Free Way Down Dark by J.P. Smythe Page A

When it’s done, I rifle through my mother’s things, the stuff that she left. I find her smoke pellets. She used to use them to scare people away, and Agatha used them when she died in exactly the same way. Maybe they’ll work again now.
    The Lows pull back the curtains, and they see me standing there, eyes closed, head bowed, my face covered in my own blood. They watch me: I can feel their gaze on my head, looking all around me. I’m terrified, but I can’t let on. They can’t see me crossing my fingers, praying that this works. They step forward: time for them to meet her ghost and see just how afraid of me they should be.
    I slam one of the pellets to the ground, and it takes a second—a second in which I think that this is all over, that I’m screwed, that they’ll be in here and on me and I’m dead—but then it coughs out the smoke in these towering plumes around my body. Through the smoke, I speak. “Leave,” I say. I channel her voice, lowering mine. I speak almost from my throat. “Leave or I will kill you.” I can’t see them through the smoke now, but I hear their footsteps stop, their breathing quiet. They’re scared, or wary at the least. They’re trying to work out if they can take me or if the rumors are true and I’m protected by something other than just my tiny knife.
    They’re trying to work out if I’m worth it.
    I’m not. They leave, backing away from my berth, and I follow, striding slowly through the smoke, letting everyone see me. They skulk off down the gantry, looking back over their shoulders. I hear their footsteps getting fainter, and then they haul themselves down off the edge. I go back to my berth, indicating to Bess to stay down, below the level of the smoke, and then I creep to the edge of the gantry, to the railing. I put my hands onto the cold black metal and hold on, and I lean over, craning my neck to see them return to the girl’s berth.I can’t see inside. I don’t know if she’s still there, still alive. They throw her things over the side, but there’s no noise from her, and then they throw the bodies of their fallen after them, and I watch them fall until they’re just glints in the darkness at the bottom, joining my knife and God knows how many other bodies.
    I breathe then. I didn’t know that I was holding my breath or how long I’d held it for, but my lungs almost ache when I start again. As the smoke dissipates, I shut the curtains to my berth and wipe my blood off my face, and I hold myself to stop myself shaking. Bess tries to say something to me, but I can’t listen to her, not right now.
    I feel like I’m a child again, wanting to hide behind my mother’s legs while she protects me, but now she isn’t here to tell me that it’s all going to be better again.
    It’s not enough that life is scary. We invent other things to be terrified of, to scare the children into staying in line. There are things worse than Lows, we say. The story of the Bell who went insane, who killed an entire section of the ship in the early days; the story of the Nightman, who comes and takes children who wander off while their parents are asleep; the story about when the Pale Women supposedly poisoned the water in the arboretum, killing off all the fish and water bugs. All of them carry their own warnings, but there’s nothing worse than the Lows. They’re here, and they’re not stories. And we’re right to be scared.
    After a night spent with Bess and Peter—all three of us drifting in and out of half sleep, waking each other with oursnoring—work seems like a relief. Being back in the arboretum, among the plants and the grass and the trees, is calming.
    I ache like I’ve never ached before: My chin is tight when I try to speak, and my leg hurts so badly that I’m walking with a limp. I look at myself in the river, kneeling on the bank and peering into the water. The flesh is a plum color underneath my jaw, and the skin is slightly broken (the punch was