Lindsay lost her bearings in seconds, and with it, any sense of control. Still, she found strength in her choice to plummet head-on into this unknown. Even as her sense of helplessness grew, so did her resolve not to turn back. Talon drew her through grunge-ridden passageways void of light and filled with sour, befouled air. Sounds were mutated and magnified as if the tunnels were the chambers of an instrument, resonating all around her. Drips of water sounded like a heavy ball being bounced; skittering pebbles seemed more like a flood of rats; and the walls themselves moaned in oppressive sorrow. Lindsay could only assume their ultimate destination would be even more desolate, and it filled her with deep sadness to think that Talon could find comfort in such a bleak, hopeless existence.
He led her through the darkness with a confidence that made Lindsay grip his hand tighter. “How can you see?” Lindsay asked.
“I can’t,” he answered so matter-of-factly that Lindsay took it to be a joke at first...but then she began to wonder if people who lived down below might not have evolved some sort of echolocation, like a dolphin or bat.
“You don’t need to see,” he continued, “if you can follow the breeze.”
He made another sharp turn, and Lindsay reached out to feel the damp wall he had just avoided.
“The feel of the air on the hairs of your arms tells you as much as your eyes can,” he told her.
“It doesn’t work for me. I’m wearing a jacket.”
Talon slowed his pace as he considered this. “Why do you people keep your arms covered so much of the time?”
Lindsay stiffened. It was the second time he had placed her in that questionable group known as “you people.” Exactly who did he mean by that?
“The same reason as anybody else,” she said. “To keep warm.”
“But how can you move in the dark without being able to feel the air?”
“I don’t. I just turn on a light.”
“But isn’t that wasteful?”
Lindsay had no comment, so she just shrugged, and wondered if he could feel that on the hairs of his arm as well. Then, in the silence that followed, it occurred to Lindsay who “you people” must have been. Could it be that Talon meant everyone who lived normal lives in the world above?
“How long have you lived down here?” she asked.
Talon stopped in his tracks at the question. “Are you asking me if I’m a faller?”
She had no clue what he meant but didn’t want to let on, so she said nothing.
“I was born Down,” he finally said, “and to an important family, too.”
“Important to whom?”
“To everyone who knows us, I guess. I even had a great-aunt who was Most-Beloved.”
“Most-beloved what?”
“You know,” Talon said. “The leader. The chosen leader.”
“Oh. Kind of like the mayor.”
“Yeah, yeah, that’s right,” he said, but from his tone of voice, Lindsay knew he didn’t know a mayor from a minstrel.
They went down a long flight of stairs to a place where the feel of the breeze changed. Lindsay could hear it whistling beneath a doorway where a sliver of light escaped. Talon took a deep, shuddering breath, as if something was troubling him. He hesitated at the door.
“Why are we stopping?” she asked. In the dim light, she could now see him in gray-on-gray. His pupils were wide and vulnerable. She could feel his apprehension as goose-flesh on the fine hairs of her arm, just as surely as Talon could feel the tunnel drafts.
“We’ve just crossed through the High Perimeter. Through there is the Downside,” Talon said, taking another uneasy breath. “No Topsider has ever entered with their clothes, or with their name.”
“I prefer to keep both, thank you.” She spoke glibly, trying to mask her own growing unease. Talon didn’t speak like a homeless boy who had taken refuge in the tunnels, but like one whose home—whose whole way of life—was every bit as rich and complex as her own. She found herself frightened by the sudden magnitude of the unknown beyond the door.
Talon listened for sounds on the other side, and then he leaned against the heavy metal door, which labored open under his weight.
A world, regardless of which one it happens to be, is rather ordinary to the souls who inhabit it. A Topsider could see a spray of a billion stars across the heavens each night, and think nothing of their wonder...or sit on the beach before an ocean stretched out to the razor edge of the horizon and be more concerned with the sand that has gotten between their ham on rye than with the majesty of the seas.
It is human nature to take the most magical of worlds for granted, turning each one into a blank canvas upon which to paint the lives of those who would live there. Only an outsider can see a world’s wonders for what they truly are. And so it was with Lindsay as Talon brought her into the Downside.
The moment Lindsay crossed the threshold, she was quick to realize that this place was as different from the “High Perimeter” as her own world was. She had come through the rabbit hole into a realm of beauty.
