Long ago, a city got built. It had a dome and could protect all the people that lived inside it. It had an underground too, and diggers were needed to tunnel deep into the earth. The work was hard and the men who got recruited were strong. When the city was finished, the people who ran it didn’t want to let them go; they were needed for something else now. ‘We have a new job for you,’ the City people said. ‘We need you to dig for what will keep the City running, for the brine that is buried underground.’
But the men didn’t want to dig anymore. They were ready to go back to their families; they missed their children and wives. The City people had an idea. They’d bring the children and wives to them. Now the men wouldn’t need to leave because they’d all be together.
The men agreed because they thought they’d get to live up above, under the dome; their families would be safe, and they’d all be together. But the City people had a different plan. They wanted to keep the men underground, so they did.
The men didn’t like being cheated. There was an ugly battle and an unfair fight. The men who survived were taken away. No one saw them again. But now, the City people didn’t have anyone to dig so they came up with a different plan. Underland children would be taught to do the job their fathers had done. They might not be as strong, but children are smaller, they can fit through tight tunnels. Children are nimble and quick and don’t fight back.
That is how us Unders came to be.
I scratched a little line on the cave wall, another mark for another shift. It used to be Jacob’s job to do this, but since he was gone, it fell on me. I’d put an X above the line when he got taken. That was fifteen sleeps ago. I swallowed hard and walked away from the wall.
“Coming, Ama?” Kibo called. The leader of my team, he was the one we followed into the tunnels. A long line of us, fifty Unders in all, snaked past the rock we called Big Mother. It dangled down from the ceiling of the cave, glistening silvery white. It had a lump in the middle that looked like a belly, which was why we called it Big Mother. She’d been there for who knows how long watching over us. No matter how mad Old Father got or how bad he made the walls tremble, Big Mother didn’t budge.
After I whispered a prayer to Big Mother asking her to keep us safe, I caught up with my team and went into the tunnels. Each team branched off toward a different digging chamber. I adjusted the rope that crisscrossed my chest. Attached to it was the basket that was used to carry the brine from the digging chamber to the conveyor belt. After muling for so long, the skin under my tunic was thick with calluses. All the mules had scars from where the ropes had rubbed the skin raw. Our knees and hands were all chewed up from crawling, our faces, arms, and legs coated with dirt.
Diggers didn’t have it any better. On my team, Kibo and Abel had swollen hands. The skin on their palms was as tough as that on their feet. Muscles bulged across their aching backs because they spent every shift chipping at the walls of Old Father with dull axes. Tch tch tch. We heard that sound in our sleep. It echoed till the rock hummed with it.
Each of us had a headlamp that was strapped to our head and powered by our body heat. The more we dug or the faster we crawled, the brighter it shone.
Us Unders dug for the brine the City people needed to keep everything running. Brine came out of the rock walls in glittering chunks. Once the diggers had a pile, mules like me carried it in baskets on our backs to the depot. Jacob and Noah said on the Mountain it was called salt.
“Ama,” Kibo called me over, his voice echoed off the walls. Kibo had wispy bits of curly hair that grew in tufts all over his head and eyes that bugged out a little. His ears stuck out too, like mine, but Kibo can wiggle his; I can’t. Sometimes he gave my ears a tweak, to remind me.
The pile of glittering brine crystals lay at his feet. Behind him, grimy with rock dust, was Abel. So quiet sometimes we forgot he was there, he kept chipping at the rock as Kibo loaded his pile into my basket. He was gentle, like if he put the brine in softly it wouldn’t weigh as much.
When I had taken all I could, the pile was only half gone. “Luken,” Kibo said. “Come here.”
Luken was the new mule I was training. He was young and small, too small to be muling, if you asked me. “I can take more,” I said.
Kibo frowned. “He’s got to take his fair share. It’s the only way he’ll get strong.”
“It’s his third shift. Third’s the hardest, everyone knows that. He can get strong on his fourth shift.” Kibo, even though he was older than me by two years, knew better than to argue. I could be hard as rock when I wanted to be.
Once the basket was loaded up, I checked for balance, making sure none of the brine was gonna fall out of it in the tunnels. “I can take a little more,” I said.
Instead, Kibo tweaked my ear. “You have enough. Luken will be right behind you.”
I nodded and crawled across the stone floor to the tunnel opening. As soon as I got into the tunnel, I had to crouch down so I didn’t bump my head. There wasn’t much clearance for my basket of brine, which was why only small kids like me could be mules. A basket like this on Kibo would have meant he’d be crawling on his belly. As it was, getting him in and out of the tunnels was becoming tricky. He’d gotten stuck once a few shifts ago. His shoulders were too broad to fit and he’d had to wiggle like a bug to get free.
I went slow, waiting on Luken to catch up. “Ama?” he called.
