The Nethers

by M. E. Parker

  Chained to a support beam, Myron slumped in the corner of the depot while two cockrels, what Netherides called Jonesbridge ghosts, sat across from each other at a table, gnawing on salted pork strap.

  When Myron adjusted the heavy chain so that he could sit, the ghost closest to the door chucked a wooden block, used to keep the window propped open, at Myron’s head. “Quiet over there.”

  The corner of the wooden block struck Myron in the forehead. He squinted as the pain shot down to his eyes.

  “Soon as the afternoon patrol gets back—oh, in about half a click,” he glanced out the window, “we’re heading for Jonesbridge.” The ghost pushed his chair back and stood up, glaring at Myron. The ghost went outside to check for signs of the incoming Civility patrol.

  The other ghost knelt beside Myron. “I remember you,” he whispered. “I’ll do what I can to help you. Won’t be easy.” He stood suddenly when the door opened and his partner returned.

  “Wind howling up a cordbuster out there.” The ghost eyed Myron. “Here’s hoping they find a new water hole.” He tossed back a swig of rot onion. His face twisted as the burn hit his throat. “Got to bring some kind of good news back to Jonesbridge—besides this derelict slog.”

  Hearing the word sent a shiver down Myron’s back. Jonesbridge. The salvage factory took shape in his mind, the rows of work benches manned by solemn faces, foremen pacing the floor, the clank of twisted metal, the smell of the furnace, the boom of a heavy crate of recovered war debris.

  The door flew open. Boom, Jonesbridge disappeared. The ghost by the window fell across the table. Boom, the other ghost flew back against the wall, the orange fibers from his shirt blasted like a holiday confetti bomb. Myron’s ears felt as though he were underwater. Blood dripped from the table into a red pool on the floor. Rounder stood with the shotgun, a shell between his teeth, reloading.

  “Don’t look so surprised.” Rounder kicked the chair out from under the slumping ghost. “I wasn’t going to leave you with these cockrels. I just needed two things.” He grabbed the key hanging from a ring on the ghost’s belt. “Some shotgun shells to fight them with, and the combination to their safe.” He laughed. “They gave me both.” He tossed Myron the shackle key.

  Shocked by the noise, the blood, and the sudden change in outlook from free to imprisoned to free again had left Myron reeling. He couldn’t move.

  “Well, come on. When that patrol gets back,” Rounder pointed to the barracks on the other side of the corral, “there’ll be twenty or more of these beak-suckin’ foggers looking to dice into bits whoever’s responsible for this.” He twisted the knob on the safe, stopped, rotated it again, and stopped.

  The safe door creaked open. “Jackpot.” From the safe, Rounder slid a dozen shotgun shells into a burlap bag, throwing in ten sticks of mining ordnance and a metal canister with a conical top closed with a cotter pin. “Get moving.” Rounder slapped Myron across the side of the head. Myron’s eardrums throbbed. Rounder lifted the slumping ghost’s hand on the table and bit off a chunk of the half-eaten strip of salt pork.

  Myron stumbled by the table. The sight of puddles of blood soaking into the dry wood turned his stomach.

  “Why—you didn’t have to kill them.” Myron struggled to breathe. He lifted the face of the ghost who’d whispered promises of escape. “He was gonna help me.” Myron shoved Rounder in the chest.

  “You’re as dumb as you look if you think these folks help anyone but themselves.” Rounder cocked his shotgun. “If that’s the best thank you for saving my sorry life I’m going to get, I should leave you here chained to that post and let the ghost patrol have you.”

  Myron shoved his forearm into Rounder’s throat, pinning him against the wall. “You left me with them in the first place.” He pressed harder until Rounder gagged, until his face turned red and his eyes bulged. “Here’s your thanks.” Myron eased up on the pressure to Rounder’s neck.

  Rounder coughed and shoved clear of Myron, dismissing his display of indignation. “If you aim to stay out of Jonesbridge, you might have to do some killin’. These orange-shirted monsters extend their reach farther west every day.” Rounder rubbed his throat and swallowed. “We don’t stop ’em and we’ll all be headed right back to Jonesbridge in a god-forgotten windowless train car—and the death odor of some poor slog in the dark corner.” He struck the table with the stock of his shotgun.