Before her was an old train station—perhaps from one of the first subways almost one hundred years before. But the station was now far more beautiful than when it had been a part of the surface world, for upon the stones and girders of this old station were painted a magnificent feast of hieroglyphics, a multicolored spectacle of lines and texture, like the walls of an ancient temple. Images within words, words within images, intertwined until the whole place seemed to glow with the captured light of an Impressionist painting. Lindsay was surprised to find that the entire chamber, bright as it seemed, was lit by a single bulb dangling from a long cord above them—and even the cord had writing on it.
“What is this place?” Lindsay said, scarcely able to catch her breath.
“Oh, this?” Talon glanced around as if it were nothing. “This is one of the Rune Chambers.”
“Who painted all this?”
“We all have Tagging rotation,” Talon said as nonchalantly as a mechanic explaining a car engine. “Sometime between twelve years and sixteen, we spend three months in one of the Rune Chambers. We write our dreams, or things that have happened—or things that we wished would happen. What we think about. What we fear. And when we’re done, it’s here for all time, for anyone who wants to come and read.”
“A library!” Lindsay approached a girder where the words and images grew out of a spiral painted so microscopically fine, they could have been done with a single hair of a paint-brush. She tried to read it, but found only some of the words and letters were English. Some seemed Russian, others Chinese, and some were word-pictures—but taken as a whole, the effect was dazzling. If this was Tagging, then it was the graffiti of the gods.
She turned to Talon. “Where’s yours?”
He quickly looked away. “I haven’t had Tagging rotation.” Then he hopped down to the word-painted tracks of the ancient station, pointing at the mouth of the tunnel. “This way.”
The air flowing through the tunnel was warm and tropical, with a clean, earthy smell. It was the same scent Talon had brought to her room on New Year’s Eve—and Lindsay now found herself regretting that the tunnel had enough light to see, for now she had no excuse to hold his hand.
So taken was Lindsay with these first glimpses of the Downside that she never noticed how uneasy Talon had gotten. He hadn’t planned to bring her to the Downside, not in his wildest dreams—well, maybe in his wildest dreams—but now that she was here, Talon was septic-deep. This sort of thing simply didn’t happen. Aside from the fallers, no Topsider had ever set foot on Downside soil. Of course, there were legends of Topsiders infiltrating many years ago. Such legends always ended with beheadings and other equally bloody business—but then, just about every old legend left someone without a major body part. These were modern times, Talon told himself, and besides, there was no one in power who could order a beheading. Such punishment could only be doled out by the Most-Beloved.
Still, the Wise Advisors—and even worse, his parents— would not be pleased if they found out. Today, however, was market day, which meant that most people were in the Floodgate Concourse buying and selling food and wares. If Talon was discreet, he could give Lindsay a whirlwind tour and no one would be the wiser.
Lindsay, still oblivious to Talon’s concerns, followed him, awestruck by everything she saw. The Rune Chambers and their tunnels gave way to the low ceilings of what Talon called “The Hudward Growing Caverns,” places of dim light where mushrooms, lichen, and the like were farmed.
“This is a parking garage!” exclaimed Lindsay.
Talon explained how Topsiders had a tendency to tear down buildings but forget to pull out the roots, sealing them out of sight and memory.
“But aren’t you worried that someone will find it?” Lindsay asked.
“A place must be untouched by Topsiders for a dozen years to be considered part of the High Perimeter, and a dozen more to be claimed as Downside territory,” explained Talon.
Lindsay listened to his explanation, amazed at how easily a hidden world could grow in the forgotten places of another.
Talon led her through an assortment of remarkable places, each more breathtaking than the last. They passed through the Hot Springs, where an underground river flowed across a series of steam pipes, heating the water that spilled from pool to pool in a series of waterfalls. They crossed through the Brass Junction, a high-domed chamber at the crossroads of two tunnels. It was like a great domed cathedral, and she wondered how such a dome of brass could be forged...until she examined the wall and discovered that the entire Brass Junction was inlaid with outdated subway tokens—thousands of them lining the walls and ceiling.
“This is a very special place,” Talon explained. “People are married here, fallers are named here...”
“Fallers?” asked Lindsay.
Talon hesitated for a moment, then said, “Come on, I’ll show you.”
Lindsay followed him, feeling more light-headed and giddy by the moment. Everything around her was bursting with a magic she had never found in the Surface World. It had to do with the care that went into every inch of the Downside. Every chamber and niche was a work of art, from the corridor walls papered with colorful images from old billboards, to the floors paved with broken fragments of Topside junk. These people had taken the waste of the World and transformed it into something priceless, with all the skill of Rumpelstiltskin weaving straw into gold.
But nowhere was this more evident than in the Grotto of Light.
