Fiasco Heights

by Zack Archer

  We eased over the upper tier and stood on a rise that provided a view of what I could see was the place where Kree’s people lived and labored. It had a dismal, shantytown vibe, the structure and its inhabitants barely visible beyond the spillage of light from the gas fires we’d seen earlier. My first thought was that the place was a shithole that made East Baltimore look like a paradise.

  “This is it.” Kree spoke softly. “This is what we call home now. This is Hinnom.”

  Kree descended from the rise and we followed, catching wary looks from her people. We strolled past soot-covered females and males and pods of spindly creatures that pissed in plain sight. I took in the countenances of those assembled—Kree’s people, the Honoria—and there wasn’t a cheerful face anywhere to drive the gloom away. Beyond that, while there were plenty of adults in sight, there wasn’t a single figure under what I assumed to be the age of thirty.

  There were no children.

  Engines whirred somewhere off in the distance, the chatter rising heavenward toward the roof of the chamber which was a hundred feet above us. Kree led us along a metal walkway that snaked under thin webs of light cast from lamps that were powered by ruby-colored crystals.

  We trudged across byways covered with a straw-like material that was used to deaden the noise of the digging machines that some of the men and women, faces hidden behind what looked like full-face snorkeling masks, were operating.

  The machines, which resembled handheld tillers, chewed deep holes in the ash. I watched one of the male Honoria bore into the ground while a dull-eyed female lay in the ash beside him, periodically reaching down to remove chunks of unearthed Akash. I realized it wasn’t only the machines, the Weaver, that were involved in the mining operations.

  Beyond the machines, I saw a group of men load metal shells into what looked like rocket launchers and then fire the projectiles into the ground twenty yards away. The ground ruptured, revealing long, thick veins of Akash. I noticed a discarded yellow metal shell on the ground and I picked it up. It was smooth, dense, and had a joint in the middle as if it were two parts that had been screwed together.

  I pocketed the yellow shell and followed the others past a mass of translucent pipes that were at least five feet in diameter. The pipes resembled the same ones I’d seen back in the Gullet with Aurora shortly after I arrived in Fiasco Heights. The ones that purportedly carried water to various parts of the underground city.

  My eyes followed the pipes down to a series of oversized drilling machines that were connected to the tubes. The pipes fed into the machines, causing them to ratchet back and forth, oversized pistons at the end of the apparatuses tearing at the ground.

  The action was frenetic, the pistons producing a kind of slurry that was carried up into the ceiling by more of the tubes.

  I saw some of the workers stumbling back from the pipes, removing their masks, faces slicked black from the slurry.

  “This is some nasty-ass grunt work,” Kaptain Khaos said, coughing from the plumes of ash that were kicked up by the mining tillers.

  “Who the hell would ever want to work down here?” I asked.

  “You’re assuming we have a choice,” Kree retorted.

  She signaled for us to follow her down a depression in the ground that snaked between two mounds of debris. At the bottom of a wide basin was a series of incredibly long buildings made from stone and scrap that stretched across it.

  Kree opened the door to one and ushered us inside. The interior of the buildings smelled of old vegetables and stagnant water. The faint light that oozed through holes in the roof revealed a table and chairs formed of roughly-cut stone, a crude stove made of dented metal, and heaps of brown-splotched fruit and vegetables in stone bowls.

  Kree stood at the doorway as we huddled inside. “Now you wait.”

  “For what?” Atlas asked.

  “To see if the Turk will take an audience with you.”

  “Who’s the Turk?” I asked.

  “The person who runs this place,” she replied.

  She closed the door and locked it, and I stood there with the others in silence, trembling inwardly, wondering where Aurora was and what she was doing with the Light Breaker.

  48

  Splinter moved to the door, gripped its edges and tugged back.

  “Let it be,” Atlas said.

  “Why?” Splinter asked. “I’m going to rip this thing down and then we’re gonna roll.”

