THROUGH GRAVEL

We twisted our bent backs and held our flowers up through the fine-grit gravel and soggy cigarette filters—up through the gaps and the spaces where things didn’t fit together anymore, and we waited.

Beth came to us that spring in her red cardigan, reaching down for the buttercup sprouting from the crack in the sidewalk. She pinched the stem, as delicate as her own little fingers, and she was gone before her guardian could turn to see why she had stopped. She slipped through the cracks of the busy world above, and was ours. The first child of the new spring. The first child in more than eight years.

In the dark of the understreets, by the light of the grates and drains overhead, she smiled nervously as we marveled at her small digits, at how the dimples in her knuckles were fading into lily-slim fingers, at how straight her spine had grown without the weight of the city pressing down from above. At the gap in her smile.

Many of us had gaps in our smiles that year, but none so fresh as hers. Our arthritic fingers grasped at her shining hair. Youth was a balm to eyes even as weak as ours.

We huddled in excited half-formed factions for the meeting where one of us would be blessed with her guardianship. When the hour came and the name was drawn—and it was mine, Aemon—I confess, I wept.

I had never dreamed that when I stooped to my own small flower in the pavement years ago, I would be given a new life, one far from the paths of those I’d lost aboveground.

A new child. My heart filled with love for her—filled the holes in the spaces where things didn’t fit together.

I stumbled through the custom of her adoption. It had been so long since I’d seen it done. I wrapped her in my parka and handed her a tarp, freshly patched, washed and folded. It would become her room, and annex to my home—our home. I gave her a trowel—my better one, with the smooth handle and less rust. I sprinkled her brow with water from the Last Drain.

Though it was Chev that had drawn my name, he was the one to protest. As soon as the ritual was complete, he stood, his reverence for the old customs the only thing that had kept him in his seat till then.

“Are you sure you’re up to this, Aemon? You are old in years but young to our kind. Perhaps the child should be placed with someone younger and with more experience in our ways.” He meant himself, of course. He’d been here since he was a tiny thing, born to the understreets to a Kindred mother long since washed away. But he still had youth in him. His hair still grew the color of shadows.

“I am no stranger to raising children, Chev.”

“Yes. I recall. I believe it is relevant for us to inquire as to the nature of your daughter’s death?”

Gasps echoed off the high stone walls of the meeting chamber. Chev raised his hands. “This is a rare moment where I feel a discussion of his life before coming to us as Kindred is not only prudent but necessary.”

I thought of not answering. This was a violation of my rights. As far as the Kindred are concerned, no one has a life before their life underground. Our lives start with the appreciation of small flowers, from the time we notice a spot of brightness and pause to take it in. When the city forgets us and we slip through the cracks. We are born again beneath the streets.

But Beth looked scared. Her cheeks, rosy with chill a moment before, had gone white. I couldn’t have that. For her sake, I let the fight fall from my shoulders.

“It was a car accident. My wife and daughter were driving home from the ballet. A drunk driver struck them. They both died.”

I felt Beth’s small hand then, inside my own. It was already taking on the cold of the underground, but it warmed me better than any sun that I remembered.

Chev’s gambit had worked against him, and the Kindred shot him troubled glances as they crept away into their tunnels, to their tarp homes to cultivate their small patches of flowers, in hope of catching a Beth of their own.

Beth clutched her tarp to her chest, her red sweater darkening in the damp air of the tunnels.

“I’m sorry about your daughter.” Her pupils stretched wide in the darkness, searching for scraps of light. Soon they would learn to fix open into the black stare of the Kindred, able to pull in the light from a storm drain three tunnels down.

I squeezed her small hand. “You’re my daughter now, and the only one in all the understreets.”

She was silent, then. I thought it was out of shyness. But knowing her now, I believe she was thinking. Planning.

***

“Why doesn’t anyone else have children?” Beth crumbled compost over the delicate buttercup sprouts that lined the old brick wall.

“Most of us are very old. Only the very old and the very young stop for small flowers anymore. And the young these days are older than the young that used to be. There are too many cares on their shoulders to bother with a small bit of brightness underfoot.” I looked at how her arms bent to her task, willowy and lean. “And you are very old, or very young, for a newborn.”