“I’m here,” I said impatiently. If I closed my eyes, I could smell him, his scent loud against the damp walls. He’d have to learn to do that too. None of us Unders could rely on our eyes in the dark tunnels. It was our noses that helped the most. And ears too, I guess. But it was easier to tell people apart by their smell than the sound of their breathing.
The tunnel we were in led to the depot. The Unders on cranker duty used pulleys to send the brine somewhere else. “We’re almost there, Luken.” I was moving slow, so the headlamp’s glow was too weak to do any good. “You have to pay attention to the path so you can find it on your own,” I told him.
When we got to the depot, the crankers helped Luken dump his basket of brine into the big bucket that got heaved up somewhere else.
Luken tugged at the ropes crisscrossing his chest. Empty now, the basket flopped. “I want to take it off.” His voice cracked and I knew tears weren’t far behind.
“No. All that’s gonna do is make the hurt worse when you have to put it back on. The best way is if the skin hardens. You gotta get scars for that to happen. We’ll get Lila to put on the healing mud when we’re in the pit.”
“Ama,” someone called. I didn’t need to sniff the air to know who it was. Romi appeared from a different tunnel, her basket filled with half the amount of brine I’d carried. She murmured words of encouragement to Luken and I wished Noah had given Luken to Romi to train. She was better with the younguns than I was.
“How’s the digging?” I asked. It was a common question in the Underland. We all wanted to know where good amounts of brine were found. It would tell us the direction that new tunnels would need to be dug.
“Our hole’s almost empty.”
“Ours too.” The crankers helped unload Romi’s basket. We were about to head back down the tunnels when the crankers called for us to stop. A bucket of food had been lowered, which meant it was quitting time. The bucket came down once a day. The nutritional mix would be combined with water from the pool into a sludge that was the consistency of wet mud and tasted about the same, except salty on account of the briny water. Sometimes we’d get bonuses. Limp, leafy green things that Jacob said was kale.
“We’re done,” I said, turning to Luken.
He fell against my gritty body like he was going to collapse. “Come on,” I said. “We still gotta get back to the pit.” Romi shot me a look. I rolled my eyes at her but crouched down so I was nose to nose with Luken. “Look,” I said, as patiently as I could, “Every day it’s gonna get easier. I promise. Before you know it, you’ll be the one training a youngun.”
“It’s never gonna get easier.” Tears glistened in his eyes, but I shook my head.
“Don’t start crying, Luken,” I said, irritated. “If Krux is in the pit and sees you crying, he’ll think you’re weak. He’ll send you.” Luken’s chin quivered, but the tears wobbling in his eyes never fell.
I hated having to scare him, but what I’d said was the truth.
“I don’t like Krux,” Luken whispered.
“None of us do,” I agreed. Krux was a City person and the only one of them who ever came into the pit. We were all scared of him, even Jacob and Noah. He carried a zapper stick to sizzle anyone who didn’t listen, but that wasn’t what I was afraid of. It was his eyes.
They were pale and he hardly blinked, so when he found someone he was interested in, his eyes stuck and didn’t let go. Whenever he came to the pit, I worried his eyes were gonna find me or Romi. Thinking about what would happen if they did sent a jolt through me worse than what his zapper could do.
Noah and Jacob called Krux the Boss. He decided who went where in the Underland. He’d sent Luken out of the nest to start muling and he’d decide which of the mules were strong enough to start digging. Krux was also looking for Unders who got sickly and couldn’t work anymore. When a boy got to being a man, Krux told them they were ready to live with Old Father. It was an exciting time for the boys. We clapped them out as they left with Krux, shouting goodbye till the rocks sang with us.
It wasn’t the same for the girls. When one of us left to join Big Mother, there was no loud cheering. The weight of what she’d been chosen to do was too important. Krux kept an eye on us, looking for the few girls who were fleshy in the right parts and got their bleeds. Only some girls were special enough to be blessed by Big Mother. I just hoped I wasn’t one of them. As much as I wanted to rest my aching body, I wasn’t going anywhere without Romi. Once you left the pit, boy or girl, you didn’t come back.
Maybe I’d end up like Lila. She’d never left the pit because her bleeds never came. She said she prayed to Big Mother to send them, but nothing happened. In the end, she thinks Big Mother knew letting her stay in the pit was the right thing. Even though she couldn’t be a mother, she raised the ones who would be.
“Will you tell me a story later?” Luken asked as we made our way through the tunnels to the pit.
The pit was the biggest space in the Underland, and it was where we ate and slept. It had a high, domed ceiling. Smaller chambers led off of it. One of them was the pool and another, the nest, where the younguns and their nurses slept.
“Maybe,” I said with a sigh. Those first sleeps in the pit had been hard on Luken. Without the crush of other bodies around him, he’d wept and shivered alone on his mat. Finally, Romi had convinced me to let him crawl over to ours. I’d whispered a story in his ear till he drifted off. I never should have let Romi talk me into it though. Now he expected one before every sleep.
