Just a few short hours after the Aqueduct Shaft blew, the utilities were all restored as unexpectedly as they had gone out, and the current of traffic flowing out of the city reversed direction, heading right back in. The time was, according to every digital appliance in the city, 12:00, in urgent blinking green.
In a world addicted to change and new experiences, current events become yesterday’s news before nightfall. Only a scant few events become legendary. The legend of the Great Shaft Disaster, was, like most legends, made up of a few bare facts, upon which were hung the most outlandish speculation. The most common version of the legend is this: Evil city engineer Mark Matthias, while digging the Aqueduct Shaft, came across some key pressure points for the city’s entire utility structure. At that point, he may or may not have blackmailed city hall, threatening to shut the city down. A dump truck, which may or may not have been filled with the city’s ransom payment, had the bad fortune to fall into the hole, revealing that the alleged bags of ransom loot were actually just bags of worthless old subway tokens. Then, after spreading some cockamamy story about an underground cavern, with archaeological “experts” who may or may not have been his partners in crime, Matthias made good his threat to shut down the city. In the end it took a highly covert military operation to collapse the shaft, and sever Matthias’s stranglehold on the city.
Of course none of this could be substantiated—all people knew for sure was that Matthias resigned amidst a storm of controversy—but everyone had heard the blackmail story from their hairdresser, or their dentist, or their hairdresser’s dentist—and the fact that city hall flatly denied it made people believe it even more.
The one Topside girl who knew the truth knew she could share it with no one. Although Lindsay longed to know the fate of the Downside, and although she wanted to spare her father from the absurdly spiraling rumors about his involvement, she also knew that she was the keeper of their secret. Not a day passed where she didn’t worry about the fate of Talon and the Downside—that they indeed might have drowned in Lindsay’s waves, as the Champ had warned. It was only her trust in Talon and his ability to rise above—or more accurately, sink below—that gave her hope.
At first she found herself horrified by the whispered allegations against her father, but soon her father found himself amused by it. After all, his only ambition had been to supply the city with water for the next five hundred years, and now he was being treated like a villain of James Bond-like proportions—a status, incidentally, that commanded far more respect than he had ever had before.
“I enjoy being infamous,” he told Lindsay over dinner one night. “The bank tellers know my name.”
As it turned out, that same infamy was enough to extract Todd’s mother from her comfortable Brooklyn cult. Refusing to allow her son to remain in the clutches of an evil stepfather, she came to collect him, then promptly shipped him off to a brutal military academy upstate, where all the food was in lumpy shades of brown, and “personal space” meant the three feet of air between an upper and a lower bunk. Whenever Lindsay got to feeling blue, she thought of Todd doing push-ups at five A.M., and scrubbing bathroom floors with his toothbrush. It always made her feel better.
Yet each day she would find herself peering into air vents, storm drains, sewer grates, and every dark, unknown place she came across for a sign that the Downsiders were still there, refusing to believe the explosion had destroyed them. She returned to the library time and again, only to be ejected from the lower vaults by security before she could get anywhere close to the Downside. She had gone down to the shaft site, but what little remained of the shaft had been filled in, paved as a parking lot, and forgotten. The subway tokens that hadn’t been taken as souvenirs were carried off by pigeons, leaving nothing but the scratches and dings in metal awnings to testify that brass had ever rained at all.
It wasn’t until April that Lindsay came across a curious report in the news—something described as an April Fools’ Day joke. Apparently librarians had been finding numerous volumes missing from every section of the library’s main branch. With a library of so many millions of volumes, the disappearances could have gone unnoticed for months...if it hadn’t been for the fact that each missing book was replaced by a single sock. And no two of the socks matched.
What did it take to end the World? The Topside knew—in fact, it was skilled in inventing scenarios. As every six-year-old could tell you, everything from nuclear apocalypse to a microbiologic epidemic could bring about an effective Top-side end. The Downside, however, being so much smaller, did not need such elaborate methods. Their end could be far more modest.
On that dark day, after the explosions had subsided and the mattresses were pulled from the Floodgate Concourse doors, Talon expected everything to be gone. He was half right.
