TO HIS HANDS AND KNEES

1563 4D

As Andrew watched, the girl said to the other children, “Be true. De jump e dead.” She turned to the four adults and took a deep breath, shaking, forming her words with care. “We’re trapped here. That was our way up to get food and water. No other way out of here. And Steels… dead. An Steels be dead.” She clenched her fist around the handle of her knife, but terror was in her eyes. “You sav oder way?”

“Not yet,” Ezzar said. “But we can help you find one. This is Martin, and this is Grendel. Let us try to help.”

The girl looked them over. “We soon see.” She turned to the crowd of children. “Dey fine weuns new jump,” she said. “Be pass now, okay?”

In a murmur that barely rose above the crackling of the fires, they said, “Okay.” Andrew let his breath go out very slowly. Even in the teeming City streets he had walked, nothing like this had ever confronted him. He wanted to embrace them, heal them, protect them, as if he had found his own lost ones; but their sharp assessing stares, weighing him like a piece of meat, repelled him.

He looked up at the ceiling. “Where does the smoke go?”

The bone-cap girl pointed down the understreet. “There,” she said. She had recovered herself now.

“Show me,” Andrew said to her.

“Come on.” She led Andrew and Ezzar to a doorway into blackness. “Get Mama light,” she called back. A small boy in a black cloak ran up to her with a torch made from a steel spar and a knot of tempweave. She held up the torch, and they looked inside. The smoke from the fires rolled past Andrew‘s head and into a dark chamber.

“Oh, this is one of the old air shafts,” he said. “There should be a spiral stairway in it, on the wall.”

“Yes,” the girl said, “But you haven’t seen it yet.” They stepped out though the chamber’s farther end onto a platform in the shaft itself. The smoky air boiled in from behind them. All around them, torchlight danced off rivulets of grease and moisture. At the point where the stairs above should have met the flat space on which they stood, a broken jagged edge of stone marked the abyss. Andrew looked up. Part of the wall of the shaft had sheared away, leaving a twenty-foot gap in the stair’s upward spiral. Not even Grendel could jump that. He went to the other end of the platform. “Here’s a stair in good order, going down.” He set a foot on the first step. “How about this?” he said. At that moment he reeled back, gagging from the stench.

“The only good air comes from our space,” the girl said. “Nobody can breathe down there. Some of us died when we tried it.”

When they got back, Martin was sitting on the floor, his back to the wall, his eyes closed, his lips moving. Grendel stood apart, near the door they had arrived through, inspecting his large beam gun. Ezzar approached a group of the smaller children. She said, “Hello.” The children did not speak. As they stood next to each other, their small hands moved against each other in brief bursts, first with one child’s hand inside the other’s, then reversed.

The girl with the finger-bone cap said to Ezzar, “They don’t talk with their voices yet. They think you’re here to steal them.” Bending down, she took the hand of the nearest one, a girl about five years old, and put her fingers inside the little one’s hand. After a few movements of their fingers back and forth, the little girl looked up at her and gave a brief smile, then scuttled away.

Andrew looked around at all the young faces, adorned and covered with paint and parts of their headpieces. Eyes were fixed on him in looks that spoke fear, hunger, wariness, greed, or all four. Some had one or both eye sockets empty. Here and there he saw the stumps of limbs.

One small girl squeezed an eye shut and rubbed her nose with her forearm. She kept the other eye fixed on him. She appeared to be just under four years old. He stared back at her. He couldn’t move. “Jan?” he asked under his breath. “Jan?” he said again.

“Who’s Jan?” Ezzar asked him. Andrew took two steps toward the little girl and she was gone into the shadows. He turned back in frustration. “She’s my littlest. Was. But…" He bowed his head. “Never mind.” The emptiness sucked at him inside. He looked up again and bit his lip. “The shaft‘s no good.”

“Come on,” Ezzar said, her voice carrying a sharp edge, “Don’t fade out like that damn brother of yours.”

Andrew turned his back on her and started towards Martin. Ezzar grabbed his arm. He yanked it away and went over to bend down by Martin and put a hand on his shoulder.

“Martin,” Andrew said. His brother jumped, and looked up at him wide-eyed. “Are you all right?” The vile smell from the liftcar reasserted itself around them.

Martin looked up, his eyes squinting from the smoke. “I’m hungry,” he said, “and thirsty. We’ve had nothing for hours.” The red firelight made his face look gaunt and drained.

“So, you’re going to prop him up?” Ezzar came over. “You’re the one who got us this far. Is this how you kept your family going, out there where you had no damn business? Fix everything? Let him sit there and rot.”

“Back off,” Andrew said, his anger surging, “You’re always fixing Big Boy here.” He glared at Grendel.

Ezzar‘s eyes widened. She spat back, “Fix Martin, fix your farm, fix your wife and children.” She turned and started to walk away.

This was too much. Andrew jumped in front of her. “Don’t push me.”

She pushed him.

He staggered back, then reached for her. She knocked his hand aside and laughed. “Out of my way.”

Something cold, like a venomous reptile, uncoiled in Andrew, and he stepped aside. As she brushed past him, he seized her in a choke hold, bringing her down under him. “You—" He lost sensation in his body as two large hands seized his head. An unstoppable pressure dragged him up and brought him to his hands and knees. His arms still clutched Ezzar‘s throat from behind.

“Let her go.” It was Grendel. “I’ll break your neck.” His voice was flat and informational.

“All right,” Andrew coughed. He let go. Grendel raised him from Ezzar and forced him into a kneeling position. Ezzar lay dazed. Grendel‘s hands clamped Andrew‘s head like a vise as she recovered and raised herself slowly to her feet. Then she pulled her knife and placed its point in front of Andrew‘s eyes as he crouched helpless.

“Nobody does that to me,” she hissed. Dirt and scratches marred her forehead.

“And nobody treats me and mine the way you do,” Andrew answered from between Grendel‘s hands. Shaking with anger and fear, he said, “If you weren’t so scared, you’d quit picking at Martin and me and you’d help find a way out of here.” He waited.

Ezzar lowered her knife and rubbed her throat. “Let him go, Rennie,” she said.

Andrew stood up and massaged his ears. Martin sprawled motionless on the floor. Andrew knelt over him, then looked up at Grendel and said, “Did you do this?”

“He’ll be okay in a minute,” Grendel said. “I didn’t want him behind me.” Martin stirred, groaning.

“Listen,” Andrew snapped, “I need Martin. And, you have business here, still? The guns?” Guessing, he cast for words that would make Ezzar tell him what he wanted to know. “The guns you brought in. They’re on that train, right? What if the corpos find them? Or the militia?” Watching her face closely now, “You won’t get your money, will you?”

“You don’t know any of this,” Ezzar said. “The less you know, the better it is for you.” She glanced at Grendel.

“Fine. But if I help you with your business, will you help us with ours? I could forget this if you can.” He watched Ezzar, hoping she’d let it go. They’d all gotten in over their heads.

She shook her head as she sheathed her knife again. “Just give me time.”

Without another word, they all slumped to sit against the wall and rest. The children came and went, their small jaws tirelessly chewing bits of food behind the fragmented masks they wore, hand in hand with fingers coiling and uncoiling silent conversations.