3rd Day
of the Month
of Graze
Upper Earth
Gregorian Year 2153
Raisa of Upper Earth:
How We Met
For the future of our world, he has to fall in love with me. But at the party Papa orchestrated for this to occur, Lein has yet to glance my way.
Lein didn’t even look at me when we were first introduced, pride swelling Papa’s voice. “My daughter, Raisa. Raisa, may I present to you Crown Prince Lein, soon to be a guardian representing Lower Earth.”
With his hand firmly clasped in my father’s, Lein merely nodded at Papa’s announcement and then moved on—­to shake hands with the other men in the receiving line, to lift the hands of the other women to his bent forehead, ever a model of perfect Upper Earth customs despite his Lower Earth upbringing.
For the rest of the evening, my eyes trail him. I can’t help it. Papa prepped me for this introduction for months: I read the dossiers on Lein transferred by Alet, Papa’s assistant; I practiced the scripts Alet composed, full of warmth and wit, in attempts to win Lein over, in attempts to overcome my supposed aloofness when meeting new people. The latter task was hard work, to be truthful.
For ALIGN’s sake, I even deigned to dress in Lein’s favorite color.
But I’m left nursing an unsipped drink, wearing what Dame Kizuwanda assured me was a gorgeous dark emerald dress, standing at the outskirts of the party alongside whoever makes their way to me, my eyes darting to find Lein again and again as he flits about the hall, laughing with some, speaking low and serious, head bent, with others.
I locate him easily every time he pauses to scan the room before moving on with purposeful long strides to work another corner of the Visionaries Ballroom, built in the stuffy baroque style of centuries past.
Never, in any of those sweeping scans, does his gaze register my presence in the slightest.
“Raisa, you’re not listening.” Suzume tilts her head—­I can’t tell if it’s to check the left side of my forehead, to see whether my link is activated, or if it’s in judgment. “It’s a scalplink-­off event.”
“I’m not knitted.” I hide the unease in my voice—­access to the information a scalplink provideswould make this event easier to navigate. But our social events are increasingly scalplink-­free to encourage stronger connections between us. I don’t bother to tilt my own head to prove to Suzume that my link is idle.
She holds back a laugh. “I was hardly suggesting you were.”
“You were talking about pomegranates.”
“Did you notice the lack? No trace of pom in our drinks, no pom molasses dip for the amuse-­bouche. How can this be the status at the Autumn’s Eve Gala? All the guardians are here, and not just the Uppers.” She leans over to whisper, the long trails of tiny diamonds on her scalplink falling over one eye like shimmery bangs. “Even the new guardian of Lower Earth is here. If the council itself and their guests cannot be provided with offerings from the best of the harvest, what does that mean for the rest of us.” She ends in her typical way of speaking, a question uttered flatly, unquestioningly.
I nod, keeping my opinions to myself. Suzume is my closest companion—­I would never sayconfidante—­and she knows better than to ask such questions with any note of inquiry.
She knows that as I’m the chief guardian’s daughter, I likely know the reasons behind every decision made for this gathering and any others organized by the guardians. Perhaps she’s waiting for me to slip up and reveal a small kernel of truth. But I only reveal what my father tells me to, intentionally planted seeds of information—­or misinformation—­that strategically spread from Suzume through the upper echelons of our society.
I absolutely know that our carefully managed Upper Earth existence will only last, at most, twenty more years, that the future of the Bridge, the land mass on Lower Earth that we’re connected to, is projected to be even shorter—­perhaps a decade. That all the years of working to establish peace and safety on the remnants of our planet after the Great Catastrophe are being undone by the latest agitations by the brutes of Lower Earth, which have been growing in severity and violence in the last ten years.
Our food security is under the greatest threat at the moment as the brutes double their efforts to disrupt the flow of goods from Lower Earth farms to the Bridge processing plants and launch sites, gleefully seizing on this horrendous way to hurt us.
