The Gutter & The Stars

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. My brother knew this, and he didn’t waste his breath when the Watchmen came.

He was silent when they dragged him from his cot, their scanscreen eyes unblinking as they held him down with clockwork hands to brand the charges across his pale chest. Silent he stayed as the Watcher with the needle arm stepped forward to pierce his palms, threading the chains as if he were a burlap tunic in need of mending.

The angry burn on his chest was puffed and weeping—a lute and quill, the mark of a convicted Bard. A dealer of Fantasy.

I watched from my cot in the shadows as they carried him away, wide-eyed and spread-eagle, a freshly skinned junkhound pelt stretched out to dry. Off into the soundless night they went, the murky light of the tar-torches glinting off of their skittering, gunmetal limbs. A moving ribcage of cold machinery and Hux trapped within, bleeding and warm.

For many hours, I did not move.

It was only when the sunbulb’s chalky light came spilling over the grayscale horizon that I finally crept to the rusted door, pulling it shut on defiant hinges before turning to sink slowly to the floor.

All that remained of my brother was the heavy reek of burnt flesh, a constellation of black blood drops on the battered aluminum floor, and his compass—its leather cord had snapped from his neck in the chaos.

I moved without standing, scrambling to reach for the small trinket that had been my brother’s talisman. I clutched it to my heart as if it could teleport the thundering promise that boomed within my chest to wherever they’d taken him.

I will find you. I will free you.

I made it a mantra, chanting it over and over until I could feel the hum of it in my bones like a tuning fork.

My brother hadn’t screamed, but at long last, I did. It erupted from me, unbidden and unrestrained. On and on I cried out my misery, furious and trembling, my fists pounding new dents into the floor.

I shook with a tear-drenched rage that should’ve shaken the stars and consumed the cosmos, but the vacuum of space swallowed my cries before they’d flown from my mouth, like Gutter infants smothered in their rusted cribs at the hands of mothers addled by Fantasy, feral in their despair. The only sound I managed to make was barely more than a whisper. The flutter of a cluttercrow’s wings. Fury made soft and small.

In the Gutter, grief is as useless as tar-torch smoke, and on that terrible morning it evaporated in the hollow stillness of the bedsit that had once felt so nearly like a home.

The day passed as I sat there, pale light slanting, falling, fading. I was barely thirteen, and now I was alone.

It would be eleven years before the Watchmen came again.

✧✧✧

The day I find the book, I'm wearing Hux's compass.

I'm not one for charms and fate but the coincidence of it sticks heavy in my chest and stays there. Above, the vault-sky is as gray as the dirt I’m Digging, and there's a stillness to the air like every moment before had been a step stone to this one now.

It’s past halfday when I find it. The book.

My com-collar is hanging uselessly from my neck alongside the compass, and it's a rustydamn piece of luck that it is, because when my scanscreen shows the little rectangle tucked within the lockbox my archavator has just pulled from the dirt, I let out a silent shout.

I glance left and right. The others are still Digging. Eyes fixed on their flickering scanscreens as their long, jointed fingers scurry across the dirt like metal scrapspiders. All of them searching for the exact thing I’ve just found.

There are stemmed pots within the box's hinged compartment, small and shaped like icedrops. The book is tucked behind them.

My pulse is pounding in my ears.

Keep moving, Hux’s voice is in my head, you’ll draw attention gawking like that.

He’s right.

I take a steadying breath and tap an entry into my screen. Drop the lockbox into my haul bin alongside the rest of the day’s finds. Clutter to be sorted by the S.T.A.R. at workday’s close.

My nerves are charged, firing like blaster pistons, but the nearest tar-torch still has a good two hour’s burn in it. Back to work, then.

But all the while the shock of the discovery flits around my brain like a cluttercrow feather caught in an updraft:

A book. A book. A book.

At day’s end, I anchor my archavator and fall in at the end of the meandering S.T.A.R. line. My veins are thrumming.

Turning the book in would mean food for a year. I could get a new com-collar, one that doesn’t zap me every time I swallow. Someone from Genesis will probably come down and shake my hand. Give me a brand new archavator. One with brakes that work.