  “To where?” Atlas asked. “You heard the lady. There’s no way out of here.”

  “If there’s a way in, there has to be a way out,” Liberty said.

  “Well we’re not going to find it by busting up the joint,” the big man said. “We need to sit tight and let this play out.”

  Splinter smacked his hands together. “That’s what you said after they tried to murder Greylock during the lunar festival. Look where it got us.”

  “What you wanted to do was a grave thing, Splinter.”

  “It was the right call.”

  “At the wrong moment.”

  “It’s never the right fucking moment with you,” Splinter said, turning away, his face twitched up in a series of grimaces.

  Kaptain Khaos held his hands up, standing between the two. “At ease, barkskins,” he said to Splinter, referencing a nickname I’d heard the others use when ribbing Splinter. “Atlas is right. We need to play nice until it’s time not to play nice.”

  “How long are we giving it?” Lyric asked.

  “Twenty minutes,” Splinter said. “I’ll give it that long and then I’m taking action.”

  The others sat at the table as I moved toward the end of the structure. A handful of lanterns filled with glowing crystals threw radiant light over a series of small, rank cubbies that were filled with rusted mining equipment.

  The farther I crept, the darker it got and soon I’d entered through an archway and opened a wooden door that revealed a a dirt-floored space at the very back of the structure. I stopped on the threshold and waited for my eyes to adjust to the semi-darkness. My eyes watered and my nose burned because the room reeked of decay.

  There were tiny mounds of earth in the room, a few dozen of them in neat little rows.

  The floorboards I’d just crossed creaked and I gave a little start. Looking back I spotted Liberty, who flashed a smile.

  “What is this place?”

  I closed the door, not really certain what was inside the room. “It’s our home away from home. At least for the next sixteen minutes until Splinter goes nuts.”

  “Don’t worry about him. He won’t do anything rash.”

  “What was he talking about back there?”

  She looked back as if to see whether the others might be listening to our conversation. Then she leaned into me. “Splinter and Atlas haven’t always seen eye-to-eye.”

  “I figured that.”

  “One of the last assassination attempts on Greylock happened during a festival on the outskirts of the city. More than ten thousand people were there, and Greylock gave a brilliant speech on unity and finding a way to chart a new future.”

  “What happened?”

  “A gang affiliated with the Morningstars had infiltrated the crowd. They’d planted explosives inside some of the synthetic Snouts, the very machines that were supposed to keep watch. I was there with the others, up on a dais, watching him finish the speech when the explosions began.”

  “Jesus,” I said, picturing the resulting carnage.

  “We shielded him, but many died. Afterward, we investigated and traced the explosives back to a weapons maker who, after some interrogation, admitted that he’d built the bombs at the request of the Harbinger. Splinter wanted to move immediately, he wanted to arrest the Harbinger and those that might’ve been in league with him, but Atlas was more cautious. He talked about procedure and process and how such radical action couldn’t be taken solely on the forced confession of one man.”

  “And so you did nothing, right?”r />
  She nodded, her face falling. “And I suppose…this is the result.”

  “There’s a saying back on Earth that hindsight is always twenty-twenty.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means it’s easy to be certain about something that’s already happened.”

  She nodded, her eyes sparkling in the gloom. “Are you sorry you came here?”

  I shook my head. “I wasn’t really doing anything back on Earth. I was just going through the motions, wasting my life. At least here I feel like I’m doing something…real.”

  “You’re risking your life for us.”

  “Better to die for something than live for nothing.”

  “One day your name may be written in the stars, Quincy,” Liberty said, placing a finger under my chin. Her eyes winked beguilingly and then we kissed, long and slow.

  The sound of feet shuffling arrested our attention and we looked back to see Kaptain Khaos. “It’s time. Kree said they’d talk to us.”

  We exited the long building and followed down a gravel depression, following Kree. She stepped ten feet ahead of us, looking back while gesturing to an ugly building made of stacked stone that was visible at the end of the byway. The building, which looked like a glorified shack, had a peaked roof, was lashed to the ground by a series of cables and conduits and was surrounded by gizmos and rusted devices of all shapes and sizes.

