Downsiders by Neal Shusterman
“And this is?”
Then, for the first time since having his eyes back, Talon looked away from her. “No, not really,” he said, and then he looked back at her, offering an apologetic grin. “But it seemed like a good idea at the time.”
Lindsay forced back her own grin, determined not to let him see it. “What planet are you from, anyway?”
But he didn’t seem to get the question. “What are you going to do with me?”
Lindsay shrugged. “That’s up to the police.”
Outside, the sound of fireworks became fewer and farther between. A police siren echoed somewhere far off. There was no telling whether or not that particular police cruiser was on its way to this particular break-in.
There were several options in front of Lindsay now, and she began to feel the weight of responsibility on her shoulders. The safe thing would be just to wait until the police arrived to cart Talon away, and she’d never have to deal with him again. The various voices of reason in her head told her to do just that, and she was accustomed to listening to those voices.
But the voice of reason was quite often a coward, and she was tired of having her life ruled by fear. Just because he was too proud, or deranged, to take his sister to a free clinic, it didn’t mean Lindsay could just turn her back.
“It sounds to me like a bad case of bronchitis—it’s going around. Wait here,” she said, as if Talon had any choice, and she went off into the bathroom in search of what he needed.
She had no antibiotics of her own, but Todd might. Lindsay suspected that Todd would never take the full ten days of an antibiotic. Knowing Todd, he’d ditch the prescription the second he was feeling better, and as she opened Todd’s medicine chest she found that he was true to form. Inside was quite a little pharmacy of abandoned medications for everything from strep throat to athlete’s foot. She knew it was irresponsible, unwise, even illegal, to give Talon what he was asking—but what if the little girl died because Lindsay had refused to pilfer some of Todd’s medicine? And so, against a lifetime of better judgment, Lindsay took a half-full vial of Biaxin, which she knew cured a variety of ills, and hurried back to Talon.
Downstairs, the front door had opened, and she thought she heard some voices that wielded a bit more authority than Todd and his friends.
Quickly, she slipped the vial into Talon’s hip-pouch. “This is what you need,” she told him. “She’s little, so break them in half and you’ll have enough for ten days—and if she keeps getting worse, you have to swear to me you’ll take her to a doctor, whether ‘it’s allowed’ or not.”
When Talon reluctantly agreed, she tried to undo Todd’s chain. Although Todd was reported to have a decent IQ, he must have cheated on the test, because the chain, although wrapped around Talon and the pole three times, merely had to be lifted high enough to clear the bedpost for Talon to be freed. It didn’t take Houdini to do the job.
The instant Talon was free, Lindsay hurried out of the room, for she heard the heavy footfall of the policemen plodding up the stairs. She met them halfway up.
“Officers, thank you for coming,” she said, standing in their way as they tried to get upstairs. “It was terrible, he broke into the house—I’m still shaking.” Still, she stood in their way.
“Don’t worry, miss. We’ll take it from here.”
They pushed on past her, and Todd led them to her room...where they found the chain on the floor, and no sign of Talon.
“What happened? Where did he go?” yelled Todd. “Lindsay?”
“Beats me,” she said. “Didn’t you chain him tight enough?”
With nothing else to do, the police took a report, confiscated the spiked punch, and left.
It was as Lindsay was preparing for bed a few hours later that she noticed something on the floor, near the bedpost. A brown sock stretched out and overworn, filled with lines where it had been redarned...but closer inspection revealed that the sock wasn’t really brown at all. It was a coarse weave of every color of the spectrum—as if someone had cleaned out the lint-trap of a dryer and woven it into a sock. She had no idea what would have possessed her strange intruder to leave a single sock behind—and God knew how many diseases it carried. But, still, Lindsay kept it, leaving it on her dresser as she began, once and for all, to undo her stiff gator’s tail of a braid.