They wound through a narrow connecting corridor that opened up into a dazzling cavern lit from above and filled with a veritable forest of tropical plants.
“The Downside has several Grottoes of Light,” explained Talon. “Some for growing the green crops, and others, like this one, just for fun.” He pointed up to the cavern’s high ceiling, from which dangled countless crystals and bits of shiny metal, like a giant chandelier. The light from just a few high-wattage bulbs sifted through them, painting shimmering patterns of refraction across the tropical plants and trees—enough to keep them alive and green.
Lindsay could only gape, and Talon smiled. “I knew you’d like this place.”
But it was more than just the grand spectacle of this oasis that stupefied Lindsay—it was the shape and structure of the “grotto.”
“Why...this is a theater!” she said, and the more she looked around, the more certain she was. Although the seats were gone, the form was unmistakable. Up above were the balcony and boxes, which were also filled with green leafy plants that stretched toward the ceiling. The floor beneath her sloped down toward what was once an expansive stage but was now covered with a thick layer of shimmering sand—a sort of beach, which, Talon told her, was made from pulverized glass bottles.
“But...but what’s a theater doing down here?” she asked.
Talon looked at her as if the question made no sense. “Why shouldn’t it be here?” he said, leaving her question unanswered.
“There,” said Talon, pointing to a scaffold in the corner. “That’s one of my fallers.”
Atop the scaffold, a man no older than twenty was whistling happily to himself and hanging crystals from the ceiling as if he were decorating a Christmas tree.
“His name was Dunderhead, or Blunderson, something like that. Anyway, the Topside was killing him, so we took him in and made him one of us. A month ago, he almost threw himself in front of a train, and now look at him! I hear he’s redesigning the pattern of ceiling-crystals here to create different patterns of colored light.”
“Catching fallers...” Lindsay smiled, finally understanding. “We have places up top that try to ‘catch fallers,’ but they don’t always work.”
“There’s an old Downside saying,” said Talon. “‘You can’t catch that which you stand above.’”
Somewhere up above, a subway train rolled by, its rumble echoing faintly in the tropical theater. The dangling crystals tinkled like a wind chime in a breeze, and several of them rained down into the plants around them.
“Gunderson—that was his name,” said Talon. “Problem is, I’m the one who’s supposed to give him a new Downside name, but I can’t come up with one.”
The faller formerly known as Gunderson took a proud look at his redesigned ceiling, then descended to retrieve the few pieces that had fallen.
“I know what you can name him,” Lindsay suggested with a grin as she admired the crystalline ceiling. “How about Michelangelo?”
Talon looked at her, not quite understanding. “You mean the turtle?”
Lindsay laughed, wondering how, out of all the aeons of Topside culture, that particular treasure had found its way here. “No,” she said, “I mean the artist. He painted a famous ceiling.”
“Oh,” said Talon. “Well, in that case, it’s perfect. Michelangelo it is.” Then Talon reached down and picked up one of the fallen crystals. “We’re always having to rehang these,” he said. “It’s a real pain.” He handed it to Lindsay. “Here—so you’ll remember this place.”
Only now, at close range, did Lindsay see what these dangling crystals were. “Is that an earring?”
Talon nodded. “They come washing down the Topside drains by the dozen,” he said. This one had a ruby surrounded by a cluster of tiny diamonds.
Lindsay held the earring, which seemed even larger in her hand. “I can’t take this!”
“Why not? No one will miss it—and it’s one less to clean up.”
It didn’t take much convincing. Lindsay quickly slipped it into her pocket, fending off the feeling that she was doing something dreadfully wrong.
“Thank you,” she said, and Talon led her out before the faller soon to be known as Michelangelo could see them.
As they left the Grotto of Light, the whisper of distant voices wafted through the corridor in which they traveled. Lindsay, of course, was not bothered by this, but Talon knew it meant that the market was winding down. Soon, the walkways would be full of people returning home with food, clothing, batteries, and other goods that they had traded for in the many booths of the marketplace. He picked up his pace and began to plot the quickest course to get Lindsay back to the surface.
Lindsay, however, was in no hurry. As far as she was concerned, she could have spent days navigating the Downside labyrinth, like a modern-day Cortez; a great explorer discovering unknown frontiers.
As she tried to turn down what appeared to be just any other empty corridor, Talon tugged her back, spinning her around and toward him like a step from a tango.
“We can’t go that way,” he told her. There was enough light around them for her to see a staircase descending just a dozen yards down the corridor.
“Why not?”
“Because there are some places not even Downsiders are allowed to go.”