The Hot Springs and the Hudward Growing Caverns had caved in. So had the batward dwellings, the Lesser Rune Chambers, and everything within a thousand paces of the Brass Junction. A full half of the Downside was gone. But that meant that half was spared—and even though the entire batward end of the Bot had collapsed, the herd was yonkward that day.
Against their own better judgment, but deferring to Talon’s wishes, the tappers immediately restored the Topside’s utilities, rerouting it around the blast zone to make certain every last Topsider could bathe, flush, broil, and dial once more. And to everyone’s amazement, the Topsiders abandoned the war, becoming as complacent and lethargic as they had been before, so bloated on electricity, gas, water, and the sounds of their own voices that they didn’t bother to wage further war. They left the Downside alone to deal with their biggest remaining problem: the population crunch caused by half the living space.
Now, as things slowly began to return to normal, Talon discovered what a Most-Beloved was required to do. Which was nothing in particular. Since nothing in particular was an easy task to excel in, his adjustment was remarkably easy.
They had wanted to build him his own new low-dwelling, but what with people setting up housekeeping in passageways, he had no business accepting such an offer. He refused, telling them that at the very most he needed nothing more than a thicker curtain between his and his parents’ rooms.
It was on the day that the curtain was to be delivered—in a quiet moment, almost two months after the “war”—that Talon allowed himself to think of Lindsay. In truth, he thought of her often, but he always found good reason to chase the thought away. After all, rebuilding a world took far more effort than blowing it up. But today he let her memory play in his thoughts as he held in his hands the time bomb she had given him: a folder that he had carefully sewn into his pillow. He had yet to share Lindsay’s truth with anyone. There was an anger he felt toward her, that she would give him such earth-shattering information, and yet an even deeper gratitude that she cared enough to make such a hard choice. Of course, she wasn’t being entirely selfless, but she wasn’t being entirely selfish, either. It was very human of her, and he held on to the folder, because he couldn’t hold on to her.
His mother pushed back the curtain and stepped in. Almost reflexively Talon began to squeeze the pillow tighter in his hands, as if it were a rabid rat that could leap out of his arms and attack her.
“Skeet’s here with the new curtain,” his mother told him. “He wants the honor of hanging it himself.”
Talon grimaced as the memory of Railborn and Gutta struck him like the pang of a healing wound. Skeet Skinner, bearing the weight of his son’s disappearance, had taken it upon himself to gather the finest patches from the finest skins and oversee the creation of a leather curtain for the new Most-Beloved. It was far more than Talon wanted, but he could not refuse the gift.
Talon concealed his grimace with an apologetic grin. “Tell Skeet he can hang the curtain in a few minutes.” The admiration of the entire Downside was a poor substitute for lost friends. He had to believe that Railborn hadn’t just “wandered the wrong way” with Gutta, as Strut Mason claimed. He had to believe that Railborn chose to save her life, and that they were together in a sort of permanent Topside rotation—a challenge he knew they would both rise to.
Talon’s mother turned to leave, but thought better of it, then turned to him and said, “Those papers in your pillow—are they Topside?”
The question knocked the wind out of Talon. At first he tried to hide his reaction, and then realized there was no point, for when had he ever successfully concealed anything from her?
“Yes and no,” he answered truthfully.
“I was tempted to read them, but then decided if they were important enough to guard even in your sleep, perhaps I’d better leave them be.”
He looked down at the pillow, so ineffectively concealing its load. “I don’t know what to do with them.”
“You’ll figure it out,” she told him with absolute certainty.
The fact was, he already had figured it out...but knowing what he had to do and actually doing it were two different things.
His mother shook her head and laughed. “My son the Most-Beloved. If I had thought it six months ago, I would have been bounding the soft walls.” Then her laughter faded, and she gazed at him as if she were searching for something she could not find. “Nowadays, Talon...when I look at you, it’s as if you’re a stranger to me. Like I don’t even know you anymore.”
Six months ago, he would have been happy to hear her say that...but now he told her, in the quietest of voices, “Please, Mom. I need you to know me just a little while longer.”
