Afterimage

When we broke open the sky, it felt like my eyes had short-circuited.

I’d never told the others I didn’t care about finding a way out. That while they were solemn and earnest in their preparations, I was only ever playing make-believe; that it wasn’t the plan that moved me, nor lofty ideals of freedom. I just didn’t want to stop being around them. And so, really, I hadn’t given any serious thought to what it would be like if we ever did break the sky. A momentary shock to the system, probably, a disorienting burst like a surprise cold shower.

I was quite underprepared when my sight failed.

‘Oh, god,’ I said, the words tumbling from my mouth like shoddy brickwork. The skin around my eyes almost creaked with strain as my pupils searched for something, anything to swallow. ‘I can’t see. I’ve gone blind, god, am I blind?’

Lamia’s voice floated from somewhere on my right, distant and faint. ‘You’re fine. Give it a moment. It’s just the light.’

I was sure Lamia had lost her mind. The light? Our skin – all of us – had been tinged with artificial blue for our entire lives. Lamia had even hypothesised once that it must have by now permanently altered our biology. ‘Like how pepper moths changed colour during the industrial revolution to blend in with all the soot. And then when things became cleaner the following century, the moths changed back.’ I’ve since learned that the only safe response to Lamia’s impromptu Over World lessons was to nod sagely and agree, but back then what I said was, simply, naively, ‘Pepper moths?’ Dewey groaned and in my periphery I saw his head slump into his hands.

All that to say: we lived and breathed drowning in light. The lamps affixed to the sky and dangling from the walls poured light to every corner of the Under World. Every action we took, most every word uttered, illuminated by a bright white-blue. So why would a bit of light – even if it was from beyond the sky – cause us to lose our vision?

As though she was reading my thoughts, Lamia’s voice wafted over to me again. ‘The light outside in the Over World, natural light, isn’t like what we’re used to down here. It comes from the sun,’ she said, like it was obvious, like I was expected to remember everything about this sun. ‘Wait, it’s getting better already – look!’

‘I can’t look, because I can’t see,’ I said desperately, my fingers knotted in my hair. ‘I can’t…’

But shapes had begun to carve themselves out of the nothing that had engulfed us only moments before; vague and translucent around the edges, like Dewey’s nest of hair in the morning, but gaining permanence with every split second. The nothing faded to red, then to a normal hue as seen through shards of broken glass. Prismatic. Soon the shapes were chairs, stacks of them teetering high and threatening to topple, were tables and boxes all pushed together against a wall, littered with chunks of sky, were the mounted artillery we all aimed at a single point above us for maximum impact.

‘Holy crap,’ Dewey said. I turned to see him only feet away.

My head swivelled round to find Lamia. Her face was tilted upward towards the massive hole in the sky, basked in a glow I didn’t recognise but which felt achingly, inexplicably correct. These days, if I ever see a sunflower out in the fields, my brain automatically replays this moment in high definition. Her face angled up, reaching for more. Reaching for life.

I climbed up onto the tables to get closer to the sight beyond the sky.

It was overwhelming, the blue of it. My brain could hardly process what it was perceiving, the sight was so alien to me. As if someone had just waltzed up and told me actually, I had three arms all along, and then I looked down and a third arm was poking out of my chest. My eyes drank the blue up in great gulps.

‘Guys,’ I said. ‘Is that really the sky? Like the real one, the Over World sky?’ Then, something white and soft-looking poked in from one edge of the hole in the sky, like it had overheard us in another room and had popped its head in to say hello. I yelped. It took no heed and rolled lazily across to the other side of the sky hole, then disappeared from view. ‘What the heck was that? Some kind of Over World beast?’

There was a brief pause before laughter erupted around me. Lamia and Dewey shook with it, and as I watched them and the shock melted from my body, as I became infected with the giggles too, I realised it wasn’t just laughter. Lamia and Dewey were, finally, surrendering all the anxieties and doubts that had built up inside them. The stories whispered by their grandparents describing how they used to live in the Over World, before everything went bad and humans had to seek refuge underground. The weight of holding these secrets inside them for years, grasped fearfully to their chests like stolen rations and hidden from view. The hope – hope! In a world like this! – that life could be more than generations existing in tunnels and caves. As I thought about all this, as I laughed with them, I recognised my own relief mingled with theirs.

‘It was a cloud,’ Dewey said, once our giggles had died down.

‘Like our network?’

‘Well,’ said Lamia, ‘more like the inspiration for the digital cloud. The sky clouds,’ and she raised her head again, ‘happen when there’s too much vapour – evaporated water – for the air to hold. It rises and becomes tiny, miniscule water drops, then collects together and looks like that.’ She indicated the sky hole with her chin, and Dewey and I both followed her gaze.

The cloud was magnificent. I couldn’t tell its size – I had no idea how far away we were from it – but the way it meandered from one side of the sky hole to the next, like it had all the time in the world, made it appear enormous. Certainly bigger than anything I had seen before. It was like milk dropped into a glass of water, like the stuffing of the pillows I used to help my mother repair when I was young. All of a sudden, my fingers itched to reach out and hold it.

‘Wow,’ I said eventually. The magnitude of the Over World was just starting to hit me and I looked to the others. ‘I can’t believe it. We actually broke the sky.’

Dewey’s grin cracked his face in two. ‘We broke the sky, baby.’

‘We broke the sky!’

The two of us repeated our achievement like a child’s song, soon hopping around each other while our cries of jubilation coated us like a hug. Lamia watched our celebrations for a few moments, the only one who hadn’t moved from her spot. When I caught sight of her watching us, the look on her face made me stop.

‘We know you didn’t actually believe there was anything out there,’ she said softly.

I felt the bottom of my stomach drop. Next to me, Dewey’s lips drew back into another wide smile: good try, kiddo, but no dice.

For a while, words eluded me – they flitted around, occasionally landing on my tongue but never for long enough that they solidified into speech. Lamia’s eyes were gentle, relaxed with understanding. Acceptance.

‘You… you knew?’ They nodded. ‘So why did you let me join you? What if I messed things up, or slacked on something important?’

A small sound, halfway between a breath and a hum, escaped Dewey’s lips. ‘Actually, it was the other way ‘round. You kept us going, even if you didn’t know it.’ My face must have looked as confused as I felt, because he clicked his tongue and continued. ‘It didn’t matter how much we knew about the Over World. Sometimes, belief isn’t enough to keep you going. Not in a place like this,’ he said gesturing at the room we were in. ‘It’s been hard. You know that. And there were so many times, so many times, we wanted to give up. But how could we, when we wanted to prove you wrong so badly?’

I gaped at him, then at Lamia, who only smiled in return.

Dewey broke the silence. ‘Well, job’s not done just yet.’ He pointed up to what was left of the sky – our old sky, the fake one. ‘We’re gonna have to make more mess.’ He slid back to where his catapult was, loaded it with our explosives.

I stared at my hands.

‘Well, I guess I’m not blue after all,’ I said, hoping to break the tension. 'Too bad about your pepper moth theory, Lamia.' But something in my head niggled at me. We weren't blue, but something was different.

Dewey’s hair was alight at the edges, the light from the outside sky illuminating it like a crown. Eventually, Lamia lowered her head and looked around her, probably to reload, too. I scampered over to her.

‘You’re glowing,’ I said, trying to ignore how light-headed I felt so close to her shining skin. ‘You’re glowing. I can’t believe I’ve lived all this time without knowing how beautiful your skin is.’

Lamia smirked as she aimed her artillery up at the concrete sky. ‘Don’t get too excited. There’s still a whole world to see.’