“Please stop crying.
Please
. If I could hug you, I would. Perhaps you would like to get back onto the bed for a while? A small round of, uh, of larvae, of moth larvae, to lessen your pain? You
did
rise from the sickbed rather quickly — ”
“No.” Deidre looked around again; in the atmosphere of menace, the trees appeared suddenly sterile and so unmoving compared to those of Elegia. She thought for a second about poor Sam, and about the dead boy, and she wondered what it would be like to die twice, or to exist without really having ever lived. Sam had wanted life. The boy, too, had wanted life.
She
wanted it also.
But as she lifted her eyes skyward, towards that sun and bleached sky, everything reeked of death. “You can’t keep me here. You can’t.” Sobbing, she wiped her nose on her forearm. “I hate you.”
“If you ask me to go away, I will. We can talk later.”
“Go away!”
She stood, bolting, crashing through the brush that grew behind the bench until she banged up against the translucent wall of the cage with her knee and forehead. She did not fall. Outside: endless, hostile sand, russet, undulating with heat.
Looking out, panting, her wounds hurting, her head throbbing where she’d hit it. When it became clear the voice had indeed gone away, she said, “Voice?”
The reply was immediate: “Yes?”
“You never answered my question. What’s going to happen to me?”
“You’re going to carry the torch, Deidre.”
“What does that mean?”
“Try not to think of yourself. Think of your species. Deidre, I’m one of the ones that got away. We are your
real
ancestors. We lived here once, but we left. And we hit a brick wall, genetically speaking. Until a short time ago, we were facing slow doom. Then we discovered you. Stuck under the ground. There were rumours of the project, old news files of the habitat . . . So now we’re coming. We’re coming to get you!”
Tears streamed her face. Snot dripped from her nose. Nearly hysterical, she leaned against the barrier, pounding at it with her fists.
“Please,” the voice whispered, “please, don’t panic.”
“Go away!” she screamed. “Leave me alone! Leave me alone!”
“I know this is a difficult time — ”
“Stop talking!”
And for a time, at least, the voice did.
Quick, clean pain woke him. He lay on his back. There was a stench in the air — wet coals, and something worse, something burning that had recently been alive. Had he smelled burnt flesh previously? That did not seem likely, but how else could he have identified it?
Damp mist nearly soothed him, but there was a disturbing, fluctuating susurrus of muffled moans and wails that grew louder now, nullifying the sensation. Mereziah opened his eyes —
Smoke, and sharp light. He moaned, wanting to rub at the irritation, but could not move his hands.
He coughed a moment later, and pain flared through him again.
Some warm and damp membrane covered his mouth.
“Relax,” a voice said, gently, from nearby. A large, blurred face peered down over him. “I’ve given you a shot. And you’re in a mask. Try to relax.” The face sported a red beard and had the soot-smeared features of a man who did not dwell in perpetual gloom. “Don’t talk. You’ll get your strength back soon.”
Mereziah was about to disobey, and try to speak, when he realized it had begun to rain. A rare occurrence, but not entirely unheard of: he had experienced rain twice before in his life, falling down the length of the shaft.
What had happened to the world? And where was this place? He closed his eyes again. The pain was constant now, radiating out from his chest. Whatever was over his mouth was not easy to dislodge; he touched the substance with his tongue and found it to be resistant, like a layer of skin grown there. When he rolled onto his side to retch, the strange, pliable cover vanished to let out the hot bile but reformed quickly.
“Please, try not to move, sir, try not to move.” The firm hand on his back rubbed. “You’ve had a coronary.”
“My heart . . .? I’m . . . Who are you?” The covering over his mouth had not hindered his speech, and his throat felt raw, as if the fire he smelled in the air had burned inside him as well. But, as the voice had promised, he felt the pain lessening, in pulses, felt himself growing stronger. Soon his breathing came a little easier, and when he opened his eyes he could keep them open, though he blinked, squinted, and tears streamed his cheeks.
“My name is Steven,” said the bleary face. “Please, lie still.”
“Are we at the bottom?” Mereziah tried again to move his hands, wanting desperately to reach up and clear his mouth; whatever the thing was, it moved with his lips, conforming as he spoke. The sensation was horrible.