There was a harshness to his voice that made it clear there was no arguing this point. She held up her hand, feeling a steady heat pulsing out of the corridor.
“What’s down there?”
At first Talon didn’t answer, but then his face softened just a bit, and he finally said, “It’s called the Place of First Runes. It’s guarded by fire and two sentry-assassins. Only a Most-Beloved is allowed to pass. The sentries kill anyone else who tries.”
She could sense Talon’s growing discomfort as strongly as she could feel the heat rising from the Place of First Runes, and she began to wonder exactly what First Runes meant.
“Talon,” she asked quietly, “exactly how long has the Downside been here?”
Again, he looked at her as if her question made no sense. “It’s always been here,” he answered, as if it were obvious. Then, before Lindsay could press him further, he pulled her away. “C’mon—we can’t stay here.”
Talon hurried her down a different corridor, a wider one lit by stove burners converted into gas lamps that grew from the wall.
In a moment they heard voices, and a shadow approached down the winding corridor.
Although Lindsay sensed no danger, Talon was anxious enough for the both of them, and the sight of someone approaching brought him close to panic. How could he have been so reckless as to bring her here? What was he thinking? He doubled back with her only to hear the approach of another cluster of Downsiders from the other direction. Frantically Talon scanned the area for options, of which there were few. He remembered seeing a rusted ladder and a closed floor-hatch some twenty paces back. Although Lindsay imagined he knew every nook and cranny of the Downside, it was far from true. The Downside was too large and convoluted to truly know in a single lifetime, much less fourteen years. Talon had no idea where that ladder descended—and what made it worse was the fact that the hatch was sealed. The Downside didn’t much believe in closed doors. If an entryway was closed, there was generally a good reason for it. But, Talon figured, any door in a deluge, so he pulled Lindsay down the corridor, hoping to reach that hatch before they were spotted.
The latch on the hatch gave way with a hollow scrape when he kicked at it, and he pulled up the creaky metal door just as figures came into view up ahead. They were traveling without flashlights, but there was enough light pouring in from adjacent chambers that faces could be seen. Faces and clothes. There would be no mistaking that Lindsay was a Topsider when they saw her clothes.
“Hurry.” Talon hid her from view, and she descended without complaint, finally accepting the severity of the situation. He would have followed had there been time, but instead dropped the hatch closed as soon as she was out of view, which, he knew, might elicit another spray in the eyes from her when he let her back out again. But moments later he heard a crashing and clattering from beyond the closed hatch—and a yelp of surprise that was quickly silenced. Talon’s dread spiked to an unexplored high.
“Talon!” said a booming voice. “Is that you?”
The voice belonged to Railborn’s good-humored, if somewhat bombastic, father—an oversized bear of a man, with the unlikely name of Mosquito, which he had shortened to Skeet.
Skeet slapped a heavy hand on Talon’s back, as was his habit; and as was Talon’s habit, he pretended the slap didn’t hurt like hell. “What are you doing here?”
“Just stalling around,” Talon answered.
Skeet looked at the other two men with him, and then turned back to Talon with a hesitant pause that made Talon sick to his stomach. He knew what Skeet was about to say.
“Didn’t your new rotation start today? Aren’t you supposed to be learning the skills of the Hunt with Railborn and Gutta?”
“I...uh, had an errand to run for the hunts master,” he said.
A hunter by trade, Skeet was quick to accept the explanation, for he more than anyone would know how the hunts master loved to run the kids in his charge ragged every moment of their rotation. He laughed and said, “In a few weeks I’ll be the one running you ragged when I teach you to gut and skin.”
Talon hid his grimace beneath a close-lipped grin. Another painful slap on the back, and Skeet and his cronies were gone. The second the coast was clear, Talon heaved open the hatch and climbed down to find out what nasty fate had befallen Lindsay. It was about three rungs down that he found out the hard way what Lindsay already knew: The ladder had broken. His foot fell upon air, his hands slipped, and he plummeted down the shaft into chilly, muck-filled water. He only needed one guess to know exactly where they were now.
Lindsay stood aside, knee-deep in the pitch-black mire, terrified but trying her best not to show it. She had fallen here a few moments before, along with the lower portion of the ladder, which had snapped under her weight. Her only consolation was having the chance to watch Talon do his ungraceful plunge into the water as well—or at least hear him fall, since the place was as lightless as could be.
“If I knew the tour included the sewers,” she told him, “I would have worn boots.”
“This isn’t just any sewer,” Talon said, shaking the slime from his vest. “It’s the Bot, and we shouldn’t be here.”