A Variation of the Fable of the Founding of the City
It wasn’t his real name, but the boy called himself Zipper. Foot swinging in the polluted mist, he hawked his throat and spat a glob of stuff the color of smoke down into the chasm below him. He wiped his rosy lips and stared at the shrinking blob until it disappeared in the dark thickening haze below. Waiting pointlessly for it to make a sound, Zipper realized that one full week had passed. Today he would have to decide.
Zipper shone his flashlight on the vast mesh of black crystal pillars surrounding him. The carbon nanotube lattice had a perfect zig for every zag, snaking order into the primordial cloud of smog that seemed to be the only firmament upon which Clover City existed. Large metal pipes peeked out into the pit, each one leaking fluid or toxic gas of some vile kind. Thankfully, the pipe Zipper sat on only excreted water, and the pit, wide as a city block, swallowed the spillage with ease. He added what he could to the mix.
A flock of arrows punctured the cloud. Foot still swaying, Zipper craned his head up to watch as they cut through the haze, sucking up the tepid filth and leaving only cold oxygen in their wake. Same time every day. The arrows passed perfectly through a carbon nanotube grate bisecting the pit into two portions. The grate had a small square for each arrow pass through, but any larger objects could never hope to enter sewer system of Atamashi above.
Eyes closed and nostrils flared, Zipper waited. Knowing what was coming, he was reminded of the coarseness of his own body. He thought of what the inside of his lungs must look like. What color were they? All at once, a smell like ice crept into him and into his blood. Fresh air.
Opening his eyes, Zipper was confronted by the brilliant clarity that now ran through the tunnel all the way to the top of the city. A solitary speck of holy Sky shone down from the apex miles above, and Zipper did not blink. Heavy smog still emanated from the network of pipes and began filling the tunnel. Zipper spent this moment before the atmosphere was corrupted once more staring wide-eyed at the blue dot up high. It was only proof he’d ever known that there were things beyond this world, so he knew better than to waste even a second peering down; it was too dark below.
* * *
As child in Ashishi, the bottom tier of Clover City, Zipper was taught the mythology of the Sky. From his earliest memories onward, everyone he met made some mention of the Sky and its grandeur. He was quite fond of the memory of him asking his father what the color of the Sky was. His father told him red, and of course Zipper believed him. He believed as only a child could.
The culture of Ashishi was one of storytelling. Zipper heard fantastic tales about the heavens beyond the city, beyond everything. There were entire other worlds with whimsical names. Jupiter. Narnia. Germany. These stories were everywhere. People told them to pass the time, especially when children were around. People seemed happier when these places were mentioned. They seemed so different from Ashishi.
The denizens of Ashishi were not without their torturers: ill-tempered street ramblers, lunatic corner kings, skeleton-key hustlers, crackbone fiends. Zipper modified his stories such that each villain had their own codified punishment. Likewise, those who did good would receive their own special gift of fortune. In this way, the grandeur of the Sky was an escape from the baseness of the world. Its legends were the maps he used to deal with the world. This scheme worked well enough.
 Then one day Zipper felt the unique pain of losing a father to the siren call of a dopium den. That was a fresh realm of pain. His mother comforted him as much as she could. She kept him away from the chaos. She tried to make his world small. But he did not want his world to be small. He wanted the world to be expansive and explosive and glorious. He wanted his father’s knowledge. He wanted the stories. He decided that since he did not have a father to look up to, he would to look up to the Sky instead.
* * *
As the string of light finally thinned into nothingness, Zipper considered just how badly he wanted to do it. Back on his feet, he turned and crouched back into the mouth of the pipe. Ankle-deep in water, he waded through the current tugging his feet, resisting. Before long, he arrived at the point where the pipe forked vertically with a man-sized leaking artificial light. Zipper crawled through it and slinked out of the earthen tunnel onto the edge of the old-style grass park in Greymouth Plaza.
