see it in his eyes, that slick-brightness heating up as they talked terms.
“You get a happy customer who’ll come back again,” Cage said.
“Bah! “ The Middle-man slapped his fat belly with his hand. “Happy customers don’t feed the middle. Happy customers I don’t need. Angry customers is what I like. Angry ’cause they paid so much. Angry ’cause they got so little. Man don’t eat well making customers happy. Customers should make me happy.”
“Call it a favor then.”
“I don’t do favors. Particularly for boys who don’t shave yet, go half weight. Tell me, you old enough to want girls? Or is it boys?”
Cage put the situation in terms the Middle-man could understand. It took only an eye-blink.
“Now,” Cage said, increasing the pressure a bit, blade against the fat throat. “Where does the boy stay?”
“So this the deal you want to make?” The Middle-man asked. He was perfectly still; only his pulse moved, exactly at the place where Cage’s blade touched his skin.
“Yeah,” Cage said. “This is the deal you get.”
“My life for the information?”
“Call it that.”
“You only get that deal once, you know.”
Cage pressed the knife.
“So what you want to hear?” Middle-man asked.
“Where he stays.”
“I only know what people tell me, and nobody tells me that.” He was sweating now. At first Cage thought the old man was nervous, but then he realized it was the exchange excitement, the game. They were working their deal, and the Middle-man liked that. The Middle-man lived for the trade. Even a trade like this.
“So what do people tell you then?”
“Lotsa things.”
“What things?”
“The boy’s mother’s name is Ingred something. Originally from the one of the uppermost free-level sects.”
“The top-top?”
“Yeah, a long way to fall in one lifetime. People call her beautiful, but she’s dying.”
“The conviction?”
“Heard it said she was an adulterer. Had an angry husband powerful enough to get her dropped for it. Also heard it said that he’d been the adulterer, arranged for her conviction to get her out the way. Either version could be right, I suppose. But I seen the tattoo on her wrist, and it tells a different story altogether.”
“And what about her son?”
“She gave birth to him in one of the warm-air return ducts a little more than a year after being dropped. Rumor tells it, when she found she was pregnant, she made the climb back to the exchange zone and spent weeks wearing calluses into her knees for the guards. The money went for pharms to prevent passing the slowvirus to the baby.”
“What else do you know?”
“What else you gotta know, boy? Nobody tells me where they stay. But people you don’t see, people that show up only every so often–only one place they can be.”
Cage eased the knife back.
“This deal over, boy?” The Middle-man said.
“It’s over.”
“That your last deal then, boy. I see you again, we through with deals.” The Middle-man glanced toward the door. It took an instant, but when he looked back, Cage was gone.
#
The Consul Assembly shall enact no law that creates or permits the existence of an under-caste. Crimes and grievances shall be redressed within the bounds of a compensatory and vertically mobile society, for the presence of any formal penal class would necessarily be at cross-purposes to the larger civil welfare. Society, in a place such as this, cannot tolerate a prison.
–Partial transcript, from the Floor of the Second Governance, 211a.f.
The stairwells took him deeper than he’d ever been.
The levels he entered were strange to him, the floor plans unfamiliar. Even the light was a new kind of thing–dim and gray/white, filtering through the windows in the peripheral halls, barely rising to the magnitude of dusk.
Cage wandered through the rooms and corridors, looking for sign that someone had been there recently. The ceiling bulbs–in those places where they still worked–hummed down on only pale, dusty tile and dry-rotten carpets. Everywhere empty rooms, empty halls, echoing empty chambers whose once-purpose Cage could only guess at.
After five days, the food ran out.
It took more than an hour to smash open a window in one of the ancient, barren halls. It was hard work; the window kept trying to heal. Cage had another hour invested in widening the hole when he heard the voice.
“You’re wasting your time,” were the boy’s first words to him.
The steel bar slipped from Cage’s hand and clattered to the tile. He turned.
“The pidges don’t fly this low,” the copper-skinned boy explained.
#
The boy’s name was Mykel.
They hadn’t gone far. “Stay here,” Mykel said.
“Why?” Cage asked. They were in a long hall with many doors. Some of the doors hung at odd angles, jutting crookedly from ruptured hinges. There were holes in the wall; like a battle had been fought here, and the room had lost.
