I traced my finger over the lines gouged in the cave wall. As a youngun, I’d practised with a sharp stone till the wall was covered with my name. ‘AMA’ written a hundred times.
Jacob had taught letters to all the Unders who wanted to learn. He said living down here, we had to keep our minds sharp. Just because you live in a dark place doesn’t make you dim, he said.
I’ve lived my whole life in the Underland, all twelve years. I knew that was my age because Jacob kept a tally chart on the cave wall. Before he went to sleep, he scratched a mark to keep track. “Keep track of what?” I asked once.
“How long I’ve been away from my people,” he’d said. That was when Jacob started telling me his stories. About the Mountain, and outside.
He told me how before he and Noah were taken by the City people, time got marked by the sun. It woke up and fell asleep and that made a day. Those days got organized into weeks and months and seasons and then years. But in the Underland, there was no sun, so there weren’t those other things either. All we knew was work and sleep. The tally helped Jacob to know things like how long he and Noah had been in the Underland, and how old some of us Unders were.
When a new youngun joined us, Jacob wrote their name over their mark on the wall. I found my ‘AMA’ marked over a clump of lines at the bottom. I counted all the way up till now and that was how I knew I was twelve. He marked other things on the cave wall too. Things Jacob said we had to remember, like when there was a cave-in and the names of the Unders we lost.
That was how it was down here. There was Big Mother who gave to us and Old Father who took when he got angry. Lila, who joked she was almost as old as the caves, said it like this: Old Father gets hungry. Same as we do. All this time, we take and take from him, digging and chipping at his insides. Well, sometimes he’s gonna wanna take back to make up for what he lost.
Old Father scared me and every other Underlander and I tried my best not to make him mad.
As scared as us Unders were of Old Father, we loved Big Mother. She was everywhere and everything. She put new life inside the mothers, wherever they were. When a new youngun arrived, the nurses would show them off to us so we could see the pink-skinned freshness. A bright tender thing in all the darkness; a gift from Big Mother.
Jacob told me that where he lived before, babies came from mothers and fathers. Together they made a child and raised it together. He called it a family. In the Underland we were all family. The mothers and fathers couldn’t be with their younguns, so we looked after each other.
Jacob and Noah were Prims before they came to live with us. They were different than the City people we dug for. The Prims didn’t live under the dome. They lived on the Mountain. Jacob drew pictures on the walls with sharp stones to help me see it. The Mountain looked like the A in Ama. A stream wiggled over the land like a bug. There was a sun and it lit up everything and made things grow. Jacob told me people can’t survive without the sun, which made me laugh because look at us Unders. We survive and we don’t have a sun. Guess he was wrong about a few things.
Since I’d been a youngun, Lila had been filling my head with stories. She knew I was the one to carry them with me. “You see things other miss,” she said to me one night. “You’re a leader, Ama.” I didn’t know about that, but I liked that she’d picked me. She told me about Old Father and Big Mother and how us Unders came to be. Before we fell asleep, I told the stories out loud to anyone who wanted to listen. The words hung in the air so when we breathed them in, they became part of us. I missed hearing them from Lila’s mouth, but I loved closing my eyes and letting them spill out, feeling those words wash over the walls and ground till we were scrubbed clean by them.
Romi was my best listener. She and I were like a split rock. Our two halves went together so perfect it was like we were one thing. She was the quiet and I was the loud. I was the hard and she was the soft. We were a little like Big Mother and Old Father that way. There couldn’t be one of us without the other. When I was telling a story, it was Romi’s face I watched the most. She drank up the words like they were water.
Jacob told me his stories too, so they’d carry on when he wasn’t around. I soaked them up and made them mine, even though I’d never been on the Mountain. Noah caught him once, when I was six, telling me about the Mountain. His voice sounded like he was grinding rock dust between his teeth. “Why tell them about something they’ll never see?”
Jacob stayed calm, like always, and said. “Maybe one day they will.”
Noah snorted.
“You can’t give up, Noah.”
“Give up on what?” I asked.
“On getting out of here.” That was the first time I heard about Jacob’s plan to escape.