Zipper jogged over to the aeroglass walkway behind the Giga-Galleria, where they would not take his money. Offgridders like him lived illicit lifestyles that required the use of cryptocurrency of some form or another. Zipper used the drachma, one of the more common cryptocurrencies, which derives its value from the ephemerality of its possession between transactions. In other words, the value of the drachma resets immediately after a transaction and begins degrading every day according to an unknown algorithm. Knowing a fraction of his money would radiate away on a daily basis, he would spend his drachmas as soon as possible, leaving his vendors to do the same in a never-ending game of economic hot potato. He liked the psychology behind this behavior. It made things interesting.
Zipper did not think of himself as a criminal, but the omnipresent police drones reminded him that he was one. He preferred to say that his work was inevitable, even necessary in a place like Karadashi. Every human desire, virtue, and vice could be commodified and capitalized on by an eager assortment of shady individuals. Break-ins and thefts were the most common job for Zipper, and the easiest at that, but his repertoire of skills included sabotage, surveillance, and information extraction, making him an attractive specialist in the eyes of Karadashi’s business elites, who never faltered in their perpetual struggle to gain the upper hand against their competitors. He took the gladly accepted the jobs, as they served as an outlet for the creative energy that naturally bubbled between his ears.
Zipper hopped on his slickboard, whose undersurface was near frictionless. He alarmed onlookers by gliding into hyperdrive with one kick, soaring past the grumbling pedestrians populating the floating walkways. Most of them were either trudging from work to home or home to work, or work to other work. He zoomed past a particularly miserable-looking woman with a cybernetic prosthetic arm. He was familiar with this woman. Not her, but her type of person. It could have been a voluntary replacement for functional purposes, as some higher paying jobs required specialized mechanical parts that are best controlled by those with cybernetic enhancements. More likely, it was self-defense. There was more than enough violent crime to go around, and many resorted to weaponizing their own bodies as more than a deterrent.
The echelons of Clover City were segregated by G-score, an identification number assigned by the exceedingly clandestine government to every citizen on the Grid according to an eclectic algorithm, whose myriad of factors included social status, income, and genetic fitness, just to name a few that happened to be common knowledge. Although the number was purposely kept secret by the government, you could find out your G-score if you really wanted to.
Street hackers took shifts at regular hours in the bazaars scattered throughout Karadashi, offering various digital services, most of them technically illegal but universally demanded. Among these services was tapping into the government’s citizenry database, where virtually every brand of information pertaining to every citizen was stored and meticulously updated on a regular basis. This service was highly expensive but overtly common among the populace, and for good reason. Your G-score determined much more than what echelon you were assigned to. Your G-score spelled your fate in just a few digits.
This was an accepted fact. A G-score in the bottom quartile meant you got cancer at forty-3. One in the thirty-fourth percentile meant you would have a stroke at forty-six. One ending in zero meant you would die on a Thursday. People with the lowest G-scores would just disappear overnight. Mangled portions of their body parts would appear months later in typical places like a clogged toilet or a swimming pool. So, most gridders set aside some money every so often to get a glimpse of their tentative fate.
	Offgridders like Zipper found the mysterious order imposed by the government more of a vice than a virtue. It was easy to get out, thankfully. No one questions suicide. Once dead, a person got wiped from the citizenry database and the trajectory of their lives, meticulously calculated for their convenience by the government, would instantly evaporate.
* * *
Zipper’s mother stumbled in the dark over to the tattered sofa on which Zipper lay woken from sleep. Sitting up now, Zipper saw the thick fumes oozing out of her mouth and nostrils and immediately knew where she had been. She began saying something but was interrupted by a fit of coughing. Eventually she managed to mumble out that she had been cut off at the vapors bar again. In her narcotic stupor, she had not realized that the bar was the same one where she had skipped out on paying twice before.