I have to turn it in.

A woman from Sector 8 stole a toy for her child a few years back, something small and broken. They hung her from the scaffolding above the sorting center, right beneath the jumbotron. They didn’t take her down until the cluttercrows had picked her dry.

I have to turn it in.

My pulse keeps fluttering and I try to count my breaths the way Hux taught me as the line inches forward. The sorting process is no quick thing.

The tar-torches have all but burned out and the only light comes from the massive S.T.A.R. screen above. Tallying up the Sectors' finds. Sector 19 is always in the middle. Productive, but not overly. Still behind Sector 14. Sector 5 is catching up.

Between hauls, the screen changes and there’s a cartoon archavator swinging its metal arms in a jolly dance, a smile where its front exhaust fans should be. Archie, the high-ups at Genesis call him.

The harder we work, the sooner we’ll play! Archie's saying in his chipper, high-pitched static. I point a finger and thumb, squint one eye and pretend to shoot his pixelated face with a pin gun.

Some of the workers in line ahead of me stare up at the screen, slack jawed and vacant. It’s always the old ones. Spend enough time digging the Fang and radiation will cook your mind like a souffle.

When it’s my turn, I adjust my com-collar and lean down to the speaker.

"Indigo Ironside. Sector nineteen."

I set my bin in the cradle, snap the sidelocks down. Press the button, watch it travel up the long conveyor belt into the belly of the S.T.A.R. My items appear on the flickering jumbotron overhead as they’re sorted. The lockbox goes to miscellaneous scrap, while the tiny pots inside it—nail polish, according to the S.T.A.R—go to miscellaneous pigment. The rest gets dumped out the backend onto yet another one of the Gutter’s trash heaps.

I pocket the measly half-orbit the S.T.A.R. spits out in exchange for my haul and start heading for the market, a portrait of indifference.

Good, Hux is in my head again. Act natural. Just another day.

But Imaginary-Hux is wrong. It isn’t just another day.

The book is in my other pocket.

✧✧✧

Long ago, Hux made me promise him that I’d never go to the Black Bazaar at night. The broken promise stings every time, even now. A lingering bruise.

The road to the market is dark and empty, but I know better. In the Gutter, someone is always watching from the shadows.

I'm not wrong, because just then Crook ambushes me from above. A frenzied dive bomb of feathers.

“Don’t fragging do that! I’ve told you!” I scold through my com-collar. “Could’ve gutted you just then.” I show her the ore knife in my hand. A reflex.

She pecks at the blade, unbothered.

I sigh. A cluttercrow on my shoulder is going to draw attention. I glance over my shoulder at the dark road behind me, then back to the distant torches of the market ahead.

The book is burning in my pocket. I need to get rid of it.

Nothing for it, then, I suppose. Better the odd eye in the bazaar than execution.

You can smell the Black Bazaar long before you reach it. Incense and tar-smoke and junkhound ribs roasting over open spits. It’s a shantytown of scrapmetal stalls and tin stands, back alleys and winding, narrow streets. Dim tar-light burns from salvaged jars of all shapes and sizes, but the sum of their glow is barely enough to browse by.

It doesn’t matter, I know where I’m going.

I take the shortcut—past the bone carver’s stall and down the alleyway to the docks, where cargo containers full of S.T.A.R.-sorted clutter wait to be hooked to the cable and shipped down. There’s a door near the bottom of the Vault and a pipeline beyond, stretching all the way to Genesis. A two-way umbilical cord. Oxygen in, cargo out.

At the mouth of the alley, I hesitate. You can't just walk onto the docks. There are spiked gates and fences of reinforced steel. Plus scanscreens and guards with blasters that could eat my pin gun for breakfast.

But there’s also a guy. Fox, he’s called. Rumor has it, he can be paid off. The S.T.A.R. would’ve given me a thousand orbits for the book and then some. All I want from Fox is a ride in one of those crates.

I will find you. I will free you.

Hux is somewhere in Genesis. He has to be. There’s nowhere else.

“Is that a robot crow?”

