Downsiders

by Neal Shusterman

  “Your world will survive,” he said again. “But mine will not.”

  He was out the door not a second later, without taking as much as his Topside parka to protect him from the unforgiving cold.

  Lindsay could have let him go.

  She could have stood there in her warm living room, blaming her father and his miserable aqueduct. She could have thrown up her hands, pretending that this was all above and beyond her. It would have been so easy to stave off making up her mind until it was too late to do anything about it. But she cared too much about Talon and the Downside to allow either his superstitious beliefs or her own rationalizations to corner her into inaction. Nobody’s world was going to end just because of a falling dump truck, and Talon was not going to disappear into some hole, out of her life again.

  Wasting no time, she took to the street after him.

  He was not hard to find. As surefootedly as he moved in the Downside shadows, he was as clumsy as an ox when it came to negotiating Topside streets. He smashed his shin on a fire hydrant, and skidded in something a neighbor’s dog left on the sidewalk. It slowed him down enough for her to catch up with him just as he reached the corner and leaped into the darkness of a subway station. She followed him down.

  “Talon! Talon, wait!”

  If he heard her, he didn’t acknowledge it. She saw him run into a turnstile, but since he had no token, it didn’t budge, and he flipped awkwardly over the bar. But he barely lost momentum, and she found herself losing time as she crawled beneath the turnstile bar rather than search for a token.

  He raced to the end of the station, his feet pounding on the yellow caution line at the edge of the platform. Then he leaped off, and disappeared down the tunnel.

  Lindsay hesitated, but only for a moment. He had entered the High Perimeter. Well, perhaps he knew how to move through these dark places, but her determination had to count for something. She jumped from the platform, stumbled on the wet, muck-filled ground between the rails, then took off into the darkness, ripping off her coat, trying to feel the air around her with the fine hairs of her arms.

  Five minutes later, at the end of her breath, she stopped. The tunnel was absolute pitch-black now. She turned to the left and right, listening to the dead air around her, fearing Talon had taken off down some other connecting tunnel, or worse, found a doorway that led him back to the Downside. She listened for his footfalls, but all she heard was the distant rumble of countless trains racing beneath the city.

  “Talon, I’m not letting you run away—do you hear me?”

  No answer. And then, in a moment, she realized that she had lost track of which direction she had come, or which direction she faced.

  “Talon?”

  The fear hit her then, petrifying her in this darkness between worlds. I am alone and lost in a place where sane people don’t go. She took a step forward, then stopped. The third rail. Was it off to her right, or left? In the subway stations, that lethal electrified rail was covered by a protective sheath, should some idiot happen to leap to the tracks, but here in the deep, intestinal maze of the subway lines, no protection was provided. Here, one misplaced footfall could be her last.

  She reached her hands forward, and they met with rough stone. She still would not move her feet. Then the air pressure around her began to change. She could feel her ears threatening to pop, the way they did in an airplane or fast elevator. And with the change in air pressure came a rumble, and a faint light from far off.

  She didn’t need to be told what that meant.

  As the light increased, she thought it might help her get her bearings long enough to find a way out of the path of the approaching train, but what she saw in the tunnel around her was even worse than the darkness. This wasn’t a wide space filled with many parallel tracks and pillars. This was a single, narrow, black stone tunnel, with a curved roof and no gaps in the stone into which she could crawl. It’s like the inside of a coffin, thought Lindsay, and the association made her stomach shrivel into a tight little knot.

  Now the air began to breeze past her with greater urgency, and the oblique light revealed its source—a pair of headlights coming around a distant bend, lighting the tracks in a shining wedge that led directly to her.

  She began to run, cursing her luck, and wondering why it now seemed her lot in life to be trapped in tunnels in the path of deadly things. She ran, praying for the tunnel to open up, or at least provide a doorway or grotto she could hide in, but there was nothing but the dead black walls on either side as the light grew around her, making the tip of her long, ghostly shadow fall thirty feet away.