Cage didn’t like this place. It was too small, too cramped–nowhere to move if he had to fight. And worse, he had the feeling that was the point.
“Mother will have to decide,” Mykel said.
“So I’ll follow you then.”
Mykel shook his head. “No, it’s for your own good.”
“How’s that?”
“If you stay here, and mother don’t like the idea of you, then you’ll go on your way and never see us again.”
“And if I went with you?”
“If you saw where we stay, and mother don’t like the idea of you, then maybe you never see anybody again.”
“You think it’d be that easy?”
“No, maybe I don’t.” Mykel looked at him closely, sizing him up. “Another reason you stay here.”
Mykel disappeared through a hole in the wall. Cage backed into a corner, shoulders against peeling paint. He saw the blood stains on the tile. Huge dark pools of it, dried to flakes of rust.
#
Ingred didn’t keep him waiting long.
And Middle-man had been right. She was beautiful. She was beautiful the way rich men’s fancy-girls were often beautiful when dropped through from the free-levels, faces like something you’d dream, a symmetry you recognized though you never saw it before. It was a type you saw sometimes. But there was something different, too, in Ingred. Something different from other fancy-girls.
Cage watched her walk into the room. She ducked the doorway. She was, he realized, the tallest woman he’d ever seen. She was blonde and pale–scars showing pink instead of darker, like most people. The top half of her right ear was missing.
“How old are you?” she asked.
“I never counted it.”
She moved closer, looking down on him. Her eyes lit the shadows, so blue they weren’t blue really, but a lighter color–the opposite of King’s eyes. She held him with her gaze; he didn’t move.
“Open your mouth.”
He did as he was told.
“Good teeth still,” she said. “Molars coming in make you about twelve, maybe thirteen standard. You look surprised.”
“I figured older.”
“You look younger. So how is it you’re here?”
“Your son brought–
“I know that, I mean how is it you’ve survived? We haven’t seen a boy your age in a long time.”
“My mother.”
Cage noticed the tattoo. She caught him looking. She rotated her wrist so he could see it:
–Ingred Anderson–
–life sentence–
–criminal sexual deviant–
He looked back up at her face. Something showed in his expression.
“So you know how to read then,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Where’d you learn?”
“My mother.”
“And where’s she now?”
“The wind.”
Ingred smiled for the first time. Her teeth were wide and white. “The wind taketh us all.”
It was not a long walk to where they stayed. The broken hall was a kind of gateway, Mykel explained. All the other passages were blocked, doors barricaded; so you had to pass through the broken hall to find the door leading to where they stayed.
The rooms of their hab were small, like all the other quarters, but they were many. Ingred and his mother had taken over a whole unit–a series of rooms interconnected by a long hall.
The largest of the rooms contained a table, several couches, and three large lamps.
“This is the front room,” Mykel said. “Look at this.” He walked over to a plastic box in the corner. One of box’s faces was glass, a window looking into nothing.
Cage bent close, and the dark glass reflected his own face back at him, a pale angularity materializing out of nothing–gray eyes like smoke, like the mists, like his mother’s eyes. He touched his cheekbone. I am thirteen, he thought.
“Watch,” Mykel said and hit a small button.
The box exploded into gray/white light–sound rushing out of it like hard rain on a window, only more so, louder, more frantic.
“Mother calls it static,” the boy said.
Cage looked at her.
“They had a few of these in the free-levels,” she explained.
“What are they used for?”
“Now? Lighting, mostly, and conversation pieces at parties. Very old. Very expensive. They used to do more a long, long time ago.”
“I found it in the deeps,” the boy said.
“How far?” Cage asked.
“Seventy levels.”
Cage clicked his tongue. He couldn’t imagine going down that far.
“I’ve been deeper,” the boy said.
“How much deeper?”
“So far the sky stays dark. So far the wind don’t blow.”
“How far?”
“A hundred levels from here. Maybe a little more.”
“Why?”
“I wanted to go as far as I could.”
“What stopped you?”
“The ruins stopped me. A hundred levels down, the rooms were all black and burned, level after level. A fire had burned up everything. There was no food, no pidges, no sill gardens. I had to turn back or starve.”