I spin around at the voice. Two children, sitting atop a tin barrel in the shadows. I’d walked right by them. The boy points at Crook’s prosthetic.

“No, it’s—she lost a wing.”

“She for sale?” The girl’s face is smeared with grease from the scrapmeat skewer she’s gnawing, legs swinging like she hasn’t a care.

“No.” I'd found Crook at the backend of the S.T.A.R., some cruel frag had fed her into the machine. I'd only meant to give her a second chance, but I'd ended up with a shadow. And you don’t sell your shadow.

The pair of them shrug in unison and go back to ignoring me. It’s odd—two com-collared children, alone on the docks at night. Something about it niggles at the back of my mind, but I’m on a mission.

Except, the docks are vacant and it’s just occurred to me that I’ve no idea how to find Fox.

“Where’d you get that?” It’s the boy asking this time, pointing at Hux’s compass. He hops down and comes toward me.

My stomach squirms. Something isn’t right. He doesn’t look curious, he looks angry. My fingers are twitching against my hidden ore knife and I’m thinking about how much I really don’t want to use it on a kid when someone grabs me from behind—a giant of a man, stinking and toothless with unseeing eyes gone white and cloudy like a scanscreen tuned to the wrong channel.

“They’ve burned the windmill!” He shouts through his filthy com-collar. “Oh, but he isn’t the monster, why can’t they see—”

My heart is in my throat. Crook is flapping wildly, pecking at his head while I pry his fingers from my arm, one by one.

“Beware,” his voice is a menacing rattle, “for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.” His grip is a vice and now heart is on the ground because why did I come to the market in the middle of the fragging night?

But then he let’s go, just like that.

“The colors,” he whispers, stumbling backward and falling to the ground.

For a minute I think he’s unconscious—Fantasy will do that. But no, he’s weeping. Crumpled and crying softly.

I swallow. Take a shaky breath. I’m suddenly all too aware of how idiotic this is. Bringing S.T.A.R. contraband to the Black Bazaar at night. Alone. Without a real plan. Fragging stupid.

Go home, Imaginary-Hux says. Run.

So, I do. But I look back—just once—at the barrels.

The children are gone.

✧✧✧

By the time I’m cresting the final heap toward home, I’ve decided I'll go back to the docks at sunbulb’s first light. Scope it out. Carefully.

But for tonight, I have a different idea.

The Ironside apartment block is a great, teetering thing, a single updraft short of total collapse. Thousands of bedsits nooked and crannied into a monstrosity of patchworked scrapmetal. Crooked chimneys are belching black smoke into the colorless night.

From a distance the towering slums look like an insect, the way the scaffolding maze of rails and walkways surrounds them like an exoskeleton. A giant rubbleroach that might go scuttling away one day.

It’s after halfnight by the time I reach the block. I should be exhausted. Dead on my feet. I should go home.

But instead, I grab an abandoned tar-torch on my way past the block and walk on, out toward the heaps. Crook tugs at a curl by my ear, confused. Annoyed. First the market, now this.

“Soon,” I say soundlessly. “There’s something I have to do first.”

Hux is in my head again. Don’t do it. It’s too risky.

It is too risky, but I can’t stop myself. I’ll never have another chance.

A piece of tarp is poking up from beneath the rubbish when I summit the highest heap and I tug it free, spreading it like a blanket. It crinkles beneath my fingers and I try to imagine the sound of it in my head.

It's a clear, black night and the glow of the lantern is casting everything it touches in hues of soft grey and dusty white.

For a moment I sit in the quiet, cross-legged and watching Crook hunting rubbleroaches. There's a breeze and I turn my ear toward it, testing the night's capacity for secret keeping.

Then carefully, reverently, I set the book on the tarp before me.

It's thick-covered and worn. It smells a bit like the crates at the sorting center, musty and old. The writing on the front shimmers in the tar-light.

There are pictures inside—on the first page a young girl with long braids is wearing a checkered dress and holding a large rodent. I squint. Not a rodent. A small junkhound, maybe.

On another page the girl is swept away in a wind helix, and later she's watering a man who may have been an early Watcher prototype. She kills the baddie—a scraggly woman in robes and a pointed hat—then she and her friends are rewarded by a mustachioed man in a great factory that looks just like what I imagine Genesis to be.