And although nothing else was said, Talon knew she understood.
Alfred Ely Beach’s grave was just as Talon had left it. The only difference was that now there was no need to convince the guards to douse the flames and let him pass—although they did look at each other curiously when they noticed the pillow he carried under his arm.
As he knelt beside the grave, he laid the torch on the ground. It was already fading, but he would take his time in doing this. Respect was owed to the First Most-Beloved of the Downside, even if the respect could come from no one but Talon.
“You would be proud of us,” Talon said, speaking to the long-dead inventor. “We have honor, we have compassion... but most of all, we have self-respect. I guess we didn’t have that on the Topside. I guess that is why we chose to stay down here.”
At the edge of the grave was something Talon hadn’t noticed on his first visit. It was a journal so covered in dust, it just about blended into the ground around it. The book must have detailed those first years, and how Beach’s great train project had evolved into the creation of this world instead. Although Talon was tempted, he did not open the journal, nor did he read the many writings on the walls. It was enough to know they were there.
“You would have been proud of us,” he said again. “And I hope you’ll understand what I have to do now.” Then Talon tore apart his pillow, scattering feathers across the grave. He pulled out the folder Lindsay had given him, all wrinkled and stained from many weeks of late-night sweats. He straightened the pages as best he could, and laid them down beside the journal.
“You had to be forgotten, or the Downside wouldn’t take. You knew that, didn’t you?” Talon tried to imagine that first generation a hundred years ago, suffering to erase its own true history and lovingly building a false history for the sake of their children, and their children’s children. A world based on a lie...and yet the Downside turned that lie into something glorious. If they could save a faller with the touch of a sword, surely that lie deserved to be knighted into truth.
“I will be keeper of your secret,” Talon told the silent grave of the forgotten inventor. “I will be the one who remembers why we forget.”
The torch went out, but Talon lingered in the darkness. Truth was such a strange thing—its face changing depending on the angle at which it was viewed. There were some truths that gained value by being proclaimed, and others whose greatest virtue is that they remain unknown. Better that the truth be like the moon, which Talon had so briefly spied above the Topside night—a bright sphere only showing half of its face at a time, leaving the rest to be uncovered fragment by fragment, in its own proper time.
“Someday there will come a time for us to know...,” said Talon. “But there are many more things we must know first.” If there was one thing he had learned from his trip to the surface, it was the vastness of their own ignorance. There were those who couldn’t see this; those who said, “Forget the Topside, and dig deeper still. Teach our children that the Topside doesn’t even exist.” But burrowing into deeper darkness was no more a solution than was exposing themselves to the blinding truth of how their world came to be. Perhaps, thought Talon, there was a path in between. A way to shed their ignorance without losing their souls.
Talon touched the grave that now stretched invisibly before him, leaving his handprint firmly in the dust as a sign that he had been there, then he left.
Once across the steaming pumice approach, he instructed the sentries, in the sternest voice that a fourteen-year-old could muster, that the fire be turned back on, and that no one—not even he—be allowed to enter the Place of First Runes again until many years hence, when the next Most-Beloved demanded their glimpse of the unknowable.
Meanwhile, about as far from the Downside as the moon itself, sat Long Island, completely unknown to them, and the type of place Downside map makers would label HERE BE DRAGONS.
On Long Island’s North Shore, about thirty miles away from anything Downside, was the John Alden Dix Home for wards of the state—a pleasant enough place, as far as orphanages go, with a nice view of Long Island Sound, and the distant Throgsneck Bridge, the name of which was lost on most of Dix Home’s residents.
The teenagers wing was filled with kids bitter about the fact that they were never adopted—but many were now drawing strength from two newcomers, a boy and a girl who shared a closeness that was the envy of their peers. Although they chose to keep their past a mystery, Raymond, as he called himself, proved to be a wizard at navigating the blind passageways of the Internet, hunting down information as if he were born to it. The girl, Greta, although still recovering from unexplained wounds, managed to defuse every conflict that arose among the angrier kids in the home with an empathetic and rational ear that could someday make her a master diplomat.
There was no question that the two were the most beloved kids in the home.