Crown Prince Lein’s father, Amir Gauis, not at the gala, governs Lower Earth but with increasing ineffectiveness. After a short period of iron-­fisted rule when the agricultural and mining operations were in full swing, he gradually lost hold of the small towns and villages of Lower Earth. Forget about the mission to track and control the brutes—­that fell to us in Upper Earth and the Bridge, to our commissaries, our experts, our spies.A drunkard and womanizer, the dossier on the palace revealed, Amir Gauis lives in a constant state of stupor, only revived by the periodic smuggling of new women into the palace or his excursions to visit the bride markets. His rulership, once seen as a hopeful replacement of the previous leader, is now a security threat to ALIGN. Resources and support must be shifted to his son, Lein, who by all accounts is more sophisticated in both lifestyle choices and world views.
The sophisticated Lein is now laughing at something Moineau just shared, her porcelain-­smooth face upturned to his own olive-­tinted one. He appears taken by her, which isn’t surprising.
She’s a tiny thing, aptly named “sparrow” in French, one of the three languages of Upper Earth. She tells everyone she meets everything in her brain, which is often filled with quite fanciful observations connecting the happenings around her with something she just read. She reads a lot. I wonder if her scalplink, dressed up tonight in stems of gold reaching to the center of her forehead, is idle now, or whether it’s offering facts to share with a rapt-­faced Lein.
I recall what I read this morning: Lein has great respect for the accruement of knowledge. He believes in access to information for all. He is committed to the importance of knitting the population of Lower Earth into the streams of civilizational scholarship ALIGN has preserved. He believes in the immediate implementation of the Enlightenment Project.
“He doesn’t appear to have Lower Earth ways, that’s certain.” Suzume is also observing Lein now, as he continues to bestow Moineau with amused attention. “I would have sworn he grew up here with us. His manners are beyond reproach.”
We watch Lein’s face—­dark eyes under dark groomed eyebrows, a straight nose, and a wide mouth that bursts into smiles just as easily as it closes into a thoughtful line, framed by an impeccable jawline and a high brow—­transform as he leans closer to Moineau. She puts a hand on his arm and says something into his ear earnestly, at which he draws away to indulge her with a beautiful smile. Even from across the room, I can read what his lips say in response: “I’ll keep your secret, not to worry.”
Moineau is also wearing green, but hers is a short, sleeveless, simple sheath that emphasizes her ingenuousness. It’s not like the long fulsome gown I’m wearing on my tall frame. The dossier suggested Lower Earth men prefer outward modesty.
Moineau may beg to differ with the dossier.
I suddenly feel stuffy. My gown had felt elegant at first but now feels overdone.
A gaudy ornament hung among refined jewels.
The familiar fear washes over me again: I am a pretender in this world.
I leave the cheery sounds of tinkling glasses being lifted from or set back on serving trays, lilting laughter, buoyant conversations, the full orchestra providing a symphonic background to it all, and find my way to the Hall of History, quiet and dead.
Unknitted, I feel the panic coming on: I’m failing at Papa’s assignment, failing at securing our future. Simply failing, like I always seem to do.

From my earliest memory, I knew I was different, and those differences were shortcomings on Upper Earth. Though I tried to mimic the other kids as much as possible, my efforts were to no avail.
I couldn’t ever achieve their sunny, even-­keeled dispositions. I couldn’t ever accept the losses that came my way without throwing a tantrum, without bursting into tears and descending into depressive episodes, without acting out my frustrations.
I cannot lie and say my peers rejected me; that wasn’t true. They loved me through my maladjustments—­but not because they were saints, nor because I was lovable.
It was because of my mother. Hers was the first precentenarian-term death recorded in Upper Earth files, having died at thirty-­three, when I was nine years old. No one else here has had anyone die so early in their families.
I sit now on the sole bench, a round orange one, in the middle of the Hall of History and activate my scalplink with three rapid blinks. The bare gray walls come to life, and I flick my fingers in the air to find the beginnings of recent history. I zoom in on the part of Earth called the Bridge, the inhabitants of which joined an alliance with Upper Earth ten years ago.
When I was nine and my mother was thirty-­three.
I watch the explosion with morbid and philosophical fascination—­how cananyone extinguish human life without a second thought?