That’s when Zipper noticed the bruises. He saw her swollen face and black eye. Although he knew little of the world, he knew what this meant. Almost reflexively, Zipper began praying aloud for the Sky to hurt whoever did this and the first strike came down. Zipper froze, his mouth agape and hands clasped. The second blow sobered him, but he was still perplexed. This couldn’t be right. It wasn’t until she hit him a third time that he understood what was happening.
“You dumb piece of shit,” she said. “There is no Sky. If the Sky were real then life wouldn’t be like this. I’m getting tired of hearing nothing but goddamn stories. This is real.”
Unable to pray, Zipper let his mother beat him until his bruises matched hers. He couldn’t count the number of nights like that.
* * *
Zipper jerked the slickboard onto another obsidian-paved street. It led to the prime bazaar of Karadashi, called Blackjack by its regulars for its many gambling parlors. The road’s material transitioned gradually from smooth glass to dark sand. Multicolored awnings refracted the light pouring from the lamps attached to the platform walkways above. Quick-tongued commotion replaced vexed yawning as the ambient sound of his surroundings. He was home.
The slickboard skidded to a halt in front of the vapors tavern. Zipper maneuvered quickly but was promptly surrounded by barking madmen. Inside, a waitress silently noted with amusement the boy outside struggling past the quagmire of vendors, each promoting various treasures for low low prices. Finally inside, the boy charged up to the counter and posed his question to the waitress.
“Yo, where’s Sipowicz?”
“Hi to you, too, Zip.” Pelly said glancing up from the grid of colored cubes of liquid she was organizing behind the counter. “You doing good?”
“Uh, yeah, I’m fine. Where’s Sipowicz?” the boy repeated.
“You must have missed the part where I was passive-aggressively sarcastic towards you.”
“Hi, Pelly. Have a good day today moving noxious gases into people’s bodies? Say, would you happen to know where Sipowicz might be, my dear?” Zipper feigned sincerity.
“I actually did, Zip, thanks for asking! Sipowicz was looking for you. He’s downstairs in the smith room.”
Zipper furrowed his eyebrows and made a lewd remark about Pelly and the android down the street before stomping down the stairs at the back of the bar. He flew a couple flights down the annoyingly small steps and passed through the beaded entrance hidden on the left side.
The room was dim, with the only light emanating from a corner where a rotund man sat working.
“Hey Sipowitz, how’s the smell of burnt neurons today?” Zipper called out.
Sipowitz twitched one eye in acknowledgment. His cybernetic one was busy being used as a microscope. He was soldering individual atoms on a neurocircuit board the size of a thumbnail. Letting the blade of plasma fade, he swiveled noiselessly in his hoverchair to fully face his greeter.
“Speaking of smell… guess what my latest hack is,” Sipowicz said.
“Did you invent deodorant?” Zipper asked.
“Ha-ha. Notice my sarcasm.”
“I’d rather not. I get enough of that from Pelly as is.” Zipper moved closer to the hacker, letting the beads he had been holding fall back into place behind him. He found scent of atomic fusion in the atmosphere peculiarly pleasant. “Alright, tell me. What’d you hack?”
“I programmed a neurochip and had it implanted in my cortex so that I can smell memories now,” Sipowitz said before immediately resuming his technical task. “With every sniff of charred neuron, the neurochip translates it into the associated memory fragment derived from its original owner and then I remember it as if it were my own.”
“Wow, that has to be your stupidest hack yet.”
“Oh, on the contrary. What was before a menial task soldering neurocircuits is now an invigorating excavation of human lives forgotten in the relentless torrents of time. I am an archeologist of human experience, a rememberer of the dead!
“You’re a hacker in a hoverchair.”
“For example,” Sipowicz smelt, “this one was from a man named Dorehku. He regrets the departure of his mistress from an ancient city where their love once flourished. How sad. In other news, what are you back so early for? The ceiling lights on the neighborhood right above us don’t go out for another four hours.”
Leaning softly against the workbench at which Sipowitz labored, Zipper considered what he was about to say.
“I’ll do the job.”