When I've seen every picture, when I've studied every drawn line, I go back and do it again.

The writing is Old Earth code, that’s clear enough—long-handed glyphs that some lowgrade programmer down in Genesis would’ve entered into the Archive. If I’d turned it in.

For a split second I feel a spark of guilt. Every find was a step toward the New Earth, and I’d taken a book, the most important thing of all. But Hux was the most important thing to me.

I will find you. I will free you.

I never asked him why he did it. Why he took the risk that eventually took him. I knew why.

He’d done it to put bread in our bellies. He’d done it because his only other option was Digging, and that would’ve meant leaving me alone all day while he excavated down on the Fang. And that was something Hux would never do. Not when the Body-Lenders had begun eyeing me in the bazaar, their cloaked scouts leering at me from between the tin stalls. I’ll be rustydamned, Hux had said, before I let them turn you into our mother.

So, he’d become a Bard. My freedom in exchange for his.

A few weeks before he was taken, a man in Sector 19 had pulled a strange, stringed paddle from the Fang. There was talk in Ironside about jumping him—the S.T.A.R. had spit out three-hundred orbits for the find.

“How does the S.T.A.R. decide?” I’d asked Hux that night.

We were gazing up at the empty sky, passing the com-collar between us and huddled beneath the scratchy blanket we’d dragged to the top of the tallest heap. Best to be far from the block if there was going to be trouble.

“Some things are just worth more,” he’d shrugged.

“Like books and string-paddle things.”

He smiled. “Violin.” Without the com-collar the word was just shaped air.

I handed him the collar.

“It was a violin,” he repeated. “What the man in Sector 19 found today.”

Violin. I balanced the word on my tongue.

“Is it music?”

He nodded.

I remember being pleased with myself then. That somehow, I’d known. Later, I would hate myself for not asking how he’d known. It would’ve changed everything.

For months after his arrest I’d laid in my cot, reciting all the things he’d taught me like a prayer.

Tiger. Skateboard. Ocean. Lollipop. Meadow. Moonlight. Oatmeal. Symphony.

Words that conjured images so fantastic I could barely believe they’d once existed. That one day, we might have all those things again.

That if we work hard enough, we might be the first generation to see the New Earth.

When the Old Earth was swallowed, the black hole chewed up the Old Sun and the Old Moon and the Old Planets and everything else besides.

Everything except the Vault.

It was a desperate experiment at the eleventh hour—a hollow, iron globe a hundred miles wide, with a massive corkscrew mechanism that spiraled into the Old Earth and pulled up an enormous portion of land as if pulling a stopper from a bottle.

A lottery was held. A hundred-thousand people were granted entry. Then, the doors were welded shut and the land and people trapped within were suspended from that corkscrew, waiting.

The Swallowing was no easy thing. The Vault and its occupants were digested by the cosmos—there was no up or down anymore, just a solidified mass of dirt and bodies and relics and raw materials.

Even still, some survived. But the other side of the black hole was different. Darker. The wavelengths were blamed.

No color. No sound.

Eventually, the wisest survivors formed Genesis, and in time, they ventured out and discovered the silver lining: the black hole had spit them out into the orbit of a planet. A barren, radioactive planet—but one that had the potential to be fixed.

Genesis would provide oxygen to the Vault, and in exchange, the rest of the survivors would Dig for raw materials. Genesis had a plan, they promised. A careful fine-tuning that would make the New Earth just like the Old.

But these things take time. Lifetimes, it turned out. And then some.

Inside the Vault, the land clinging to the corkscrew became the Gutter, and the dirt beneath it became the Fang. An upside-down mountain that the Diggers just kept whittling away at, while overhead the hazy sunbulb flickered and faded in the iron sky.

Each generation was born with a little less hope.

“Why do people like Fantasy?” I’d asked once, watching as Hux counted orbits on his cot after a delivery.

He’d paused, thoughtful about his answer. “Because their souls are starving.”

✧✧✧

Back home, I nod off as I wait for the sunbulb to rise.

