The Belly of the Beast

Ch. 10, Infinite and Endless

For one glorious moment I was free as the thing they once called stars: infinite and endless. Then the net caught me— Xyla and I had nearly thirty stretched between pipes throughout the Belly, for moments when we needed to disappear quickly. Above, a hole in the smog showed where I'd fallen, already reforming itself and hiding me from view. Combined with the screeching alarm, the clanking of boots, and the noise of the Belly, they would never find me. More importantly, they wouldn't find Xyla, who wasn't nearly the climber I was.

I rolled out of the net, swinging from a pipe over empty air before I grabbed one of the thin metal ladders that crisscrossed the Belly like a web. Then I abandoned even those, climbing across machines and metal walls, flowing up and over, only the smallest handhold needed to pull me forward.

After a few minutes it was clear no one followed. The guards were disappointingly slow and never strayed from the metal walkways— barely even a challenge for a Belly rat like me. Suspended over a spindle thin ladder, the Belly roiling and shaking below, I pulled the metal necklace free, turning over the ship in my hand. There, written on the side in tiny swirling letters, as if it were the ship's name, was the word Aliyah.

Aliyah. Could that have been her name? Could I truly have met an A? Hanging there in space, the smog and machines stretched out below, I wondered at the events of the last two days. A fighter with no listed crime. A dead engineer, and his partner who claimed that Yaneli had helped with the quarantine of Level N— and asked if she regretted it. The Admiral announcing a decrease in food. Then a murdered woman from the Top, and what looked like an entire regiment of guards in the Chute, in a place I've never seen more than two guards at once. And one of them fired his gun. Whatever it all meant, or if it meant anything at all, it was beyond me.

Nearly half an hour later, I opened the door to the room Xyla, Yaneli and I all shared—a small metal room with a few deeply etched names on the walls of the past inhabitants (whom Xyla and I liked to invent stories for), a single large bed in one corner, and a tiny bathroom in the other. Xyla and I had tried to make it more homey over the years with scraps from the Chute: a wobbly stool in the corner, tattered paintings on the walls and a few battered nick nacks on the lone shelf. Despite years of begging, Yaneli had never let me paint the walls. Mostly because the only paint available in the Belly was made from a mixture of rat's blood and corn syrup. Yaneli hated rats, and Xyla loved all creatures—even the beady-eyed rodents she insisted were actually intelligent. My argument that we'd have to kill tons of them to get enough paint didn't persuade either of them.

Xyla already laid on the bed, on top of the single coarse blanket we received every year, and even the way she turned to look at me, I could tell she was mad. "That was too close, Z. I mean it."

"Speak for yourself, next time I'm gonna moon them before I jump."

"Might want to hold off on that." She lifted the tattered remains of her shirt beneath her overalls, and I swore. Her side held a wound I'd never seen before, like a deep red trench had been scooped out of her skin.

"Bloody Beast, Xyla." I peered closer, realizing what it was. "A bullet? Wow, that's incredible."

"Glad to hear you're so concerned."

"No seriously, what are the chances a guard not only risks a ricochet, but then grazes you just enough to leave an awesome scar? A million to one, that's what." All the K-guards had guns, but they rarely used them in favor of the burrowing whips, a rod with a wire at the end that burrowed into the flesh and burned from the inside out. I'd only felt one once, and personally, I'd rather be shot. "If I have to hear Wesson tell the story about how he got whipped one more time, I'll enter the Tuv Pit fight myself. But he'll never beat this." I turned to one of the metal cabinets set into the wall, digging out some of the rags we used for bandages, and then turned back to Xyla. "Lay down," I instructed her.

She laid flat, but then caught my hands before I could examine the wound closer, her eyes full of that judgmental look I hated. It meant she was about to act like Yaneli.

"The necklace," she said. "You got rid of it?"

"I said I would, didn't I?" I couldn't lie to her— but I also didn't need to tell her the full truth.

"Then there's nothing else to say. It never happened."

Her voice was final, and I nodded, a strange mixture of disappointed and relieved. Even if Xyla was my best friend, my family, she still had a letter. She'd never understand why my promise to the dead woman in the Chute wasn't a promise I could easily forget. If I didn't have a letter, wasn't a real doctor, and couldn't honor my word, then what was I?

The answer came too easily. 

I was Nothing. No one. 

Just a Z.