#
Cage spent his days foraging with Mykel and his nights listening to Ingred’s stories. There were ways to survive where the light was too dim for sill gardens, but you had to know where to look. You had to have a knack for it. And Mykel, as best he could, taught Cage the knack. He taught him about canfood.
Ingred never left their home. She had her good days, and her bad. The slowvirus took its toll on her energies. On her good days, her stories lasted for hours. She told of what life was like in the free-levels, where there were no gangs, but instead medicines, and teachers, and food enough for people to grow fat and lazy. She spoke of the greenhouses at the top-top, like enormous sill gardens growing endless crops of food–a place where there was no ceiling and no walls, only sky all around in every direction, the very terminus of the world.
“Imagine that,” She told them. “To look up and see no ceiling above you.”
She spoke of the un-bats, and the harmonies. She spoke of the Coherents. And when she spoke of the Coherents, she spoke of death. And when she spoke of death, she spoke of her husband. And her other son.
On her good days she sometimes smiled, and in hushed tones, whispered of other worlds that, from the very highest levels of the top-top, could occasionally be seen jutting from the mists in the distance. “But they are a secret,” she said. “A secret the Coherents keep from the mid-levelers, who know the other worlds only as rumors and legends. But on clear days I’ve seen them. Their tips rise from the clouds, their windows dark and dead. And that is the real secret the Coherents keep, that worlds can die.”
While Cage and Mykel foraged, Ingred spent her days creating lessons for them. She told them about great pipes which ran along the outside of the world, and collected the alkali rain, funneling it into filters and turbines. She told them about great flags near the top which flew in the wind to make electricity.
“What is electricity?” Cage asked.
“It is like the world’s blood.”
And after these lessons, she spoke often of honor. “Honor is what makes men whole,” she said. “Without honor, we are ungulates. Without honor, we have nothing.”
Her eyes dropped. “Honor is different things in different places. Here it is transformed into the lowest version of itself, but you can still find it. You must learn this: your own eyes can lie to you. Books can lie. The schools in the free-levels, near the top of the world…” Her attention wavered. “You cannot imagine the lies that are possible.”
“What kind of schools?” Cage asked.
“Different kinds, like honor has different kinds. My education was…unusual. In some ways, I was the best student my teachers ever had.”
“What did they teach you?”
“Many things.” She paused. “That power is expressed as an energy gradient. That momentum equals mass times velocity. That technology can outlive civilization.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It doesn’t matter. It was the one thing they couldn’t teach me that brought me here.”
“What couldn’t they teach you?”
“How to forget.”
Is no bottom, is no top.
Like the mathy men they taught.
Only thing that never stop,
Out the window we all drop.
–Children’s rhyme
As the seasons beyond the glass changed, the boys grew. Mykel did more of it.
Still beardless and immature, he took on a full man’s height–a boy’s skin wrapping a man’s bones. Though more mismatched in size than ever, the boys practiced at fighting each other, honing the art of survival in this place where only true artists survived.
Ingred, on her good days, taught them katis, and sho. But she would not speak of where she’d learned them.
“There is sho,” she told Cage. “In the way you hold your knife. I’ve seen it.” She took the blade from him, gripping the crude pommel tightly, steel pointed downward, folded toward the elbow. “Did your mother teach you that?”
Cage nodded.
“I thought so. I knew your mother, before here. I suspected it the first time I saw your face, but now I am sure.”
“You knew her!”
Ingred’s face tightened, smoothed. “We were not friends.”
Cage stared at her. “What do you mean?”
“It is difficult to explain.” She said. “People at the top don’t have to fight for food. So they fight for other things instead.”
“Like what?”
“Power.”
“Why?”
“People take sides, even in heaven.”
“What kind of sides?”
“More than two.”
She glanced back and forth between the boys. “But think of us now. Soon you two will be all that is left of she and I. Your mother and I are allies now.”
Cage began to ask another question, but she silenced him by sliding into a stance.
