Downsiders

by Neal Shusterman

  “You really think they’ll kick it?”

  “They already have.” Then he cleared away the wrappers before him to reveal a piece of official city stationery beneath it. The letter written on the paper bore a single line, and a space for her father’s signature.

  “They’ve requested my resignation.”

  Lindsay noticed a pen near the letter of resignation, lethally poised like a pistol. She wondered how long her father had been sitting there, contemplating that pen.

  He blinked slowly, as if even his own eyelids were now a burden. “I put five years into building this aqueduct. Now they’re taking it away from me...” His voice trailed off, and his gaze turned to the pen.

  Perhaps it was the knowledge of what else was at stake today in the tunnels down below, or perhaps some of Todd’s insensitivity had finally rubbed off on her, but Lindsay found herself wanting to shake her father. It’s just a hole in the ground, she wanted to say...but as she looked at him, she realized it wasn’t just the hole he was seeing. He was seeing everything else that would be sucked into that hole: his career, his home, but most of all, his dignity. And it occurred to Lindsay that he wasn’t all that different from Talon—for her father, too, would be losing his world today.

  For the first time in as long as she could remember, Lindsay wanted to reach across that precarious chocolate wrapper chasm to him, but she had no idea what she could do or say. She couldn’t share with him her own woes and misgivings...she couldn’t tell him about the Down-side...but as she thought about it, she realized she did have something they could share that could bridge the distance between them.

  There was the box in her suitcase.

  She had hidden it so well, she had almost forgotten about it. Without a word, she left her father and went up to her room. Then, standing on her desk chair, she pulled the suitcase off a closet shelf and fished out the shoe box, which was creased and dented from the trip out from Texas and her own weeks of neglect. She didn’t have to look inside—she had done that enough before she arrived, and she knew every item inside. Looking at them had been like scratching a scab—knowing it would bleed, yet unable to stop. She was supposed to have presented these items to her father upon her arrival. Instead, she had taken guilty pleasure in hiding them...for in its own way, the box was a letter of resignation, too—one that she had no desire to deliver.

  When she returned to the kitchen, her father was still there, contemplating the pen. She sat down and set the shoe box between them. “Mom said you should have this,” she told him, then opened the box to reveal her mother’s parting gift to both of them.

  Inside were a dozen incomplete items. The left half of memories.

  There was a single champagne glass—half of a set her parents had sipped from on the day they were wed. There was Lindsay’s baby book—an oddly slim thing that on closer inspection revealed itself to be only half the book, neatly rebound to hide the fact that every other page was missing. There was one pink baby bootie—part of a pair Lindsay had worn shortly after the exaggerated forty-eight hours of labor her mother claimed to have endured. There were other things, too—from keys for locks that no longer existed, to a ceramic bookend with no mate.

  She wanted to hate her mother for dividing these memories, but then she considered the care with which they had been prepared and packed. Her mother had done this painstakingly, with great attention to the gravity of her task. She had cleanly separated the inseparable, like a surgeon transplanting a heart.

  Now the other half of this collection was part of another world, and although Lindsay never expected her parents’ two worlds to be reconciled, neither did she want to admit that they would be eternally separate. Lindsay tried to imagine her mother somewhere in the Serengeti looking at her half of this final settlement of accounts. Did her mother even take them with her, or were they like the furniture she left behind in the dark limbo of storage? Well, maybe some truths were better left unknown.

  Her father looked at the box, but did not attempt to remove anything, as if it were some sort of diorama—a fragile shadowbox to be seen, but not touched....

  So Lindsay reached in and pulled out the pink knit booty. “I’m sorry for the things that have been taken from you, Daddy,” she said, then she reached out and pressed the tiny knit sock into his hand. “Maybe this can make up for it.”

  For the longest time he rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger, staring at it, saying nothing. Then he looked at the pen. Perhaps it was just her imagination, but it seemed to Lindsay that the pen no longer held the same malevolence it had only a moment ago. He picked it up and, in one smooth, confident motion, signed his name to the letter of resignation, as if that particular loss was now unimportant. And he smiled.

  Far away there was a distant rumble, like the foundation shifting. The walls rattled for an instant, and a report came up from the drain, like a hollow belch from the center of the earth. But even then, Lindsay and her father continued to share their moment of silence, if for no other reason than to honor the memory of all the worlds lost to the passing of time.

  Fire in the Hole

  In its pure state, natural gas has no odor—its unpleasant stench has to be added, to make gas leaks easy to smell. Few Topsiders had their olfactory sense more attuned to changes in atmosphere than those whose jobs took them beneath the city streets, for down below, a keen sense of smell could mean the difference between life and death.

  Shortly before Lindsay’s walls rattled and her drains belched, a dozen tireless teams of city workers had begun to break through the Downside barricades, into tunnels that seemed remarkably well maintained—tunnels that seemed to lead inward toward some other place entirely. Just as their curiosity began to take hold, drawing their thoughts deeper into the mysteries that lay ahead, their noses caught the unmistakable smell of leaking gas. When they were faced with a maddened scurry of rats racing past to seek better air, they didn’t wait to find the source of the gas leak. Each and every team turned tail, abandoning their curiosity along with their equipment, and joined the rat race in a mad dash for the surface.