I could hear her thinking in the way that she breathed. Slow and shallow, like a rush of fresh air might interrupt her train of thought, though the air isn’t fresh. Not down here, and not up there.

“Do you miss your mother, Beth?” I shouldn’t have asked it. I should have done as Kindred do and pretended she’d never had one. That the canal through which she was born was a drain—her caul the tender leaves of sidewalk weeds.

“I never knew her. I don’t miss the nuns. They never let us play in the dirt.” She ran her fingers through the black soil at the base of an unfurling sprout.

It’s not uncommon for a Kindred. It’s easier to slip through the cracks when no one is looking.

“Are you bored, Beth? Are you lonely?”

“No.” She plucked at a mushroom sprouting from ancient grout and popped it in her mouth. “But maybe a little. Or maybe just worried.”

I paused in my digging. “Worry isn’t for the Kindred.” I fixed my black eyes on her. “Worry leaves no room for small flowers.” It’s what Belle had told me once, when I was newborn to the understreets, before the sun had faded from my skin and my collar sprouted lichen.

“But I’m worried about the Kindred, Aemon.”

“No need for that, child. We left our worries aboveground.”

“But if there are no other children, who will there be when the elders are gone?”

“No one, love.”

“But who will tend the flowers?”

“No one. Might be that’s an end for small flowers in the city above. Or might be that they never needed tending. Might be that the tunnels will fill with streams of wild buttercups.”

She smiled through the dark, and I saw her eyes were as black as mine. But then her smile wilted and her pupils shrank to pinpricks—her eyes wide discs of blue.

“I’ll be alone, then. When all of you are gone. That can’t happen,” she said, and jabbed her trowel into the offal piled under a drain.

***

Toes tapped like the incessant drip of water, echoed through the meeting chamber as we waited. Beth balanced along an old train rail, dragging her toes through the grit, oblivious to the empty seat that held the elders rapt.

Roz never came.

The agenda was cast aside in favor of organizing a search. Chev knew where her tarp was, but none knew her fishing spot—her crack in the sidewalk where she held her flower, hopes high.

“Her knees have ague,” Dane said. “It won’t be far from her tarp.”

No maps are allowed in the understreets, but any Kindred worth his muck can follow the glowing fissures in the street overhead. It’s the branching vascular system of our world.

Dane found Roz in a bright beam of light pouring from the hole where a slab of sidewalk had fallen in and crushed her. Her fragile frame curled in at jointed angles, like a dry spider. She held a fistful of buttercups—one still pinched in her outstretched fingers. The flowers drank in the light and glowed with it.

We squeezed our eyes against the glare, wrapped strips of black cloth across them, and felt our way toward her. She had to be moved before the sunwalkers found her—before their light-kissed faces peered curiously through the hole, now a window to our world.

There was a rustling and crunch of gravel.

“Aemon, what should we do with her flowers?” A small voice echoed from somewhere in front of me. I peered at her from beneath my cloth. She stared at Roz’s fallen form, her face pinched in a familiar kind of pain. Her childhood had faded from her in that moment—her shoulders squared and fists clenched.

“Beth, get away from there! The street here isn’t stable. Put your blindfold on and stand back.”

“I don’t need a blindfold, Aemon, the light doesn’t hurt after a minute or two.” She kneeled and took Roz’s hand in her own.

Chev’s deep voice came from the left. “Obey your father, child. If you would be Kindred, your eyes must be attuned to the dark. Light poisons them. Shun it.”

“The light isn’t poison. Our flowers need it, so we need it. We need more of it,” Beth said.

Heavy footfalls fell beside me. I ripped off my blindfold.

Chev had removed his as well, and he sprinted to Beth, grabbed her ear, and dragged her from Roz’s sunbeam. My eyes burned in the light. Chev swung her by the ear into my arms. He narrowed his black eyes to see, and glowered. “Your duty is to raise her as Kindred. If you fail in this duty, you will be banished. I’ll raise her myself. Properly.”

Beth clutched at the redness of her ear peeking from between her curls.