  “What is that place?” Liberty asked.

  “The house of the Turk,” Kree replied.

  Kree loped forward and threw open the door on the building. I bounded after her, leading the others inside and was immediately greeted by the barrel of a rifle.

  49

  The rifle was held in the hands of an Honoria guard who peered down at me. My hands went up.

  “Who you be?” the guard asked, his ears trembling.

  “I be Quincy.” I gently moved the barrel aside. “This be Atlas, Splinter, Kaptain Khaos, Liberty, and Lyric,” I added with a sweep of my hand. “We’re the Shadow Catchers. You’ve probably heard of us.”

  The guard shook his head. The guard and Kree clucked their tongues, exchanging some comments in their native tongue. I might’ve been mistaken, but I could swear I heard Kree use the words “jackasses” and “idiots” when referring to us.

  “We’re lost,” Atlas said.

  The guard grumbled, then twirled his stick and pointed toward another door. He motioned for us to follow and grabbed the door, sliding it open to reveal an inner space in the building. Through an alcove, we could see tinkerers and smiths showered in sparks, working at forges and lathes and general labor stations. Everyone was working on what looked like tools for mining.

  Kree and the guard led us across the workspace to a side panel, a large, hidden partition in a wall that you would never have suspected was there.

  Kree shoved the panel aside and led us into a windowless space filled with plumes of smoke. There were two figures on the inside. The first was a tall, wiry Honoria with gray hair, his face creased with worry. He was seated in a chair, puffing on a metal pipe that was curled like a “U.”

  Behind him was what looked like a child reclining in a dented, electric baby rocker. The rocker swayed, back and forth, one wonky foot rhythmically clubbing the floor.

  I looked closer and was shocked to see that it wasn’t a baby after all, but an aged little person wrapped up in what looked like swaddling that resembled a child’s sleep sack. The tiny creature’s eyes went wide and he whispered something that only the wiry figure could hear.

  “That’s Metaxas,” Kree said, pointing at the wiry figure. “And the one behind him is the Turk.”

  “What have you brought us, Kree?” Metaxas asked, taking a pull from his pipe.

  “They’re from the Upperworld. This is Atlas, Liberty, Lyric, Splinter, Kaptain Khaos, and Night Rider.”

  “That’s Night Fire,” I corrected her. “Why is the name so hard to remember?”

  Metaxas drew near to us, puffing smoke like a chimney, giving us the once-over. “You’ve got the scent of the Elect on you.” He sniffed in our direction.

  Atlas folded his enormous arms over his chest. “We’re the Shadow Catchers.”

  “Thought I smelled lort,” Metaxas replied. Now, ‘lort’ is not a word I’m familiar with, but given the way Metaxas said it, nearly spitting it out of his mouth, it made me think it wasn’t a good thing.

  Silence leeched into the room and even though Metaxas was a spindly sonofabitch, dwarfed in size and attitude by Atlas, he held his ground. I mean the guy was standing there stooped, the weight of the world on his narrow shoulders, but he gave no ground. He shot scornful looks at all of us. “You all were on high and now you’ve been brought low, huh? Cast down in the darkness with the rest of us and now…what? You need something from us?”

  “We don’t need a godsdamned thing from you,” Splinter said, scrunching his fists as if he was about to throw down.

  “One of our own, a woman named Aurora, stole what was inside the Light Breaker,” I blurted out, trying to defuse the situation.

  This seemed to throw Metaxas. “The Light Breaker? T-that’s impossible.”

  “I wish it were, but we helped her do it. I helped her move the antimatter from the Light Breaker into a trap bottle.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Greylock was murdered,” Liberty said.

  Metaxas didn’t seem surprised at this. He muttered something in his native tongue to the Turk who nodded. “The universe always has a way of coming full circle.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Splinter asked.