Strangers in a Drain
Lindsay knew that in a city of ten million rushing souls, chance meetings rarely happen more than once. Yet she found herself wishing that weren’t the case. True, her experience with Talon had been somewhat traumatic—the type of big-city nightmare her mother always warned about. After all, what could be more terrifying than a stranger appearing in her own room? And yet, Lindsay could not get the image of Talon out of her mind. It nagged at her like an itch out of reach.
“I saved Lindsay’s life,” Todd announced at the breakfast table the following morning. He proceeded to tell their father the complete tale, in a bungee-stretch of exaggeration.
“He was huge,” Todd said.
“Not that huge,” Lindsay corrected.
“He had these wild, psychotic eyes,” Todd said.
“Maybe because I sprayed them with pepper spray,” Lindsay reminded him.
“No telling what twisted, demented things he wanted.”
“I know what he wanted,” Lindsay mumbled.
Needless to say, Mr. Matthias had the fissure between the two upstairs hallways completed immediately, closing out forever that dark space between the walls. For the next few days, Todd was constantly reminding her how very dangerous the situation had been.
“He could have cut you up into a thousand pieces and eaten you one bite at a time,” he would say, or, “He could have sautéed your guts in garlic and olive oil.” Todd was merciless in illustrating all the ways in which she might have been ingested. Lindsay’s personal favorite was: “He could have barbecued your liver and served it up with onions.” It made Lindsay laugh because surely no cannibal in his right mind would eat liver and onions.
By the end of her first week of school, she reluctantly had to admit her landing in New York was a crash-and-burn. Her father’s schedule left him little opportunity to keep track of Lindsay’s tribulations—but he must have sensed something amiss, because he found his way into her room one night as she prepared for bed, and asked the proverbial parental question: “Is everything all right at school?”
Lindsay wondered if there was ever a kid in the history of the world who answered anything but, “Yeah, sure, fine” when the question was posed. “Yeah, sure, fine,” she told him.
He sat on the chair beside her as she read a book. Unlike Todd, he didn’t use her school supplies to clean his finger-nails. “The schoolwork’s not too hard? Kids treating you okay?” he asked.
She considered telling him the truth—that Todd had blabbed her New Year’s Eve experience throughout the hallowed halls of Icharus Academy so that Lindsay had instantly become known as “that poor girl who was attacked on New Year’s Eve” and everyone looked at her as if she would slip into some screeching flashback at any moment.
But what was the point in telling her father that? He would call the school, raise a ruckus, and it would solve nothing, because the problem wasn’t the school. It wasn’t really Todd, either.
“Things are different here,” she told him. “I’ll get used to it.” But it wasn’t just “things” that were different...she was different. In any other situation, she would have quickly exerted her own personality and shone through, but the girl who had grown under her mother’s tutelage wasn’t the girl she wanted to be anymore. The problem was, there was no image rushing in to fill that void. Nothing but the image the Icharus kids tried to pin on her.
“You should have Todd get you an appointment at Hair-On-Fire,” her father suggested. “They’ll give you one of those nuclear hair creations that will get you into the in-crowd in no time.”
Lindsay sighed and put down her book. “Maybe I’ll get a few o
That started her father stammering, like someone who suddenly found himself on the wrong side of a closed window.
“I’m kidding, Dad.”
He grinned, dropping his shoulders in relief, then kissed her and left, as if something had been accomplished.
With the Icharus crew not worth the trouble, Lindsay found herself alone more often than not during those first few weeks, but she was hardly bored, because she had developed a curious hobby. She spent her free time secretly searching dark, unsafe corners for a trace of the one thing in New York that intrigued her and gave her a hint of mystery: Talon.
Though she tried to avoid it, her search eventually brought her sniffing around the subway, and as anyone can tell you, that is not a pleasant endeavor. The smell of the subway is a unique brew of select garbage fermenting in soot-sifted runoff and various bodily fluids—and when people speak of the special air of life that fills the city, they are probably imagining the smell of the subway. The Downsiders had no love of it—in fact, they had great fans that sent the stench back to the surface, where it belonged.