I’m dreaming of an ocean, soft and gray, when suddenly Crook is on my cot, half-crazed and pecking.

I’m instantly wide awake, screaming a pointless rush of air and scrambling backward until I hit the wall.

There are people standing over me. Three of them. Staring.

“She woke up,” the smallest one says, and it’s her, the little girl from the docks. With the same little boy beside her.

“I see that, thanks,” the third person says.

It’s a woman, her skin dark like the boy’s and her head half-shaved, the rest of her hair in long braids, tied back in a big knot. Not a Digger, then. Diggers can’t have long hair. Too many scalping incidents. Fantasy makes your eyes cave into your skull, so she’s not an addict, either. Her eyes are sharp. Pretty, even. And they keep flicking down my neck to Hux’s compass.

Who are you? I try to ask. Fragging foolish to sleep with my com-collar out of reach. Even worse that my pin gun is in a box beneath my cot.

“Name’s Fox,” she says, which is nearly as shocking as the intrusion because I’d pictured an old man, “and this is gonna go one of two ways—easy or hard.”

She reaches for the compass and I bite her, feeling the moment my teeth puncture her skin. She snaps her hand back, glaring.

“Right,” she says, “hard it is.”

The boy drops a syringe into her bleeding hand.

No! Stop, I’ll cooperate, I’m trying to say, but it’s all just puffs of air and the last thing I see is the white scar beneath her collarbone as she leans in with the needle. A lute and quill. Just like Hux.

I don’t remember anything after that.

✧✧✧

I wake up in a cargo hold. Crates stacked from floor to ceiling.

The boy is checking my neck for a pulse when I come to. Quick as a flashflare I grab his hand and pin him to the floor, but the girl slams into me from behind, shrieking and scratching, then I’m screeching, pushing both of them away but they’re scrabbling after me like junkhound pups—

“HEY!”

All three of us freeze.

It’s the woman. Fox. Shaking her head like she’s disappointed in our behavior, which is fragging rich considering she’s just gone and kidnapped me.

She arches her brow at the children. “What were you supposed to do if she woke up? Brutus?”

The girl gives an aggravated sigh before facing me. “Welcome to our airship, sorry we drugged you.”

Fox nods, then looks at the boy. “Breaker?”

“We're not gonna kill you, sorry we took you against your will.” He, at least, has the decency to look it.

“Bit rough at the edges, the twins are,” Fox says, sounding apologetic even as she ties my hands.

The children hoist themselves on top of a crate and sit, watching us. They’re clearly not twins, but at the moment that feels like the least important thing.

I look down at my binds, then up at Fox. "Why'd you...?"

“Take you?” She finishes. “You have something we need.”

My brain is too fuzzy to process that answer, so instead, I look around.

The crates are all marked S.T.A.R. Contraband, then. Taken from the docks. I’d been kidnapped by airpirates. And, I notice with a flash of rage, my compass is hanging from the little boy’s neck. Breaker. And Crook is sitting on Brutus’ shoulder. Traitor.

The book, I realize with a jolt, patting my tunic, searching, frenzied.

I look up when Fox clears her throat. She’s holding the book and smiling, like my panic is funny. Like having everything that matters stolen from you time and again doesn’t leave marks like scars. I imagine opening her throat with my ore knife.

But I’m so tired. The adrenaline is fading and the tendrils of the drug are still winding through my veins. So instead, I point to the mark on her chest.

“You’re a Bard.” And she was free. My stomach cartwheels. Hope.

But she was frowning.

“The brand,” I point again, “on your chest. You sold Fantasy.”

She laughs and the children join in, and I don’t understand what’s funny about a hot poker scarring your—

“It doesn’t mean Bard, it means Storyteller.” She says it importantly, like I should understand, before tilting her head. “Why would Genesis brand someone for selling Fantasy?”

“Because,” I bulge my eyes at her, because obviously, “it’s a disease that’s delayed the New Earth for generations?” I’m echoing Hux. Ironic and complicated, his view on Fantasy. “It’s a drug.”

“That Genesis manufactures.”

I feel myself squinting.

