by James Bow
We couldn’t raise our cities out of the fog forest fast enough.
We drove anchors into the sides of the cliffs, wove cables, and winched our cities as high as we could go, while still staying in the shadow of the cliffs.
The original Grounders had been scientists, planners: people with expertise in setting up new colonies. They cited “critical populations,” “closed systems” and other reasons why raising our cities was a bad idea. They wanted to get our struggling cities closer to the only source of resources. The hard truth, they told us, was that our colony pods could not survive indefinitely in the air.
But our society had hit the steam and clockwork age from the wrong direction, moving fast. We became conservative, modest and obedient — and we frayed around the edges, developing a lunatic fringe of conspiracy theories and alternate histories. Three generations in, the Grounders were broadly considered the most lunatic of the lot.
Nathaniel Tal had insinuated that Isaac might have been a Grounder. And when Isaac told me that Mom hadn’t committed suicide, he’d said he’d spoken to some people. Were those Grounders?
Worse, could the Grounders be sabotaging the colony? People had nearly died. My brother would never have been involved with any group that got people killed.
Would he?
* * *
Heading back to the infirmary from another “activity of daily living,” I walked through one of the lesser-used corridors. The lights flickered here. I frowned at them.
Two battery boys marched past me, carrying a ladder between them. They opened the ladder at the light. One boy held the ladder while the other — actually a girl — scrambled up. She snatched the battery from its slot and tossed it down. The boy caught it, shoved it into his satchel and tossed another battery up. The girl snicked it in, and the light shone bright. The girl jumped down, the two swept up the ladder between them and went on their way.
I watched them go. They worked eight hours a day, every day, and this was the plum assignment. Behind the doors of the sorting rooms … Nathaniel was right: there were worse things than working at the Communications Hub.
That’s when I heard the whoosh and click behind me. Three metres away, in the middle of a wall, beside the latest inspirational poster from the mayor’s office — MEND AND MAKE DO — was a pneumatic message tube. The little plastic red flag flipped up. I stared. This was a public intake area, not an outlet. Who’d be sending a message here?
Another failure, I thought.
I limped over, opened the hatch and pulled out the canister. There was no address label. Should I take it to the Communications Hub? What would they do?
Muttering a silent apology to the patron saint of privacy, I wrestled open the canister and took out the paper inside. It was a single sheet, folded into a square. I unfolded it.
The time has come for Icarus Down to go to ground.
A bang like a hundred balloons bursting at once made me drop the canister. There was a hiss that sounded like it came from a gigantic snake. A thick white cloud billowed through the corridor toward me. People shouted. Someone screamed; I think it was the battery girl. Steam! I pressed myself against the wall. People ran to escape; others ran to help. The cloud washed over everything; over me. Water beaded on my skin and the air heated up. And still the horrible hissing continued. A burst pipe.
Alarms rang. I couldn’t see the corridor through the cloud, and I knew that running into it would have been foolhardy. I could hear other people coming, but they wouldn’t be here soon enough. The battery girl was still screaming. There had to be something I could do.
Pipes laced through the ceiling. I could see the big pipe that carried the steam from the solar vats to the battery rechargers. Follow that pipe along, down the wall, and —
There! A huge wheel with a handle — a valve. I staggered over, gripped it in both hands and strained. My arms blazed with pain, but I couldn’t think of giving up, not when I could still hear the girl screaming. Just as I offered a silent prayer, the wheel shifted. It was the only encouragement I needed. I heaved. It turned. I turned it until it wouldn’t turn anymore. Behind me, the whoosh of steam ebbed, then stopped. A shocked silence descended upon the corridor.
Then I realized that my hands had cramped. My arms felt as though I’d broken them. I groaned and staggered back, into the arms of a maintenance worker.
“Whoa!” He looked me up and down. “You all right?” I was breathing too heavily to speak. I just nodded.
He glanced at my handiwork. “Quick thinking, there. I think you saved a few lives.”