My mother was killed by the brutes who took the air carrier she was in hostage, as a way to disrupt the merger of the Bridge and Upper Earth, to prevent ALIGN from growing. I’d already gone up to Upper Earth with Papa, while my mother had stayed behind to help with the process of knitting Bridge residents into our systems. They blew her up on her way to join us.
My scalplink, attuned to my bewilderment on this topic, feeds me background by providing the brutes’ ethos:The brutes despise our way of life. They detest our freedoms. They fear the equality of men and women, and they reject the fraternity of all people.They despise ALIGN.
I wonder if this is where the seed of my disturbance was planted: in the story of my mother’s death. Papa said the brutes were angry because they believed my mother was a traitor: Since she was born into a family on Lower Earth, her work to increase the scope of ALIGN was a betrayal.
I also wonder if my temperament is because I’m not purely of Upper Earth, like Papa is, like most everyone around me is. Because I am of Lower Earth too.
Because working extra hard to show up with the “natural elegance” expected of me is exhausting, and sometimes I just can’t do it any longer.
But those wonderings are surface ones.
I turn off my scalplink and slide it off my head completely, feeling my jaw slacken as the probe loosens its connection to my left temple. Cradled in my hands, the green jewels Dame Kizuwanda clipped onto my link for the event sparkle in the recessed lights running along the edges of the ceiling.
The truth is something I can reflect on only with my scalp­link off, in case Papa sees the extent of my anguish. He often checks in on my emotional state if I’m knitted.
He can’t know.
He might not trust me again with the tasks he assigns me, tasks that affirm his belief in me, that affirm he doesn’t hold me responsible in any way for—­
I’m a mess inside because my mother died because of me.
She was meant to stay longer, finish her mission on the Bridge, wait to board a heavily fortified carrier from the Council of Guardians, but because I’d cried every passing day, begging for her to join us in Upper Earth, which was then a strange new world for me, she left earlier.
She died in compliance of my yearning for her.
She no longer lives because I couldn’t live without her.

But I must remember I still have Papa.
And Papa has a plan: Once Lein agrees to a strategic marriage with me, Raisa, daughter of Aeon, the chief guardian of the Council of Guardians of ALIGN, a child of both Earths, we will tour Lower Earth to celebrate our wedding and to usher in Enlightenment, the process of transferring the knowledge streams into the inhabitants below via scalplinks.
The final hope for peace: the rest of humanity knitted into the ALIGN system willingly.
Since my mother’s death, this has become my primary fascination, the focus of my life: I want to finish my mother’s work for peace—­the work I cut short with my cries for her.
The first step toward my goal is through Lein’s heart.
Birdsong floats from the Visionaries Ballroom, announcing dinner.Recorded birdsong, as, while many bird species survived the Great Catastrophe, there are none that could live so high on Upper Earth—­though numerous attempts were and are still made to bring them up here. People buy them in cages from the Grand Market on Lower Earth in hopes they’ll be the lucky ones to keep them alive.
But they all end up dying eventually. And our scientists have never been able to breed them in the atmosphere artificially engineered to sustain us and our other pets.
Birds flying free are the only things we miss in Upper Earth, and so everything avian is highly prized.
As the chirps from the ballroom die down, I slide my scalp­link on and activate it, a momentary but necessary rebellion, and brace myself for the zing of conduction, the probe rejoining my mind. It always takes a few seconds to get used to the linking pressure, but as soon as it happens, my spirit lifts as it reconnects me to the world.
Back on, I quickly switch my scalplink to mirrormode and look at myself on the wall across from me in the Hall of History while knitting into the palace dossier to prepare myself to be in Lein’s vicinity again at dinner.
Lein likes petite and fair women. His last love interest, Clure, had blond hair and blue eyes, a small nose, and a rosebud mouth. He would have made her his partner if it weren’t for the fact she was a castoff from one of his father’s bride-­market purchases. He understands the peril this brings, to introduce instability into his bloodline, as his constituents in Lower Earth would see it. He is aware of the need for a propitious match.
My skin is brown; my mouth is full; my nose is long; my stature is tall and healthy. I look like my mother, and I won’t apologize for it. I straighten and blink thrice to flick my scalplink idle before making my way to dinner.