“All this?” She gestures around at the crates. “It’s the raw ingredients.”

“It’s S.T.A.R. stuff,” I say, defiant. “For the New—”

“Right,” her voice is sharp, “best get this part over with.” She draws her sword—a thick, clumsy looking thing—and comes at me.

I barely have time to duck and fling my arms up over my head before she’s bringing the sword down like she’s aiming to halve me with a single swing. I scream, loud and final, and the universe itself implodes because even as the sword crashes down I realize:

My com-collar is back in the bedsit, and I just heard myself scream.

The crates behind me explode—she wasn’t aiming for my head after all—and splinters rocket like shrapnel. The glass bottles inside the crates shatter to the floor, their powdery contents erupting in a great, chalky cloud.

Slowly, I stand. My temples are pulsing. My heart is beating backward.

It’s strange, the way you can know a thing you’ve never once seen.

I’d failed to imagine it every time I’d tried, and there wasn’t a night I hadn’t tried. And now, here it was. Everywhere.

Some of it landed on the toe of my worn boot and I stare at the powdery stain, entranced.

“You gonna hurl?” Brutus asks. “Sometimes people hurl the first time.”

I shake my head. “It’s…” But I don’t have a word for what it is.

“Color?" Fox suggests.

I’m still staring at the spot on my boot, bright against the worn black leather.

The cloud is settling on every surface. Even in the dull light of the single lantern I could see it—a layer of dust like a rainbow.

“But...how?” I look at Fox because I need her to make sense of it for me. “Genesis said the wavelengths…”

They lied, they lied, they lied, Hux is chanting in my head.

“Sensory deprivation.” She says it like it answers everything, but it doesn’t answer a thing. “It’s on purpose. Genesis does it to all the Vaults.”

All. The word snaps in my mind like a strip of rubber. “What do you mean all?”

Instead of answering, Fox goes to the hatch and slides it open with an enormous thwunk.

“Look,” she points out the open door. It’s a command.

I look.

Now I am going to be sick. Pass out. Scream. There are hundreds of them. Suspended and floating like iron balloons.

“I don’t understand—” I’m saying it over and over.

The vaults are tethered to the land far below and it’s land, not a factory trying to colonize a radioactive planet but a seemingly endless map of mountains and valleys and meadows and forests and oceans. The colors are sizzling in my brain like grease over a tar-flame and maybe it’s too much because my vision starts flipping like a faulty scanscreen. Still, I can’t look away.

“We’ll bring you back,” Fox is saying, “but first, you should know the truth about Genesis.” She’s taken the compass from Breaker and she’s turning it in her hands.

It twists off like a covered jar. Eleven years I’d had it, and never once had I suspected it was anything more.

She tips the contents of the secret compartment into her hand. It’s a delicate series of small metal tubes, fused together according to length.

“Pan pipes.” She offers them to me.

“Like this—” Breaker mimes blowing into them.

I copy him, and the pipes make an airy little tune. Crook’s head goes to one side at the sound and she makes a curious little chirp, then dives behind me, feathers puffed, scared by the revelation of her own voice.

“For music? Like a violin?” I turn the tiny pipes over in my hand. Nothing made sense. None of it. Why did my brother have a compass that wasn’t a compass and a brand that didn’t mean Bard?

A slow smile dawns on Fox’s face. “Not for music.”

“It’s a key,” Brutus says.

Breaker nods. “If you know the right tune.”

I look at them. “What does it open?”

Fox doesn’t answer. Instead, she says,

“I know where your brother is.”

All the air punches out of me and I’m pretty sure I whimper. “You know my brother?”

Just then there’s a high-pitched whistling and the wall of the cargo hold explodes in a spray of sparks.

My eyes are too full with the revelation of colored sparks, bright and warm, and the novelty of sound—metal grating and tearing. My mind is too full of Fox’s words. I know where your brother is. It takes me a moment to realize we’re in trouble.

An enormous metal claw like the bolt of a harpoon has pierced the wall and rocked the airship off-balance.

Finally, I see Fox’s wide-eyed horror. I hear the twins screaming and I understand.

The Watchmen have returned.