Downsiders

  A single flashlight lit the way—a dim oval stretching before their feet—but this was one journey Talon would much rather have made in the dark. Unlike the other Downside tunnels, this passage was narrow and cold, with no doors or junctions. Its air was as stale as death, and every step made it increasingly clear that there was no turning back. The relentless monotony of the tunnel’s own walls was a reminder that everyone would eventually make the journey to Brooklyn.

  As they silently made their way down the tunnel, Talon tried to find some greater purpose in all of this. He tried to convince himself that perhaps Lindsay was worth dying for...but he didn’t know her well enough to know if she was worth dying for. Their friendship was just a curiosity at best, and now it would never be anything more.

  How could I be so stupid, Talon thought, to throw away my life for a taste of snow and the sight of a Topside girl?

  Finally the narrow corridor opened up into the uninviting chamber of the Aquatorium, a jagged cavern where gnarled tree roots wrapped around a ceiling of heavy pipes. At the far end a darkly dressed undertaker waited by a heavy lever.

  Talon looked up to see a wide red ceramic pipe dripping with cold condensation and hissing with the rush of millions of gallons of water. This was the Bensonhurst water main—a lifeline that quenched the thirst of the mysterious Topside borough. The Topsiders here never noticed or missed the short surges of water that were regularly rerouted from the water main and into the Downside funeral siphon.

  The siphon itself was a narrow rusting pipe, level with the Aquatorium floor. Like so many things in the Downside, it gave the impression that it had been here eternally and had always been meant for this one final purpose.

  The Fourth Advisor—the one who had first brought the charge—stood on the platform before the siphon and signaled for Talon to step closer, which he did on unsteady knees.

  “You have been sentenced to judgment in the Great Beyond,” he said with as much formality as he could muster. Talon heard his parents weeping behind him and cursed the Wise Advisors for forcing them to witness this.

  “Do you have any last words? Anything you say will be inscribed in the Rune Chambers.”

  The suggestion made Talon furious. There were so many things he had planned to write in the Rune Chambers when his Tagging rotation came, but nothing that could be boiled down into a single set of last words. The only thing he could think to say was, “Tell Railborn he can have my bottle-cap collection.”

  There was a hole about six feet long in the siphon pipe, and Talon was ordered to climb in. Only now did it finally hit him exactly what his fate would be, and he found his muscles locked solid, unable to move. The enforcers had to carry him. As they did, he frantically began reciting old nursery rhymes in his head, desperate to keep from thinking more than one rhyme into the future—because he knew if he did, he would turn into a screaming, struggling child. For the sake of his parents, he was determined to keep his dignity...but the moment he was laid on his back and he felt the coldness of the pipe seep into his clothes, the fear ripped through him, exiting his mouth in an uncontrollable wail.

  “Mom...Dad...” he found himself calling out. “Mom, Dad, I’m scared....” He shut his eyes tight, praying that this would all go away and he could just be a simple Downside kid catching carp alongside his father, never thinking of the Topside again. But when he opened his eyes there was no last-minute reprieve—only the somber face of the undertaker, with his hand on the heavy lever.

  “May the Fates have mercy on your soul,” he said, then pulled back on the lever, sending a mighty surge of frigid water exploding through the pipe, coursing around Talon’s body and propelling him feetfirst toward the Land of the Dead.

  With his world and his life behind him, Talon flushed through darkness, riding the cold surge, gagging, choking, almost drowning in the rushing water. It nearly overtook him, but then he found that if he tilted his neck forward, the water coursing around his head formed a pocket of air and he gulped short breaths every few seconds as he flew on the crest of the wave toward his end.

  As he careened through the darkness, he tried desperately to fight the fears that threatened to overwhelm him just as certainly as the water would. What was waiting for him up in the tunnel? Final judgment in the place where all souls go? Or what if there was no Land of the Dead—what if, after all he had been taught to believe, there was nothing up ahead? What if the pipe spat him and all the dead out into an eternal bottomless pit? Or even worse, what if that pit had a bottom?