  Kree looked over. “It means them that visit evil upon others, often have it returned tenfold.”

  Splinter opened his mouth to respond, but Atlas silenced him with a look. I turned to Metaxas and because I reckoned he was the only one who could show us the way out, I dredged up my very best salesman’s smile. “Sir, the bottom line is, Aurora double-crossed us. Now we can sit around here talking all day, but unless we find a way out of this place and stop her, you can kiss all of this goodbye.”

  “What do you know about this place?” Metaxas asked. When I didn’t respond, he slapped his hands together, his eyes glowing. “Tell true. What the fuck do you know about it, boy?”

  “I know I’d be fighting to get the hell out of here if it was me.”

  “Don’t you think we would if we could?” Kree asked.

  “Well, here’s an idea for you: leave. Just…beat your feet and get the fuck out of this place.”

  “If only it were that easy.”

  “You’ve got legs don’t you?”

  Anger glowed in her eyes. Through bared teeth she hissed, “And they’ve got our little ones.”

  I started. “What?”

  “You heard her,” Metaxas said. “The ones you serve. Greylock and all the others who dwell in the tall towers and the big city. The ones who brought us from Halja and forced us into slavery. They have our families and what’s left of our children. The ones birthed down here have all died, a failure to thrive because of the conditions, the noxious vapors. The rest are captives until we serve out our labor sentences.” Metaxas pointed at Atlas. “Go on and ask him about it. He knows.”

  My gaze swung back to Atlas, who kicked at the ground.

  I thought about what Metaxas had said, about the children born underground dying and I remembered the small mounds I’d seen earlier in the long building.

  The dirt-floored room was where their dead offspring were buried. “Tell me you didn’t know about this, Atlas.”

  “I’ve got no good answers for you,” he replied.

  “Look me in the eyes and tell me.”

  I searched the big man’s face for a response, but he answered with silence. I shook my head. “Suddenly, the Morningstars are looking a whole lot better.”

  Lyric shook her head. “Don’t say that, Quincy.”

  “It wasn’t us that did it,” Liberty said. “It was the El
ect.”

  “Jesus, it’s just like back on Earth,” I replied. “The douchebags in charge are screwing over the little guys.”

  Kaptain Khaos chewed on his lips. “Absolute power corrupts absolutely, Q. That is a universal truth.”

  “And whatever wrong they did was for the greater good,” Splinter said.

  “That’s the same excuse the bad guys always use,” I replied.

  “There’s a reason we took a risk in rebelling against the Elect,” Atlas said. “The ones at the top have made mistakes, there’s no disputing that, but now we’ve been given a chance to make things right. We fight not for the Harbinger or any of the others, but for the people of Fiasco Heights.”

  “And what of the people below Fiasco Heights?” Metaxas asked, jabbing his pipe in Atlas’s direction. “What about them?”

  “We struggle on behalf of everyone,” Atlas replied.

  Metaxas put his hands to his head. “Words, mere words…”

  “Words are all I’ve got, sir,” Atlas said. “Words and…my word.”

  “The word of an Upperworlder?” Metaxas scoffed, looking up. “What’s that worth on the open market?”

  “Not a whole lot to some, but it’s valuable to me. It’s all I have at the moment. And I swear to you that the only way these wrongs can be righted is if we get out of here. If we don’t, if we remain in this place, either the universe will end or evil will triumph.”

  Splinter angled his chin in Metaxas’s direction. “Choose your madness.”

  A long silence fell and I looked back to Kree. “I need to know the truth. Is there a way out?”

  She whispered something to Metaxas who turned to the Turk. The little man muttered to them, and Metaxas nodded and sighed. “There is…there is a way out,” he said.

  50

  We followed Kree and Metaxas out through a door at the back of the building. What

  looked like a planked boardwalk was visible and we moved swiftly across it.

  “After we were brought here, they sealed the entire chamber shut,” Kree said, gesturing