Dane stood from where he’d cleared the concrete from Roz’s crushed form. Raw pinkness bubbled up from where she had folded. “You can’t banish a Kindred, Chev. And even if you could, you shouldn’t. We need every Kindred who comes to us.”

“If you could see her eyes right now, Dane, you’d know she isn’t one of us.”

Beth’s eyes were as wide and blue as the sky. Sunlight danced across their shining surfaces. My own eyes had stopped burning, and I stared in wonder at the way the concrete dust sparkled in the beam of light.

“Change takes time,” Dane said. He hefted Roz into his arms. “I only hope we’ve got enough time.” He walked into the tunnel, heading for the Last Drain, the final resting spot of all Kindred.

Beth handed me a bouquet of Roz’s buttercups. She grinned. Light glinted off her snaggletooth smile. “Your eyes are green,” she said.

***

Roz’s tarp was patched, washed and folded, and handed to Chev at the next meeting, ready to be given to the next child, whenever one might come to us.

Beth sat in Roz’s empty chair. Chev overlooked it, though his brow lowered at the breach in decorum. There were now more chairs than elders.

Chev stood with his fists clenched in his coat pockets. “We are here to discuss new openings found to the street above. Has anyone witnessed promising new fishing grounds?”

No one answered. Beth toyed with a strand of yarn that had unraveled from the cuff of her cardigan. Her black eyes roved over the circle of elders. “Have you checked at the new museum?” She flinched as all eyes turned to her. I reached for her hand.

“What museum, child?” Belle asked.

“There’s a new children’s learning center, up on Wilson Stree—”

“We do not name streets here,” Chev bellowed, his voice frothing into a white cloud in front of his mouth.

Beth stared at him. The soft lines of her face hardened. “In the far west sector, there is a new children’s museum. They have a large parking lot, and a playground. The concrete is fresh. It may crack when it settles.”

Dane stood. “I have no new fissures to report in the far west sector. But I will check there often in the next few weeks.” He nodded his thanks to Beth.

“Have you tried—” Beth’s voice trailed off as Chev hissed at her further interruption. She lowered her eyes.

I squeezed her small, cold hand.

Belle stood. “I would like to hear what the child has to say.”

Beth slid off the end of her chair, shoes tapping against the damp brick. “Have you tried making a crack?” she asked. “Splitting a small hole in a spot where you know our flowers might be seen?”

Chev made a sound like a drain. “If finding small flowers were so easy, those that found them would not be Kindred,” he said. “The Kindred are drawn to them because they are looking for something—and only in that moment understand that they have found it. It is a rare person who stops for small flowers.”

“But what if it isn’t? What if Kindred aren’t rare at all? What if they’re just in the wrong place?”

Chev’s voice rose and echoed through the tunnels. “A Kindred still looking for their flower is not yet ready for the understreets. This meeting is over.” He stalked from the chamber, vanishing into the tunnel that led to his tarp.

The other elders remained in their seats, looking at Beth.

“We don’t have many tools,” Dane said.

Beth held her trowel out, small fingers curled around the worn handle; its blade flashing in light so faint that even our gaping pupils strained.

***

Beth slipped the edge of her trowel into the seam where the rough under-grit of road met the smooth sidewalk near a drain, where the road had been opened before and worked soft. She twisted and pushed, digging away at loosened slag until a small seam of light opened and grew across her knuckles. She pushed the metal in farther. The plane of pavement shifted.

Beth’s dark hair was showered with grey dust that sparkled in the light from the new fissure. She turned to me and smiled. I traded a flower for her trowel, and she raised it into the daylight. We breathed the fine dust that hung in the air.

Laughter and joyful shouting spilled through the beam of light. Within moments, the flower was pinched. The world blurred, as it always did at the birth of a Kindred. A deep scrape, as if all the streets of the city above were sliding over the tunnels, sounded in my ears. Like the world pulling apart and then falling back together.

Beth tumbled to the tunnel floor, a fair young boy in her arms. His hair was so bright it stung my eyes. He smiled at Beth, and wrapped his chubby arms around her neck.

