Lindsay would have feigned amnesia if she’d believed it would fly...but her father was right: He did deserve some sort of explanation, a half-truth at the very least.
“I thought I’d take a tour of the subway,” she told him, “but I guess I took a wrong train and ended up lost in a place I’d never seen before. I would have called, but I felt so stupid about the whole thing, I just wanted to get home.”
Her father scrutinized her, clearly wrestling with how much of the story he should buy. “And the clothes?”
“Oh, that...well, my clothes sort of got...trampled....But I met some nice people who gave me clean clothes and cab fare. You know, people here aren’t as nasty as everyone says.”
Her father paced the room, obsessively rubbing his allergic nose.
“Daddy,” she asked, remembering what The Champ had said to her, “did you ever hear of someone named Alfred Beach?”
Her father spun on his heel at the mention of the name—something Lindsay hadn’t expected. “What about Alfred Beach?” he asked suspiciously. “Who said anything about him?”
Lindsay just shrugged in her own ignorance. “I just heard someone talking, that’s all.”
Her father hesitated, as if weighing whether or not he should say anything at all. “Alfred Beach was a kind of engineer,” he finally told her. “An inventor—a crazy one—who lived a very long time ago.”
“Oh,” said Lindsay, realizing too late that she had inadvertently tripped a land mine. She could imagine her father, with his grandiose aqueduct dreams, being compared to an old-time crazy by his coworkers. It must have been quite a sore spot with dear old Dad. “Well, I’m sure you’re nothing like him,” she offered, and began to wonder what a disreputed engineer might have to do with Talon and his world. She wanted to press him further—but then she would have to tell him why she wanted to know, and that was something she had no desire to share. There were so few things she shared with him these days. Since she had arrived they hadn’t had a single conversation worth remembering—and it was more her fault than his. His long hours just made it easier to blame him, that’s all. The truth is, she hadn’t even given him the box of odds and ends that her mother had decided he should have, for fear that the little shoe box of memories might spark some unwanted conversation between her and her father—so she had never even taken it out of her suitcase.
Her father paced a bit more, and finally his eyes zeroed in on hers. “After what happened tonight, I don’t want you to go anywhere in this city without your brother anymore.”
“He’s not my brother.”
But her father refused to speak to that. “You heard me,” he said, making sure to have the last word as he left.
By the time Talon arrived home in his family’s private little corner of the world, his clothes had dried enough for his mother not to notice. She sat in their modest but comfortable living area, patiently listening as his sister read from a worn Downside reader.
“How was the first day of the Hunt?” his mother asked.
“Great,” said Talon. “The bulls were running. I didn’t catch anything, though.”
“It’s only your first day. Give it time.”
Talon quietly slipped into his room and drew the leather room-divider, needing the time alone to sift through the many layers of sediment building up in his brain. He was always a kid who traveled on the fringe of the rules and he could always get away with it, perhaps because he was so well-liked. But bringing a Topsider Down, that was more than bending the rules—it was a cardinal offense, the kind of thing that would shame his family’s good name for generations.
But if it was so awful, then why did he find his thoughts so drawn to Lindsay’s world? Perhaps because he wanted to be the one to catch Lindsay and rescue her from that sun-blinded Topside life, so full of mysterious temptation—like the taste of snow, or the sight of rushing cars.
He shook his head and laughed as he considered how he might bring the subject up with his father. He was an understanding man, but limited. His life revolved around his trade, and if conversation ever strayed from fishing, he had nothing to say. Talon imagined himself fishing in the main line alongside his father, as he had done for so many years, and trying to breach the subject of the Topside.
“Keep your head in the ground where it belongs,” his father would say, shutting him down even before Talon could get to the point. “There’s plenty of fish in the pipes,” he’d tell Talon; or, “If you don’t bite, you can’t get hooked.”
