Downsiders

by Neal Shusterman

  “Yeah,” he said, squeezing her hands. “Guess I can’t even die right.”

  He gave her a grin, then lost himself in the embraces of his parents and little Pidge, who never believed he was dead anyway. Then he forced himself free from the loving arms encircling him, pushing his way forward to where the Wise Advisors stood with Railborn. Even the Wise Advisors were shaking in their boots, for few things are more dangerous than a dead man who can still tell a tale.

  “Your presence here is a surprise to us, Talon,” said the First Advisor, her voice far thinner than usual. “Perhaps you can explain it.”

  Talon looked around at the awed crowds and chose his words wisely. “The Fates saw fit to pull me from the funerary pipe before I reached its destination,” he said. “You sent me to be judged in the world beyond. Consider my return as the judgment passed.”

  Talon paused and looked at Railborn, who stood dumb-founded in the company of the Wise Advisors. Talon offered him a grin. “Hi, Railborn.”

  Railborn didn’t answer—he only stared, aghast.

  Talon took a deep breath. He had heard Railborn’s plan as he lingered at the back, before making his presence known. A week ago, he would have been the one lifting Railborn on his shoulders, ready to leap into his utility war—but things change. “I’ve seen a vision of the Topside, Wise Advisor,” he said, once more choosing his words with caution.

  “What was your vision?” asked the Second Advisor.

  “I saw a world that stretches beyond sight. A vast place, with more people than one could count in a lifetime.”

  “And all of them dependent on us!” shouted Railborn, trying to bring the attention back to his war plan.

  Talon pursed his lips and spoke softly to his friend. “Maybe not.”

  Railborn’s face hardened, as if he had been struck in the face. “Maybe you’ve gone over to their side.”

  “If I had, I wouldn’t be here.”

  “Enough!” shouted the Fourth Advisor, and he turned to the enforcers beside him but spoke loud enough for everyone to hear. “Have the undertaker arrested. Clearly he sabotaged the execution.” And then he turned to Railborn.

  “Railborn, as man of the hour, we leave it up to you— what shall be done with Talon Angler?”

  Talon smiled at him, glad to be left in the hands of his friend, and ready to concede that his return had been easier than he had thought.

  But Talon wasn’t the only one who had changed over the past few days.

  Railborn saw this as a test. A test by the Advisors before the whole Downside, and everything hinged on whether or not he passed it. All his life he had lived in Talon’s shadow, and here, again, his time of glory was eclipsed by Talon’s unfathomable return from the dead. And even though Talon’s return released Railborn from his deep guilt, it also heralded the death of himself as anything more than just Skeet Skinner’s unremarkable son. It would all be over, unless he passed this test the Advisors had set before him. There was only one way for him to succeed now.

  “This vision of the Topside sounds like the ravings of a lunatic,” Railborn finally said. “So I say he belongs in the Chamber of Soft Walls, until his mind returns!”

  Talon locked eyes with Railborn, the betrayal now lying naked between them, and as much as Railborn wanted to look away in shame, he didn’t. “I’m sorry, Talon,” he whispered. This time it was Talon’s turn to stare, speechless.

  “No!” shouted a voice in the crowd. It was Gutta. She hurled a look at Railborn that went miles beyond disgust, and then dismissed him entirely, pushing her way toward Talon even as the enforcers grabbed him and led him away.

  The Fourth Advisor slunk up beside Railborn. “You continue to surprise me,” he said, clearly pleased. But it only made Railborn feel all the more empty. It didn’t make a difference what he did now, or how the campaign against the Topside went, or even if he rose to Most-Beloved. For he had just lost everything that mattered, and now Railborn knew, even more than Talon, how it felt to die.