  Do some killing? Myron often returned in his mind to the Old Age textbooks with word problems for learning math that his grandfather showed him, and, in this way, he framed his confusion into a potential solution, if only to pacify the screaming questions. People killed, it seemed, in far greater numbers than they reproduced—the war with the E’sters, the battles for water, lunatics worshipping the custodian of murder. They ran from each other and either lived free and alone or with others in captivity. At what tipping point, he wondered, would there no longer be any new people to replace the ones who’d died? And slogs couldn’t bear children at all anymore who didn’t come out wrong, destined for death. The killing would have to stop soon.

  “I’ve killed before.” Even then, Myron hadn’t intended to kill, just to stop the ghosts that were raping Sindra.

  “My guess is these orange shirts are up to something.” Rounder’s voice trailed as he turned the corner. “They’ve been out here where they never used to be. Searching. For what? I ain’t sure, but I aim to stop them here.”

  Behind the depot, Rounder took his hatchet to the water cistern supports until they gave way, toppling the cylinder and spilling enough water to quench the thirst for a year. With his hatchet, he scooped some fiery coals from the firebox of one of the nearby steam wagons . He jogged to the barracks and situated the coals so that fire crawled up the building, consuming the dry wood. He did the same thing to the coal shacks before he opened the corral and scared the mules into the desert.

  “They’ll die out there without water.” Myron chased after one of the mules. The mules brayed, circling back into the corral near the burning depot.

  Rounder pointed to a wall of brown haze on the horizon. “We got to get ahead of that sandstorm.” He extinguished the fires from the steam wagons so the orange shirts couldn’t follow. When he reached the landship, he gave Myron the signal to pedal and they sped onto the Old Age highway, glancing back at the mother and her twins and the curtain of sand hanging in the sky behind them.

  Myron rubbed his ankle where the original shackle still pinched his flesh. They traveled in silence until the sun set, forcing them to camp under a washed-out bridge that cut the highway in half. At first light, they left the Old Age paved roadway for a dirt road, a deviation that Rounder claimed would cut a day off of their travel time.

  Near midday, they crested a dune with a clear view of a settlement nestled in the protection of a butte. “Megan’s Point.” Rounder nodded toward the large collection of structures, the closest thing to a thriving town Myron had ever seen. “Thing about this place is, civilization hinges on mystery. No one knows what firepower I got under my tarp, and I don’t know what they got. Megan’s drudgers keep order. Watch yourself. They’ll send us all to the Chasm in a breath.”

  “They have lights.” Myron stared at the strings of twinkling bulbs stretched across the market alley.

  “Don’t be taken in by all the carousing down there. There’s an old woman with a market stall that sells sweet confections, called doughnuts. And that’s the only reason we’re going. In and out. Hear?”

  “Doughnuts?”

  “Like chewin’ on edible gold.” Rounder returned to pedaling. “Got some slick to trade in, too.”

  The Netherides referred to water as a canteen-ready consumable. Slick described a fluid that could be consumed only after a copious amount of filtration and preparation, which included any liquid that fell from the sky and some that flowed on the ground. Slick fell between water and slime, good for steam boilers, as it wouldn’t produce toxic steam like slime. Slime held no value
, except in Mesa Gap where Rounder claimed they could process it with a sort of Old Age magic.

  Megan, Rounder explained, was one of a dozen or so Netheride nobles who ruled their own little fiefdoms in the Nethers. Megan controlled a water filtration apparatus that turned slick into water, for a price ratio of one gallon of slick to one pint of water, an eight to one rip-off, according to Rounder.

  Heat waves on the road looked like puddles of disappearing slick as Myron and Rounder pedaled toward the town gate, which was protected by clusters of wooden spikes, rolls of razor wire, and broken bottles wedged into stacks of rubber tires. The town gate stood open and unguarded, except for the lookout in a turret constructed above the façade of an Old Age storefront bearing a faded sign that read DISCOUNT TIRE.