  He was carried for miles, coughing and sputtering, fighting for every measure of breath in the midst of the churning water. What if it’s just this pipe, he thought; a straight and endless flow of cold, angry water forever and ever? But no sooner did he think that than the angle of the pipe changed, heading down a steeper slope, drawing him toward whatever might await him.

  He gritted his teeth and pulled his elbows tightly against his body, preparing himself. And when he thought he could not bear a moment more, the pipe was suddenly gone, and gravity took over. Talon yelled as he fell through the void, then his voice was silenced by an icy chill many times colder than the water that had carried him here. It filled his mouth and nose with a bitter, salty taste.

  This was death; a wet, lonely hell of frigid salt water. His eyes stung as he tried to open them. His head felt as if it would shatter from the cold. Never before had Talon seen water enough to sink in. The Downside Hot Springs were only four feet deep—but this, this was an abyss. This was the bottomless pit he feared, and it was filled with killing water. He sank, releasing himself to the chill, knowing there was no sense in fighting it now.

  Then something snagged his arm. A creature. No—no, a person, pulling him through this liquid eternity, until his head broke the surface and his lungs spewed out the water and drew in a choking gasp of air.

  “I got you!” said a woman’s voice, raspy and unfamiliar.

  Talon could only cough in response. He did not have the strength to resist. He let himself be carried over the waters by this mysterious savior, who could actually float on this vast puddle—not only float, but move, kicking her legs and stretching an arm before her, pulling them both along.

  Around them, the waters conspired to take them down, raising and dropping them with a slow, undulating rhythm, curling and crashing over their heads over and over again, until Talon finally felt ground beneath him, and the strange living water pulled back away from them in defeat as they stumbled on soft, sloping earth.

  The wind ripped at him now. His muscles cramped into tight, useless knots, and his jaw locked so tight, he could not even shiver.

  “Over here,” said the woman, dragging him through the coarse sand beneath them. In a moment he felt the pressure of a blanket over his numb body, and another and another—heavy blankets wrapping his body, silencing his thoughts until nothing was left but the will to sleep.

  Downside, Talon’s family received the comforting solace of visitors, their condolences heartfelt, if somewhat trite.

  “You’ll make it through this,” Gutta’s mother tearfully told them, with the certainty of a woman who knew grief well, having been made an early widow by a steam-tapping accident. She clasped little Pidge’s hands in her own, saying, “Just think of Talon as asleep; resting in peaceful slumber.” The woman had no idea how right she was.

  After a long, dreamless slumber, Talon opened his eyes to find himself staring at a low, wooden ceiling. He pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth, tasting a strange bitterness in his throat that wasn’t entirely unpleasant.

  “You’re awake,” said a woman’s scratchy voice.

  He turned his neck to see her, but found that his neck moved like a rusty gear.

  “Thought I lost you during the night. Practically had to set you on fire to keep you warm. Here, more coffee?”

  She poured a hot, black brew down his throat, and Talon recognized this as the taste he had woken up with. How much of this black fire had t
his strange woman filled him with? He coughed but swallowed all the same, the warmth of the brew feeling good in his gut.

  Slowly, the events that had led him here came back to him. His swift sentencing and immediate execution; the journey to the Land of the Dead—which was not land at all, but water.

  This wasn’t death, however—he knew that now. Something must have gone wrong—the pipe must have ruptured before reaching its final destination and belched him out somewhere else. A place where the ground was sand, and the ceiling was dark planks, held up by wooden piles.

  The woman who attended him had all the semblance of a faller. Her clothes were tattered Topside rags, her hair was a matted red mess, and her lack of teeth made her lips flap around a weakened jaw, turning her speech slippery.

  “Lucky I saw you come out of that pipe, yesiree,” she said. “Ain’t never seen no one sewer-surfing before, and I thought I’d seen just about everything!”