“If someone comes at you, blade up, like so.” Ingred spun the knife in her hand, blade now pointed forward from her thumb. “You can take it from them, and break the wrist. But in sho…” She changed grips again, pivoting the knife back along her forearm, fist cocked near her shoulder. “In sho, this is not so easily accomplished.” She lashed out and sliced the air a hand’s breath from Cage’s throat. The movement was quick as an eye-blink. She handed the knife back to Cage. “But you’re faster than I ever was,” she said. “Like your mother.”
#
As Mykel and Cage got older, they ventured up into the more populated areas.
They stalked the central fringe, avoiding the most contested gang turf. But they were fascinated by what went on there. Cage liked testing the limits, trying to find which lines he could cross.
The boys often talked of the future, when they’d be older and bigger and would walk without fear in the peripheries of the upper prison levels–when their own gang would rule. The boys would be compensated, they knew, for years of hiding and hunger. And Ingred would be their queen.
They were crouching in broken glass when Mykel first told Cage of his change of plans. “They don’t seem to live very long, do they?”
Cage, who knew Mykel’s mind well enough to know who he was talking about, said, “No, they don’t.”
Mykel was silent. Wind swirled through the window, cold and foul. A winter storm threatened, and the light was fading fast.
“The gangs would die out without new drops,” Mykel said. “They only keep their numbers up by absorbing the biggest men who are dropped through. One faction wipes out another. The babies they make on the women don’t survive long.”
“Some do,” Cage said.
Mykel looked at him. “Us? Two out of a thousand? Out of five thousand?”
Cage wasn’t sure how Mykel wanted him to respond.
“There is no continuity,” Mykel said. “Nothing is left behind. That’s their punishment for whatever crimes they committed in the Free-levels, but we have no tattoo on our wrists.”
Realization struck Cage like a blow. He understood the enormity of what Mykel was proposing. “They won’t let us.”
“Why not? What have we done?”
“We were born here.”
“That is no crime.”
“How do you know that?”
“People aren’t born with tattoos, there’s no conviction keeps us here.”
“This place is its own conviction.”
“I’m going,” Mykel said.
“You can’t.”
“Each time we go out for food, we have to go deeper. This place is death. Slow or fast, what difference does it make?”
“The difference is why we’re still breathing.”
“More to life than breathing.”
“What about your mother?”
Mykel’s face changed. “She’s dying. Do you think she wants us to watch?”
Cage stared at him.
“This was her idea,” Mykel said.
Mykel nodded at Cage’s silence.
Cage grasped at a final straw. “The factions. They’d kill us before we got within five levels of the exchange floor.”
“Maybe.” Mykel said. “But it’s better than dying here without even trying.”
“Without trying? That’s what this life is, trying. We’re still here because we learned to stay out of the way. Now you want to confront everything we’ve been hiding from. For what?”
“There has got to be more than this,” Mykel said.
“This is enough.”
“Not for me.”
Quiet settled between them. The storm rolled in. It splashed at Cage through the broken glass. Cage tried to recall his mother’s face and couldn’t. All he saw was the dark blanket tumbling into the mists. Would Ingred’s face slip away, too? Next time at that windy edge, alone, would something stop him from following?
“The free-levels…” It came out a whisper, as if Cage could barely speak it. “I’ll go with you.”
#
They spent most of the next three months gathering as much food as they could find. Entire days at a time were spent in the Deeps, and the boys searched through dusty corridors and strange halls. Some of the levels were empty–the ceiling bulbs illuminating only dry rot and blank white walls. Other levels were crowded with the remnants of a people who had long since relinquished their claim to the strange, unknowable artifacts the boys found. Every so often they would come across a supply of canfood, usually on a shelf, or in a cabinet alongside disintegrating boxes of dust.
When they knew they had gathered a supply of food larger than Ingred had life left in her, they stopped their searches and ascended the stairs to home.
It was good to see her again, but sad, too. For it would be their last return to her. As time passed, her coughing grew worse until her thin body convulsed with the effort of expelling air. Mykel and Cage didn’t discuss it; they fed her warm soups and brought her extra blankets.
In the early morning, Mykel woke Cage. “It is time,” he said.
Cage glanced over at Ingred. A dream turned her lips in a graceful half smile as her bony chest rose and fell beneath the blanket. Her lungs rattled only a little. She hadn’t breathed that well in a while. Cage threw his blankets off and gathered his clothes. Mykel was right; this is how he wanted to remember her.