I sit across from the eldest Upper Earth guardian on the council, Wilfred, 120 years old. On the way in, I saw a switch had taken place—­instead ofmy nameplate, the charming Moineau’s now sits across from Lein’s spot.
I can’t imagine poised Moineau doing such a thing—­it must have been Lein, completely besotted by her, so I ponder taking a moment to turn my scalplink to thinkmode to record the failure to secure this evening’s goal. Perhaps if Papa knows the loss of this opportunity early, we can try some sort of intervention before dessert.
I glance to the head of the lengthy table, where Papa presides, with the head guardian of the Bridge at his right arm. After him, the other Bridge guardians are seated in order of importance. Papa’s hair whitened when my mother died, and now it hangs neatly combed back from his head, falling slightly wavy to his shoulder. His beard, similarly white, is trim and edged precisely. He sees me and smiles encouragingly, blue eyes crinkling at the edges like they always do the moment they land on me. I smile back but look away quickly, afraid to reveal too much in front of guests.
Maybe I should have saved my thoughts; the way I broke Papa’s gaze just now, he’s sure to check my thinkmode stream immediately to see what I’m upset about. He can’t stand to see me hurt. He often reminds me,Always record your feelings in thinkmode so you can be helped to feel optimally at all times. We don’t need to waste time on unproductive emotions.
Lein is standing, tucking in his dining chair.
He makes his way behind the line of diners sitting, chatting, preparing themselves happily—­flicking out napkins, straightening cutlery—­for the arrival of the first course. I don’t care that I’m staring keenly. Maybe even shamelessly. I might make a bad spy, but I will never lose sight of someone I’m trailing.
He stops behind Wilfred’s chair. He bends and whispers a few words into the old man’s ear.
Wilfred gets up from his seat, holding his nameplate.
Lein sets his nameplate down.
Across from mine.
Then he finally looks me right in the eyes. Smiles a smile I haven’t seen yet at this party.
“At long last, I get to have some time with you,” he says, his voice thrillingly low and smooth, superb, in a tone that seems made only for me. “I’ve been waiting for this moment all night, Raisa.”

6th Day
of the Month
of Graze
Lower Earth
Lunar Year 1579
Musaid of Underground:
At the Tower of Bones
Musaid descended the decommissioned escalator to Atlantis, the subterranean apartments where his aunt still lived, where he had lived as a child. It had been a few weeks since he’d promised to come by for a visit, and he never liked to let his sole remaining family down.
Especially since any day now, he’d be flying to Upper Earth to bring Lein’s fiancée to Lower Earth for the Enlighten­ment Tour. The hangar would be busy from then on, and he wasn’t sure he’d be returning to his old neighborhood any time soon.
He took his air filter mask off when he neared the lobby landing of the former mid-­rise building—­which opened to the stairways that accessed each subsurface story full of apartments—­and as various food scents assaulted his nose, his mind immediately went to his new clothes. He cringed, remembering his earlier excitement at the possibility that Aunt Patma had made his favorite, a layered rice dish called mujda; now he was worried about the smell.
He wasn’t sure how his sleek dark gray suit with conductive trimming on the front yoke and shoulders would react to the odors—­would it absorb the cooking smells wafting their way into the gritty halls that led to Aunt Patma’s?
After this visit, and a visit to the cemetery, Musaid’s last stop today would be the hangar. Tiller, his Upper Earth supervisor, would be there, and he’d expect his new recruit to be completely presentable.
A month ago, right after he’d been hired as an air carrier pilot for the palace, Musaid had donated his old clothes to the largest charity landfill in Verg, a few blocks from Atlantis.
Then he’d gotten a new wardrobe consisting of only three outfits, and each cost more than all of his former clothes put together.
He’d been saving for years to switch to purform clothing.
Securing the job he’d dreamed of since his parental guardian, Nene Nushba, had taken his nine-­year-­old self up into the sky with her on a quick trip to Upper Earth was the impetus for the splurge to change his look.
Now he glimpsed himself in a reflection of the rusted mirrors that lined the hallways of the sunken former mid-rise, and a sense of accomplishment turned his walk into a swagger.