  The Festival of Outages

  The next day, the power went out on the island of Manhattan. It happened at noon. Then, two hours later, all gas appliances ceased to function as well—and an hour after that, faucets coughed, sputtered, and gave up the ghost, followed by the phones. By 4:30, people began to notice sewer lines backing up into drains around the city, in spite of the fact that no one was able to flush anymore. Then, by sundown, sensing that the timing would never be so perfect, the garbage men went on strike, putting a rather zesty cherry on top of the city’s nightmare sundae.

  The only machinery left working was the clockwork of blame, whose heavy hands were all beginning to point toward Mark Matthias.

  “Such a massive utility shutdown,” concluded the various heads of the various utility bureaucracies, “could only be caused by someone mucking around deep below the surface.” And everyone knew who the city’s biggest mucker-upper was. Mark Matthias went from urban Indiana Jones to Public Utility Villain faster than you can say, “Help, I’m stuck in the elevator.”

  Meanwhile, the gas company, phone company, and the Department of Water and Power mobilized every emergency unit they could find to end the crisis, but to no avail...for as soon as the crews would think they had isolated the source of the problem, that source would move elsewhere.

  Nothing in the history of the city had so successfully crippled it—but the effect was not what one might expect. While it is well-known that big-city breakdowns often lead to wild looting binges, it’s also well-known that New Yorkers hate to be told what to do. Thus, the collective consciousness of the city decided that the looting trend was as passé as last year’s fashions. Instead, most chose to see this like a cruise ship stuck on a sandbar. What else is there to do but party?

  Warmer weather had moved in, bringing people out into the streets in droves. Supermarkets donated food before it spoiled. Bottled water companies called in their trucks from across the nation, and before long the city had become the single largest block party on record. It was instantly proclaimed “the Festival of Outages” by the mayor, who suggested that the utilities be shut down once every year in the name of conservation and community relations.

  That night, Eighty-fourth Street was awash with people cooking up ethnic foods over trash-can barbecues. Todd organized a dance on the Matthias’s roof, charging his guests two D batteries for admission, thereby assuring that his portable CD player would never run out of tunes.

  Lindsay observed all of this with a wild sense of amusement and the guilty pleasure of knowing something that nobody else did. She instinctively sensed that this utility fiasco was of Downside doing, and she wondered if they had any idea how many millions of people they had successfully inconvenienced.

  All the more reason to find her way down there again and to give them the larger perspective of the world that they so needed. With the Brass Junction shattered, and their world exposed to the scrutiny of the sunlit world, they could no longer live in secrecy. They would be forced to shed their ignorance. Lindsay found herself in the unique position to help them through it—both her and Talon. Lindsay fancied herself a missionary, bringing them the light of Heaven in a very literal sense and putting it into Talon’s hands. The hard part was finding her way back down, for The Champ’s abandoned pool was still full of water, and she didn’t dare venture into the subways again, even if the trains weren’t running.

  When the answer finally came, it struck her with more than a little bit of irony that the threshold of the Downside had been right in front of her nose—but her nose was buried in a microfilm machine.

  It was her father who first told her about the curious history of New York City’s main library back when she first arrived, in an attempt to dazzle her with a tower of architectural tidbits. The short version of the story was that the library was built on the city’s old reservoir, and, like a sidewalk tree, the library’s roots extended out unseen beneath the streets.

  “There are rooms within
rooms within rooms down there,” her father had told her. “Places that no one has been for ten, maybe twenty years.”

  What he was describing, although he didn’t know it, was a classic interface to the Downside. And so, while everyone else was dancing in the streets, Lindsay took her folder of century-old news articles, complete with her own theories and extrapolations, and set off for the library.

  With no electricity, the library was closed, of course, but that also meant that the security systems weren’t working and an enterprising person could find a way in.

  Turns out, getting in was disappointingly easy. All Lindsay had to do was wait until the posted guard got up to relieve himself in one of the nonfunctioning bathrooms. Lindsay simply slipped in through the front door and, with flashlight in hand and a crowbar in her backpack, descended to the library’s lower levels.