  The conductor blasted his horn idiotically, as if there was something she could do, and then, just before the train overtook her, she was clipped from the side, and smashed, her back to the wall. At first she thought it was the train itself, but when she looked up, there was a figure before her, pressing her against the wall.

  “Don’t move,” Talon said. “Don’t even breathe.”

  He pressed closer still, spreading his hands against the wall, his fingertips hooked into the tiniest gap between the stones, trying to flatten both their bodies against the unyielding tunnel wall.

  The train exploded past them, each car passing with a WHOOSH—WHOOSH—WHOOSH, the windows a blur of light just inches away. With her head turned to the side, she could see Talon’s fingers splayed and sinewy, gripping that tiny space, fighting the awful underdraft that now tried to tear them from the wall and hurl them beneath the wheels. She felt Talon losing his grip—she felt him falling away. She fell as well, unable to hear her own scream in the roaring tunnel...

  ...And they both found themselves almost tumbling into the eddies of wind left by the train’s passage.

  “Don’t you Topsiders have the sense to feel the rail for trains before entering a ‘Null Tunnel’?”

  As the last of the light faded, Lindsay noticed one more thing. The pop-top vest he had worn for as long as she had known him was gone, and there, on the ground were its remnants, shredded and twisted.

  “Talon—are you hurt?”

  It was dark again, and now she could see neither his state nor the expression on his face. She reached out and felt his shoulder, reaching around to his back. He pulled away...but not before she felt something wet, sticky, and warm. “You’re bleeding.”

  “The train scraped against my back.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “As all right as I need to be.” But the answer wasn’t too convincing.

  He took her hand, as he had done in their first trip through the darkness, and led her to a place where the Null Tunnel opened up once more into a labyrinth of switching tracks and alcoves of high-perimeter grime. She couldn’t see it, but now she could feel the difference in the air, and in the sound of their footfalls.

  “Don’t seek me anymore, Lindsay. Don’t even think of me.”

  There was a finality—a decisiveness—in his voice that Lindsay found as devastating as the sight of the approaching train had been. “What do you mean? What are you saying?”

  “From this moment forward, it must be as if we never met,” he told her. “I thought I could leave the Downside and run from the Fates—but look what’s happened. The Fates have made their wishes known.”

  “How do you know?” demanded Lindsay.

  “I know, because everything we do together, we do in danger.”

  She had no response to that, because, in spite of all her protests, she knew exactly what Talon meant. Were “the Fates,” as Talon called them, punishing them for their audacity, or were they challenging them to rise above all this? It seemed to Lindsay that the Fates showed different faces, depending on how you looked upon them—but she had no clue which perspective was true anymore. She felt as lost as she had back in the Null Tunnel.

  And then something occurred to her. She thought again of The Champ, who knew more about the Downside than he would say. There certainly was more to know, if only Lindsay could uncover it. If sh
e could offer him a truth about himself and his world—if she could dispel his superstitions and fill his ignorance with understanding—there would be no need for him to run from her.

  “What if...what if the Downside’s not the place you think it is?” she asked Talon. “What if I could find a truth that’s not written on the Rune Chambers’ walls, and prove that you have every right to come Topside whenever you want?”

  “Don’t speak of things you know nothing about,” he said, with a touch of indignance in his voice, which reminded her of that bold boy who had come to her house on New Year’s Eve.

  “But if I could prove that there’s no reason why Downsiders and Topsiders can’t mix—”

  “Then our problems would be solved...but you won’t find such a truth, because it doesn’t exist.”

  Talon led her to a ladder, lit by a crosshatch of dim light, indicating a grate far above. “Good-bye, Lindsay,” he said simply, placing her hand on the rung, and then he disappeared once more into the darkness.