On that trip with Nene Nushba to Upper Earth, other than the way their entire physical world looked different, he’d also noticed something strange about the Upper Earthers’ appearances, but he couldn’t put a finger on it. It wasn’t their skins or hair textures—­they were as diverse as the people of Lower Earth and the Bridge.
Later the same month as that impressive flight, he’d observed dignitaries from ALIGN visiting the palace and been further confused as to what made them stand out so much, what made them seem more regal than even Nene Nushba, the leader of Lower Earth before Amir Gauis, herself.
Finally, when the guardians and palace officials assembled to smile for a recording on the negotiations underway for Lower Earth’s agreements with ALIGN, it struck Musaid what made them look exceptional.
It was their clothes.
The people from the ALIGN nations of Upper Earth and the Bridge wore simple clothes, subdued shades—­usually in one color. Their clothes didn’t overflow or hang and weren’t layered haphazardly as though they were thrown together without thought, nor were they loud or embellished with countless designs. Each outfit looked well put together, efficient, and effective as protection against the elements, so volatile on Lower Earth.
A few short years later, he’d learned why, even in the harshest of winters, when the temperature in Verg hit freezing point, ALIGNers still wore simple, trim clothes and not the heavy coats nor the bundles of layers like those Lower Earthers who couldn’t afford to purchase coats did.
There they were, the people from Upper Earth, in their streamlined outfits, while even Nene Nushba, the most powerful person on Lower Earth, strolled among them in a thick coat.
ALIGN clothing was made from purform, a fabric regulated to adjust to outside temperatures, intimately intuitive to the wearer’s discomforts, quick at providing responses accordingly.
Engineered to serve people, not the whims of ever-changing fashion norms as was the case on Lower Earth.
Like everything Upper Earth citizens made, their attire was intelligent and efficient.
Smart attire that, due to long-­standing agitation by revolutionaries against innovations promoted by Upper Earth, wasn’t accessible on Lower Earth. Under rebel tutelage, the population grew suspicious of tech-­infused materials like purform, convinced that it was a means of spying on the people of Lower Earth.
You couldn’t buy purform clothing anywhere, not even knockoffs.
Until Amir Gauis came into power after Nene Nushba, that is.
One of his first reforms was to open up the sale of purform.
Musaid had immediately begun saving. To have three outfits that provided everything one humanly needed was better than having a closet full of inefficient choices.
He couldn’t wait for the upcoming Enlightenment Ceremony.
Lower Earth joining ALIGN would finally boost everyone, pull them out of poverty, including his aunt Patma and her three kids, who came to the door now, sporting the same level of excitement he did. Their eyes were lighting up due to the bags filled with gifts he held in his hands; his aunt’s spirits were lifted because she knew he also arrived with the portion of his salary that sustained her, while his excitement had a simple source: He could smell that Aunt Patmahad made his favorite.
His trepidation about an odorous impact on his new clothing disappeared on seeing his aunt’s kindly face and her loving eyes.
Perhaps he’d bring back some mujda for Tiller, to make up for the smell.

Two hours later, Musaid emerged onto the streets, maskless. He’d insisted Aunt Patma take his, as he always did when he visited. They repeated the game each time, his aunt shaking her head, reluctant to accept such a generous gift, air-­filtration masks being only for the wealthy, he assuring her he had access to a supply at the palace, that she had emphysema and needed it more than he did.
But he coughed now as thick smog embraced him. Atlantis was in the sweatshop district of the largest city on Lower Earth, so far on the outskirts, it barely hung on to being considered part of Verg, the only prosperous area of Lower Earth, controlled by the Verg family. He still marveled that as soon as he’d learned to walk steadily as a child, he’d walked seven miles six days a week with his parents just to get to the market to hitch a ride on produce carts heading to the palace, where his parents worked, and then got a ride on a real land carrier back home at the end of their shifts, along with other employees.
That’s when he’d grown fascinated with carriers—­on those magical rides under evening skies in a fast-­moving vehicle, instead of wearing out the thin soles of the mismatched shoes Mama found for him in the landfill, always a size too small or too large.
First land carriers and then air ones had opened his mind to the possibility of a better life.