  Once there, she found a door labeled RESTRICTED ACCESS —AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, an invitation if ever there was one. Lindsay stepped through and found that she had entered the catacombs.

  There, in the library’s decrepit bowels, she had a clear and chilling vision of history decomposing. She found dust-covered shelves and half-opened vaults filled with the knickknacks of ages. Age-old historical letters of great significance. Death masks of renowned poets, and curious objects of unknown origin that someone deemed worthy of cataloging. She wondered if the great library at Alexandria could ever have been so eerily exotic as this place.

  She ventured though one open vault door into another, then descended a staircase, its stone steps layered in dust like a gray fall of snow. It was clear that no one had ventured down here since before she was born. She turned the corner and found herself in a hallway with no shelves, and at the very end, a black iron door that looked like none of the others. There was no lock on that door, or more accurately, the one that was there had been worn away by decades of rust. She pushed it open with a squeaking complaint and found herself on a catwalk in a stone space about ten feet high.

  This, she thought, must have been left over from the old reservoir. A ladder led her down to a floor flooded in two inches of brackish water, and there on the wall, just above the water level, was a grate breathing a steady flow of warm air that smelled very different from the bitter odor of mildew around her. There was also the far-off sound of children. She had found her entryway!

  Ignoring the icy water at her feet, Lindsay pried open the grate with the crowbar, then forced her way through the hole, leaving behind the library bowels and entering the Downside.

  Once through the vent-hole, she quickly got to her feet. She didn’t need her flashlight anymore. The place was lit well enough to see—apparently electricity still flowed freely down here. She took in her surroundings. This wasn’t a place that Talon had shown her. She was looking at an old steam engine, and although it sat on a single piece of track, it was walled in on all sides, leaving only a low doorway for people to come and go.

  The train was painted in bright primary colors and was swarming with small children. As soon as they saw her, the games ended and they became quiet, staring in the way small children do when they don’t know whether to heed their fear or curiosity.

  “Children, go home,” said a woman as she came around from the other side of the play-train. Although the woman’s hair and clothes were clearly Downside, the look on her face was universal. She moved out in front of the children, ready to do battle with this intruder as the kids funneled out through the low doorway. Do I really look that dangerous? Lindsay wondered.

  “Go out the way you came,” the woman demanded, and then she swallowed, “...or I will have to kill you.” But clearly the woman had no weapon, and there was no bite to her threat.

  “I mean you no harm,” Lindsay said, then rolled her eyeballs at how stilted it sounded. She might as well have said, “I come in peace. Take me to your leader.”

  “Others are coming,” threatened the woman. “Leave now.”

  But Lindsay just took a step closer, and the woman took a step back, maintaining five feet of air space between them. “I can’t leave,” she said. “I have to speak to Talon. Talon Angler.”

  The woman’s eyes seemed to change at the mention of his name.

  “Do you know him?” Lindsay asked.

  She didn’t answer, but her body language told Lindsay all she needed to know. It was as if Talon’s very name was the password. She wondered what had happened when he returned here, that could make the mention of his name have such sway.

  “I know it’s dangerous,” Lindsay pressed, “but it will be more dangerous if I don’t see him.”

  Lindsay waited, and waited a moment more, saying nothing until the woman finally said, “I’ll take you to him.”

  Just like anywhere else in the world, the Downside had its less attractive spots. The Chamber of Soft Walls was a nasty cavernous space padded on every side by old mildewed mattresses, and populated by all those considered in their wrong mind.

  As Lindsay peered through the barred window, she couldn’t help thinking of something she had heard of in history class: an oubliette, the forgetting place—a miserable medieval dungeon where offenders too unimportant to torture were thrown in and left to die. Of course, the plates of food and the cleanliness of these Downside prisoners’ clothes showed Lindsay that the people here were adequately cared for, but it didn’t change the fact that they were put here to be forgotten.

  A guard who had been away from his post returned with enough intimidation to make up for his absence. “What business do you have here?” the guard asked with a stern voice.

