What dim light there had been in the tunnel had been blown out by the blast, and now a heavy fog of pulverized stone filled the air, making breathing a burden. Railborn pushed his way through the thick dust, stumbling over the rubble, until he fell over something soft that lay unmoving on the ground.
“Gutta? Gutta!”
He found her face in the dark and touched her lips, searching for the moist feel of her breath. He put his ear to her chest, listening for a heartbeat, but his own labored breathing made it impossible to hear. When he pulled his ear away, he realized it had become warm and wet, covered with what could only be blood.
Then came the lights—sharp, violating flashlight beams poking and prodding through the huge hole at the end of the tunnel. As the light hit Gutta, he could see the blood that bloomed from her abdomen. Then he heard the voices of men as they moved toward the breach from the other side. The men who had done this to Gutta, babbling to one another of unimportant Topside things—and that’s when Railborn snapped.
In that moment, Railborn ceased to be human. No one is quite sure what he became. Perhaps he was suddenly filled with the spirits of all the gators his father had killed, or perhaps he dredged up something even darker, and angrier. It is said that Railborn’s war cry could be heard from one end of the Downside to the other, and that if you listened on quiet days, you could hear it echoing still. He lunged through the hole at the invaders, bellowing a cry of rage and anguish beyond the measure of either world. When those workers on the other side heard it, their blood chilled, and their courage turned to cowardice. An instant later, Railborn came through the cloud of dust, a beast covered in gray powder, hurling bricks and stones. The Topside workers turned and ran, dropping their flashlights, stumbling over one another to escape from the beast that wailed.
When they were gone, Railborn crossed back through the breach and returned to Gutta. The fury was released from him, leaving behind panic and desperation. He knelt beside her and, in the light of the fallen flashlights, he saw the sharp wedge of stone that had punctured her belly like a stake—but now he could see her eyes fluttering with the faintest sign of life. She was still alive...but barely.
The others stood around her, too frightened of the sight to get close. “We’ll get her to the healers,” Strut Mason weakly suggested.
Railborn knew that would be useless. The healers had herbs for many things, and they were skilled in the sewing of wounds—but those were always surface wounds...and there was a saying among healers: A wound that touches the Downside of the flesh breaks the vessel of the soul.
“Hurry,” insisted Strut. “My uncle is healer to the Advisors—there’s no one better!”
But Railborn already knew what the healer would tell him. Let her soul spill free from its broken vessel, the healer would say. Accept that which cannot be mended—you have no choice.
But he did have a choice. It was an unthinkable choice that he never thought he’d consider...but he forced himself to consider it now. As every Downsider knew, Topsiders were cheaters of the highest order. They lived their ignoble Surface ways, and were so skilled at deception that they had learned to cheat death itself. Sometimes with potions and pills, and other times with brazen sleight of hand in Top-side hospitals. Of course, those were all stories—but Railborn was wise enough to know that at least some of the stories must have been true.
Railborn lifted Gutta in arms that had grown strong from a lifetime of the rough play of a hunter’s son. Then he turned toward the hole.
“Where are you going?” shouted Strut. “That’s the wrong way!”
But Railborn didn’t answer him and didn’t turn back, for fear that he might change his mind. With Gutta pressed tightly against him to stem off her flow of blood, Railborn stepped over the breach and into the world he so despised.
The sentry who guarded the Chamber of Soft Walls did not know what the Topside girl had left for Talon—only that it brought Talon to the very state of madness he had been accused of. The guard watched through the little window in the door as Talon buried his head in his hands and wept, then hurled the pages across the room only to gather them back again, on his hands and knees, chasing away any other inmates who tried to look at them. Finally, with the papers collected, Talon stood and strode to the door.
The guard, who had never been intimidated by anyone, felt a wave of fear ricochet through him and settle in his knees, which began to shake.
“I wish to be released now,” was all Talon said.
The guard stammered, grasping for a way to answer him. How do you say “no” to the one whom the Fates had deemed worthy to survive an execution? How do you refuse the one whom even the Wise Advisors feared?
“I can’t do that,” the guard said apologetically.
Talon waited, his eyes bloodshot and worn. Then he said again, “I wish to be released now.”
As much as the guard wanted to go down in history as being the one who set Talon Angler free, his sense of duty was strong. “I’m sorry. I can’t.”
Talon was unrelenting. This time he asked, “Is the war going as expected?”