“Musaid.” A hiss broke the silence on the dead street, most of the populace shut in factories at this time of day.
He looked around.
“Up.”
He paused and tipped his head back to scan the floors of Atlantis that remained aboveground, its exterior a mess of green lichen and soot, most of its windows blown out or boarded up. The air was too polluted to live in apartments that were, due to decay, no longer sealed against the elements.
“Behind you.”
He spun around to a strange sight: a man on the roof of a half-­subsurfaced warehouse clutching his arm bound in cloth splotching red as his wound bled, face shielded with the lower part of his head cover.
Musaid shook his head when he recognized what he was looking at. He spun around and walked.
“For Nush.” The hiss was urgent.
He froze for a beat in anger. For Nush. That one had been used on him many times.
It was the revolutionaries’ code in safe spaces. He never fell for it, aware of their hubris. Aware of the atrocities the Ahraar committed in the late Nene Nushba’s name.
He was also highly aware that he was only one degree away from being suspected of having links to them due to his background growing up as an Underground.
“It’s me . . . Khattabi.”
Musaid shook his head, refusing to look at him. Even if it had been his dead father arisen from the grave whisperingFor Nush, he wouldn’t have turned to him.
“Nayf has escaped. We got him out of prison today, and Ngwale died trying to reach Nayf at our meeting spot. And Nada  .  .  .” A pause. “Nada’s in trouble.”
Musaid stopped.
“I know you’re headed to the Tower of Bones. You always go there after your aunt’s. Bring some clean bandages, pain­killers. That’s it. I already have a needle and thread. I’ll tell you about Nada.”
When Musaid turned around again, Khattabi was gone.
A former guard at the palace, he knew Musaid too well.
All he had to do was dangle her name. Nada.

As a six-­year-­old, no one had told him he wasn’t allowed in the palace kitchens.
That auspicious day, he’d taken a pause from helping Mama pick mint in one of the royal gardens and followed his nose—­the scent of the cinnamon candy Baba made at home on special days wafted from around the corner of the building at the end of the garden.
Not a soul was in the kitchen, nothing on the black stone counters. But on the stove, a pot bubbled.
He’d been drawn to it, hadn’t noticed a girl around his age sitting on a counter in the far corner, near the pantry, swinging her dangling legs. He stood in front of the pot with his eyes closed, inhaling the intense cinnamon mixed with something else. Something like the perfume Mama wore sometimes.
“That’s for my nene and me. Kids can’t go near the stove. You’re a kid.”
Musaid turned around and there she was.
Nada: eyes the biggest feature on her face, a pointy chin, jet-­black hair coming out of two braids, riotously askew, dead-­straight bangs above narrowing eyes—­bangs very high above her eyes, so high he could see her thick dark eyebrows moving up and down in a dance between anger and wonder.
She was angry he was in her kitchen and also wondering who he was, Musaid realized. He held up the bunch of mint in his hands. “I’m helping my mother pick mint outside.”
“Are you Underground?”
“Yeah.”
She stared harder at him, but this time her eyebrows stuck to wonder. “I’ve never seen an Underground boy before. How long does it take you to get here? You and your parents?” She turned and slid down the cupboards, holding on to the counter for a moment before landing on her feet. She was much smaller than him, and he guessed her to be younger than him too. “I want to see the undergrounds.” She came right up to him and whispered, “Can you take me one day? No, not one day. Can you take me soon?”
He nodded, lifting his head with pride. She made him feel pride in living in the Underground, something he’d never felt before, even though Mama and Babawere proud of it.
“Okay, then I’ll give you some of my and my nene’s tea.” She gestured for him to follow her to the pantry, then reached on her tiptoes to grab the door handle to swing it wide. “But sit here. When Nene Nushba pours the cinnarose tea, I’ll tell her I want another cup for you. If she says no, just wait until she leaves and I’ll give you some of mine. If she says yes, I’ll show her that you’re here. Okay?”
He nodded and sat on the step stool she’d pointed at in the pantry, clutching the mint tightly with two hands. Something made him nervous about waiting for approval from the girl’s nene.