  A severed head, week-old, shriveled in the sun, dangled from a rope tied through the eye socket. Beneath it hung a sign with a symbol scrawled in blood. “What happened to that guy?” A pang of dread greeted Myron as they rolled past the gate.

  “Gapi don’t have written words. Just pictures. That there is the symbol for thief.”

  The mast of Rounder’s landship banged the DISCOUNT TIRE sign as they entered town, tilting the landship until they corrected course.

  “Megan’s a merchant sort of woman. Commerce and the like. You might get away with killin’ someone around here, but stealing…” Rounder nodded to the severed head. “Stealing don’t work in a place built for buyin’ and sellin’. And Megan, she’ll sell anything for the right price.”

  Rounder parked near a bandstand in the town center, where three windmill generators pierced a hole in the market alleyways covered in low-hanging fabrics and planks to shield the sun. A dozen people on the bandstand banged on barrels and drums, plucked cables, and danced with tambourines.

  A drudger approached the landship and marked it with a coal stick, then made the same mark on Rounder’s arm, temporary parking. If they stayed so long that the symbol on Rounder’s arm, from sweat or heat or crowd, no longer resembled the one on the landship so that Rounder could claim it, Megan would have the ship hauled away to the auction pit.

  The structures in Megan’s Point huddled with one another in a dense jumble, shanties on top of stalls, in, around, and on top of Old Age rubble, mixing the old world with the new in an architectural stew. Aside from the three windmill generators, the tallest buildings, situated just above the fray, were the guard houses where drudgers eyed the goings-on to keep order.

  One of the guards’ eyes stayed fixed on Myron. “Why’s he eyeballing me like that?”

  “Probably looking at them twins behind you.” Mah-ré and Gah-té stood between Myron and their mother.

  “Dosh łéʼétsoh.” Rounder held up two fingers and stepped up to a counter in a shadowy alcove. He dug through his bag and slapped down a chunk of copper ore.

  A woman lifted off her stool and inspected the rock before wagging her finger at Rounder. “Nop.”

  He fished a thin tab of refined copper from his bag and held it up.

  The woman nodded and pulled two wooden cups encrusted with white chalk from under the counter. She filled each one halfway from a spigot under a barrel.

  Rounder reached for the cups as she pushed them forward. “Rat wine. Don’t know what the Chasm it is, but it takes the edge off.” He handed one of the cups to Myron.

  The mother of the twins smacked Rounder in the back of the head and shrugged, as if she’d expected a cup as well. Myron gave her his, and Rounder held up another finger with a sigh, and then three fingers when the twins’ mother made it clear through an insistent gesture that the twins would also partake of the rat wine.

  Rounder snapped a Gapi phrase at the twins’ mother before turning to Myron. “I didn’t take these girls to raise.” He held his cup to his lips. “Might help to hold your nose.” Rounder squeezed his nostrils and tossed his head back, swallowing hard with a grimace.

  The rat wine felt like chewing on a hunk of white-hot coal, something Myron had never done, but his imagination filled in the blanks as the fiery sensation mixed with unexpected chunks of a chalky substance, some that slithered down his throat. The bit he couldn’t bring himself to swallow sat under his tongue while his eyes watered and a bead of sweat rolled down his jaw.

  “Don’t let it linger too long.” Rounder patted Myron on the back.

  The rest of the rat wine slid down Myron’s throat. When he finally opened his eyes, the colors of the market exploded with green and yellow, and, as he followed Rounder to the stall around the corner, the faces in the crowd mingled, forming an image like the one in the kaleidoscope his grandfather had made for him.

  “Jasper.” An old woman left her stall to give Rounder a hug.

  “Hi, Ktala.” He glanced at Myron. “But it’s Rounder now.”

  “I’ve known Jasper since he was no higher than a shin pine,” Ktala said to Myron. She turned to speak to the twins’ mother in Gapi, and they both laughed. Rounder’s face turned red.

  “I know why you’re here. Sure as Chasm ain’t to see your old Auntie Ktala.” She ambled into her stall and returned with a single disc of fried dough, covered in a glaze, with a hole in the middle. “Ain’t had no shipments of confectioner powders going on, oh, ten days.”

