Page 15 of The Only Way Out Is Up

“Okay,” she whispers into my shoulder.

I squeeze her tighter. “You won’t tell Somi?”

She sniffs, her voice barely audible. “If you do my toilet cleaning for the month.”

“What?” I pull away to look her in the eye. “Really? I thought we were having a moment there.”

She shrugs. “Business is business. Deal?”

SIX

I live in a giant hole in the ground.

There are some weird cults who’ll tell you that our enclosed cavern is the whole of the universe; they insist that stories of the outside—the sun, the moon, the stars, and so on—are merely heretical fictions. This is obviously idiotic. If there’s no outside, where does the mash come from? And where does the scrap we scavenge go?

Anyway. Giant hole in the ground. It’s a cylinder several kilometers across and a few hundred meters high. At the very top is the Asshole, the giant orifice that dumps endless scrap atop the Heap. Below that are the three tiers of the ring-city, each a circle around an empty void to give the tumbling concrete and metal plenty of space. From the bottom up, the tiers are red-lit Malkuth, busy Yesod, and luxurious Hod.

The bottom of Malkuth is still a hundred meters above the floor of the cavern, so there are four great stairs connecting the ring-city with the Heap. Stair #3 is at the heart of our market, a spiderweb of steps and scaffolding that looms over us like a mountain of metal. If you don’t want to wear yourself out hoofing it all the way up, entrepreneurial types have strung baskets and pullies over the side for a less exhausting ascent at the cost of a few bits.

At the top is a cul-de-sac, a plaza lined by razor-wire fences patrolled by watchful Arbiters. Only those with appropriate passes are allowed to pass through the gates into Malkuth proper. And if you want to get to Yesod, the pleasant second tier where the workhouse overseers and factory bosses reside, that means another ascent; the steps are less fearsome but the security is even stricter. A Malkuth pass isn’t that hard to come by, stolen or sold by some workhouse inmate on leave, but a Yesod pass is rarer than a dancing pig.

So what’s a boy with robbery on his mind to do? If he happens to be completely insane, he might try this:

Find a hole in the grating that protects the underside of the Stair from debris.

There, among the shadowed tangle of rusting, groaning beams and girders, pull on a pair of gloves and kneepads enhanced with BIND sigils.

Work his way up a hundred meters to the underside of Malkuth, then climb upside down to its inner edge.

Ascend the armored inner wall another few dozen meters to reach the bottom of Yesod, all the while hoping that the spastic Asshole above doesn’t release a new torrent of junk that scrapes him off like a bug.

Crawl upside down again to reach a certain loose panel, which, when pressed upward in the right way, admits our enterprising thief into the sewer-and-maintenance layer that underlies the elegant houses and broad lawns above.

After all that I lie on the rusty metal and just breathe for a while, my leg a screaming mass of knotted pain. My faithful runic companion skitters around and helpfully berates me for the failures of my inadequate meat body.

Can’t spend too long relaxing in the sewage stink, though. Unlike the Heap, the tiered city actually gets dark at night, courtesy of huge sunlamps set into the roof of the cavern. That’s important because up here the Arbiters actually patrol; there’s no world in which my gray thieving outfit looks anything but suspicious, so it’ll go badly if they spot me. Best to stick to the shadows and be gone before daybreak.

I move through the maintenance tunnels for a bit, then climb a ladder and ease open a hatch a few centimeters. Star flattens himself out and scrabbles through the gap.

[Observation: no observers], he tells me.

I slip out after him, press myself against a wall, and take a few moments to let my eyes adjust. Not just my eyes, either—everything here is so different I feel like I’m in another world.

Yesod has streets, not just haphazard alleys. Yesod has houses, not just shacks leaning drunkenly against one another for support. Most of all Yesod has plants, grassy lawns and neat rows of trees. You might almost think you were in one of the surface towns from Somi’s storybooks, if not for the blackness of the sky and the stillness of the air. I’ve been here a couple of times before, and it still takes my breath away.

[Query: what is the purpose of a “lawn”?]

You can… walk on it, I guess?

[Further query: the streets are insufficient?]

I don’t know. The lawns are nicer to look at.

[Speculation: “lawns” are decorative in nature?]

I think so. I know they’re involved in something called a “picnic,” but the nature of that activity remains unclear to me.

[Addendum: similar to “flowers.”]