  As they ran, they heard the gas ignite somewhere deep down, and they could hear the series of explosions drawing nearer, moving just behind the speed of sound. By the time they emerged into daylight, they knew there was no time to do anything but dive for cover.

  Few people, however, had a better view of the catastrophe than Becky Peckerling—whose eyewitness account would make her the most popular girl at Icharus Academy for some time to come.

  Becky was making her way from her West Side apartment to her Saturday violin lesson, fuming over the fact that this utility crisis didn’t come close enough to hell freezing over for her instructor to cancel the lesson. Around her, traffic police had replaced the unlit streetlights. Word was that traffic was at a standstill around the city’s bridges and tunnels, where impatient citizens were making hasty escapes. But here, on the West Side, traffic was actually less busy than on a typical Saturday.

  The policeman had just blown his whistle and signaled for her to cross the street, when the ground began to shake with the force of an earthquake. All at once a blast of light and heat hit her from the right, and she turned to see, several blocks away, a cloud of fire erupt from a construction site, sending dump trucks and all sorts of other heavy equipment flying through the air like Tonka toys.

  That’s the Aqueduct Shaft! she thought to herself just as the sound from the blast hit her like a sonic boom, rattling her braces and purging all thoughts from her mind. She stood there in the middle of the street, watching the fireball rise and facing an approaching procession of exploding manhole covers, which popped from the ground like corks from champagne as the underground shock wave moved closer. Then, when she looked down, she noticed that her own feet were standing squarely on a manhole cover.

  One block away another manhole blew, and then another half a block away. Needless to say, Becky was not in an enviable position—and although her instinct
for survival was less developed than some, she did manage to sidestep off the man hole cover just before it blew sky-high with a fiery burst that melted the nylon off the right sleeve of her jacket. As she fell to the ground, she caught sight of that manhole cover flipping through the air like a two-hundred-pound coin, and she knew it had to come down somewhere. She got up screaming, convinced that no matter where she ran, that manhole cover would land squarely on her head, as punishment for all her years of prattling chatter. When the manhole landed a healthy twenty feet away, she was relieved, but also a bit disappointed that the Powers-That-Be did not find her worthy of smiting in a freak accident.

  Then, in the silence just after the explosion, it began to rain—but it wasn’t the kind of rain that any weatherman would predict. It pummeled the streets around Becky with a jangling clatter, and shone in the air as it fell, like shimmering bits of sun. It was more like hail. It struck her head and arms, stinging like snaps from a rubber band, so she held her violin case above her head to protect herself from the falling sky.

  Around her the street began to glimmer bronze, and she dared to reach out to catch one of these hailstones in her hand only to discover that it wasn’t hail at all. “Hmm,” said Becky, “that’s odd.”

  It appeared that today’s prevailing weather condition called for only the sturdiest of umbrellas—because today, it was raining subway tokens.

  On the Dark Side of the Moon

  Just a few short hours after the Aqueduct Shaft blew, the utilities were all restored as unexpectedly as they had gone out, and the current of traffic flowing out of the city reversed direction, heading right back in. The time was, according to every digital appliance in the city, 12:00, in urgent blinking green.

  In a world addicted to change and new experiences, current events become yesterday’s news before nightfall. Only a scant few events become legendary. The legend of the Great Shaft Disaster, was, like most legends, made up of a few bare facts, upon which were hung the most outlandish speculation. The most common version of the legend is this: Evil city engineer Mark Matthias, while digging the Aqueduct Shaft, came across some key pressure points for the city’s entire utility structure. At that point, he may or may not have blackmailed city hall, threatening to shut the city down. A dump truck, which may or may not have been filled with the city’s ransom payment, had the bad fortune to fall into the hole, revealing that the alleged bags of ransom loot were actually just bags of worthless old subway tokens. Then, after spreading some cockamamy story about an underground cavern, with archaeological “experts” who may or may not have been his partners in crime, Matthias made good his threat to shut down the city. In the end it took a highly covert military operation to collapse the shaft, and sever Matthias’s stranglehold on the city.

  Of course none of this could be substantiated—all people knew for sure was that Matthias resigned amidst a storm of controversy—but everyone had heard the blackmail story from their hairdresser, or their dentist, or their hairdresser’s dentist—and the fact that city hall flatly denied it made people believe it even more.

  The one Topside girl who knew the truth knew she could share it with no one. Although Lindsay longed to know the fate of the Downside, and although she wanted to spare her father from the absurdly spiraling rumors about his involvement, she also knew that she was the keeper of their secret. Not a day passed where she didn’t worry about the fate of Talon and the Downside—that they indeed might have drowned in Lindsay’s waves, as the Champ had warned. It was only her trust in Talon and his ability to rise above—or more accurately, sink below—that gave her hope.

  At first she found herself horrified by the whispered allegations against her father, but soon her father found himself amused by it. After all, his only ambition had been to supply the city with water for the next five hundred years, and now he was being treated like a villain of James Bond-like proportions—a status, incidentally, that commanded far more respect than he had ever had before.