***

Trowels chimed like small bells against the rough rock overhead. All through the tunnels, they made music, and seams of light opened across the understreets. So much light that new flowers bloomed—ones we hadn’t seen since our sunwalker days. Our faces pinched, adjusting to the new brightness in our world. Our black eyes began to shrink back into a multitude of color.

“I wonder what color Chev’s eyes are?” Beth dug at a sooty spot overhead. A small rush of dirt dusted her hair. She coughed and scrambled back as a chunk of concrete fell at her feet and shattered. The sounds of a busy street tumbled down through the new hole.

“I don’t think we’ll ever know, darling. I don’t think he’s coming back. And if he does—be kind to him. He doesn’t even remember the sun.” I collected the fistful of flowers that the bright boy—Beth had named him Bracken—harvested from our small patch.

He never spoke a word, but smiled and followed Beth everywhere. His feet were bare and unflinching against the cold tunnel floor, and his golden hair soon took on the texture of seaweed.

In Chev’s absence, the Kindred’s gapped smiles twinkled in falling bars of sunlight. The old adoption rituals were abandoned. Every elder now had a child—some two—and laughter sounded in the underground for the first time in living memory. There were now more children than tarps. The future of our line was secure.

***

A sound like a siren wailed through the tunnels. Kindred crawled from under tarps, blinking in the light. As the sound fell and then rose again, I realized it was a child, crying. I raced around corners, down tunnels, now unfamiliar in their sunlit map, until I found the source of the cries.

Belle held a young girl in her arms, fresh from the streets above. The girl pushed at Belle’s face, her eyes wide with fear.

Belle looked to me, bewildered, her brows raised, raining concrete dust across her cheek. “What do I do? Why is it crying?”

Chev stepped out of the tunnel behind her. His face had grown gaunter, his eyes even blacker than before, as if he’d sheltered someplace deep, away from our growing light. “Because it isn’t Kindred. That’s a sunwalker child you’ve pulled down. Your greedy opening of the streets is contaminating our world.”

Belle looked in horror at the child, and dropped it. It scrambled away from her, backed to the wall, and reached up for the light from the hole Belle had dug. A woman was screaming in the street above, and the child screamed in answer.

Beth ran up behind me, her face pale, her hand clamped around Bracken’s fist.

“Go home, you two,” I said. “Let us handle this.”

The commotion aboveground intensified. The roaring screech of power tools sounded from the drain grate nearby. The understreets concussed with the assault of a jackhammer.

“They’re coming,” Chev said. “Leave the child and run. Its kind will claim it soon. Hide—or you’re finished. We all are.”

Beth lifted Bracken’s feet from the ground and clutched him to her chest as she splashed down the tunnel. I limped after them.

“Pack the tarps,” I called to the disappearing bob of her curls.

The Kindred packed their homes on their backs and vanished into the network of tunnels as the sunwalkers broke through to reclaim their stolen child. Dust rained all along the cracks we’d made—our unnatural breaches widened under the stress of the city’s machines.

Beth, Bracken, Chev, Belle, and I huddled in an enclave, listening to their frantic mission. A loud crack echoed from the tunnel. It traveled, ripping along the underground network. The air filled with dust. A roar like a wrecking train followed. And then all went black with soot, then as bright as day.

The stone all around us seemed to roar, the bricks at our backs throbbing with the vibrations of the world coming undone. Tides of dust rolled past our enclave, chased by light strong enough to throw our shadows against the walls.

The city had fallen. The understreets were now the settling ground for the rubble of that which had rested above our heads. Small tracts of tunnel remained, clogged with debris.

Chev rubbed at his eyes and gasped as the pure sunlight raked at his pale face. Beth reached up and took his face in her hands. His breathing slowed. His eyelids split and peeled back to reveal nothing but a field of white shot through with bulging red capillaries. The red spread through the sclera like a stain. His pupils had contracted to nothing, sealed, shut off from the light forever. Beth’s hands flinched back.

“You see what you’ve done, child? That’s an end to us all. The sun has risen on the understreets, and the time of the Kindred is over.”