As the son of one of the Downside’s most respected fishermen, Talon was expected to take on the trade after all his rotations were done. Talon never minded the idea, until now. It was an easy path for him—a “no-brainer,” as Lindsay would say. But now Talon felt something shifting in himself—something bright and dangerous, realigning his heart toward a new purpose. He wasn’t certain where it would lead, but he did know that he would not be his father’s son. The prospect thrilled him almost as much as it scared him, and he wondered if the Fates would punish him for being so brash and defiant.
Talon approached the mirror on his wall. What does this Topside girl see when she looks at me? he wondered. His face was far from perfect: There was that scar above his right eye; his ears stuck out a bit too much; and then there were his feet, threatening to be even larger than his father’s were— useful for balance in slippery places, but still not something to look forward to.
When he turned, he caught his mother spying on him through the divider.
“See anything new in that handsome face?” she asked.
“Sure I do.” Talon studied his jaw line, then took notice of how his rounded boyish nose was becoming the strong rigid nose of a man. “Getting so I’ll bet you barely recognize me anymore.”
“Oh, I think I’ll recognize you for quite a while,” she said with a smirk, then she left him to grapple with her answer.
Low Justice
A single sentence was engraved on the wall of the Brass Junction:
FEAR THE TOPSIDE, OR BE CRUSHED BY ITS EMBRACE.
It was the single most powerful piece of Downside doctrine; all rules and rituals grew from that belief. Fallers were stripped of all but their soul; the no-man’s land of the High Perimeter was established; children were taught the evils of daylight, all to keep the worlds from touching, for it was believed that the slightest brush of one against the other could end both.
As a good citizen, this was something Railborn believed with all his heart. He knew what he was doing when he descended to the low dwellings—the fine apartments where the Wise Advisors lived. He had thought the whole thing through, and although the decision left him with a brutal case of the sweats, he knew he had to notify the Wise Advisors of what he had uncovered since his and Gutta’s strange encounter with Talon above the Bot.
“I believe a Topsider has seen the Downside.”
He stood in the doorway of the Fourth Advisor—a stocky, gray-haired man who had once been a baker before attaining this position of honor. Railborn chose to tell him rather than any of the other Advisors, because of his mild manner, evenhanded counseling, and his disarming, grand-fatherly smile.
But the man’s smile faded at the mention of a Topsider. Now he regarded Railborn as if he were the culprit and not just the messenger. “A Topsider? What are you talking about? How do you know this?”
Railborn stammered for a moment, cleared his throat, and stood straighter, determined to get it out. “I know because I saw her myself, Wise Advisor. I’ve spoken to everyone on the last Catching rotation—no one caught a girl our age, so I know she’s not a faller.”
“This is serious business. Come, sit down.” The Wise Advisor led him into his inner parlor, a spacious and well-adorned room. The low dwellings were larger and quieter than most, because advising wisely required a large, quiet place to ponder weighty questions.
Railborn sat down in a comfortable patchwork chair, and the old man sat across from him. “You’ve done the right t
hing coming here.”
“I know.” Railborn let his eyes wander around the room, decorated with only the best polished hubcaps and plastic knickknacks collected over many years. Gifts for solving disputes, no doubt. With trophies like these, Railborn felt comforted that he was now in the best of hands.
“This Topsider—how did she get here?” the Wise Advisor asked, his hands crossed calmly on his knee.
“She was brought here,” Railborn answered evasively.
“By whom?”
“A Downsider.”
“Which Downsider?”
Railborn had no rope left to dangle on, so he let go, setting the truth in free fall, and putting his faith in the Wise Advisor’s ability to fix all things.
“Talon Angler,” Railborn said. “Talon Angler brought her here.”
The Wise Advisor showed a moment of surprise, but quickly covered it. It was obvious that he knew Talon. But then, everyone knew Talon. Many people knew Railborn, too, but more often than not he was just known as “Talon’s friend.”
The Wise Advisor pursed his lips. “These are difficult times,” he said. “People think they can do as they please, with no consequences to their actions....”