The guard looked away. There was no denying that the Topside was much more formidable an enemy than expected. They had forces amassed all around the Downside now. It was only a matter of time until they broke through, and presumably enslaved them all. “No,” the guard told him. “It is not.”
“And do the Advisors have a plan for when the walls fall?” Talon asked.
Again, the guard could not look him in the eye. Word was that the Advisors were collecting their belongings, preparing for an escape, as if there were somewhere they could run. “No,” he told Talon. “They have no plan.”
Talon nodded, and said again, “I wish to be released now.”
This time the guard swung the door open wide, and left it that way as he ran off to join his family in these last hours of the World.
In the city high above, the morning sun shone through a cloudless winter sky, assaulting streets that were eerily vacant. Last night the spirit of the city had risen like a bullet shot into the air, but now that bullet had reached its peak, hanging there in the silence of the morning, ready to fall with lethal gravity. No power, no water, no gas. Nothing to do but wait.
There was, however, a building on First Avenue that existed like an island in the city. It had its own generator and massive cisterns that still flowed long after most others in the city had run dry. The place functioned because it simply had to function.
It was to this place that Railborn carried Gutta, for although he liked to deny any knowledge of the Topside, he knew from his Catching rotation that Topsiders brought their dying in screaming white cars to this place—this “hospital”—although he couldn’t fathom why it would be called that, as it was as inhospitable a place as he had ever seen.
He had risen from a forgotten cellar onto the early morning street, Gutta a limp weight in his arms. Ignoring his terror of the open sky, he forged through the sunlight and the midwinter chill that seeped through the pores of his skin like a disease. With his eyes locked straight ahead of him, he ran toward his destination.
Once through the hospital’s doors, action had been quick. Gutta was taken from him and spirited off on a rolling table while a healer asked him what had happened.
“It was the war,” Railborn told him, but the healer had looked at him with uncomprehending eyes.
“What war?”
It was then Railborn finally began to realize how very different this world’s perceptions were from his own.
Through a slit in a swinging door, Railborn watched in unblinking terror as a gaggle of green-clad healers worked on Gutta, prodding her with pins and tubes, bringing sacks of blood, hooking her up to inconceivable devices, and performing acts on her that seemed more like torture than healing. Railborn held his tongue, for he knew that the cheating of death must be a complicated matter.
Then they questioned him—but he was careful only to tell them what they needed to know: that he and Gutta were here on their own and completely alone in this world; that they had no money, no belongings; that they came from “another place,” which he refused to identify; and that their very existence would not have been recorded.
Now he stood at the threshold of the room where they had placed her, afraid to see what they had done to her. He ventured into the room to find Gutta asleep on an elaborate mechanical bed, still beneath a siege of tubes and strange devices. It made Railborn think of the old fairy tale: the beauty asleep in a deep cavern of thorns. Only the kiss of a Most-Beloved would awaken her—but he didn’t dare kiss her for fear that she might slap him silly, even in this state.
As he stood there, a woman entered and identified herself as a social worker. “I’ve been assigned your case,” she told him, and Railborn nodded, neither understanding nor caring what she was talking about.
“Will she live?” Railborn asked—a question he had asked everyone, and which no one was willing to answer.
“I’m not a doctor,” the woman said. “But her condition is stable. I think she’ll be okay.”
Railborn heaved his relief so heavily from his shoulders that he became light-headed and needed to grab the wall for support. Then, with that burden finally lifted, he dared to ask himself the question he had been avoiding since first setting foot on the Topside: So what happens now?
The woman looked at his Downside clothes, heavily stained with Gutta’s blood, and held out to him a set of the green garments the healers had worn. “You’ll have to take those clothes off,” she said.
Railborn raised his chin and looked into this woman’s eyes, realizing what she was requesting. Railborn accepted it as a call to duty.
“I understand,” he told her. Then, taking the clothes from her, he stepped into the small bathroom, closing the door behind him.
There were rules for how a Downsider lived. They were clear and simple, always stated in black and white—and even when breaking those rules, Railborn knew there were rules for the proper way to break them. Standing before the bathroom mirror, Railborn peeled off his Downside garments until he was standing as naked as the day he was born. Then he began to intone the pledge.
“I have climbed through the roof of the World...” he began, his eyes fixed on his reflection, “and I now renounce the Downside, and the life I had led...”