“I’m afraid I don’t understand your question.”
“At the bottom. Bottom of the world.” Mereziah tried not to gag. His eyes were watering profusely. “With the dead.”
“I brought you
upwards
, sir. Below us, there have been events. Of cataclysmic proportions.”
“How far up are we?”
“Cataclysmic,” Steven whispered, as if he had not heard Mereziah. Staring off into middle space, where a billow of grey rolled in as the thin rain attempted to slice through it, the bearded man said, “Most of the fires are out.”
From within the haze just then came a swell of groans and cries: people were injured in there. Gravely injured. Wounded were all around Mereziah but he could not see them. Other sounds were urgent voices, people giving instruction, calling for assistance, trying to help in a helpless situation.
Steven said, “But there are fires burning below, on several levels.” He looked at Mereziah again. “The air here is being cleaned. We’ve activated a small squall. It’ll take a while but thank God the air conditioning is working.”
“What . . . events?” Mereziah struggled to understand. “Did you say where we were? How high up we came?”
Now that Mereziah’s senses were clearing, he saw that Steven looked exhausted, deflated, yet in an odd way seemed healthier than all the people he had ever known. Newer, skin uniform in tone, his body’s lines less harsh.
Beyond the man’s head was more smoke, more mist.
“A collapse, for starters,” Steven said. “On level twenty-four, above the stasis tanks. We might still be there, if it wasn’t for that fire.
“And apparently there’s been a breach of some kind, in the outer structure. No one has been able to see the roof clearly yet and we have no data from outside. The suns are struggling to stay lit. I don’t know how much time has gone by . . .” Letting his words fade, Steven looked up once more, as if for guidance, peering into the grey bank hanging over them both.
Finally Mereziah managed to move a hand, a foot. He tried to sit up. “I have to know where we are. I
insist
.”
“There’s fighting. And a thousand nasty viruses in the air. It’s a wonder
any
one is alive.”
Despite the small size of Steven’s eyes, they held a powerful urgency, blazing with a power long-vanished from the old man — if it had ever resided in him.
A sudden wave of warm rain moved over, splattering loudly in the mud as the squall intensified. Dense veils of downpour consumed the landscape, then, just as suddenly, diminished.
“What is happening?” Mereziah whispered.
“I wanted to ask you that.” Steven touched Mereziah’s shoulder. “You have on an old uniform. I’ve never seen it before. I don’t recognize it.”
“I’m a lift attendant.”
“The elevators?”
Mereziah was not sure how to respond.
“Listen, can you speak for the network? Were you in touch recently? Up until . . . until
this
?”
“I don’t know.” Water dripped from the red beard to Mereziah’s face, mingling with the rain and the tears. “I don’t recall a thing.” Watching the falling droplets, Mereziah realized that Steven also wore a mask of some sort: a thin membrane covered the man’s mouth, probably similar, or identical, to the one over his own.
“You have no insights at all?” Steven’s voice verged on desperation. “We were paid good money. But my God, how much time has passed?” His eyes implored. “You’re the only person I’ve found wearing a uniform, the only staff member besides myself, so I thought . . .”
All Mereziah could say was, “You should have let me die,” for now his memories had come back, triggered by the smell of charred meat in the air: yes, a woman had been burned, consumed by fire. He had watched her die. He had filled his lungs with her stench. But worse than the knowledge of how a human smells and looks when they are immolated, worse even than the fact that this knowledge was now integrated into him, never to leave, was the memory of the kiss he’d planted on the beautiful toothless mouth of Crystal Max. He recalled her indignity, her anger, her hatred of him. He recalled her subsequent demise.
Sheets of rain washed over.
He was responsible. For Crystal’s death. For all of the deaths.
Right now, Crystal was probably telling his parents the truth.
Mereziah groaned, retching, wishing the mask or whatever it was over his mouth would suffocate him.
Steven’s hand still rubbed at his back. As those fingers pressed firmly against his spine, Mereziah finally understood what the man had implied in their brief, confused conversation: cognition filtered down through the miasma of self-pity and pain exactly like a distant light overhead was now doing, filtering down through the haze of smoke and rain and grey vapour.