  Ktala pulled apart the doughnut and offered one half to Mah-ré and the other to Gah-té. “Made the last batch this morning. Only one left, I’m afraid.” She wagged her finger at Rounder as he watched the girls bite into their treat, staring at them as though they were gnawing on his own flesh. “You wouldn’t deprive these two what you got at their age, would you?”

  Gah-té, with one bite left, nudged it toward Myron. He took the morsel and popped it into his mouth. “How do you say thanks in Gapi?”

  “What does it matter?” As Rounder walked away, Mah-ré gave her last bite to him. He sighed and shook his head. “It’s ahéhee. Thank you.”

  “Ahéhee,” Myron said.

  Where the rat wine had burned, the doughnut dissolved on his tongue in waves of joy.

  “We best get going. Can’t get stuck here. Gates close at night and this place turns into an entertainment for those with sickness of the mind. We need to get out of here. Now.”

  Rounder navigated the growing crowd at the town center, trying to get back to his landship. With the symbol on his arm still fresh, the drudger let him pass. Myron led the twins through a crush of onlookers pushing toward the bandstand.

  With Rounder’s landship now stuck, surrounded by people, Myron stood up on a bench for a better look at the crowd gathered at the edge of the platform. A boy, weathered and weary, whose bones wore his skin the way smock hooks hung burlap, stood as if to lean on an invisible wall behind him. A man in a leather apron pointed. “Here we have what looks to be a healthy boy, ten or so. Make a strong workhand. In a few years, might even be able to help some of you road hags bear a child. Bidding starts at three gallons of slick.”

  A man looked at the woman standing beside him and raised his index finger when the auctioneer rattled off his call.

  “What’s going on?” Myron stretched for a better look.

  “Looks like a slave auction.” Rounder stepped down off the wagon and untied the rope that held his supplies to the landship.

  “People? Sold on the block? That’s not right.”

  “Maybe it ain’t right, but it’d take more bullets than what I got to alter the natural order of things.”

  “Where’d that kid come from?”

  “Who knows? People roam the Nethers searching for something. Most of them aren’t sure what they’re looking for—or if they’d know it if they found it.”

  Myron understood. He wasn’t certain he would know it if he found Bora Bora. How could he differentiate one island from another?

  “One of three things happens to roamers out here.” Rounder pulled out a brown bag filled with prairie bread and shoved a wad into his mouth. “They curl up into a clump of dried flesh and croak.” Crumbs flew from his mouth
as he spoke. “Somebody like that fat jack up there finds them and sells them to the highest bidder. Or, if I find them first, they wind up in Mesa Gap, provided they’re Gapi, or Te Yah reads their intentions to be honorable.” He bit off another chunk of bread. “And that’s it.” He cocked his head and turned back to Myron. “Until now. With orange shirts pushing west, I guess a poor soul is about as likely to wind up in Jonesbridge as anywhere these days.”

  The highest bidder, one of only three interested parties in the crowd of fifty, ended up paying three gallons of slick, a half-crate of coal, a strongbox, and length of rope for the boy on the platform.

  A man in a wide-brimmed leather hat whispered to the auctioneer before he motioned for the next property to step forward. “Next up. A pair. A very healthy pair.” The auctioneer smirked. Another boy sidestepped onto the platform, attached to a woman beside him. Two drudgers armed with popcap bombers stood beside the pair. They were the auction officiators who kept things from getting out of hand.

  “Twelve years old. Strong. Defiant. Claims he and this woman are married—official-like—in the eyes of the Great Above.” The auctioneer raised his palms skyward. “The woman don’t talk, so I won’t press my luck with Judas. These two stay together. Do whatever you want with the boy. After the sale.”

  Myron knew little of Judas except that he was the guardian spirit of betrayers and traitors. A real marriage would involve the blessing of Judas so that the couple would stay true to one another.

  “Let’s get going.” Rounder eyed the sun’s location in the sky—it was dipping toward the horizon. “Hurry.” Rounder motioned for the twins and their mother to return to the landship. Myron detected panic in Rounder’s voice.