Chapter 4.1: Down in a Hole
“It’s all my fault.”
Garden tries to continue, to explain the terrible truth, but she can’t. The mouldering air stings her dry eyes, but no more tears come, perhaps never will again. She feels emotionless and hollow, like she’s fallen into a bottomless pit and left her heart to bleed out at the top.
“What are you talking about?”
“I … well … I think the attack happened last night because of me,” she finally blurts out all at once then hides her face in her hair.
Carlita’s staring at Garden like she’s completely lost her mind. She places her hand on Garden’s shoulder and gives her a gentle shake, saying, “Garden, hey, don’t be silly. That doesn’t make any sense. Don’t be foolish.”
“It makes perfect sense, Lita!” Garden says, looking her friend in the eye with a defiantly set chin that dares further condescension.
Carlita snaps her mouth shut and waits with raised eyebrows for Garden to explain herself.
“I told you about my dream of the fog, right? How all that mess of text and images was coming out of it? Well, I went down to the third floor yesterday, and the fog talked to me.”
“Talked to you?”
“Well, kind of. It showed me things.”
Garden takes a deep breath and then launches into a long retelling of her story about what she saw during yesterday’s fog-trance. She holds nothing back, leaves nothing out. She was worried it would be difficult to explain, but now the words just spill out of her mouth like so much dry soil sifting between her fingers, like the tears that once streamed down her cheeks and are now gone. A lightness spreads across her chest when she sees her friend is actually taking her seriously; not a hint of sarcasm or dubiety is on Carlita’s face. Garden ends with a deeply satisfying sigh and buries her hands in the baggy pockets of her oversized hoodie.
The two girls are sitting on the tiled floor of what used to be a restaurant on the uninhabited 28th floor of their scraper. All the furniture and kitchenware had been scavenged long ago, leaving the diner an empty shell that suddenly feels overly hushed now that the last echoes of the story have died away.
Garden is glad for the privacy—she doesn’t want rumors about this spreading. But she sure wishes she’d brought her coat. It’s very chilly down here, even with the windows all solidly boarded up. The fog generally engulfs between 20 to 23 floors of every building in the NBAZ, depending on the tide, but nobody lives lower than the 32nd in this scraper. The higher up, the warmer it is—and the farther away from the tendrils of freezing mist that tend to fly free from the greater fog mass and whip around the building like fingers of sentient smoke feeling for a way inside the warm lairs of the living.
“So, it’s like the fog is trying to communicate with you or something, right?” Garden nods, but Carlita isn’t finished. “OK, but that doesn’t make any of this your fault. For sure it’s weird, but it doesn’t have anything to do with what happened last night. With the attack.”
“Soda said he saw like a thousand wraiths in the fog, just standing around on the outskirts of the battle.” Garden didn’t actually hear that from Soda himself, but everybody in the scraper knows about it by now, and it’s only half ten in the morning. Word travels fast.
“And, you think … what?” Carlita says, at a loss for words.
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“Look, Lita, there’s gotta be some reason the main attack was centered on this building. They coulda stormed any other building on the outskirts, but no, they came all the way downtown and attacked Embarcadero and 101 Cali. None of the other buildings were even touched.”
That too was the subject of much rumor and speculation all last night and this morning. This building was certainly targeted. But why? 101 Cali’s in a central location, but so are half a dozen other buildings nearby. There’s nothing particularly special about Garden and Carlita’s home scraper other than the NBAZ City Hall on the 40th floor. And the Committee doesn’t even hold much sway outside of the downtown core anyway. Whoever launched an attack against them either had no idea what they were doing, or were trying to send a message of some kind. At least, these were the avenues of thought floating around the gossip table at the general store this morning.
“You think the fog sent them to find you?” Carlita sinks back as she takes in this new revelation.
Garden nods. “Maybe, yeah.”
Carlita huffs in consternation as she mulls this over for a bit, then says, “Look, just wait till Del gets back. I bet he’ll have learned something out on his run that will completely disprove your worries.”
Garden chortles and manages a small smile. “My idiot brother? When was the last time he learned anything?”
“Yeah, he certainly doesn’t know how to take a clue,” Carlita replies sadly. “I miss him—the old him.”
Garden places her hand on Carlita’s arm. “Me too.”
The silence that follows is suddenly broken by a long creaking noise, followed by a soft bang. The two girls look at each other in shock and dismay. A closing door! But that means … someone else was down here, and they heard the whole thing!
Garden jumps to her feet and runs to the door of the diner, but stops. Whoever it is could still be out there on this floor. She looks to Carlita, who is slower to rise, leaning most of her weight on her cane. Garden’s mind is racing, desperately weighing her options. By the time Carlita joins her and they both work up enough courage to open the door and take a look around, their eavesdropper is long gone.
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Dead Boy’s standing at the edge of the chasm, his outstretched hands painted blue by its soft glow. Looking down into the wide crack that stretches below his feet, he can see the light’s origin.
It’s a sun.
A layer of ice encrusts the chasm’s edge, below which stretches a few feet of sedimentary rock. Under the rock is what appears to be a layer of purple soil, with intertwined roots visible in a cross-section opened by the split earth. Below that, small teal-hued leafy plants and grass poke out, except the plants are all growing downward, poking out of the soil upside-down into empty space that hangs just a few feet below the top of the chasm. It’s like Dead Boy is looking into a living inverted world hanging just under his feet. And hanging high (or rather, extremely deep) in the subterranean sky is a large ball of blue fire, swirling and pulsing like a negative image of the topside sun. Everything is tinted with a periwinkle hue, giving the whole scene a purplish turquoise overcast that unnerves Dead Boy in a way he’s never felt before.
Howls echo softly down the gulley, prodding him forward. He feels distinctly like he’s in a living nightmare. No way to fight them all, no way to get away…
Completely unsure whether he’s doing the smart thing or not, Dead Boy gets down on his knees, belly-scoots close to the edge of the chasm and reaches a hand down into the hole, groping around until he is patting the underside “surface”. It feels solid enough. He rips out a handful of grass, pulls it out of the hole and buries his face in it. The sharp scent fills his nostrils. Definitely not a dream.
On a whim, Dead Boy carefully lowers his axe down into the hole, maneuvers it under the grassy patch and gently relaxes his grasp. Half-expecting the axe to begin tipping out of his hand and threaten a long tumble into the blue sun, he’s intrigued when the weight of the heavy weapon actually sags back toward him. He opens his fingers and hears the axe thump to the grassy ground of the inverted world. He pats it—still right there, just resting on the upside-down earth a few feet under him. So weird…
Well, this seems to be the only way forward, he thinks with a fatalistic sigh. At least there’s light.
He reaches both hands down into the crack, grabs the crumbly lip of the bottomside edge and hoists himself across the threshold. An unpleasant lurch twists in his belly as gravity flip-flops and then he is scrabbling onto the grass of a blue field next to a shiny silver dome rising out of the ground.
The crack opens up the wall of the dome on this side too. Dead Boy wonders whether it’s even a dome at all, or perhaps half of a sphere that stretches from one world into the next.
He shudders uneasily as he peers through the gash in the metal wall.
A large shadow is moving inside.
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