Suns
, Steven had said. So now Mereziah understood. He said, “We are at the top of the world.”
“Yes.” Steven nodded. “We’re in a field, on the uppermost level.”
Since there was already moisture on Mereziah’s face, and his eyes had been watering for some time, it was hard for him to tell if more tears sprung from his ducts just then.
The top of the world . . .
How could this place — this muddy
disaster
— be the fabled upper reaches? Where were the fancy balls? Where were the green fields? Where were the children playing, laughing in the warm and welcoming light?
Both men, for a moment, were silent with their own disillusionments. Aside from the muted groans of the nearby wounded and the dripping of the dying rain, there was relative silence. Mereziah imagined that he might have shattered, with his own blatant disrespect for his position, with his bad decisions and addled capabilities, all bonds that held fragments of life, world, and reality together. Surely, it wasn’t possible that the upper level had always been like this: corrupt, smoky, filled with pain. That his lifelong dreams to reach here were a bitter joke, revealed to him just now, in his last days, after everything else had turned to shit.
Or did he bring this misery here
?
“Was there,” Mereziah said carefully, “anybody else with me when you found me?”
“No, sir. There were no other people, I’m afraid. Are you searching for anyone in particular? A loved one?”
“I’m searching for someone, yes . . . These are fields?” He tried again, futilely, to sit up. “I’m in a
field
?”
“It used to be one, when this place first opened. We’re near the easternmost part of Grant Park. But everything’s changed . . . Listen to me, I tell you not to talk and then I ask you questions. Rest, sir, rest.” Steven’s hand remained on Mereziah’s shoulder. “Try not to breathe too deeply. You’ve been given menzatane. More help will be here soon . . . Now I have to attend other people. I have to go back down.”
“Look for a girl,” Mereziah implored, words rasping out of his dry throat. “Look for a young girl . . .”
“Your granddaughter?”
Mereziah winced. He lay back down. Shame had succeeded in crushing him flat. These fields, he thought, are consumed with fire and drowned in water. There are no parties. No fresh air. No laughter or open grass. Because I have brought a plague upon the world. I am pestilence. I have killed a dozen people. I have killed an innocent girl.
A loud and violent disturbance from the fog jolted him from his unpleasant reveries: agitated shouts, the tremendous sound of something large and fundamental shifting under him, trembling the very ground. He tried to get up onto one elbow; pain, spreading through him, was once again exquisite.
The man, Steven, was nowhere to be seen.
Moans coming out from the bank of mists now were certainly from a living creature, but not from any human. Peering in the direction, touched all over by goosebumps, Mereziah could not see the source. Had he heard this sound before? Was that a shadow, moving? Silhouettes of some huge bulk?
Now two men burst from the fog and smoke, running straight at him, in a panic, stumbling past on the slick ground and splashing him with mud and rain —
A massive shape, massive shadow, lumbering closer but still obscured within the grey confines. Again and again the ground shook. Mereziah, to his astonishment, actually got unsteadily to his feet — holding his left arm cradled; it remained useless.
Then all the smoke and mists and fog blanketing the landscape suddenly swirled upward into a vortex, torn away in an instant.
He blinked.
Moisture, cold on his skin.
And stitches of pain, down his left side, but he was standing, staring incredulously into the near distance, where a handful people also stood, facing away from him.
The numerous wounded were laid out in rows and rows at their feet.
The apparition among them was a giant sloth.
It took a moment to register the creature as such; never before had Mereziah seen one of these beasts walking upright: it was massive, easily as tall as five men standing on one another’s shoulders. Rocking slowly from side to side, the beast shambled toward him on giant, incurved claws. Gravity was unkind to the sloth but fires below had been crueler still: in places, the shaggy, matted coat smouldered and on the huge humped shoulder a patch of meat sizzled. Trails of smoke tried to tether the beast to the background yet it came on, relentless, blindly moaning.
Behind the creature, tented by a structure that once must have been tinted festive colours but was currently grim and damaged, a hole yawned so large it could only be the opening of a lift shaft.