Mykel knelt next to his mother and bent to kiss her on the forehead. He brushed back a lock of hair from her cheek and caressed her face lightly with one big hand. “Goodbye,” he whispered. He turned quickly away.
Cage stood next to her and looked down, the full weight of the moment bearing down on him. He would never see her again. His vision blurred with moisture as he bent to kiss her goodbye. The boys didn’t look back; they couldn’t. To look back was to go back, and then they’d never get the courage to leave her. The central stairs took them up.
The climb was slow, and Cage concentrated on the sounds of his footfalls. Anything not to think. The boys had no supplies, and little to barter with; their prospects were grim.
The boys had decided on the central stairwell because it was the least frequently used, being furthest from the peripheral food sources. Though it seemed there should be, Cage could discern no physical evidence of change as they ascended. No line was drawn across the worn rubber stair treads to mark out the boundary between the life they’d known and the life they chose; but still, Cage felt it at a point along the way, that divergence. There was no going back.
They stepped quietly, giving the hard blank walls as little to use against them as they could. The long muscles in Cage’s thighs began to ache as he climbed; and his heart thudded in his chest.
They’d both heard the stories. The territories changed, but the motives never did. The Exchange Zone was a commodity controlled by the gangs. Access, like anything else of value, could be bought, bartered, or fought for–but never was it freely given. Cage carried a few seeds from their sill crops. The seeds had value. Cage hoped it was enough.
When they came to the first missing door, the boys stopped. The frame was twisted, the remaining hinges vacant tabs of metal that jutted into the opening. The number on the wall was 1339. Cage knew then that they’d entered the heart of gang territory.
They continued to climb. Fourteen levels passed beneath their feet before it happened. Cage saw them first.
He was lanky and bent, standing in the access hall as the boys rounded the stairwell. His skin was sick-gray, and he eyed the boys with curiosity from beneath a shaggy mop of tangled hair. The boys kept moving. Another floor, and another face, two faces, three; these younger and harder.
The men grew silent, looking hard at the boys as they passed. Cage expected a voice, or an attack, but neither came. Their eyes followed them up. Then, from a distance, their footsteps. They maintained a position at the edge of perception, always several floors down, moving with the boys without closing the gap. Cage wondered what they were waiting for. On level 1423, it became apparent.
These last two men were quiet. They had the look of men used to boredom, used to waiting. They had the look of men stationed to do a job. It occurred to Cage then why they’d met so little resistance up to then. Here it was.
The taller was shirtless in the common battlegarb of a gang enforcer. His dark, bloodstained pants were cinched tight at the waist and cut off just below the knees to allow for easy range of motion. He held his meaty arms across his chest, deep scars visible along the knuckles, pale face ugly and unbalanced in a way you could blame on the bones. His companion was much smaller, and wiry. He wore a loose shirt, open at the chest; and he stepped down to the landing with economical grace. His strange, hooded eyes darted between the boys’ faces as he approached. His flat features gave no emotion.
The larger man stepped significantly into their path. The boys stopped.
“You lost?” the smaller man said.
“No,” Mykel answered.
“Stupid then?”
“No.”
“You’re not lost, and you say you’re not stupid, but here you are.” The small, flat-faced man stroked his chin. After careful consideration, he seemed to come to a conclusion. “What have you brought us as offering?”
Mykel’s hand slid inside his shirt, going for the packet of seeds.
No bribe would be enough, Cage realized. There was nothing they could offer that would buy their ascent.
Mykel pulled the bag of seeds from his shirt while Cage moved forward, positioning himself to the big man’s right.
“And what’s this?” the big man said, reaching for the bag. A reaching hand is an empty hand.
“Seeds,” Mykel said.
“We’re going to need more than seeds,” Flat-Face said.
Cage turned toward the big man as if about to speak, but instead pivoted and arced his knife into the enforcer’s right temple.
The big man fell twitching, knife still lodged in his head.
