Downsiders

by Neal Shusterman

  “Yes and no,” he answered truthfully.

  “I was tempted to read them, but then decided if they were important enough to guard even in your sleep, perhaps I’d better leave them be.”

  He looked down at the pillow, so ineffectively concealing its load. “I don’t know what to do with them.”

  “You’ll figure it out,” she told him with absolute certainty.

  The fact was, he already had figured it out...but knowing what he had to do and actually doing it were two different things.

  His mother shook her head and laughed. “My son the Most-Beloved. If I had thought it six months ago, I would have been bounding the soft walls.” Then her laughter faded, and she gazed at him as if she were searching for something she could not find. “Nowadays, Talon...when I look at you, it’s as if you’re a stranger to me. Like I don’t even know you anymore.”

  Six months ago, he would have been happy to hear her say that...but now he told her, in the quietest of voices, “Please, Mom. I need you to know me just a little while longer.”

  And although nothing else was said, Talon knew she understood.

  Alfred Ely Beach’s grave was just as Talon had left it. The only difference was that now there was no need to convince the guards to douse the flames and let him pass—although they did look at each other curiously when they noticed the pillow he carried under his arm.

  As he knelt beside the grave, he laid the torch on the ground. It was already fading, but he would take his time in doing this. Respect was owed to the First Most-Beloved of the Downside, even if the respect could come from no one but Talon.

  “You would be proud of us,” Talon said, speaking to the long-dead inventor. “We have honor, we have compassion... but most of all, we have self-respect. I guess we didn’t have that on the Topside. I guess that is why we chose to stay down here.”

  At the edge of the grave was something Talon hadn’t noticed on his first visit. It was a journal so covered in dust, it just about blended into the ground around it. The book must have detailed those first years, and how Beach’s great train project had evolved into the creation of this world instead. Although Talon was tempted, he did not open the journal, nor did he read the many writings on the walls. It was enough to know they were there.

  “You would have been proud of us,” he said again. “And I hope you’ll understand what I have to do now.” Then Talon tore apart his pillow, scattering feathers across the grave. He pulled out the folder Lindsay had given him, all wrinkled and stained from many weeks of late-night sweats. He straightened the pages as best he could, and laid them down beside the journal.

  “You had to be forgotten, or the Downside wouldn’t take. You knew that, didn’t you?” Talon tried to imagine that first generation a hundred years ago, suffering to erase its own true history and lovingly building a false history for the sake of their children, and their children’s children. A world based on a lie...and yet the Downside turned that lie into something glorious. If they could save a faller with the touch of a sword, surely that lie deserved to be knighted into truth.

  “I will be keeper of your secret,” Talon told the silent grave of the forgotten inventor. “I will be the one who remembers why we forget.”

  The torch went out, but Talon lingered in the darkness. Truth was such a strange thing—its face changing depending on the angle at which it was viewed. There were some truths that gained value by being proclaimed, and others whose greatest virtue is that they remain unknown. Better that the truth be like the moon, which Talon had so briefly spied above the Topside night—a bright sphere only showing half of its face at a time, leaving the rest to be uncovered fragment by fragment, in its own proper time.

  “Someday there will come a time for us to know...,” said Talon. “But there are many more things we must know first.” If there was one thing he had learned from his trip to the surface, it was the vastness of their own ignorance. There were those who couldn’t see this; those who said, “Forget the Topside, and dig deeper still. Teach our children that the Topside doesn’t even exist.” But burrowing into deeper darkness was no more a solution than was exposing themselves to the blinding truth of how their world came to be. Perhaps, thought Talon, there was a path in between. A way to shed their ignorance without losing their souls.

  Talon touched the grave that now stretched invisibly before him, leaving his handprint firmly in the dust as a sign that he had been there, then he left.

  Once across the steaming pumice approach, he instructed the sentries, in the sternest voice that a fourteen-year-old could muster, that the fire be turned back on, and that no one—not even he—be allowed to enter the Place of First Runes again until many years hence, when the next Most-Beloved demanded their glimpse of the unknowable.

  Meanwhile, about as far from the Downside as the moon itself, sat Long Island, completely unknown to them, and the type of place Downside map makers would label HERE BE DRAGONS.

  On Long Island’s North Shore, about thirty miles away from anything Downside, was the John Alden Dix Home for wards of the state—a pleasant enough place, as far as orphanages go, with a nice view of Long Island Sound, and the distant Throgsneck Bridge, the name of which was lost on most of Dix Home’s residents.

  The teenagers wing was filled with kids bitter about the fact that they were never adopted—but many were now drawing strength from two newcomers, a boy and a girl who shared a closeness that was the envy of their peers. Although they chose to keep their past a mystery, Raymond, as he called himself, proved to be a wizard at navigating the blind passageways of the Internet, hunting down information as if he were born to it. The girl, Greta, although still recovering from unexplained wounds, managed to defuse every conflict that arose among the angrier kids in the home with an empathetic and rational ear that could someday make her a master diplomat.

  There was no question that the two were the most beloved kids in the home.

