Roderick Gordon: Deeper

"Cal, I found him! I found Chester!" Will yelled, his words all but drowned out by the noise of the train. Cal's and Chester's eyes met, but neither spoke, being too far apart for any sort of exchange. Although they had been introduced very briefly before, it had been under the worst of circumstances, with the Styx snapping at their heels. There had been no time for any niceties.

They looked away from each other and Chester lowered himself from the crate onto the freight bed, where he cradled his head in his hands. The trek he and Will had just made down the train had sapped all his remaining strength. Cal went back to massaging his neck. He didn’t appear to be the least bit surprised that Chester was on the train. Or perhaps he simply didn't care.

Will shrugged. "What a pair of wrecks!" he said in a normal voice, so that neither of them would hear him above the mechanical roar. But as he began to think about the future again, his anxiety returned, as if something were gnawing away at his insides.

From all accounts, they were destined for a place that even the Colonists spoke of with a hushed reverence. Indeed, it was one of the worst punishments imaginable for a Colonist to be "Banished" and expelled there, into the savage wasteland known as the Deeps. And the Colonists were a phenomenally hardy race, who had endured the toughest living conditions for centuries in their subterranean world. So how were they going to fare? Will had no doubt that they were going to be put to the test again, all three of them. And there was no escaping the fact that neither his brother nor his friend was up to facing any challenges. Not right now.

Flexing his arm and feeling the stiffness in it, Will put his hand under his jacket to probe the bite on his shoulder. He'd been mauled by a stalker, one of the ferocious attack dogs used by the Styx, and even though the injuries had been tended to, he wasn't in great shape, either. He automatically glanced at the crates of fresh fruit around them. At least they had ample food to keep up their strength. But other than that, they were hardly well prepared.

The responsibility was immense, as if large weights had been placed on his shoulders and there was no way to shake free of them. He'd involved Chester and Cal in this wild goose chase to search for his father, who even now was somewhere in the unknown lands they were nearing with every twist and turn of these winding tunnels. That was, if Dr. Burrows was still alive… Will shook his head.

No!

He couldn't let himself think like that. He had to go on believing he'd be reunited with his father, and then everything would be all right, just as he dreamed it would. The four of them — Dr. Burrows, Chester, Cal and him — working as a team, discovering unimaginable and wondrous things… lost civilizations… maybe new life forms… and then… then what?

He hadn't the foggiest idea.

Will couldn't see that far ahead, see how all this would pan out. He just knew that somehow, there would be a happy outcome, and finding his father was the key.

It had to be.

From different points around the floor, the sewing machines rattled and the steam hissed back their responses, as if they were trying to communicate with each other.

Where Sarah was sitting, the piping tones of a radio station, forever present in the background, were trying vainly to break through the mechanical din. Depressing the pedal with her foot, she whirred her machine into life, and it threw a thread into the fabric. Everyone on the floor was working flat out, as there was a rush on to get the clothes ready for the next day.

Sarah heard someone shouting and looked up — a woman was winding her way between the workbenches toward her companions, who were waiting by the exit. As she joined them, they chatted noisily, like a gaggle of overexcited geese, then pushed their way through the swinging doors.

As the doors flapped shut behind them, Sarah peered up at the dirty panes of the tall factory windows. She could see clouds gathering, making it as dark as early evening although it was only midday. There were still quite a number of other women on the factory floor, each of them isolated under a cone of illumination from their overhead light as they doggedly toiled away.

Sarah punched the button under her bench to turn off her machine and, snatching up her coat and bag, tore toward the doorway. She slipped through the swinging doors, then swept down the corridor. Through the window to his office, she could see the floor manager's plump back as he sat hunched over his desk, engrossed in his newspaper. Sarah should have told him she was leaving, but she had a train to catch and, besides, the fewer people who knew she'd left, the better.

Once outside, she scanned the sidewalks for anyone who didn't fit. It was an automatic gesture; she wasn't even aware she was doing it. Her instincts told her it was safe, and she forged down the hill, branching off the main road to take a far more circuitous route.

After so many years of moving from job to job every few months and varying her accommodation with similar regularity, she lived like a ghost, among the invisible people, the illegal immigrants and petty criminals. But although she was an immigrant of sorts, too, she was no criminal. Other than the several false identities she'd acquired over the years, she would have never dreamed of breaking the law, not even if she was desperate for money. No, that brought with it the risk of arrest and of being caught up in the system. Of leaving a trace that could be detected. And that was not an option, because the first thirty years of Sarah's life were not what would have been expected.

She'd been born underground, in the Colony. Her great-great-grandfather, along with several hundred other men, had been handpicked to work on the hidden city, swearing allegiance to Sir Gabriel Martineau, a man they believed was their savior.

Sir Gabriel had told his willing followers that, on an unspecified day in the future, the corrupt world would be wiped clean by an angry and vengeful god. All the people who inhabited the surface, the Topsoilers, would be exterminated, and then his flock, the pure people, would return to their rightful home.

And Sarah feared what her ancestors feared — the Styx. These religious police enforced order in the Colony with a brutal, single-minded efficiency. Years ago, against all odds, Sarah had escaped from the Colony, and the Styx would stop at nothing to capture and make an example of her.

She entered a square and walked a full circuit of it, checking that she hadn't been followed. Before she made her way back to the main road, she ducked behind a parked van.

It was a very different-looking person who stepped out from behind the van moments later. She had reversed her coat to change it from the green check to a dull gray fabric and had knotted a black scarf around her head. She covered the remaining distance to the train station, her clothes almost rendering her invisible against the grimy faзades of the shops and office buildings she was passing, as if she were a human chameleon.

She looked up as she caught the first sounds of an approaching train. She smiled — her timing was perfect.

As Chester and Cal slept, Will took stock of their situation.

Glancing around the train car, he realized that their first priority was concealment. He thought it highly unlikely that any of the Colonists would conduct any sort of search while the train was moving. However, if it did happen to stop, then he, Chester, and Cal had to be prepared. But what could he do? There wasn't much to work with; he decided that rearranging the undamaged crates would be their best bet. He set about dragging them around the slumbering forms of Cal and Chester, stacking them one upon the other, to build a makeshift blind with enough room for the three of them in the middle.