So Below (Draft)

The Ascendent laughed from the throne room in his tower, and throughout the land it echoed. Buried beneath the earth as we are, we could still feel it reverberating through the soil, shaking our walls and raining rubble down into our watered-down, cold soup – remnants of the meager rations we were begrudgingly given. Quietly, we wait for the vibrations to subside, and slowly fish out the bits of dirt that had collected at the bottom of our bowls. The muffled sounds seeping through from Above seem to suggest that a celebration was taking place.

I catch myself once again wondering what it must be like to have the privilege of being up there. Were they, the Treaders, genuinely convinced of the façade they were all a part of? Or did they choose to turn a blind eye in order to keep themselves in His good graces? Afterall, if there’s anything that the people in this place don’t lack, it’s the keen sense of self-preservation. It’s that same need to keep one’s self alive (and clothed, and fed) that’s driven plenty of Dwellers from Below to dig themselves out and decide to live in servitude of the Ascendent – despite the costs.

“What do you think their soup is like?” my sister asks, looking up at me with her deep-set eyes and pointing up towards the ceiling with a finger so thin it might as well have been just bone.

“I don’t think they even eat soup, Twelves” I respond.

Her nickname, given to her by our eldest brother, was a reference to how her birth code consisted of the multiples of the number 12 – 122436. I on the other hand, have always been called Odds. 115379.

Between us siblings, we’ve never referred to each other by our numerical codes. To us, they’re a constant reminder that that is all we are in this ecosystem – statistics. Numbers to be listed, but not to be accounted for.

Most days I miss our brother. He doesn’t go by his Dweller nickname anymore, but instead has adapted to the name they’ve given him up there. We never bothered to learn it – mostly because it didn’t feel right – but also because we never see him enough these days to actually call him by any of his names. Twelves and I understood that he had no other choice – that he did what he had to do, what with mom and dad gone. Despite that though, I’ve never been able to shake the desire for things to have been different, for there to have been another way.

Is it envy? Me wishing that I could be up there too? That all three of us could masquerade as Treaders? Then again, his situation could never be something I’d be envious of, which is saying a lot for someone who lives in darkness under rubble and soil. No, my brother has had to sacrifice his body and sanity to make sure we were taken care of. He couldn’t bear to see his sisters starving anymore, so though he was only 15 cycles old at the time, he climbed.

Their first order of business was to scrub him down, remove every trace of dust and soot that clung to his body. Stripped and sterilised. His ill-fitting, tattered, handed-down clothes replaced with uniforms that visually marked him as one of their lackeys. Next to go was his tongue, for the likes of him are only to be seen and never heard – and because they didn’t trust that anyone from Below could conform to a rule like this (especially with so much that they could complain of), they thought it was much easier to just snip that possibility away. I could never be envious of that.

He’s far from being the first among us Below who has decided to climb Above though. The motto up there, “Break a man’s spirit, and he will rise” must sound so inspirational for Treaders – a message of resilience, grit, perseverance: though you falter, you will stand again. For us, it rings too true in its literal connotations – push someone to the brink, deprive and neglect them, and eventually they will come Above. To beg. To plead. For scraps, for anything. Down here, if a family is to survive, one of them must be up there.