  The Highside

  With April came windswept days when the storm clouds shred into skies full of bright, billowing islands. Days when schoolchildren ran across the Great Lawn of Central Park, holding their jackets open like bat wings, daring the spring wind to give them flight. It was on a day like this, when anything seemed possible, that Lindsay saw Talon once again.

  “I hate windy days,” Becky Peckerling complained as she and Lindsay walked home from school. Becky held down her skirt, which the wind kept trying to lift. Lindsay smiled at her frustrated attempts to keep the wind from its mischief.

  “Actually, I like the wind,” she told Becky. “I like what it does to my hair.”

  “It makes you look like Einstein.”

  This time Lindsay did laugh. Months ago, in those days when her hair was a taut gator-tail braid, the thought of her hair unkempt and windblown would have mortified her, but not now. So many things had changed since her arrival in December—but in a way it was oddly comforting to know that Becky hadn’t.

  Of course, Becky did have her fifteen minutes of Icharus Academy fame after her eyewitness account of the Torrent of Tokens. She would pick through her braid-parted scalp as if hunting for lice, to show awestruck schoolmates the actual red marks where the tokens had struck her. She still had those red marks, although Lindsay suspected she was now making those marks herself, and would probably continue to do so until people stopped asking to see them.

  As they crossed Third Avenue, Lindsay heard someone call her name. It wasn’t the first time, either—she had thought she’d heard it a few streets back, but it was so faint, she had been certain it was her imagination. This time, she wasn’t so sure. She spun on her heel, but saw no one there.

  “Did you hear that?” she asked Becky, who said she could hear nothing over the honking horns. At first Lindsay thought it might have come from a passing car, but then she noticed, a few yards away, an open manhole marked off with orange traffic cones and a big MEN AT WORK sign. A hint of excitement relayed up her spine and back down again until s
he could feel it tingling in her toes. There was no one near the manhole, and further down the street she spied a group of city workers near a van, drinking coffee and joking, making it very clear that the Men at Work, in fact, weren’t.

  Lindsay strode to the manhole and peered in, while Becky, who was no friend to manholes, kept her distance.

  “Did you drop something, Lindsay? I didn’t see you drop anything. Maybe you left it at school. Maybe it’s in your locker.”

  “I didn’t drop anything, Becky.”

  To Becky’s growing horror, Lindsay leaned further over the hole. All she could see was a brick-lined shaft and a rusted ladder descending into darkness. She thought she heard her name again, but the roar of a passing truck made it hard to be sure.

  “The light is about to change,” Becky warned. She glanced warily at a cab still stopped at the light, gunning its engine, preparing to charge. “Lindsay—I don’t like the look of that cabbie. He looks psychotic.”

  Lindsay got down on her knees and pulled her hair away from her eyes as she peered into the hole. Then at last she caught sight of two points of light deep down in the shadows. A pair of eyes reflecting the light of day.

  The light changed, the cabbie swerved around them within an inch of their lives, and Becky took refuge behind the MEN AT WORK sign.

  “Lindsay, are you trying to kill us?” she asked.

  To which Lindsay replied, “Becky, I have to go now.” And she climbed down into the hole, vanishing beneath Third Avenue.

  Becky lingered through two traffic light cycles and several more psychotic cabbies. But in the end she finally gave up, determined that the next time she walked home with Lindsay, she would be the one to unexpectedly crawl into some ungodly hole, and let’s just see how Lindsay liked it, hmm?

  Twenty rungs down, the manhole ended at a circular drainage tunnel, and standing there, as she knew he would be, was Talon.

  “It’s about time you heard me,” he said. “I’ve been calling you for three grates and two storm drains.” Although his words were reserved, he couldn’t hide his excitement at seeing her. Even in this dim light, she could see it in his eyes.

  “It’s Topside custom to say hello when you greet someone,” said Lindsay. “Especially someone who thought you were dead.”

  “I’m not dead,” he told her in all seriousness, “just very busy.”

  She laughed, threw her arms around him, and was pleased to feel him return the embrace.

  “Do you have any idea how hard you were to find?” he asked.

  “We had to move to a smaller place,” said Lindsay. “It’s lucky you found me at all.” But it was less lucky than she would have had him believe...because she often went out of her way to travel the same path she used to take home, on the off chance that someone who knew that path might just be observing her from a rain gutter.

  “You’re not the only one who’s moved,” said Talon. “I haven’t been able to find The Champ anywhere.”

  “Neither have I,” said Lindsay. Of course, she had heard rumors of someone setting up house in an old, dry-docked submarine in some abandoned shipyard....“Perhaps we could look for him together.”

  Talon thought about it for a moment, then took her hand. “Come on, there’s something I want to show you.” He led her, as he had once before, through the darkest of tunnels weaving deep beneath the city. But this time those tunnels felt different. First was the smell. Everything smelled of smoke and ash, like a fireplace the day after Christmas. The walls weren’t right, either—they were rough and jagged to the touch, as if they were not so much walls but piles of debris. Talon moved more slowly than he had on her previous visit, as if these places were not the same ones he was used to.

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “You’ll see.”