Sipowicz paused for a moment. Sniff. He resumed.
“It’s probably the riskiest job I’ll ever take,” Zipper continued, “but it’s also the smartest given what I stand to gain. I don’t know how this guy found you. If I got any brains at all I won’t even ask.”
The hacker withdrew his plasma flame and blinked rapidly at the neurocircuit board.
“Then don’t,” Sipowitz replied.
“I said I wouldn’t.”
“Then don’t.” Sipowitz flicked his flesh eye to meet Zipper’s.
“Fine. I won’t ask. There are some things I gotta know first, though. This guy lives in Atamashi, probably some big shot high roller, maybe even runs one of those corporations that gridders are so fond of. Why the hell does he wanna smash up some old jars of stuff inside an Amazon warehouse down on the Terra? I just don’t see the benefit.”
“Don’t worry. Everything I told you before is still the case. You will get what is promised.”
“You sure? I’ve never heard of anyone putting an offgridder back on the Grid, let alone with a G-score good enough to get you into Atamashi. Just doesn’t seem possible.”
“Don’t doubt me. I checked all the data manipulation. It’s legit.” Sipowicz assured him.
“But in Atamashi? How would I even get there?”
“You sound like you’re complaining. You don’t realize how lucky you are.” Sipowitz picked up another neurocircuit board and began soldering. Zipper’s face tightened.
“I realize that anyone in Karadashi would kill for a chance at a life in Atamshi. I certainly am not complaining.”
“What exactly made you decide?” Sipowicz changed the subject.
“Like I said, Witz, a life in Atamashi isn’t something a lowly offgridder can turn down. Even if I don’t know what it’s like up there it’s probably better than here. That makes sense, doesn’t it?”
“That’s not what I’m talking about. You hesitated. It took you the full week to give me an answer.”
A silence permeated the room, interrupted only by that zapping of plasma, sparkling and darkling at regular intervals. Zipper eyed the thin stream of smoke oscillating in the corner.
“I don’t like things below Karadashi. You know?”
“Is that why you’re always spitting down that pit?”
“I know it’s dumb. I’m just wicked scared of getting stranded down there or something.”
“What are you talking about? You visit that literal Hellhole of an airshaft whenever you can, and you don’t seem too frightened by the possibility of falling in.”
“I have before,” Zipper laughed. “You know that.” He moved closer. “I go there because I like the vastness. The light. How it goes on forever. That literal Hellhole calms me in a way that you can’t find anywhere else in this figurative Hellhole of a city.”
 “Except in Atamashi, right?” Sipowicz asked. He whiffed the ghost of a memory. “I’ll let Mr. Big Shot High Roller know that you’ve accepted the mission.”
* * *
	Running away had not gone as planned. On the third night on his own, Zipper was hiding in an alley, looking for cardboard to sleep on. He found a crackbone fiend instead. Raving and drooling, clearly dying of some bone-eating STD, the rickety skeleton of a man grabbed Zipper with surprising strength for such scrawny arms.
	Moments later, Zipper was in the hands of another villain. He didn’t understand why, only how. He bit a hand and bolted out of grasp. No time to think. Hide. Hide. There.
	Zipper jumped into a trashcan and fell through the bottom into the garbage pipe. Now he lived in the pipes. It was dark. Zipper forgot which pipes led to the surface. He must have tried hundreds of combinations by now. This was his world now, cramped and dark. Sewage everywhere.
	Until he died, he had nothing to do but crawl	. The monotony of crawling. Anything would be better.
	Suddenly he was falling. Really falling. The last thing he remembers was being stabbed. He woke up on the edge of a water pipe with an arrow wound through his chest.
* * *
	Zipper knew he would have to ask for Pelly’s help. She owned a quadcopter bike that was faster than any privately piloted vehicle to be found in Karadashi. More importantly, though, it was ultra-lightweight and foldable, making it the only vehicle Zipper could think of that would fit through the hole in the pipe at Greymouth Plaza.