  “None,” said the woman who had led Lindsay there. “But she does.”

  The guard scanned Lindsay up and down, quickly reading the foreignness of her clothes. His eyes darted nervously, unprepared for a Topsider in his jurisdiction.

  “She’s from the Surface,” said the woman.

  “I can see that,” sneered the guard, insulted to be taken for an idiot.

  When he turned back to Lindsay, there seemed less fear in his eyes and more hopefulness. Although he must have been in his thirties, he suddenly looked many years younger.

  “Are you here to see Talon?” he asked in little more than a whisper.

  When Lindsay nodded, he took a step closer. “Is it true the things he says about the Topside?”

  Lindsay shrugged. “I don’t know what he said.”

  He nodded as if in some profound understanding, then turned the key in the rusty door and flung it open with a painful arthritic complaint of old metal hinges.

  Lindsay took a step toward the door, but before she passed into the Chamber of Soft Walls, the guard stopped her with a beefy hand on her shoulder. “You know,” he said, “not all of us want to see Talon in there.”

  And finally Lindsay understood why she had been allowed to get this far. There was dissent in the Downside— real dissent—perhaps for the first time in its history. And Talon was at the center of it.

  Lindsay took a deep breath, feeling the sudden weight of a world on her shoulders. Even though that world was not her own, it was still oppressively heavy. She opened her backpack, pulled out the folder of Downside truths she had brought with her, then crossed the threshold.

  The cavern was sparsely populated. Apparently not many people were consigned to this soft corner of hell, and Talon was easy to spot. He sat by himself in a far-off corner. She slowly approached him, awkwardly navigating the floor made of wall-to-wall mattresses. It was like walking on a trampoline. Although she was happy to see him, his circumstance and the gravity of her task stole from her the joy she wanted to feel.

  Talon looked up to her from where he sat, eating a bowl of stew. His spoon missed a beat, but then he continued.

  He won’t show me his surprise, she thought, but then she realized that it was more than just surprise. He was hiding his humiliation at being found like this.

  “Did they catch you and bring you here,” he asked, “or are you ‘just visiting�
�?”

  She smiled, catching his meaning right away. “Just visiting,” she said. “If you like, I could help you roll doubles to get out.”

  He refused to return her smile, so she kept her distance.

  “How did you get in here?”

  “I used my Topsider wiles,” she said. “And, besides, you have a lot more friends than you realize.”

  He sighed bitterly. “Anyone crazy enough to return from the dead doesn’t have friends. Just enemies and followers.” He put down his bowl of stew. “I don’t want either.”

  Lindsay sat down beside him, leaning back against a padded wall, and waited to see if he would move away. He didn’t. “I’m sorry they put you in this place,” she told him. “But I’ve brought something that could get you out. Something important.”

  Again, he tried to hide his feelings, but his curiosity leaked through the cracks in his facade. “Important to whom?”

  “To you...to the guard at the door...to the people who put you in this place. To everyone in the Downside.” She could tell when he began to sense how truly important this was. She held the folder out to him, but he made no move to take it.

  “I’ve always believed,” she said, “that the truth can fix anything, no matter how messed up things get. Now that the Topside knows you’re here, maybe the truth is the only thing that can fix it...make things easier on the Downside.”

  “The Topside doesn’t know we’re here,” he reminded her. “They’ve seen some of our works, but they haven’t found us.”

  “But they will.”

  Talon looked away, not able to deny it. “The others think they can beat the Topside with this utility war, but they can’t. The Topsiders will keep digging until they root us out, won’t they?”

  Lindsay nodded sadly. “There’re probably more people working for the Department of Water and Power than your entire population.”

  Talon turned his eyes upward, and she could see tears forming. “Imagine that,” he said. Then he reached out, and for a moment, Lindsay thought he was reaching for her. She would have taken his hand, comforted him, but it was the folder he was reaching for. He grasped it, and Lindsay let it pass from her hands into his.