Just an Undercity Rat, Julie Steimle [e book reader TXT] 📗

“The worst poverty is not to live in a small house, but to live in a small world.”

-Ray L. Smith-

The timer went off and beeped incessantly as Jafarr fumbled for the switch. Clicking it with his hand, the light flickered on before settling into a bluish hue. He squinted at the blue white light then silently rolled off his narrow bed. As his mother had taught him, on his knees, he offered a plea to the Father of Our Souls that he would survive yet another day.

It was all a fourteen-year-old from the undercity could do.

Standing up, Jafarr rubbed his leg, which occasionally fell asleep from the night. He staggered to the inset drawer case that appeared only as handles in the wall. Pulling on one, he opened a drawer and removed a simple green, two-piece outfit. He slung it on his shoulder. With the same groggy motions he took his black jacket off the wall peg and lifted his black shoes from off the computer study desk. Without deviation from his usual morning routine, Jafarr headed for the sanitizing room where he placed the garments on a metal shelf hooked to the wall next to the door and added an undersuit to the pile. Rubbing his eyes, he stepped up to the shower booth, stripped off his old undersuit and discarded it in the chute next to the shelf and shower door.

Climbing in, he pressed the shower button to activate the cleansing process. It took no time. His mind numb from the tired dreams of the night before, he lathered up, rinsed off and scrubbed again. Coldness, exhaustion, and frustration. The images were blurred in his head, and the odd story of his night dreams vanished further into oblivion as he slowly woke up. He really didn’t want to think about it anyway. When the last water blast came it rinsed off the chemical lather leaving him clean.

 Jafarr shook out his damp hair the moment the water shut off. His long bangs flopped into his eyes from the top of his head and hug about his phantom pale face. He wiped the remaining dampness from his cheeks with his hands, though it was not that necessary. It would dry in seconds. Water never lasted on Arras. 

Stepping out of the shower stall with a shiver, he dried off the remaining moisture with a soft cloth that hung for both him and his father. His mind went back to that fact with a pain. They had lived without his mother for some time. The absence of her towel always made the place feel empty. His dreams had included her, as they always seemed to since she was killed, but he had to shake them off. He somberly glanced about the room and continued on in his routine.

Jafarr dressed, still half-asleep, brushing his hair at last with a thin comb so that it dropped into his dark blue eyes, framing his chiseled cheeks. Once fully clothed, Jafarr stepped from the bathroom to the front of the apartment where their small kitchen adjoined a smaller sitting room. His father’s room opened into the sitting room, but it was empty except for furniture and the collection of musical instruments they both played. As usual, his father had already gone to work. He had long hours.

Jafarr rarely saw his father those days. As a repair crew worker in the middlecity, his father often left early and came back late. Scanning the room with a sense of morose exhaustion, he searched for the usual brief message between father and son, looking up at the computer screen for the kitchenette cook timer that his father had adjusted into a note pad. Above the bare counters it hung, sterile under the dim blue light of the floor lights, glowing in green letters.

Join me after class. I need you in the shop today. –Dad

Pressing the erase button, the image vanished. Jafarr sighed to himself, but he actually appreciated the message. His father only left a note when he wanted him to come in to work. Jafarr sometimes worked with his father after school as an apprentice to be an electrical engineer. It was a rather big nuisance to have to go after school, since it would take time from being with his friends, but it was the only way for someone of his station to get such a job, since ‘rats’ couldn’t afford college. However, Jafarr had much loftier goals than being an electrical engineer—but to share that with others meant risking the attention of the P.M.s.

Checking the cupboards, Jafarr found his usual breakfast. The mulch cakes sat with five others in the nearly empty cupboard. Noting to himself that they were running low in food rations and would soon need to go to another food dispenser to collect more, he shoved two of the cakes into his pocket and took his identi-card out for a check to make sure it was still there. They could not get food without it. Feeling around deeper into his pockets, he also pulled out his pronged “tool” that helped him better than any government identification card. Smirking slightly he stuffed it back into his pocket. It was not something to lose, and he made sure it was deep down inside his jacket just in case.

Jafarr returned the identicard to his pocket as he munched on one of his mulch cakes. Taking another bite of his mulch cake, he grimaced peering at the processed bar that was meant to give a person all the vitamins, minerals and roughage that a body needed. Little flavor, but food rarely had that…at least in the undercity. Glancing at the food bar, he sighed again. He had counted on going to the Surface Gate to meet his friends for some tastier food after school, but his dad’s message had changed that.