“There’s no one to lay down the law,” agreed Railborn.
“Well, we need to make an example of Talon so this sort of thing won’t happen again,” the Advisor decreed. Then he regarded Railborn, eyebrows raised. “What do you think Talon’s punishment should be?”
“What do I think?” Railborn looked down. “Well...I think he should be pulled out of Hunting rotation,” suggested Railborn—a punishment that, not coincidentally, would leave their little trio a duo. A nice fringe benefit of having done the right thing.
“And?” prompted the Wise Advisor.
“Uh...and he should have to make up for what he’s done.” Railborn imagined three months of slime-scrubbing might humble Talon a bit.
“And?”
“And?” Railborn hadn’t considered any more “ands”— but this was why Wise Advisors held their positions: They were the ones who always thought one step beyond. “And,” concluded Railborn, “he should be stopped from ever going to the Surface again.” He imagined that if Talon were no longer allowed to roam the High Perimeter, he couldn’t be tempted by the Topside. Talon will thank me someday, thought Railborn. When he’s free from whatever spell that Topside girl has put him under, he’ll thank me for saving him.
The Wise Advisor studied Railborn a moment more, a hint of that warm smile returning to his face. “You’re Skeet Skinner’s boy, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” said Railborn, impressed to be recognized, even it had taken all this time.
“Your father keeps hinting that you possess all the qualities of a Most-Beloved. I can see now that he’s right.”
Railborn beamed. “You really think so?” It was something he never dared to speak aloud, although he dreamed of it often...but to be complimented in this way by a Wise Advisor was more than just a daydream. He couldn’t wait to tell Gutta!
The Wise Advisor slapped his knees and stood up. “Very well, then, we’ll do exactly as you say: Talon will be pulled from his rotations, made to pay for what he’s done, and we’ll make certain he never goes to the Surface again.”
Railborn said a respectful good-bye and left, bloated with civic pride and a sense that all wrongs would soon be righted, thanks to him, a leader in the making.
By the time the Downside rose to greet the new night, a rumor was shooting through the pipes that someone was about to be executed.
Guesses flew as to who the unlucky outlaw might be. Was it Tesla the Tapper, who was known to bribe Wise Advisors with free electricity taps from the city’s best transformers? Or maybe it would be Maggot the Tanner, who was once caught trying to pass off leather as fine vinyl.
Railborn knew that they all were wrong, and he raced to catch up with the execution party only to be turned away by a guard at the entrance to the Brooklyn Battery Passage. His heart was now filled with a hopeless sense of doom as he sat there, head in hands, at the passage entrance, and it occurred to him how just a few words spoken to the wrong person could crush one’s entire world.
Dead Man Flushing
When it comes to world-shattering events, history has a short and selective memory. The great San Francisco earthquake of 1906 lives on in public memory, but no one remembers how, only ninety-six years earlier, a quake hit New Madrid, Missouri, with such force that it made church bells ring in Boston and made the mighty Mississippi River flow backward. Popular memory recalls how Pompeii was buried under the ash of Mount Vesuvius thousands of years ago, but fails to consider the Tunguska Comet blast, less than one hundred years ago, when a stray piece of sky hurtled to earth and leveled a Siberian forest.
Likewise, no one recalls the Great Sinkhole of 1885, when, late in an otherwise uneventful July night, two entire city blocks plunged through one of nature’s nasty little trap-doors. It took a two-hundred-foot ladder and a full day to evacuate the hundreds of theatergoers from the ruined Plymouth Theater, which had resided near the corner of Sixth Avenue and Sixtieth Street.
The event would have been front-page news had not former president Ulysses S. Grant died that very day, thereby diverting everyone’s eyes elsewhere. Since all souls were accounted for and there was no loss of life to sensationalize, the Sinkhole of 1885 was treated as small news by the press.