“Good,” I wheezed. “What happened?”
He looked down the corridor in the direction maintenance and medical crews were already running. “Another failure.” He looked at me. He looked angry. “Grounders.”
* * *
The infirmary was in an uproar when I returned. A lot of people were hurt, and people who had brought the injured were in the waiting area, talking frantically at each other. The message in the canister was in the news — an impressively fast scoop by whoever had first reported it. It put everyone on edge. This wasn’t just a steam-burst. The message made it sabotage.
I wasn’t hurt, but I was exhausted. I headed to my room and was met by Michael, carrying my possessions in a box. He looked harried and angry, but he brightened when he saw me. “Hey!” He shoved the box into my hands. “Congratulations!”
“Uh, why?” I looked at the box. “What’s this?”
“Your belongings. You get to go home!”
“What? Already?” Then I tamped down my protest. “You need the bed, don’t you.”
Michael’s smile was brief. “Yes. Sorry. We’re crashed.” Which is what the people on Icarus Down used to say instead of buried or swamped.
Behind him, a nurse laid out sheets. It looked like I’d never been in the room.
Michael shook my hand carefully and left. There was nothing else to do. So, lugging my box of possessions, I went home.
* * *
What was home, exactly?
When I was small I slept on a purple futon with Isaac. We painted white blotches on it and pretended they were stars. And that was home.
And then Dad died. And Mom …
I don’t think she jumped, Simon.
Well, however she died, she died. They stuck us in the dorms. I was nine and I had a room of my own, ten centimetres wider than the bed it came with. And that was home. Then I went to the flight academy and got a room thirty centimetres wider than the bed. I stuck a star or two on the wall, along with sketches I’d made of ornithopters. I’d never seen a star, of course, but they still meant something to me. They meant home.
My new apartment was near the Communications Hub. The rest of my belongings had been sent from the flight academy and were waiting in a box beside the door. I jiggled my key into the lock, shouldered open the door, and nudged the box inside with my foot. Home.
I was moving up in the world. There was room beside the bed for a whole (small) desk. Also, I’d lucked out in being assigned a room with a window. Propping my cane by my bedside, I looked out. The cables of my city laced around me. Below, the chasm stretched out as a white ribbon between black banks. Sunlight glittered off the silica cap, reflecting into the valley, raising jets of steam from the fog — steam devils, the first signs of Solar Maximum, but far enough away to be safe.
An ornithopter buzzed over the clouds. In the middle distance, at the edge of the cables, the gantry spiders were working, swinging hand over hand.
Hand over hand. I shuddered.
My father had fallen from Iapyx when I was five. Though I hardly remember his face, I remember the elevator ride to see him. Iapyx went past us in flashes: the sparks of welders in the factories, people sitting in offices staring at papers, the green pause of the Great Hall. Mom stood behind us, smiling indulgently.
We reached a viewing gallery at one end of Iapyx, where the city narrowed to a point. All around us, a spider’s web of cables st
retched out to the cliff face, to one of the two great anchors that held us between the chasm walls. The great canopy draped down over us like a blanket, but if I angled my head right, I could see the sunside anchor, punched into the cliffs near the silica cap. Covered in chrome, it reflected the sky, looking to me like a giant teardrop, or a hole cut through the rock.
I pressed my face to the glass and picked out the shapes the wires made around us. Mom knelt beside me. “Can you see Daddy?”
The workers moved along the net of wires, crawling or swinging from one handhold to the next. Suspended over a sea of white, it was as though they were clinging to the only real thing in the world.
Isaac’s breath caught. “Mom? Is that—” He pointed.
I looked up. Mom looked up. Her face changed.
There was a flurry of activity along the wires. Workers were running, crawling or swinging their way toward someone dangling awkwardly from a cable.
“No,” Mom breathed. It was my father who was dangling.
The workers clambered closer.
“It’s okay, Mommy,” I said. “If he falls, the clouds will catch him.”