Surprisingly, it wasn’t difficult to convince her to say yes to the mission. She seemed almost eager to help him and even offered to drive, which he found curious. He wouldn’t be able to pay her, so she must have had her own reasons for going down that pit. Perhaps she was just interested in the opportunity to see the Terra.
	“It will be nice little adventure in Hell,” she had joked. “Excited for your first ever date with a girl, Zipper?”
Zipper had barely any experience at all with the opposite gender, having only once learned the anatomy of a woman as a courtesy of the girl who worked in the cybernetic enhancement parlor down the road with too much time on her hands. Pelly maintained an extensive social life despite her status as an offgridder. Zipper found this task arduous even as he entered his eighteenth year of life. She was not shy about pointing this out to him, either unaware of or simply indifferent to just how much of a barrier it formed between them.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” said Zipper.
Pelly lived over in Priapisk, by far the rankest district of Karadashi, and Zipper was waiting for her to pick him up in front of some government-funded housing projects, which were known to just about everyone as the G-Shacks. They were better described as glorified cardboard boxes, as the government was rumored to have cut costs massively by constructing housing projects mainly out of repurposed cardboard, which was vastly abundant in the old abandoned Amazon supply warehouse near the Terra. Everything in the warehouse from protein powder to lighter fluid to sex toys had been pilfered long ago by the bottomdwellers, leaving only the cheap brown cardboard boxes to rot in the Terra’s cursed atmosphere.
Zipper checked his bag to make sure he had everything he needed. Flashlight? Check. Flare gun? Check. Lighter? Check. Was he forgetting anything? Zipper knew that the air down there would be especially putrid, so he wish he could have gotten his hands on some oxygen masks, but they were near impossible to come by in Karadashi. Suddenly distracted by the whirring of surveillance drones flying overhead, Zipper didn’t notice Pelly roll up in front of the G-shacks on her quadcopter bike. She revved it louder than necessary.
“Ready to go, kid?”
“You’re only three years older than me,” Zipper groaned.
“Yeah and it shows.” She smirked that smirk Zipper knew well enough. Pelly was already exceedingly strange in Zipper’s mind, and she constantly gave him reasons to think about her. She found the time to spend time doing something she loved outside of work, even though gasoline was expensive. Zipper admired her priorities. She often treated him warmly, though of course there were exceptions. Once she had knocked him out cold with an elbow to the face. She claimed it was accidental, allegedly startled by a mutant cockroach with spider limbs, but somehow he knew it was retaliation for the time he tried to take her quadcopter for a joyride and ended up crashing it less a block away.
Pelly zigzagged in harmony with the city, savant-like in her ability. At Greymouth Plaza, they folded up the bike into a suitcase and squeezed into the hidden passageway. A surge of water flowed into the pipe as they were passing through it.
“Ugh! You didn’t tell me I’d get this wet!” Pelly complained.
“Be thankful it’s just water,” Zipper said.
At the edge of the pipe they opened the unfolded the suitcase, mounted, and fell like a bat with unopened wings into the gaping mouth.
* * *
The ground was moist, grey, and teeming with life, terrifying Zipper. Creatures for which he had no names constantly emerged and re-interred themselves in it. This, in combination with the rancid air, gave Zipper a feeling of nausea unlike any sickness he was familiar with.
“I’m gonna puke.”
“Not on the bike,” Pelly commanded.
They glided along just above the surface of the Terra looking for the clue provided by Zipper’s client. The atmosphere surrounding them was noticeably thick. They felt it cling to their bodies, dragging them ever so slightly, like it was trying to slow them down. The quadcopter had one headlight. It beamed bright in the heavy smoke like a blind cyclops searching for Odysseus in vain.
“We should try talking to some bottomdwellers. Ask them where the warehouse is. Shouldn’t be too hard.”
“They don’t speak our language,” said Zipper. “More importantly, we don’t speak theirs.”