There was a balance, Railborn knew. Nothing was achieved without loss. Without sacrifice.
“...I shed all the ties that held me there...”
Gutta’s life was not a gift but an exchange—a bargain for which he now had to pay.
“...I take nothing with me but my flesh. Even my name I leave behind...”
He flicked away a tear that had no business being there, now or ever.
“...and I swear never to seek the Downside again, for as long as I live.”
With the incantation complete, Railborn stood silent, locked on his own eyes in the mirror—wide, dark pupils that would soon close to pinpricks in the bright light of day he and Gutta would now live in. Stripped of everything he had been, Railborn finally felt worthy to become the Most-Beloved he now would never be...but as he dressed himself in the Topside clothes and prepared to receive his new life, he knew in his heart that if he could be Gutta’s most-beloved in this strange, uncovered world...it would be enough.
Like Railborn, there was no question in Talon’s mind as to what he had to do. He left the Chamber of Soft Walls knowing his destination. He did not want to be noticed, so he kept to the darkest Downside corridors, navigating as he often did by the feel of the air around him. In the silence of those dim passageways he thought once more about Lindsay, and the revelations she had inflicted upon him.
When he had viewed the reports Lindsay had compiled for him, it was as if the bottom had dropped out of his soul. If it were all true, then everything he believed about himself and his world was a lie. And yet, even as he felt his sense of place and purpose disintegrating into that bottomless pit, he felt a new sense of purpose rising to take its place—taking the fragments that Lindsay had shattered and re-forming them into something stronger than before. When Talon had risen to demand his release from the Chamber of Soft Walls, he had felt numbed by this heightened sense of purpose— elevated so high, he knew the guard could not refuse him. Now as he walked in the dark, he wondered if he was merely in some sort of shock, or if everything in his life truly was falling into place. He felt heat before him now, the temperature climbing a degree with every step, until at last he could see the flickering flame and the long stairway descending ahead of him.
There was only one place he could go now—he had known it from the moment he read the first pages about the wayward Topside inventor. But knowing where he had to go didn’t mean he was ready for the burden—and even though he had already faced death by water, it didn’t make it any easier to face death by fire in the one place that no living Downsider had ever seen. The most sacred and mysterious spot there was. The Place of First Runes.
He reached the bottom of the stairs and saw exactly what he was always told he would see: two steadfast sentries, and beyond them a passageway of flame. The two sentries were not the type that could be easily swayed to allow passage. They held electrified swords that were wired to a high-voltage line dangling from the ceiling. The floor of the passageway behind them was of porous pumice that was continually pumped with gas and set aflame. One sentry had the key to turn off the flaming floor, and the other was trained to kill him if he tried.
Talon approached the sentries, the passageway around him as hot as an oven and flickering with the blue gaslight. The sentries were dressed in heavy ceremonial uniforms forged from only the finest cloth fragments. They were drenched in sweat, partially from the heat of the flames behind them and partially from the anxiety of holding those lethal electrified swords in their rubber-gloved hands. They gripped those swords more tightly as Talon approached. He stopped just short of striking distance.
“I suppose you know who I am,” he said, hoping he could wield his reputation as well as they wielded their swords.
“We don’t care,” said one of the Rune Sentries. “If you take one step closer, we will kill you.”
Talon showed them the folder that Lindsay had given him. “These are First Runes,” he told them. “I must be allowed in.”
“Impossible,” said the other sentry. “If they’re not already in there, then they’re not First Runes.”
“Nevertheless, I must pass.”
“Only a Most-Beloved may pass.”
Talon sighed. “I realize that,” he said, finally accepting the course that the Fates had set before him. “That is why I must pass.”
It took a few moments, then it struck the sentries simultaneously just what Talon was suggesting. Everyone knew that the Fates had chosen to spare his life rather than take it on the day of his execution. By his own admission, he had been allowed to see the Topside, only so that he might return. And now Lindsay’s loving hands had handed him the only thing that could truly undo the Downside, destroying its spirit far more effectively than any Topside invasion ever could—if the things he had read were true. The only way to know for sure was to see the unknowable secrets of the Place of First Runes for himself.
Only a Most-Beloved may pass.
Which meant, if Talon passed, he must therefore be Most-Beloved. And these sentries could make it so by the simple turn of a gas key.