Flat-Face reacted before Mykel. The shank was in his hand in an instant. Mykel spun with the attack and took the first stab in the shoulder instead of the heart. Cage pounced, deflecting the second blow off the handrail and sending the steel spike skittering down the stairwell. Cage wrapped his forearm around the man’s windpipe from behind and pulled with everything he had. He felt the cartilage give, but the smaller man fought in a rage, kicking, screaming. He clawed for Cage’s eyes, and almost got them; but Cage pressed his face against the back of the man’s neck. Then fingers gripped Cage’s hair, and the man flipped him over his shoulder into the wall. Mykel rushed him.
The man was shorter than Mykel, and not as strong; but he knew how to fight. He moved inside, eliminating Mykel’s reach advantage. They grappled chest to chest, trading sidelong blows. Cage tried to gain his feet, but something wasn’t working right with his balance and he fell over the dead enforcer’s body. Flat-face got a leg behind Mykel and turned, using his lower stance for leverage. Mykel faltered. His left foot came off the floor. It will be very bad to fall, Cage thought. Mykel struck the wall with a thud, desperately trying to keep his feet. From down below came the scramble of footsteps. They were coming.
Cage crawled along the enforcer’s body and put his knee on the dead man’s face. He yanked, and the shank came free with a rasp of bone. Three feet away, Mykel hit the floor, smaller man on top. A right fist rose and fell, rose and fell. Before the man could land the third blow, Cage divided his spine neatly at the base of the neck. The shank jutted. The man fell forward.
“Come,” Cage told Mykel, pulling him from beneath the pissing corpse. “They’re almost here.”
“Who?”
“Them,” Cage said as the group of men rounded the stairwell. The boys launched upward, taking two stairs at a time, jerking themselves forward along the handrail at they ran. The men from below were right behind them, and their number had swollen from four to seven. It would be a close thing. Three flights up, the boys saw the terminal doors. The exchange zone.
#
The boys burst through–their forward momentum carrying them into the room as the doors banged loudly against the walls of the empty space. The three uniformed guards at the far end of the chamber jerked to readiness, grabbing their weapons. Before them sat a large table, and behind them spread a long ornate staircase. The free-levels. But Cage suspected it would not be so easy as that.
As the boys ran toward the guards, Cage chanced a backward glance at his pursuers, but the gang members had stopped at the entranceway. They smiled from the doorway, waiting. They could afford to be patient, those smiles said.
The guards, for their part, eyed the boys suspiciously. “What for exchange?” the tallest of them asked as the boys approached.
The exchange zone was nothing like Cage imagined. Or maybe it was. He realized suddenly that he’d never really let himself picture it, because even in all the months he’d prepared for the journey, he never really believed he would see it. The room itself was long and bare and clean–an enormous empty hallway whose only purpose was to provide enough open space for guards to get a good long look at who they’d be bartering with. It took a hundred count to cross the room.
The guard who spoke wore a red sash on his shoulder. “Well, what for exchange?”
“Nothing, we’d like to pass,” Mykel said.
The guard’s face darkened. “If you’ve got nothing to exchange, then get off my floor.” He changed his grip slightly on the steel bar in his right hand. Two companions flashed predatory grins at each other.
Mykel smiled. He lifted his wrists and turned them for the guards. “We have no tattoos.”
The guard stared. His brow creased in confusion.
“We’ve committed no crime. We have right to the Free-levels, and we will enter.”
“If you’ve committed no crime, why are you in the prison?”
“We were born here. Now we want to leave.”
The guard stared at them for a long time. “This never happened before,” he said finally.
“May we enter?”
“Wait here.”
The guards talked amongst themselves. They nodded in agreement, and one of them bounced up the wide marble staircase leading to the next level. The other two turned and glared at the boys silently.
A few minutes later, an old man in dark robes descended. His eyes burned on the boys as he approached. His bony hand snatched at Mykel’s wrist, turning it to his inspection. He held it up to his eyes. After a few seconds, the irritation in his expression changed to surprise. He dropped Mykel’s arm and reached for Cage’s a little more gently.
“My God,” he said at last, turning to the guard with the sash. “We’re going to have to start sterilizing them before we drop them through.” He turned back to the boys. “How old are you?”
“I don’t know,” Cage said. It wasn’t a total lie.
“And you?” the old man asked.
“I’m not sure, either.” Mykel said.