I pulled Beth and Bracken behind me. Belle reached out and stroked Chev’s cheek. “What do we do now?” she asked.

Chev choked on another wave of dirt blowing through our small section of tunnel. He grasped Belle’s hands to his cheeks and a tremor slipped into his voice. “We do what we have always done. We follow the tunnels. Whatever is left of them.”

“But where?” Belle asked. In the light, her bulging white knuckles writhed like compost grubs.

“To the only place left—the last place, the Last Drain.”

***

Chev shoved Beth in the small of her back. She stumbled through the knee-deep water toward the metal grate. “You’re the expert with a shovel, child. Now dig.”

I grasped Chev’s wrist and squeezed till he let out a grunt. “Touch her again, and I’ll send the rest of you where your pupils have gone.” Rage made me young again. But Chev pulled away from me and spat into the reeking water.

Belle held Bracken out of the water and stroked his damp curls. “Enough, the both of you. You wear my nerves worse than the sirens.”

The crooning alarms hadn’t quit since the dust had settled. The city above had rushed to the aid of its fallen streets. Crumbled houses wedged like barricades along our ancient pathways. Dane’s tunnel was gone. He and his three children were somewhere beneath the ruin of a home that had had green curtains and white walls.

Chev flinched with every strike as Beth’s trowel chimed against the cement that encased the bars blocking the opening of the Last Drain. Her brow furrowed in concentration. “I don’t understand . . . ”

“Don’t understand what, love?” I watched as her breathing turned slow and shallow again.

“If this is where you take the Kindred when they die, why isn’t there space already? How do they get through?”

Belle looked to me and shook her head.

Chev nodded to the grate. “You’ll find out soon enough, child. Sooner, the faster you dig.”

With the bar pulled free, we squeezed through the gap, the water at our feet flowing in a current that pulled us toward the space beyond.

“There,” Chev said. “We have passed through the Drain. All the Kindred are dead, now.”

***

Beth’s fingers scuttled up the side of my coat, gripping their way to my elbow. “Aemon?” She swept her foot across the unseen floor of the drain tunnel. “What are we standing on?”

The floor rolled beneath us, shifting like a landslide.

“Your ancestors,” Chev said. “Or my ancestors.” He reached into the dark and pulled a skull from the slick water. “I’m not certain they’d accept you as their own. Not after what you’ve done.” He held the stone face up to Beth’s. “Look into their black eyes and apologize, girl, so they may let us pass safely over their graves.”

“Enough, Chev!” Belle took the skull from him. She kissed its brow and lowered it back into the water. “What do they care anymore?”

We stumbled over the rolling bones of our ancestors till the drain’s pull grew heavy and its current pressed us against another grate. Beth hammered at the concrete while Bracken pulled, leveraging his tiny weight against the bars. When their arms grew tired, Belle and I took over. And when we wearied, Chev took the trowel from us and drove it into the crumbling rock.

“It seems there are drains beyond the Last Drain,” Beth said, rubbing the ache in her elbow.

Chev paused, running his fingers through the water.

“There are whole worlds outside of what you know, aren’t there?” she pressed. “This isn’t the end at all.”

The water beyond the grate ran clearer, the floor smooth brick interrupted with rusted train tracks. Numbered doors dotted the walls at intervals. Chev eyed them suspiciously, as if they would burst open and pour forth an army of angry sunwalkers.

The water grew lower and lower, disappearing through invisible cracks, till it ran in isolated rivulets. Beth’s cardigan trailed loose strings into it like trolling lines from a hungry vessel. The tunnel echoed with gurgling—the sound of water falling. Belle had begun to squint, and I realized that the tunnel was growing lighter.

The floor sloped to a low dip where the last water trickled into a grated drain. Chev stopped.

He crouched over the drain and pressed his face against its darkness. “Here is our path,” he said.

No one responded.

“Give me the trowel.” He held a gnarled hand out to Beth. She handed him the tool and stepped back.

“Daylight bathes the understreets. We must go under again. Under-under. The Kindred belong beneath it all, where rare flowers grow—where they’re appreciated and not taken for granted.” He threw himself against the bricks, driving the trowel between them.