If anyone had thought to probe deeper, however, they would have found that this wasn’t so much an Act of God as it was an Accident of Beach—Alfred Ely Beach, to be exact. But, because Beach was the publisher of the New York Sun, he had quite a lot of pull in the news media, and succeeded in keeping public attention away from the city’s largest pothole.
As luck would have it, the sinkhole was conveniently located right at the southern end of Central Park—and since the building of Grant’s Tomb further uptown was a much higher priority, the city decided quietly to build a platform over the whole mess when no one was looking, and extend Central Park one block south. No one argued, the whole affair was quickly put out of mind, and the Plymouth Theater was instantaneously and utterly forgotten. All that remains is the common expression “down in the ’mouth”—although no one remembers the true origin of the phrase.
While the trial and execution of Talon Angler can hardly be considered an earth-shattering event, it does happen to be a key link in the chain of events leading up to the Great Shaft Disaster—a catastrophe that is bound to have staying power in somebody’s history book, somewhere.
Justice in the Downside was a swift thing, dispensed by the Wise Advisors in small rations. There were no juries, no appeals—it was generally accepted that the Advisors’ decisions were always just, even when everyone knew they weren’t. Regardless, Downside justice was always quiet—for without the support of a Most-Beloved, it served the Wise Advisors’ interests to make ripples of justice rather than waves, lest someone more popular than they rise to defy them.
But who would challenge an act of treason?
Treason. The word hit Talon’s ears with the same shock that it hit his parents’. Such a vile, stone wall of a word, for the simple act of sharing his world. But when the Advisors woke him at dusk, dragged him down to their chambers, and asked if he denied the charge, he could not.
They invoked those words engraved on the Brass Junction walls, insisting the Downside must have nothing to do with the Topside—not now, not ever.
“We can’t live by that law!” said Talon, rising to his own defense. Everyone—even the Wise Advisors—knew small acts of treason were committed every day...for as much as the Downside’s beliefs depended on shunning the Topside, Downside reality depended on using it—from secret night raids for batteries and bulbs, to socks left behind on subway vendors’ racks as payment for soda and chocolate bars.
“Why was it so wrong to bring her here?”
“Because it’s the law!”
“Why does it have to be a
law?”
“Because it is.”
“That’s not good enough!”
He looked around to see if there was anyone who might listen. But there was no one but his anguished parents, and the Advisors. Although all trials were public, the Downsiders rarely attended, because they knew that to look upon someone else’s misery was to increase their own. It was a noble philosophy, and one that ensured there would be no resistance to bad decisions.
“Why are you doing this to me?” Talon finally asked before they announced his sentence. They looked away without answering. But Talon knew the answer. It was because anything less would expose the Wise Advisors for what they really were: a weak and useless gathering of fools. At least now they would be a gathering of fools to be reckoned with.
But though they might have been fools, the Advisors knew an easy mark when they saw one. The way the Advisors saw it, Talon was no martyr—he had no cause, no followers. He was just one in a hundred rotation-aged kids, important to nobody but himself, and his family. He would be forgotten—but his crime would be remembered. If this boy’s prompt removal could bring a generation to their senses, it was well worth the price. And so they felt no remorse in sentencing him to death.
As everyone knew, death’s first stop was Brooklyn.
Perhaps that’s why Brooklyn was a place feared and respected by the Downside. There was only one Downside tunnel that led there—a straight, solitary stretch that crossed beneath the East River and continued many miles until dead-ending at the Aquatorium, that lonely place where the dearly departed were dispatched to the next world.
Talon was denied the honors of a final meal, or a moment of silent reflection in the Grotto of Last Light. The procession through the Brooklyn Battery Passage, only an hour after his sentencing, was a meager one. There were his parents, who, at Talon’s request, did not bring his sister; two Wise Advisors; and three brawny enforcers pulling up the rear, just in case Talon had any thoughts of escaping. In a way it disappointed Talon that his execution was of such small consequence that only two of the five Wise Advisors bothered to come.