  She moved aside, and Talon’s eyes were assaulted by a bright light. He squinted, unable to look at it. “What is this place?”

  “You’re in Coney Island,” she said brightly. “Under the boardwalk—like the song.”

  Still, the light invaded Talon’s sensitive eyes. Even when he put his hand before his face, he could see it between the gaps in his fingers.

  “That light—can’t you turn it off?” he asked.

  The woman looked at him for a moment and laughed. “Only the good Lord himself can turn that one off, yesiree.”

  Talon did not appreciate being the butt of a toothless woman’s joke, so, although his muscles felt like old chewing gum, he rose to his feet. “Never mind, I’ll do it.”

  With a blanket wrapped around himself, he stumbled toward the light...

  ...and in an instant found that the light was no longer just in front of him—it was all around him, turning the sand beneath his feet blinding white. The low ceiling was gone, replaced by shapeless swirls of blue and white—and that light—it was deceptively distant, and infinitely bright. Burning...like the killing rays of the—

  The moment he realized what that light was, he fell to the ground, wailing, digging his forehead into the sand, as if he could bore his way back to the Downside.

  I’m on the surface...I’m on the surface, and this is daylight!

  Instantly the fear, the helplessness that had filled his journey down the pipe came back to him in full force as he lay there, curled up, waiting for the sun to consume him, burning away his brain as it burned away his flesh.

  But that didn’t happen.

  In fact, the burning light actually felt...good.

  Still, it seemed an eternity until he summoned up the courage to lift his face from the sand. Slowly he arose, brushing the sand from his face, his eyes adjusting to this new realm of light. Fighting all the Downside warnings that now played in his head, he dared to look at the sun-bleached world around him.

  To his right a strand of sand stretched as far as the eye could see, and to his left was a mound of jagged rocks, and the rusty pipe that ejected him here. Up above, pigeons flew freely across an unshielded treacherous blue dome, filled with puffs of white that hung motionless and weightless. But more incredible still was the view directly in front of him. The ball of the sun sat on a shelf—a shimmering blue ledge that seemed built only to hold it. But this was no ordinary ledge. There was a sound calling out to Talon now. It was deep and powerful, yet comforting, like the gentle rumble of a distant subway.

  Wishhhhhh, the sound said to him. Roarrrr...Wishhhh...

  It was the same sound he had heard when the toothless woman had pulled him from the ice-water hell during the night. With the blanket still pulled around him to protect him from the cold, he strode toward that sound, and toward the ledge that held the sun. And that’s when his eyes came into sharp enough focus to realize it was not a ledge at all.

  If someone had told him of a place like this, he would not have believed it. If someone tried to describe it, he would not have understood. How could he? For before him lay an expanse of deep water that stretched out so far it touched the dome of the sky. So huge was this pond that the water actually rolled in waves! It rippled like a deep green sheet toward the end of the universe; it leaped at the sand both angrily and playfully at the same time, shattering and retreating, only to leap again and again. It was so immense, he feared his mind would never wrap around it.

  Talon felt faint, and realized that for the longest time he had forgotten to breathe.

  “Whatsamatta?” said the woman, coming up behind him. “Ain’t ya ever seen the ocean before?”

  “No,” said Talon, too overwhelmed to offer her anything but the truth. She only laughed and returned to her spot under the boardwalk.

  Far out, halfway to the sun, a tiny, tiny vessel floated on the surface of this ocean...but Talon had figured out enough to know that this vessel wasn’t tiny at all. It just seemed that way. Maybe it was filled with hundreds of Topsiders, doing Topside things on the Topside ocean, beneath the burning—no—the warming rays of the sun.

  Talon pulled the blanket tighter as he stood there, the icy water lapping at his feet, and did something he hadn’t even done at his own “execution.” He cried. He cried for all his Downside years of not knowing miracles such as these. He cried for all the things he suddenly realized he did not know...but most of all he cried for that part of himself that had just been killed forever by his first sight of sea and sky.