Then my father had dropped like a pear from a tree. Against the white backdrop, it looked like he was floating in midair.
The clouds caught him. They didn’t give him back.
I looked at the anchor again. It was covered in scaffolding. Workers must be polishing the chrome for Solar Maximum. Life went on.
I opaqued the window. Without another thought, I lay down. I was asleep instantly.
I woke early in the morning. There was still another day before my new job started. I wasn’t looking forward to it, but with a day ahead of not much else, I considered reporting early. Instead, I burned some time by unpacking.
I unpacked a uniform — a jumpsuit with no insignia — socks and underwear, and an envelope of ration chits to buy another off-duty suit. Three books followed, placed on the desk. I set my sewing kit beside them.
Then came the map …
The roll was heavy, handmade paper. It used a lot of fibre and should have been pulped by now, but no one had come to claim it, and I’d never taken it in. It crackled in my hands as I unrolled it. My hands had changed so much since I’d last touched this. For a moment I imagined my mother’s grief had she still been alive: one son burned and broken, the other dead … But she didn’t get to grieve. That was up to me.
I pinned the map to the wall above my bed. It was of Old Mother Earth, Mom’s masterpiece, which had secured her a position in the mayor’s office. She’d painted it herself. The lines were crisp and the colours were bright and beautiful. I’d liked looking at that map, trying to imagine being able to live in all that space. I ran my fingers over the coastlines now, picking out the world powers that had existed on the eve of the Extinction Wars: the United States of Eurasia, the Pan-Polar Confederacy, La Federación de las Américas, the IndoChina Empire.
There was a knock at the door.
I limped over, frowning. Aside from the quartermaster, no one knew where I lived.
It was Rachel.
* * *
She was out of her nurse’s uniform.
Seeing her this way was a shock. I’d only ever seen her at work and, before that, in vocational school, which had its own uniforms. Save for Nocturne, this was the first time I’d seen her in clothes she’d chosen for herself.
Her white leggings and her tunic followed the shape of her body. She had a capelet wrapped over her shoulders, also in white, but with a pattern of ridged texture that gave a checkerboard appearance of light and shadow.
Her hair was out of its snood, twisted up and pinned, exposing the fine hair that tangled on the nape of her neck.
She stood there looking serious, a dark smudge under her eyes that made her look tired. She also looked a little shy. I stared at her until she said, “Well? Can I come in?”
“What?” I found my voice at last. “Of course! Come in!”
I stepped back so fast I bumped into the foot of the bed. She followed me and pushed the door closed. There wasn’t much room. We were standing very close together in that blank and private place. I struggled to think of something to say. The best I could do was, “You look tired.”
She sighed and looked away. “Long night at the infirmary. I’m sorry I wasn’t there to say goodbye. But this is better. I’ve got something for you.” From her pocket, she pulled out a thin red lozenge, as long as the palm of her hand was wide. She held it out between us.
My father’s pocketknife. I took it and looked at it in awe. “How did you—”
“Isaac.”
“Oh.” I turned the pocketknife over in my hands. It was older than the Icarus; it came from Old Earth. I ran my fingers over the edges, and the engraving of a cross on a shield that may have meant something to someone long ago. It was also one of the few things Rachel had left of Isaac. And she’d given this to me.
I looked up at her, feeling a pull at my heart — was it grief? “Thank you. But … why?”
“It’s as much yours now as it is mine,” she said, her voice tight. “And I think maybe you need it more.”
Because he was the only family I’d had left.
But Rachel had lost so much as well. “You should keep this.” I held it out to her.
She shook her head and looked away, her fingers rising to the betrothal charm. “It helps … to give you that. It helps me move on.” Her eyes swung back. They were big, dark eyes I could fall into forever and never want a parachute. “We’ve lost so much. But you can’t get so caught up in what you’ve lost that you lose sight of what you’ve still got. Things change. Sometimes you just have to … move on.”