It wasn’t something he had sought after. He wasn’t like Railborn, who was always propelled by his family’s dream of greatness. But then, perhaps that’s why it had fallen on Talon. The sentries hesitated, then the one to his right broke stance, lowered his sword, and pulled the key from around his neck. He stuck it in a small hole in the wall and turned it—and although the second sentry didn’t help, he didn’t kill the first sentry, either. Soon the thick carpet of flowing blue flame was flickering out. The second sentry grabbed an unlit torch from the wall and touched it to the last bit of flame before it was gone, then handed it to Talon. Now the corridor was lit a pale orange from the burning torch.
“Remember us, Talon,” one of them said. “Remember us in future days.”
Talon told them that he would, if indeed there were future days. Then he stepped forward across the hot stone floor and toward the Chamber beyond.
If the Downside had a soul, it resided in the Place of First Runes. It was lower than the low-dwellings of the Advisors. It was even lower than the Bot, and since only a Most-Beloved was allowed to enter, no one had set foot within its walls for more than a decade. Talon did not know what he would find, and the fear of this ultimate unknown almost made him turn back—but his shoes had just about burned through as he crossed the thirty yards of hot floor that led to the Chamber, and he didn’t know if he could stand the trip back until the floor cooled. It occurred to him that perhaps the flaming floor’s purpose was not only to deter people from entering, but also to prevent those who did enter from turning back once they had made their choice.
He swallowed his fear and stepped forward into the Place of First Runes, not knowing what to expect, and not expecting what he saw.
It was a simple chamber, about a hundred feet long, and half as wide. The ceiling was low—just about a foot above his head. It was not paved in gold, or decorated in glistening jewels—and yet it was far from ordinary.
The place seemed neither Topside nor Downside in nature, but a combination of both. Everything was carved of marble and dusty granite. There were large rectangular stone boxes, and heavy monolithic markers—some squared off at the top, others fashioned into crosses. There were words carved into the stones, but there were also all manner of graffiti written everywhere as well—not the fine, intricate runes that Downsiders wrote, but sloppy scrawlings that told of events dated in Topside years, old Topside years, like the ones in the pages Lindsay had given him: 1895, 1901. A sinking feeling took hold in the pit of his stomach, and he decided not to fight it. He had come here to know the truth. He would not hide his eyes from it now, no matter how it made him feel.
It then occurred to Talon just what this place was. He had passed through one like it during his short stay on the Top-side. He had almost slept there until he had realized with a morbid chill exactly what it was for.
This was a place for the dead.
The Champ had told him that the Topside remanded their dead to the ground rather than to the waters. He hadn’t believed it until he had seen such a place for himself. But here, in the Downside, was a graveyard that must have dated back to the days before the Aquatorium. Talon counted thirty-nine graves, each bearing a Topside name.
He half-expected the spirits of the entombed to rise up in a chorus of rage at having been disturbed. But if so, their rage would be well-matched by the rage growing within Talon.
At the far end of the Chamber was a monument larger and more elegant than the others. With his torch already beginning to fade, Talon made his way toward it. Columns rose on either side of a marble vault set into the wall. It was the only grave that had not been marred with the painted histories that filled almost every other surface of the room. There were, however, some words carved in the stone. Talon brushed the dust away and leaned close to read what he already knew it would say:
ALFRED ELY BEACH
BORN: SEPTEMBER 1, 1826
DIED : AUGUST 5, 1902
MOST BELOVED
OF ALL THOSE WHO DWELL
IN THE DOWNSIDE OF THE CITY.
So it was true. It was right there before him, carved in the stone of the Downside’s most sacred place—a place that now no longer seemed sacred, but profane. He would have set the grave ablaze if there were something there to burn.
“We are a proud and noble people!” Talon screamed to the long-dead inventor. “We have always been here! We will always be here.”
The words held no sway anymore. Because another voice was speaking in his thoughts now, taunting, and tormenting. We are nothing, the voice told him. We come from nothing. And we will always be...nothing.
Talon left the Place of First Runes a few minutes later, his anger and anguish igniting an entirely new course of action. Still clutching the folder of truths in his hands, he set out to gather as many Downsiders as he could, to put a new plan into effect—a plan that would end, once and for all, this so-called “war” with the Topside.
No Topside army would set foot in their caverns. Their homes would not be pillaged, their chambers would not be turned into museums for Topside amusement. If all went according to plan, the Topside would be left with no further reason to dig...
...because if the Downside had to die, they would blow it up themselves.