“All we gotta do is get three words across: BIG. HOUSE. WHERE? Can’t be that hard.”
They explored the Terra for over two hours, occasionally finding groups of grey-skinned bottomdwellers dressed in rags or not at all. Most scurried away from their makeshift camps of repurposed trash and broken electronics as soon as Pelly and Zipper rode up to them. Some gaped in awe at their arrival but provided no help as they spoke either an entirely different language or not at all. Zipper grew more agitated each time they spoke. It sounded painful to him.
Eventually they rode up to a camp where two bottomdwellers did not run from them. They were sitting across from each other and staring down at a screen of some sort. They took turns tapping the screen, which was divided into smaller squares alternating blue and white and were populated with strange shapes either black or white. Zipper inferred it was a game, as it looked reminiscent of the screen games some of the vaporbrains at the bar would play for money. The two players were so engrossed in their activity that they could not be bothered to run from the alien hovercraft now parked in their camp.
“Hi, you two. How are you doing?” Pelly chirped.
The pair of greyskins paid no attention to her.
“Alright, Zipper, you try,” she said.
“Um… excuse me, gentlemen. Would you happen to know where the Amazon warehouse is?” Zipper asked.
Nothing changed.
“Words aren’t gonna work with these guys. Try grabbing their attention another way,” Pelly said.
“And what would you recommend?”
“Shit, dude, I don’t know. Show them some technology or something. It’s like magic to them, probably.”
“They’re playing an electronic game.”
“Just try something! I’m getting tired of this.”
Zipper searched through his backpack for something. Without thinking, he pulled out his lighter and lit it in front of the two greyskins.
At that moment, their eyes grew wide and mouths fell open. Garbled language came rushing at Zipper. It sounded significant. Then he realized why.
“Whoa, do you understand anything their saying?” asked Pelly.
Sky. House. Fire. New. Lead. He couldn’t believe it was making sense.
“Alright, well this is a waste of time. Zipper, we’re leaving.”
Zipper stayed with the greyskins, listening to them until they were done.
 “Wait, what’s that? Over there! Look!” she pointed her flashlight to an enormous structure looming in the distance. Moving closer, they discovered it was a vast pile of old cardboard leaking out of the side of an even larger warehouse. Around the building, hills of cardboard stood like stalagmites in an untouched cave.
Hesitantly, Zipper rejoined Pelly. He looked back at the greyskins. They were playing their game again.
“Cardboard.” Pelly said. “We’re here.”
	“Wow. I can’t believe we actually found it,” Zipper said. “I’ll make this quick.”
	“I’ll come with you,” Pelly said.  “It’s not like those greyskins will be any fun to talk to. Besides, this won’t take long.”
	Zipper agreed and kicked the door in. The warehouse was enormous. It’s interior, once a meticulous archive of humanity’s artifacts, now housed only rotting cardboard waiting in darkness. There was an enclosed platform in the center of the warehouse.
	“Looks like an elevator,” said Pelly.
	“More like de-elevator,” said Zipper. “It only goes down.”
	“We have to go even further down? This mission is so messed up.” Pelly shivered. “Ugh, just thinking about being below even the Terra is just so… creepy.”
	“Those three years of difference are starting to show,” Zipper quipped.
	“Good.”
	They activated the elevator and descended several stories to the bottom of the warehouse. Stepping off the platform, Zipper flicked his flashlight around the room.
	“I’ll look for a flashlight,” Pelly said.
There seemed to old computer equipment everywhere. Wires decorated the floor. Then Zipper saw the myriad of glass cylinders in the room.
	“I found the jars!” he called out.
	“I found the lights!” she called out.
All at once, Zipper saw. Each jar contained what appeared to be an ancient fetus bathed in dark green liquid. Their bodies were the size of children’s and their heads disproportionately large. Their eyes were open and mouths open, but otherwise they gave no sign of life.