This time I kissed her.
It wasn’t graceful, but I got an arm around her and pulled her closer, and she leaned into the embrace. When we kissed, my bewilderment and sorrow changed to wings. I could have flown. I put a hand behind her head. We held the kiss a long time before we pulled apart.
I was breathless. Rachel looked down, shy. Then her face changed. She looked around, like a pilot gathering her bearings. With one arm still around me, she reached up and pulled the light chain.
Darkness. We were alone in a private room, and Rachel was holding me. “Um,” I said.
“Look around,” she whispered.
Look around at what? I could barely see the curve of her throat and the uptwist of her hair. There was not enough light to — but then I realized: there was some light. With the window opaqued, the door closed, there was still light: a spot on the wall near my mother’s map was glowing as faintly as the memory of a star.
“It’s—” I turned toward it.
Rachel put both arms around me. “A spyhole,” she whispered. Her breath was warm against my collarbone. “I thought they might put one in. Act naturally. I think we’re being watched.”
“Act … naturally?” I at least had the sense to whisper. “Rachel, how can I act naturally when there’s a spyhole in my room? Why is it there?”
She held me, as if she were comforting me. “It’s because of me. It’s because of Isaac.”
“Isaac—” I began, but she covered my mouth with a hand.
She laughed; a light laugh that echoed around the empty room. “Of all the times for a failure,” she said — and turned the light back on. I blinked, stunned into stupidity. We were being watched. Maybe right this moment, we were being watched.
Then Rachel kissed me and my thoughts stopped. I forgot the eyes on me. Her kisses travelled up my cheek, and she whispered in my ear, “There are things you need to know. About me. About Isaac. About your mother. We’ve got to go somewhere truly private. I’ll explain everything. Keep kissing me.”
A cover: the kissing was a cover. My stomach dropped. But I kissed her throat. “Okay,” I mumbled. “Where?”
She pulled away, clasped my hands, and spoke loudly. “So! What movie are we to see?”
* * *
We went to the Great Hall. Rachel p
icked out a spot near the top of the grassy amphitheatre, close to the projector hut. We sat among a few dozen other people. From behind the darkened window of the squat hut, the projector started up. The lights dimmed.
The movie opened with scenes of rolling hills and trees. I drew back, struck by the beauty of Old Mother Earth. An ocean.
Rachel leaned into my shoulder. “Simon,” she whispered. “I’m going to say something you’ll find alarming. We’re being watched.” She gripped my hand. “Don’t look around. There are two security officers here. They’re in the last row.”
I started to stand up.
She gripped my arm. “Don’t attract attention.”
“Okay,” I breathed. The feel of Rachel this close to me, combined with all the secrets, made it impossible to follow the film’s plot. Still, we waited until it was over. Then we shuffled up the incline with the rest of the crowd.
“Get ready,” she whispered.
We walked close to the projector hut. Then she dodged to the door and pulled me inside. I staggered in the sudden darkness. The room was empty. The projectionist must have stepped out on break.
Rachel locked the door. “This way.”
It’s hard to be quiet and fast at the same time, especially in the dark. “Where the— ow! What are we doing here? They’ll have no problem finding us; there’s no back way out!”
“Yes, there is. Mind these boxes.”
“What boxes? Ow!”
She guided my hands to a set of what felt like pipes attached to the wall. Rungs, I realized. A ladder. “Watch your step: there’s a drop.”
My heart stuttered as my feet stepped out over nothing, and then found a rung with ankle-jarring certainty.
“Go down,” she said. “I’ll follow.”
We climbed down to the levels below the Great Hall. Footsteps thumped above me. The doorknob rattled. There was a jangle of keys. A click as a light went on above us.
My feet touched solid ground. Rachel took my hand and led me around towers of film canisters.
“I didn’t know all this was here,” I whispered.
“That’s because you never tried out for the drama program. The trap door to the stage is just past here.”