“Or maybe . . . ” Beth looked over her shoulder at the growing glow at the end of the tunnel. Her eyes flashed a small sliver of blue. “Maybe we should keep going.”

Chev tossed a loose brick over his shoulder into the shrinking puddle behind us.

“We could teach them, up above. Show them. We don’t love small flowers any less for being in the light. That’s what makes us Kindred.” Beth moved toward Chev.

Chev panted and heaved at another brick. The edge of the grate showed through the old grout like an exposed ribcage. He laughed with what little air he could draw, but his smile faltered.

“Maybe you’re right, child,” he said.

Belle and I looked to each other. She pulled Bracken close.

“You were right about the Last Drain, after all.” The fight had gone out of his voice.

“What about it?” Beth took a step closer to Chev, her toes edging up to where he lifted the groaning metal from the stones.

“That wasn’t the Last Drain.” He swung his legs into the dark hole. He handed the trowel back to Beth. “This is.”

He vanished into the dark, falling with the water that spilled over its edge, its droplets glowing like bright eyes in the rising glow from the end of the tunnel. We never heard him land.

***

At the end of the tunnel, the metal of Beth’s trowel flashed like fire against the crumbling rock. When she paused, we saw our faces in it, pale and veined, pinched against the sting of pure daylight. Bracken reached through the bars and grasped at the tall grasses that grew up against the opening. I lay my palm against the bricks, the end of the understreets, and said a quiet goodbye to my home.

When we broke through into the stiff grass, we sank into it, burying our faces from the sun, and slept.

We woke as the sun dipped behind a distant hill, relieving our eyes from its sting. We were curled in a ditch—our tunnel set into the side of a hill that overlooked the fallen city. Clouds of dust rose from its ruin, glowing in places where flames shot from tears rent in gas lines and electric hubs. Between us and its endless light, the hill stretched, full of flowers. Blue, like Beth’s eyes. Curling leaves green, like mine.

Bracken ran into the field, hopping over and around the flowering clusters, lowering his face to the bright blooms.

We waded onto the hillside. Perfume rose around us and masked the dank funk of the compost and tunnel water.

“Can we live here? Can we make a living like this?” Belle clutched her hands to her chest. Tears traced pale tracks across her dusty face.

“I suppose we’ll try.” I reached for her hands and pulled them away from her heart, folding them into my own.

Beth called after Bracken. He danced away down the hill toward a tall rose. He cartwheeled around it, a breathless singsong of joy tumbling up the hill back to us. Beth ran toward him. “Bracken—” Her voice strained, the last syllable of his name a wail.

He righted himself and reached for the tall stem. The peach bloom bobbed, orange in the light from the setting sun. He wrapped his small fist around the barbed stem and cried out from the sting of its thorns. The hill seemed to roll beneath our feet as if the earth had turned to water. Bracken vanished.

Beth screamed.

Belle and I ran to her, long grasses catching at our feet. Beth had fallen, sobbing into a patch of blue flowers. I pushed her hair back from her face, cupped her cheeks in my hands.

“Shh, Beth, shh.”

She wailed like a sunwalker.

Belle wrapped Beth in her shawl. “That boy goes where he’s meant to. He’s a new kind of Kindred. He knows tunnels, and cities, and fields. He pulled at the tallest flower—and someone, somewhere, knows that makes him special. Might be it’s Chev, in the under-under, building a new world. And when we’re ready, he’ll hold a flower for us, child. Don’t cry.”

Beth rolled out of her embrace and ran her fingers through the grass, pinching each flower she came to, pulling at it, ripping it from the ground and moving on to the next. She carved a barren path in the hillside.

Belle and I sat in the blue flowers and watched her trail lengthen in the stretching dark.

“She won’t find it that way.” Belle brushed torn petals from her shawl and wrapped it back around her shoulders.

“She’ll realize that soon.”

“But will she realize it before she pulls out all the roots?”

“No. Not her.” My heart ached for her, but I smiled. “That one breaks worlds.”

“Then how will we find the lad?”

“He’ll be at the other end of whatever flowers are strong enough to grow back.”