  Surface Tension

  Foreigners in any land are usually easy to spot, whether it’s an American on the Acropolis, or a Latvian in Laguna. They invariably wear short pants with hiking boots and black socks. They stand uncomfortably close or awkwardly distant when they speak. They dress in ties and skirts that are an inch too narrow, too long, or too short, as if their entire wardrobe is syncopated one beat out of trend. Their faces bear the creases of exotic expressions, and they are forever doomed to appear, in the eyes of the locals, either too sheepishly wide-eyed or too cynically pinched. For all these things they are simultaneously adored and despised by the natives, because they are so elusively different.

  But Talon, who had never been anywhere, and didn’t know a tourist from a florist, had no training in how to be appropriately foreign. Instead, he flitted along the board-walk of Coney Island with such hyperkinetic abandon, people merely assumed him mad. Such an impression helped Talon in the long run, because it turned him from being a potential target for crime into a touch-me-not. Surely if there were any hoods strolling the boardwalk that crisp January morning, they were steering clear of this strange bird.

  The old woman had directed him to go further down the boardwalk. “It’s the Flatbush Day winter fair,” she had told him. “They even got the rides runnin’ all weekend—so now you can throw up and freeze your buns off at the same time.”

  Talon had thanked her, left her a well-earned sock for her troubles, then set out alone, braving the cold in nothing more than his Downside shirt and pants. He was quick to find, however, that coats were plentiful on the Topside. One need only to step into the entry of any Topside eatery to find a whole forest of them happily waiting on hooks for whomever happened to need them. Talon found one that fit nicely—a dark, puffy blue thing with a furry hood—then he wandered back to the boardwalk, pleased to find that his coat even came with wads of Topside money in two different pockets!

  Now, as he bounded and darted his way along the board-walk, he had to keep reminding himself that he was not dead, and this was not the Great Beyond—although deep down, a part of him still suspected that it was. Coney Island’s winter fair was filled with inexplicable sights and sounds, from the bells and whistles exploding from a building labeled FUN HOUSE, to a great wheel that slowly revolved. “Wonder Wheel,” it was called, and it brought people in little boxes skyward, then back again, for no sensible reason beyond the mere joy of doing it. There was a spinning machine of many arms that whipped people around like an eggbeater. Talon watched as people cam
e out stumbling, laughing, and holding one another before running off to ride some other spinning, shaking, racing wonder.

  And then there was the Cyclone.

  The Cyclone was a white wooden beast that was labeled THE WORLD’S MOST FAMOUS ROLLER COASTER in commanding red letters.

  Talon stood before it, transfixed by the mighty contraption as it carried a trainload of riders clicketty-clack to a dizzying height, only to be launched on a wicked, vicious run that left them rattled and giddy. It was strange to Talon, who was used to trains racing single-mindedly toward their destinations, that this little train didn’t actually go anywhere.

  “Three bucks a pop—get your ticket here,” said a gruff man in a peeling white booth.

  Although a Downsider never shrinks from the roar of a train, this one was far more intimidating than any subway. Talon had no true desire to ride it, but he chose to anyway, if only to spite that Downside voice of warning that still played within his head.

  Talon watched the World’s Most Famous Roller Coaster three times, not wanting to buy his ticket until he was convinced that the rickety little train consistently came back—and with the same number of riders that it had started with. Then, when he was convinced that neither death nor dismemberment were an integral part of the ride, he handed his money to the man in the booth, then ran up to join the others racing up the ramp.

  The line was short, and before he knew it, Talon found himself barred into a freezing, weatherworn seat, not able to escape.

  Beside him sat a kid who spoke a strange gibberish to his friends one row back, then he looked at Talon and spoke in an accent Talon thought he recognized from some of the oldest Downside elders.

  “Your first time?” the boy asked.

  Talon was surprised that it seemed so obvious. Until today, he had always been good at wearing his emotions on the inside rather than the outside.