“What the fuck is this?” said Zipper
“I guess Sipowicz only told you half the story.”
“What?”
“He told me to come with you on your mission. He didn’t want you to know till you were already down here.”
“Know what?”
“The nature of this job. There’s more to it. See those weird baby things in those jars? Those are the ones who commissioned you.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Yeah, I know it sounds unbelievable. They’re the Amazonbies. Like, the mythical ones. They run Amazon. Well, technically they don’t. An AI runs it now. I think his name’s Jeff. But these jarred guys benefit from it. You get it. Anyway, they figured out how to become immortal and decided to hide under the city.”
“Immortal? Wait… they don’t live in Atamashi?”
“Yeah, no, in that order. They just want people to think they do for some reason or another. I forgot. Oh, there’s more. So, they actually live, like, a million lifetimes every second apparently. And their lives are designed and simulated to be pure pleasure. Yeah, I know, I couldn’t believe it either.”
This changes everything. Does Atamashi even exist?”
“Maybe. Probably not, though. Which is good. Or bad. I don’t know, who cares? Seriously. Also, this isn’t exactly common knowledge. I only know this ‘cuz I get vape wasted with Sipowicz sometimes.”
“This is… Sipowicz told you this? How does he even know this? Why are we even here?
“He was gonna tell you all this eventually. This was just a cool way to do it. He got a message on one of his online contact lines from the Amazonbies themselves. They wanna get unplugged, if you know what I mean.”
“I thought they had perfect lives though?”
“Yeah, so get this: apparently, they’re tired of the monotony of a perfect life. How’s that for a metaphor? But seriously, they didn’t design a backdoor exit in their simulation bodies so they’d just rather die than do the same shit over and over anymore.”
“So…I have to kill them…?”
“I mean, they don’t even count as alive at this point. Anyway, I’ll let you do your thing. Just think about it all. I’ll be out front if you need anything.”
* * *
Brain matter and fleshy bodies painted the cold floor. Every fetus jar had been cracked and emptied of contents. Stuff like embalming fluid had flooded the warehouse and started to dry into a soft gelatin, now imprinted with a trail of light footprints leading to the elevator.
Pelly waited outside the warehouse. She left her quadcopter’s headlight on so Zipper could find her, but he was taking a long time. Impatient, she paced around, looking for any stimuli to pass the time. Dragging her feet, she accidentally kicked something that hissed in rage. She jumped back in fright and shone her flashlight on it: some kind of mutant worm writhing in the grey dirt. Before she could decide how to kill the thing, it disappeared into the soil. Time’s up!
Zipper shot his flare gun into the gelatin. He waited until the fire was spreading to flick the elevator switch. His eyes were half-closed, as though he were on the verge of sleep.
Once outside, Pelly greeted him.
“Great! You’re here! Now, let’s get the fuck out of here.”
Zipper walked over to the quadcopter and switched off the headlight.
“What the hell? We’re gonna need that,” she reprimanded him.
“Wait with me,” he said flatly. A worm hissed in the distance.
“Wait? For what!?” Pelly asked. “We’ve been here long enough. You’re done, aren’t you?”
“Not yet. Just wait a little with me.” He sat on the ground, facing the warehouse.
“Are you going to start making sense anytime soon?” Pelly waved her flashlight around her feet, checking for threats.
“Please,” he said. “I just need a little time.”
She sighed and sat down next to Zipper. They waited in silence. After a while her eyes adjusted to the dark. Sounds of hissing and clicking of some kind flittered through the vicinity. Pelly grew bored.
“Are you done reflecting yet? I know it was a big deal what you did down there but you can think about it on the way back to civilization. We’ll celebrate. Throw a party. You can tell all the degenerates back at the bar about how you spent half a day in Hell. They won’t believe you at first, but I’ll back you up. Hell, I’ll even let you drive the bike a little bit. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“I’d like that,” he said. “Sounds like fire.”
“Fantastic! Let’s go then.”
“Pelly, look.”