Before she closed the door on him, she leaned forward and stuck her face in the mint and inhaled. Then, with a tiny mint leaf stuck on the tip of her nose, she whispered again, “Remember, you promised to take me to the undergrounds.”
Nene Nushba, accustomed to making afternoon tea in her own palace for her granddaughter and herself when the servants were on their breaks, had approved sharing the tea with him. From that day on, Nada made it a point to find him wherever he was working on the palace grounds, and during their walks to the kitchen, made it a point to always whisper, “Remember, you’ll take me to the undergrounds.” Nene Nushba continued making the three of them tea, and though she introduced other varieties of flavors to their little tea party, Musaid continued to love cinnarose the best.
Then, two and a half years later, his parents died in their Underground home, at the hands of revolutionaries residing in Atlantis, in a bomb-­making mishap.
Or so the Ahraar claimed.
The other view, his view, was that they’d targeted people working at the palace. Especially people like his family who had long loved the Vergs. And everyone knew that since his deep friendship with Nada, Musaid’s parents had increased their loyalty to the institution.
The revolutionaries seemed to hate the palace more than they hated Upper Earth, easily stirred up by anything they viewed as betrayal. They especially hated that Gauis was then head of the palace guards.
Musaid had been at the palace at the time of his parents’ death, having been invited to Nada’s eighth birthday celebration, a joint one with her twin brother, Nayf. Musaid had spent most of it hiding in the pantry because the other kids, none Underground, either gave him a wide berth or incessantly asked him odd questions.Were you there when the buildings sank? Did you ever see them sink? Do they still sink?
How could Musaid have been there? Baba had told him it had happened before even Baba’s own grandfather was born. He often repeated the story of the world when Musaid asked him why he couldn’t live wherever he wanted to, why they had to live so deep underground, why they had to scurry below after work.

One hundred and fifteen years ago, the world of before came to a stop in the Great Catastrophe. The devastation in the wake of widespread earthquakes, droughts, and wildfires drove those surviving to embark on a journey to settle the only safe zone remaining on the planet. This was called the Last Migration. People came from all over the world, bringing with them their diverse languages, customs, and beliefs. When they reached their destination, the migrants gazed up and saw that the wise and fortunate of the world had foreseen the environmental destruction of Earth and had built themselves a hovering nation in the sky: Upper Earth.
Your ancestor Rib’yee was the first of our family to be born after the Last Migration. It was at this time that buildings on Lower Earth, on land that was supposed to be stable, began to sink. Some were salvaged and provided the best shelter to those who had nowhere else to go.
However, Rib’yee wasn’t of that group; he came from one of the first families invited to settle the Bridge.
He was smart and kind, an excellent engineer who could make anything work if you gave him enough time. One day, he spoke to his grandmother, a woman known throughout her time for her bravery and piety, and asked her if he should help make the buildings the poor were living in strong for them.
Or would it be wrong to encourage such an imbalance in the world? To make it easier for people to live like rats? While the well-­off lived in the spectacular nation in the air or sleek and smart Bridge residences, ocean-­powered, over the waters—­where Rib’yee’s own family hailed from?
By then even the last livable surfaces of Earth had shrunk to pockets of wide-apart habitations, so it became incumbent on those on Lower Earth to gather around the stable area known as Verg today. Verg, because the first family to organize the people into a collective was named Verg.
The world became the Underground for those who didn’t have the means to live under the sky, Lower Earth for those who lived on the earth by working the land for the Vergs, the Bridge for those educated enough to be allowed to live on top of the ocean, and, finally, Upper Earth for those blessed to live on the huge mega­structure in the sky above where Lower Earth meets the Bridge.
Upper Earth formed a confederacy with the Bridge called ALIGN, to protect their advantages.
There was no alliance between Lower Earth and the Underground communities, except as laborers for the Verg family and their loyalists who ran Earth. Some people call the Verg family imperialists, but wedon’t, because they protect us . . .
Musaid would always interrupt his father around this boring point in the story and say, “What did my great-­great-­great-­great-­grandmother say? When her grandson asked her if he should help the poor people underground?”