  In spite of the destruction she sensed all around her, Talon’s voice was cheery and light. “I’m sorry your father won’t get his underground river,” he said.

  “That’s okay—he was just hired to design a water-park— you know, with wave pools and water-slides.” She could feel his sudden shiver move through her, but decided not to ask what that was about. “Anyway, he’s building it in the parking lot of the aqueduct horse-racing track—so I guess he’ll get his aqueduct after all.”

  “You people race horses?” Talon asked, and when she told him yes, he asked her what a horse was.

  “Next time you and your friends raid the library,” she said, “you might want to check out a book on animals.”

  He stopped short. “How did you find out about that?”

  “I used my Topside wiles.”

  He led her up a damaged ladder, and then another, until they came into a space where the smell of ash was not as strong. Then, to her surprise, he flicked a switch, and a fluorescent bulb flickered awake above them to reveal they were in some sort of basement.

  “This is it?” she asked. “There’s nothing here!”

  “We’re not there yet.”

  Now that she could see him in the light, there was something about him that seemed a bit different, although she couldn’t quite say what it was.

  They went up some metal stairs—but not just one flight. The gray steel steps switchbacked up and up, from one landing to another, until Lindsay felt her ears begin to pop. “Are we still in the Downside?”

  “Of course we are.”

  They climbed so high, Lindsay’s legs grew weary—almost fifteen minutes, until the stairs came to an end at a door that said NO ADMITTANCE. From his waist Talon pulled out what looked like a baseball cap but was of definite Downside design—a quilt sewn of a hundred tiny pieces of shredded fabric, all lighter shades than the earth tones of the rest of his clothes. Talon slipped on the cap, then pushed the door open and the wind took over, swinging the door wide.

  And once again, Lindsay stepped over the threshold into another world.

  Before them was a huge platform, and around it heavy columns held up a domed roof that must have been five stories high. On the platform sat two immense water tanks—black iron things at least thirty feet around and forty feet high. They looked like two giant coffee cans sitting on a stage. Although the tanks were partially enclosed by the pillars and roof, they were also open to the outside. It was like a bell tower with pillars and a roof, but no walls, and when Lindsay looked out, she could see the city stretching out before her. They were downtown, atop one of the city’s older skyscrapers, the kind faced with stone and brick instead of chrome and glass.

  “It fits all the rules for Downside territory,” said Talon. “No Topsider has come up here for years—and they never actually go into the cisterns.” He looked at the two towering water tanks. “The water level in these cisterns never goes higher than halfway—so we built a second floor above the water.” He pointed to the first tank, then the second. “My parents will live in this one, and my sister and I will have that one—and we have all this space around us for our sitting room. As for those fire stairs we came up, Topsiders won’t go near them unless the building burns down—so we can use them to go back under for market day, or meetings, or any other time we’d rather be down.”

  Although Lindsay was as quick-witted as they come, on this matter she was slow on the uptake, convinced that she must not have heard Talon correctly. “You mean Downsiders...up here?”

  “Of course it wasn’t easy to convince everyone—but after two months of living cramped in together, they were ready to consider it.”

  “But...but what about the sun? Downsiders aren’t allowed to see the sun!”

  Talon grinned more broadly than Lindsay had ever seen him smile before. “Things change.”

  And then Lindsay realized what was different about Talon. He had a tan.

  “I convinced them that the sky isn’t really a part of the Topside—it’s above it—and we have every right to it, too, just like the water or the electricity. And so now we will live both below you...and above you!”

  “It’ll never wo
rk!”

  “It already has.”

  He went to a mirror that was jury-rigged on a tripod by the edge of the roof. By angling it outward, he caught the sun and reflected it to the towers around them in a pattern that was something like Morse code.

  And in a few moments, a tower three streets away flashed back the same greeting, and then another six blocks away.

  Lindsay could only shake her head and let her jaw flap in the wind—something she knew was particularly unattractive, but her jaw had lost all communication with her brain.

  “Fifty families on fifty roofs,” he told her proudly. “And more to come. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if all of us lived up here eventually.”

  “But...but aren’t you worried that someone will catch you?” Yet even as Lindsay thought about it, she knew that no one would. How long had the Downside survived undetected just below the surface? Downsiders were practically invisible—and the truth was, their invisibility was powered by the Topside’s desire not to see them. Who, really, would ever go searching in cisterns and the forgotten rooftops of aging towers? If they kept themselves out of the sight lines of neighboring tower windows, they could stay there...forever.

  Lindsay felt a lump building in her throat. “So you will never let yourselves be known....”

  Then Talon became a bit more solemn. “We will,” he said. “We will when we know all the things that you know. Only then can we face the Topside and not be swallowed by it.”

  “That could be years!” insisted Lindsay. “Lifetimes!”

  But Talon pointed down at the Rolex still stretched around his ankle. “Time is of low importance.”

  “We could teach you—”

  “No,” he said flatly. “We will take our own knowledge. Otherwise, it means nothing.”

  Lindsay then dropped all pretenses, and asked the question that they both knew hid behind all the others.