Turning from the cupboard, Jafarr went back to his room to grab his school card from off the computer shelf adding another card to the depths of his pocket. He went to school since he had yet to pass the adult test and was still considered a child. But then for a fourteen-year-old kid, that was expected.

But Jafarr had never been an ordinary kid. Besides being a Zeldar that was half seer-class—something that put a serious amount of strain on his shoulders since it was an inexplicable anomaly that did not happen much if at all within their society—he was smart. Not just smart, but extremely intelligent. And talented. Besides being the descendant of famous musicians, when he was younger he used to show off his fluent Ancient Arrassian, the language that only the Seer Class spoke. He used to write songs in the language for fun, strumming them out on his father’s lute. He also didn’t hide his knack with small machinery though he had yet to get into computer hacking. But when he got older, he acquired the wisdom to shut up and play dumb, as well as his instruments. The chances a fourteen-year-old genius had against the High Class regime and People’s Military was slim to none at all. A musician had better chances. Luckily he learned to play stupid early enough to avoid the noticed of the P.M.s. Those that were unusually intelligent among the lower classes were watched, and the last thing he wanted was to end up on the Watch Lists.

Jafarr stepped out into the hallway after his morning music practice, which included the lute, a flute, and a number for stringed instruments that used a bow. He listened for the gentle click of the lock as he pulled the door closed. He stared silently down the gray-green hall and drew in a breath. His world seemed so dreary. The old paint peeled along the corners and edges of doors and settled in flakes upon the worn synthetic carpet, occasionally swept up but rarely repainted. Shoving his hands into his jacket pockets for warmth, he strode briskly down the hall.

The hallway took him past other doors to other apartments and the elevator entrance. Jafarr scrunched his nose at the reek, which emanated from the cracks in the walls and broken seals in the door. He continued on toward the stairwell door to the metal spiral staircase that dropped down 30 flights. The door creaked from lack of maintenance, but this was his preferred exit.

The landing shook the moment he stepped onto its rusted frame, the metal moaning under his weight. He stared down past his feet and through the mesh holes to the distant bottom. Taking a breath once more, Jafarr started on his journey downward. His footsteps echoed in the stair cavern like a hollow metal drum beating, ringing, and groaning with every step he took like a discordant symphony for cockroaches. His trail led him down the dizzy spiral, and occasionally he had to grab on the railing to keep his balance as he passed by each floor in the same blurred manner as his dreams seemed to do, almost as if they weren’t altogether existent in his reality.

It was several flights before he saw any people. Most of the adults headed off to work early, and only the brave took the stairs anyway. Children with no fear liked the stairs. As he was jogging down the windy flights, Jafarr passed a pair of them while they were dropping pellets through the holes in the stair. He dodged those same pellets as he ran underneath them about three flights down. After the fourth flight, the pellets ricocheted and dropped along the far sides of the stair with clangs.

Trash cluttered the last flights. The bottom stairs were more used than the rest of the stairway because of the dizzying distance to the ground. Most did not like going more than three flights down at a time.

One pellet dropped from above falling not far from Jafarr’s ear. He looked up. The children above cheered, their voices echoing in the tall shaft. He shook his head and kicked through the trash at his feet, continuing downward.

Near the bottom he could see figures and forms of people moving in the lower halls through the foggy glass at his left. And in the street through the same kind of semi-transparent window wall at his right there were also signs of traffic—proof that others lived in the complex with him despite the overwhelming feeling of aloneness he often got from the undercity.

The undercity was indeed a lonely place. When he reached the bottom step, sitting among the garbage was a tired old man, crying. At one time that sight would have disturbed him, but that was ages ago. It was all too common to see the misery of the undercity people those days, and it did not pay to pause and pity them since there was no way to pass on petty cash. Jafarr slid by without paying him notice and entered the outside cavern through the front lobby doors.

The front entrance was plain among the many other buildings that opened into the vaulted cavern, making no distinction against the false sky that flickered with varying patches of light and warmth over the expansive stretch of junk-heaped roadways. The lights didn’t rotate as they ought, making it a constant burning out dim, and cold. Steam sprayed out of cracks in the exposed piping that jutted from holes in the walls and floor where repair jobs were never quite completed, caked with green and white deposits, some dripping into moldy crevices where rancid mildew flourished.

Jafarr wrapped his jacket tighter around his neck, fastening it up with a glance at the disrepair. There was so much of it. And though he knew the ins and outs to repairing such pieces of machinery, it took new replacement parts that they just