Light emanated from inside the warehouse. Loud pops sputtered out sporadically, adding to the growing violence of clicks and hisses. The flames crackled sunny orange, growing bigger and brighter as they spread to the mountains of cardboard spilling out of the building.
“Oh shit. You weren’t kidding,” she said.
Before Pelly could say anything else, a few bottomdwellers crept out of the grey into view. Their ghostly skin looked oily and vibrant in the orange glow of the blaze. Cautiously, they moved in the direction of the fire. Their eyes were wide in disbelief.
“Hey, look! Some greyskins are creeping toward us.” She didn’t move.
“Where?” he asked.
Pelly pointed. She felt like she was in a trance. The fire was loud now.
Standing quickly, Zipper shot his flare gun straight up. The white ball of fire floated high above and exploded with the softest pop into falling arcs of light. The bottomdwellers marveled with gaping mouths as the fragments landed among them.
The light revealed dozens of them coming from all directions. Human voices began to overtake the crackling of the fire. Dozens quickly turned into hundreds. Chanting softly, their whispers interwove together and with the howling of the blaze, collectively forming a uniform voice. KUROBA KARA, KAJI DE IKITSUKU, SHIROBA KANA.
Pelly bolted to the quadcopter and revved it to life.
“We’re leaving!” she hollered. “Now!”
Zipper looked at her. He’d never seen her like this. He walked to the bike.
“Wait,” he said. The bottomdwellers pressed inward.
KUROBA KARA.
“What!? Get on!” she shrieked. The flames grew higher.
Zipper watched her face, waiting for it. Almost there.
KAJI DE IKITSUKU.
“Zipper, please!” Her voice was desperate. By now the entire building was ablaze, revealing its towering height and illuminating the several mounds of cardboard surrounding the building.
SHIROBA KANA.
Zipper turned and methodically shot a flare into each mound. The praying masses broke into shouts of awe.
“What is this!?” Pelly cried. “What are you doing!?”
“Remember earlier how you said that Sipowicz only told me half the story?” Zipper asked.
 Pelly was hysterical now. “What the fuck are you talking about!?”
“Earlier. You said he only told me half the story,” Zipper repeated. “You were wrong. He told me a third of the story. Same with you. We both only knew part of the mission. But even when put the together the two parts aren’t the whole story.”
Pelly stared, not understanding.
“The rest of the story is down here,” Zipper continued. “With the bottomdwellers. But even Sipowicz didn’t know that. Before we found the warehouse, when we tried talking to the greyskins, I figured it out. I can understand them. Their language is almost the same as the old one I used to speak in Ashishi.”
Pelly said nothing. The spires of cardboard roared deep red. After a long time Pelly simply nodded, instructing Zipper to continue.
“They said that one day the Sky would send two beings to the Terra. They would shine Sky on the Terra, starting with the Amazon house. Then they would lead the people to a new world filled with Sky. The world of Shiroba. They don’t even have a word for fire. Hardly one for light. Just Sky.”
“Why haven’t they left on their own already?” Pelly asked.
“They were ordered to stay here until the ghosts of Amazon were destroyed in the process. Pelly, I don’t think the Amazonbies just wanted to die. They wanted to set these people free from this world. The world they were left behind in. Their ghosts ruled this world. The world of Kuroba.”
	“Ku-ro-ba…?”
	“It means dark realm. It’s the same as the word Krobah in Ashishi,” Zipper said, “or Clover in Karadashi.”
	“Is this all they know? They don’t know about the rest of the city?”
	“How would they?”
	The bottomdwellers fell silent. There were thousands of them, and each was looking to the center of the circle, trying to catch a glimpse of the heavenly beings. Those near the front could hear them speaking in an unknown tongue.
	“Should we tell them?” asked Pelly. “About the rest of the city?”
	“No. There is no Sky in our world either,” said Zipper.
	“Then where will they go?”
	“There’s more to this world than up and down.”