  Well, thought Lindsay, as she climbed, maybe he thinks it’s good-bye, but he’ll be in for a surprise. Perhaps Talon saw his own life as a Null Tunnel now—locked on a single course that seemed destined as inescapable. But Lindsay would rescue him from his Downside straight and narrow. She would seek the truth, and it would set them both free.

  Countermeasures

  In those first few hours after the Brass Junction was breached, the Downsiders did not sit idly by to watch their world be invaded. Rather, they had been quite industrious in booby-trapping the tunnels that led from the Brass Junction. Trip wires were set to open sewer valves on the unsuspecting invaders. Blockades of mortar and cow skulls were built to deter the encroaching Topsiders, who were believed to be of limited intelligence and easily frightened away. But if these tricks failed, more drastic measures would need to be taken, and no one could agree on what those measures should be.

  Thus, the benevolent anarchy that had maintained the Downside through this decade without a Most-Beloved was quickly deteriorating into the type of anarchy in which heroes and leaders were forged. The Wise Advisors knew this—unfortunately, they also knew that they themselves would never be mistaken for either heroes or leaders. If they weren’t careful, the people would dredge themselves up a champion of their own—an idea wholly indigestible to the Advisors. What they needed was a prechewed candidate, easily swallowed, and less likely to give the Wise Advisors acid indigestion. And so, when people came to them asking what they were doing to end this Topside onslaught, they would tell them they were consulting with young Railborn Skinner, who had some brilliant ideas.

  This was news to Railborn, because although he did have some ideas, he had never shared them with the Wise Advisors. For several days now, the Advisors had been lauding his upstanding qualities in public, and inviting him and his family to dine with them each night. Naturally, other Downsiders just assumed that his status in this highest circle had been developing over many months, not just several days. In fact, the Advisors treated him as if they knew him all his life—and when they would call him over to include him in some weighty business, he would turn around, still thinking they must be talking to someone behind him.

  “We see great promise in you,” they told him, in front of enough witnesses to make it stick. “We always have.” Apparently they saw in him a light he often dreamed he possessed, but never seriously believed, and Railborn wasn’t about to question their motives or their sincerity.

  The result of all this was that friends and acquaintances who had mostly ignored Railborn in the past now stood when he entered a room and made him the center of attention. Strangers began to ask his advice on matters he knew nothing about. People liked him—everyone liked him—and it almost made up for the fact that he hadn’t really liked himself much since sending Talon to his death.

  But no one knew that he was the one had who squealed on Talon. No one but the Advisors, and they kept it their little secret, holding it over his head like a dark sword.

  On that dread day when Talon was sent to final judgment, he and Gutta had rested from their Hunting duties to mourn the passing of their friend. Although Railborn’s heart pounded out a heavy beat of guilt, and although he felt sure that the blame of Talon’s death shrouded his face like a birth-caul, Gutta never suspected. She cried in his arms that day, and he found himself shamefully grateful that he, Railborn, whom she had always ignored, was now her comfort in this time of despair. But still, he had the undeniable feeling that she would much rather have been crying in Talon’s arms over Railborn’s death.

  He took audience once more with the Fourth Advisor, to bare the guilt that he could bare to no others.

  “Your guilt is pointless—be rid of it,” the Advisor told him. “What’s done is done. Think no more of it. Think only to your future, Railborn, which, I assure you, will be a fine one...as long as you do as we say.”

  The grin on the Advisor’s face spoke volumes to Railborn. He knew that the last Most-Beloved had risen to the position at the age of fourteen, because while an adult could rarely be universally loved, everyone could love the right kid.

  And so, when disaster fell from above, destroying the Brass Junction, and the entire Downside prepared to gather for what was perhaps the most important meeting in Downside history, Railborn found himself full of good ideas and poised to be that right kid, in the right place, at the right time. In fact, the Wise Advisors were counting on it.

  What they were not counting on was the return of Talon Angler, and the tenacious research of a Topside girl.