The old man turned away from the boys, mumbling something about sterilization again. He started up the stairs without a backward glance.
“Sir,” the guard said.
The old man didn’t slow. “Back down, of course. And don’t trouble me like this again.”
The guards didn’t look surprised, but Mykel visibly stiffened. Cage merely…loosened. He felt it in his arms and legs, the let down of adrenaline. It came to this. It always came to this.
Cage exploded forward and lowered his shoulder into the gut of the guard standing in front of him. The guard sputtered backward, clutching at the boy as he tried to spin away. The wide sweep of his steel rod followed inches behind Cage’s skull, but the boy was past him then, sliding across the table on his bare stomach. He hit the floor rolling and scrambled frantically forward, hands gripping the stairs as he surged upward. Cage heard a shout behind him, but didn’t look. Mykel would follow. Mykel would make it. Cage took the stairs three by three. The old man in the yellow robe shouted in terror and fell over himself getting out of the way. From behind Cage came a grunt, then a slap of steel on flesh. Metal clanked across the marble. The flight of stairs was thankfully short, but closed-off at the top by a pair of heavy reinforced doors. Cage prayed they weren’t locked as he launched himself forward.
The doors exploded inward with almost no resistance, and Cage overbalanced, spilling across the floor. Around him, dozens of faces mirrored his astonishment. Men in bright clothing gaped, open-mouthed. A woman clutched her child close against her chest. Another woman dropped her basket of goods. Light was everywhere, and all across the enormous room people stopped what they were doing to stare.
Mykel came through the doors with blood smeared across his face. The guards were hard upon him, rods swinging. Cage rolled away, trying to get to his feet. Too slow; he barely had time to raise an arm against the blow. The steel rod connected with a loud crunch. Cage didn’t scream. His arm changed shape, but he didn’t scream. And when the guard shifted his weight and raised the rod again, Cage offered up the other arm. But this blow was harder, with more carry through, and it crunched down across the other arm and against the side of Cage’s head.
The light wavered. The world beyond Cage drained of substance, became remote. A woman screamed from very far away. Cage could barely see the guard standing above him for all the distance between them now. The guard raised the rod a last time, smiling. Cage noticed then it was the guard he’d hit in the stomach, the guard he’d lowered a shoulder to.
Behind him a man was running across the room. The man wore a yellow robe, but he was younger than the old stick from the exchange zone. He was pushing people out of the way, and shouting…something about children…something that could have been, that might have been, that sounded like, “Stop.”
If the guard heard him, he gave no indication. His smile expanded to a full grin.
Cage turned away, throwing up his crooked arms. The heavy rod fell again, and with it came darkness.
#
It was not like awakening. Consciousness returned to him by small degrees, gathering in his skull like morning light beyond the windows. By the time Cage thought to wonder where he was, something in the back of his mind already knew the answer.
Cage’s arms were splinted and bandaged. A clean white blanket stretched over the contours of his body. Across from him was another bed, empty. A woman entered the room. His head clanged as she shuffled about her business, straightening the corners of his sheets.
“Water,” he said, a cracked whisper.
A smile rounded out the bottom of her round face. “I see you’re feeling better.”
“This can’t be better.”
She poured Cage a glass from a pitcher. “People are talking about what happened. Those guards were animals.”
Cage drank the water; it burned like fire going down. “My friend?”
“He’s fine. He had a clipped wing to match your two, but his head was harder. He’s been released.”
“Released?”
“Yes.”
“Are they sending us back down?”
“No. No, you don’t have to worry about that.”
“Then what’s going to happen?”
She smiled. “You get to stay.”
Cage started to speak again; there was so much he wanted to ask, but his voice gave out.
“Shhh, sit back,” the woman said. She placed a cool hand on his forehead. Her touch was tender. “You need your rest.”
“But–”
“Shh, it is time to rest. You’ve been unconscious for more than a day.”
Cage did as the woman asked. He settled more deeply into the mattress, and he allowed her to pull the covers up to his chin. Behind Cage the sun shone into the room, hot and yellow, brighter than he’d ever seen it before. Cage shut his eyes, letting the glow filter through his eyelids, and soon after, into his dreams.