It was on a bench at the lonely end of the Seventy-seventh Street and Lexington Avenue station that Lindsay found a tattered old woman willing to tell her what she wanted to hear.
“So you’ve seen one of them!” the woman said, with a voice almost as ragged as her clothes.
“He came to my house. He was looking for medicine.”
The woman nodded. “They do that sometimes. So I hear.”
“They?” asked Lindsay. “Who are they?”
The woman looked around, as if someone might be lurking in the shadows, listening in. Then she leaned in close to Lindsay. “The Under-Angels,” she said. “That’s why I wait here. I’m waiting for the day they choose me and take me down to Heaven.”
Never before had a girl caused Talon so much pain. Perhaps that’s why she had left such a lasting impression on him. This Topsider. This “Lindsay.”
“Best if you leave it alone,” The Champ told Talon over a particularly brutal game of Risk. “You don’t break into someone’s house and then go asking her out to the movies.”
“The what?”
“Never mind,” answered The Champ as he proceeded to wipe out Talon’s entire Argentinean army. “Anyway, don’t they have girls your age down there?”
Talon shrugged. “Yeah...but none of them ever sprayed me with eye-poison.”
That made The Champ laugh, and his laughter made Talon angry. He would have to take it out on The Champ’s meager forces in England. “Besides, she saved my sister’s life...and I have to return her book.” He tapped his pocket, where he kept the somewhat dog-eared copy of The Time Machine he had salvaged the day he was hit by the brick.
“Those kinds of girls...” said The Champ, “they’re not looking for the likes of you.”
“So what do they look for?”
“If I knew that, do you think I’d be living at the bottom of a pool?”
Talon looked down at the playing board, studying his positioning on the landmasses. The Champ, he knew, was one of the Topside’s wise ones, but clearly he couldn’t answer every Topside mystery.
The Champ had told him that this game board was a copy of the Topside map of the world.
“Where are we?” Talon asked. “I keep forgetting.”
The Champ pointed to a spot on the board where orange met blue. “Right here,” he said. “East coast of North America.”
Talon touched the spot on the map, and then let his eyes drift to the colorful landmasses on other parts of the board.
“And how big is all the rest?”
The Champ raised his eyebrows. “Too big for you to imagine.”
Talon nodded and rolled his dice. “Someday, I will be able to imagine all this,” he said, “and when I do, she will no longer spray me in the eyes.”
High up, where inferior concrete had worn away under decades of water erosion, a shaft twisted up from the Downside, to the brownstones of Eighty-fourth Street. For a short time there had been a gateway into the world of the girl named Lindsay Matthias, but now it had been sealed with brick and cement. In spite of The Champ’s advice, Talon went there day after day, slipping away whenever he found the chance, to climb into the secret crevice between the two buildings, and listen. The voices came through faint and muffled—even when he put his ear to the cold brick—but enough sifted through for him to know Lindsay’s comings and goings. He knew she left at 7:30 every morning and didn’t return until 5:30 in the evening, after the sun had freed the sky from its burning rays. He knew that her brother’s unpleasant nature wasn’t just reserved for Talon. There was a certain melancholy in Lindsay’s conversations with her father and brother that made it clear to Talon that she longed to be somewhere else, although he wasn’t quite sure where. It brought him a deep sadness to think that she would have to live her life in the Topside—someone with a heart such as hers deserved the dignity of being Down.
These were the thoughts that wove through Talon’s mind on the day that he was caught by Railborn.
Lindsay’s home was above the untraveled wastes, at the furthest reaches of the High Perimeter—a place of ruined basements and rotting furniture that the Topside had forgotten but the Downside had not yet claimed. Talon thought he was too clever to be followed, but Railborn, as loud and obnoxious as he tended to be, could stalk with the silence of a gopher snake when he wanted to.