Your great-­great-­great-­great-­grandmother Sausun said, “If you can save even one life, you must. If you can save the people from being crushed by their homes, don’t wait a second longer. There are many ways to change the world. You’ve found yours.
“Others will find theirs. And someone else’s way may lift the oppression.”
And then Baba would tell him that Musaid, Mama, and Baba doing their best work at the palace was the same thing: making the world a better place.
He also told Musaid to never ever share Baba’s story of the world with anyone else. That it was a crime to share a story that was different from the one issued by the palace.
Musaid didn’t understand all this at the age of eight going on nine. The only thing he knew was that he’d been born Underground and lived Underground, and while he loved his parents with his entire heart, he wished he’d been born in a place where he could go to sleep seeing the sky outside his window and not the happy clouds and rainbows Mama had painted where the windows of their home would have been.
In the midst of her birthday party, Nada found Musaid in the pantry and pulled out another step stool and joined him in his seated reverie. She wasn’t wearing a dress, like he’d thought she’d be.
Like he’d seen the royals do in the auras of palace life Mama liked to watch at home. Though Mama worked at the palace six days of the week, she wasn’t tired of it.
And Musaid understood this, because he too loved the palace wholeheartedly.
Even today, at this unexciting birthday party he was hiding from, he loved it—­because Nada had made her way to him, so it was just the two of them again.
Nada was wearing a black coverall. Her hair, while still cut in high bangs, was out of its usual braids, and it looked like someone had attempted to put curls in it.Attempted because now it was a mess of frizzy bits and tangles, except for the brief interruption of extremely straight bangs. “Can we go to the Underground today? Because it’s my birthday? And because Lein is choosing all the games for my party?”
Musaid shook his head. “Nene Nushba won’t let you come visit me on your birthday. If we wait until next week, I can ask to invite you for my birthday.”Maybe Mama will make a honey-and-sesame cake for Nada. And Baba, of course, will make cinnamon candy.
Nada clapped her hands just as the pantry door opened. Nene Nushba stood there, hair pulled back severely, a cloth spun around the bun at the back of her head. She held out her hand. “Musaid, come with me, dear one.”
Her face was extra-tender at that moment—­Musaid would see her face this way in his head forevermore, but the day she told him about the death of his parents, in addition to kindness, her eyes held pain. Later, much later, he learned it was because several months before the bomb blast, she’d begun having secret meetings with the revolutionaries to hear their grievances.
He knew why she was meeting them; she was known, after all, for her compassion. People said that was theonly reason she’d become the amira of Lower Earth when first her husband, then both her sons, died: to exercise that compassion. One of her most repeated lines in speeches wasI refuse to believe any human being is born with hate. I refuse to believe violence is inherent in some. And I absolutely refuse to vilify calls for justice.
It was one of the reasons Musaid loved her too.
And one of the reasons many in the palace, like Gauis and the palace guards, didn’t.
News of the bomb blast that killed Musaid’s parents gave the amira’s detractors one more nail to drive into her coffin:She had humored the brutes.
Nene Nushba adopted Musaid the day of his parents’ deaths, the day that sent his life spinning—­first into intense grief, when he realized he actually needed the artificial happy clouds and rainbows Mama had painted in order to go to sleep, that he needed Baba to tell him the same boring story of Rib’yee and the dawn of the Underground, that nowhere else would he find the perfect blend of the scent of home, of comfort, of ever-­present love.
And then life spun in a new direction. Sending him into the kindness of Nada and Nayf, the companionship of their cousin Lein, the caring guardianship of Nene Nushba. Into the arms of a new family.
Three years later, though, Nene Nushba died.
And a year after that, Nada and Nayf were imprisoned.
And Musaid was left with only Lein as family.
When Nada was released briefly at sixteen, she came back to the palace kitchen at three o’clock as usual—­for teatime.
Musaid, now working for the palace as a driver, turned up at the same hour like he always did—­for teatime.
He didn’t know love could be suspended in the air for years and turn into another sort the minute you set your eyes on the person you’d kept in your heart and mind.
It was the sort of love that, after seeing her in person, made him yearn for her more than he had while she was locked away.
Which she was again—­being sentenced to prison after only two weeks of freedom, after he’d fallen completely in love.