  While Talon haunted the High Perimeter, trying to decide the proper time and trajectory of his reentry into the Downside, Lindsay dove full tilt into detective work.

  Lindsay knew that Talon had been browbeaten and ham-strung by the events around him, and so nothing short of a complete enlightenment would turn him around. And then maybe, if it came to it, they could both be emissaries, easing the Downside back into a Topside world.

  Her father and Todd had gotten home sometime during the night, and as they ate breakfast that morning, watching the morning news, her father was a bundle of nervous energy. “There’s a tunnel down there that seems to run from the tip of Manhattan all the way up through the Bronx,” he said, bouncing in his chair like a little kid on a sugar rush.

  “I know, I saw it,” muttered Lindsay. “Careful of the cows.”

  But as she expected, her father didn’t even hear her. “We don’t have to spend fifteen years building an aqueduct! Someone built it for us!”

  On the news, they discussed how “unforeseen obstacles” were preventing the excursion from proceeding too quickly. “Like any other archaeological find, we must proceed slowly and with prudence,” said a bespectacled man, who was covered in sludge.

  “It might take some time,” chimed in her father, “but whatever’s down there—we’ll find it!”

  At school, Lindsay spent her lunch period searching the school’s meager library and the Internet for a hint of the elusive Mr. Beach, but ultimately realized that if she was going to find anything, she would have to go to the public library—and not just any old branch, but the big one on Forty-second Street, guarded by those famous granite lions. The hallowed halls of knowledge.

  “Not a chance,” said Todd as they left school that day. “I’m heading over to the Shaft, to see if they’ve dug up anything new and exciting. You have to stay home, or come with me.”

  “What if I do your next term paper for you?”

  Todd dished her up a gloating Cheshire grin. “In the spirit of free trade in a global economy, I’m always willing to negotiate.”

  And that was that. Lindsay bought her freedom, and now was even more determined that if she was to become an indentured servant to Todd, this afternoon would be time well spent.

  “What is it you’re trying to find?” Becky Peckerling asked, hovering around the microfilm machine Lindsay worked on. Although it had been easy to dispense with Todd, it pro
ved a greater challenge to shed Becky, who was eager to report to the rest of the school any new and inexplicable freakish things that Lindsay did. So, while Lindsay spun through endless microfilm of hundred-year-old newspapers, Becky buzzed around her like a moth at a porch light.

  “If you told me what you were looking for, maybe I could help.”

  “I’m looking for Alfred Beach,” Lindsay told her.

  Becky furrowed her eyebrows. “Is that on Long Island?” she asked, then went into a soliloquy on why Jones Beach was better than Rockaway, unless of course, you were a member of a beach club. It was somewhere during this tirade that Lindsay’s eyes locked on a faded microfilm image of a mustached man, and a front-page headline that read “Beach’s Wonder Down Under.” After almost an hour of searching, it was a thrilling sight, and her heart missed a beat.

  “Personally, I don’t like the locker rooms at public beaches,” continued Becky.

  Thinking quickly, Lindsay reached into her bag, and pulled out a book she had checked out for an English project, then feigned a worried look. “Oh no! How did this book get in here? Todd needs it right away! Hey...maybe you could bring it to him!”

  “Todd?” Becky’s eyes peeled like a deer on the interstate. Like so many girls at Icharus Academy, Becky admired Todd from afar—which is really the only way one could admire him. “You want me to take something to Todd?”

  “Yes—he’s over at the Aqueduct Shaft. I’ll bet he’ll really appreciate it.”

  “You think?”

  “I do.”

  Becky took a deep breath, grabbed the book, and happily pranced off. Lindsay wondered if Becky would even notice that the book she was traveling across town to place in Todd’s hands was a volume of Shakespearean love sonnets.

  With Becky dispatched, Lindsay leaned in close to the machine and began to read that first article, which led her to another, which led her to another, until she found herself immersed in an intrigue that had begun more than a hundred years before she or Talon were born....