  “I enjoy being infamous,” he told Lindsay over dinner one night. “The bank tellers know my name.”

  As it turned out, that same infamy was enough to extract Todd’s mother from her comfortable Brooklyn cult. Refusing to allow her son to remain in the clutches of an evil stepfather, she came to collect him, then promptly shipped him off to a brutal military academy upstate, where all the food was in lumpy shades of brown, and “personal space” meant the three feet of air between an upper and a lower bunk. Whenever Lindsay got to feeling blue, she thought of Todd doing push-ups at five A.M., and scrubbing bathroom floors with his toothbrush. It always made her feel better.

  Yet each day she would find herself peering into air vents, storm drains, sewer grates, and every dark, unknown place she came across for a sign that the Downsiders were still there, refusing to believe the explosion had destroyed them. She returned to the library time and again, only to be ejected from the lower vaults by security before she could get anywhere close to the Downside. She had gone down to the shaft site, but what little remained of the shaft had been filled in, paved as a parking lot, and forgotten. The subway tokens that hadn’t been taken as souvenirs were carried off by pigeons, leaving nothing but the scratches and dings in metal awnings to testify that brass had ever rained at all.

  It wasn’t until April that Lindsay came across a curious report in the news—something described as an April Fools’ Day joke. Apparently librarians had been finding numerous volumes missing from every section of the library’s main branch. With a library of so many millions of volumes, the disappearances could have gone unnoticed for months...if it hadn’t been for the fact that each missing book was replaced by a single sock. And no two of the socks matched.

  What did it take to end the World? The Topside knew—in fact, it was skilled in inventing scenarios. As every six-year-old could tell you, everything from nuclear apocalypse to a microbiologic epidemic could bring about an effective Top-side end. The Downside, however, being so much smaller, did not need such elaborate methods. Their end could be far more modest.

  On that dark day, after the explosions had subsided and the mattresses were pulled from the Floodgate Concourse doors, Talon expected everything to be gone. He was half right.

  The Hot Springs and the Hudward Growing Caverns had caved in. So had the batward dwellings, the Lesser Rune Chambers, and everything within a thousand paces of the Brass Junction. A full half of the Downside was gone. But that meant that half was spared—and even though the entire batward end of the Bot had collapsed, the herd was yonkward that day.

  Against their own better judgment, but deferring to Talon’s wishes, the tappers immediately restored the Topside’s utilities, rerouting it around the blast zone to make certain every last Topsider could bathe, flush, broil, and dial once more. And to everyone’s amazement, the Topsiders abandoned the war, becoming as complacent and lethargic as they had been before, so bloated on electricity, gas, water, and the sounds of their own voices that they didn’t bother to wage further war. They left the Downside alone to deal with their biggest remaining problem: the population crunch caused by half the living space.

  Now, as things slowly began to return to normal, Talon discovered what a Most-Beloved was required to do. Which was nothing in particular. Since nothing in particular was an easy task to excel in, his adjustment was remarkably easy.

  They had wanted to build him his own new low-dwelling, but what with people setting up housekeeping in passageways, he had no business accepting such an offer. He refused, telling them that at the very most he needed nothing more than a thicker curtain between his and his parents’ rooms.

  It was on the day that the curtain was to be delivered—in a quiet moment, almost two months after the “war”—that Talon allowed himself to think of Lindsay. In truth, he thought of her often, but he always found good reason to chase the thought away. After all, rebuilding a world took far more effort than blowing it up. But today he let her memory play in his thoughts as he held in h
is hands the time bomb she had given him: a folder that he had carefully sewn into his pillow. He had yet to share Lindsay’s truth with anyone. There was an anger he felt toward her, that she would give him such earth-shattering information, and yet an even deeper gratitude that she cared enough to make such a hard choice. Of course, she wasn’t being entirely selfless, but she wasn’t being entirely selfish, either. It was very human of her, and he held on to the folder, because he couldn’t hold on to her.

  His mother pushed back the curtain and stepped in. Almost reflexively Talon began to squeeze the pillow tighter in his hands, as if it were a rabid rat that could leap out of his arms and attack her.

  “Skeet’s here with the new curtain,” his mother told him. “He wants the honor of hanging it himself.”

  Talon grimaced as the memory of Railborn and Gutta struck him like the pang of a healing wound. Skeet Skinner, bearing the weight of his son’s disappearance, had taken it upon himself to gather the finest patches from the finest skins and oversee the creation of a leather curtain for the new Most-Beloved. It was far more than Talon wanted, but he could not refuse the gift.

  Talon concealed his grimace with an apologetic grin. “Tell Skeet he can hang the curtain in a few minutes.” The admiration of the entire Downside was a poor substitute for lost friends. He had to believe that Railborn hadn’t just “wandered the wrong way” with Gutta, as Strut Mason claimed. He had to believe that Railborn chose to save her life, and that they were together in a sort of permanent Topside rotation—a challenge he knew they would both rise to.

  Talon’s mother turned to leave, but thought better of it, then turned to him and said, “Those papers in your pillow—are they Topside?”

  The question knocked the wind out of Talon. At first he tried to hide his reaction, and then realized there was no point, for when had he ever successfully concealed anything from her?