The glare of big light blinded me when we stepped out of the dark tunnels and into the pit. Big light worked when an Under cranked a pedal with their feet. It illuminated almost all the pit.
As soon as my eyes adjusted, I scanned the pit for Jacob, hoping he’d be there. But it was Noah doing head count, and everyone wore the same dreary expression. If Jacob had returned, there’d be celebrating. Since Krux had come to take him, we’d all been on edge. No one knew why or where he’d gone, or if he was ever coming back.
Beside me, Luken tore at the ropes. I slapped his hands away. “Fighting only makes the knots tighter.” I untied them and he sighed with relief when they fell to the cave floor. “Take off your shirt,” I said. He pulled it off, trying not to let the rough fabric rub against his torn-up skin. Blood oozed where the ropes had been. “Get to Lila,” I told him. She was sitting on her mat in the center of the pit, surrounded by the remedies and supplies Krux gave her to keep us healthy.
“Come,” he said and pulled my hand.
“She’s right there,” I pointed across the pit. “I’ll watch you, but you have to go on your own.” He didn’t move. Stubborn youngun, I thought. I got busy taking off my basket and stretching my back, watching him out of the corner of my eye to see if he went. “If you wait too long, there’s gonna be a lineup of people who need Lila’s help.” I told him. “You better go.”
Pouting, he walked across the pit. I kept my eye on him till he got there and went to get the food. I had just sat down when Luken came back with one of Lila’s clay bowls filled to the top with her special mud. “She said you were supposed to put it on me.”
“Sit down,” I told him. “We gotta get this on before it dries out.” The sores were worse than I thought, but the mud was cool and slick. He gasped as I smoothed it on over his back and chest. “You’ll feel better after a sleep,” I said. “I’ll put some bandages on before your next shift,” I promised him. “It’ll help.”
“Thank you, Ama,” he said when I was done.
“Now, you eat and then sleep.” I passed him his bowl of food and a gourd of water.
He gave me a shy look. “Can I sleep with you?”
I shook my head. “No. You gotta learn to sleep on your own.”
“But Romi sleeps with you.”
“That’s different.”
“Why?”
“It just is.”
His lip quivered. I knew Kibo was right about him toughening up, but the same reason I’d taken part of his load to the depot made me say, “I’ll stay with you on your mat till you’re asleep. How’s that?”
I ignored the eye roll Romi gave me when she found me later with Luken’s head on my lap. “I don’t know why you act so tough with him. You’re just a softie, same as me,” she said, sitting beside me.
“I never saw anyone fall asleep so fast,” I said to her. My hand had strayed to his hair, a matted mess.
“He’s too little to be muling. How old do you think he is?” Romi asked.
I knew exactly how old he was. Luken’s name was on Jacob’s wall. “He’s four.”
She shook her head. “Krux must have been desperate if he took him from the nest when he’s so young.”
The things Krux did were a mystery to all of us Unders. “If Jacob had been here, he wouldn’t have let it happen.” Thinking about Jacob made my chest tighten. We lost people down here all the time. Between cave-ins, sickness or people getting sent, none of us were strangers to missing someone, but I more than missed Jacob. It was like part of me was lost.
Luken didn’t stir when I moved his head off my lap and stood up. “I thought he’d be back by now,” I whispered as Romi and I walked across the pit to our mat. I’d worked up the courage to ask Noah, but my question had received a sullen response, just like I’d expected. Since Jacob had left, Noah was gripped in his gloominess. All us Unders avoided him, which was easy. He sat at his station raised up from the rest of us and stared down at the pit, his mind somewhere else.
“Do you think Krux found out about—” she gave a chin nod toward the pool. Despite her voice being just a whisper, I stiffened and hushed her. “No one can hear,” she said.
Even though our mat was at the far end of the pit, barely touched by big light’s glare, I glanced around nervously. “If Krux had found out, we’d all have felt his zapper stick.” The digging Jacob and I were doing was secret. Romi and Noah were the only other people who knew about it. When every other Under was sleeping, me and Jacob would sneak to the cranny by the pool and dig. We chipped away at the rock, letting it fall down the tunnel into the pool so there’d be no evidence for Krux to find. Before he got taken, Jacob figured we were close to breaking through to the surface.
“What if Jacob left without us? What if he got a chance and took it?”
I narrowed my eyes at Romi, angry that she’d even think that. “Jacob would never do that. Anyhow, you saw Krux take him. He didn’t leave because he wanted to.”
“It was just a thought,” she muttered and lay down on the mat. She rolled over and put her back to me. I wiggled around. The thin mat did nothing to soften the cave floor. I listened as Romi’s breath grew deeper. She’d drifted off quickly while I lay stewing about Jacob. Was she right? Had Jacob found a way to escape and taken it?
And if he had, was he coming back to get us?