When Talon came down from that high crevice, Railborn was waiting for him. With a quick and painful punch to the jaw, he sent Talon sprawling. Talon was quick to react, rising from the floor and butting Railborn in the stomach, knocking him against a brick wall. Furious about this ambush, Talon was merciless in his retaliation, throwing punches long after Railborn had stopped. Finally they separated, listening to each other’s jagged breathing in the darkness.
“I thought I could knock some sense into you,” growled Railborn. “We’re done Catching, so it’s time to pull your thick skull down from the Topside and start thinking about Hunting rotation. We’ve been waiting long enough—I won’t let you ruin it for Gutta and me.”
It bothered Talon the way Railborn said “Gutta and me.” Lately, Railborn had been doing everything in his power to get Gutta to side with him in all things—as if it were the two of them against Talon. They both knew that Gutta almost always sided with Talon. This time she wasn’t, and Railborn was riding it for all it was worth.
“What I do with my free time is my business,” answered Talon.
“No, it’s not. Because if the others find out you’ve been surface-peeping, Gutta and I will be septic-deep because we didn’t stop you.”
“No one will find out,” reminded Talon, “if you don’t tell them.”
“So now you’re going to force us to be accomplices?” Railborn struck the wall in anger and stormed off.
Although Talon wished he could just leave it at that, he couldn’t. Fistfights aside, Railborn had been a true friend for longer than Talon could remember, so he caught up with him.
“Are you going to tell Gutta?” Talon asked.
“Who do you think made me go after you?”
Talon smiled. “She’s worried about me, isn’t she?”
Railborn shifted his shoulders uncomfortably. “So what? If I were the one acting like a freak, she’d be worried about me, too.”
“Then maybe you should act like a freak more often.”
“Ah, shut up.”
They made their way through holes and down debris banks until they reached the well-marked, well-traveled tunnels of home, where the air was warm and the smells and sounds were numbingly familiar. “Why shouldn’t I want to know what goes on a hundred feet above my head?”
“Because it’s a hundred feet above your head!” answered Railborn. “That place is their curse, not yours.”
“And what if they’re not cursed?”
“If they’re not cursed, then why were they born
There was little sense in arguing this. Railborn spouted Downside doctrine as if it flowed through his veins, and he believed every word of it. Now that his stint at Catching was over, all thoughts of the Topside had drained out of Railborn’s mind.
“It’s like the sewers, Talon,” Railborn said, finally beginning to cool down. “We built the sewers to channel the Topside away from us. You’ve got to do that with your brain, too.”
Talon smiled in spite of himself. “That’s what I like about you, Railborn—your mind is like a sewer.”
Railborn grinned proudly. “Thanks!” he said.
But if Railborn’s mind was like a sewer, then Talon’s was a sump, collecting all those things that no one else dared to think about.
At 5:30 the following Friday evening, Lindsay walked home from the library with a high-octane motormouth by the name of Becky Peckerling.
“The kids in class are easy to remember,” insisted Becky. “Gary’s the one with those designer blue braces; Andrea’s the one with stained teeth; Rhonda’s are perfect, but that’s only because she had them capped; and Reggie has a gap between his two front teeth that he uses to spit water at people.” Becky claimed that she wanted to be a doctor someday, but everyone suspected she’d end up a dentist. “Do you think you know everyone now?”
“Yes,” lied Lindsay, picking up her pace down Third Avenue. Gridlock had reached a fever pitch, and Lindsay didn’t know which was worse: the honking of horns, or Becky’s ramblings. Becky was Icharus Academy’s one-woman welcome wagon, although few things about her were welcoming. From the very beginning Becky had glommed onto Lindsay like a barnacle to a boat, and Lindsay didn’t have the strength to scrape the poor girl off her hull. Everyone else at school kept a carefully measured distance, which was fine with Lindsay. She didn’t want to be drawn into a cliquish world of prep-school intrigue—at least not until she knew which clique was worth aligning herself with.