A beautiful girl lay on the white sheet, her face delicate, peaceful even, laid to rest on a funeral pyre built of humanity's waste. But that wasn't what terrified me.

She wore The White Uniform. The uniform of the Top. A uniform only worn by someone from levels A, B, C.

And it was covered in blood.

I'd only ever seen the White Uniform when the Admiral made an announcement. Seeing the uniform, here, in the lowest level, was impossible. When people from the Top died, they weren't put into the Chute and burned like the rest of us.

No one from the Top ever came to the Belly, and vice versa. They were separate, untouchable worlds. If Xyla hadn't been standing right next to me, I would have thought the whole thing a dream.

Xyla's hand wrapped around my flesh hand. "Z... we should go... we can't be here."

I won't eat your lies.

The blood staining the white uniform was bright red, still fresh. More than curiosity brought me to my knees beside her. I am a doctor... even if only of the dead. I lifted two shaking fingers and placed them against the skin of her neck.

For the first time in the Chute, I felt a slow beat that wasn't the engines.

"She's alive." I took a steadying breath, then lifted the bottom of her shirt. She bore several wounds not unlike that of the fighting pits, deep, ugly gashes, like she'd been stabbed. A thousand questions swirled in my mind, but I pushed them away as I leaned forward and smelled the warmth and stench of intestines. Too deep. Too late.

"Can you save her?" Xyla whispered. I met her eyes and the truth passed between us.

Together we looked down at the girl, who looked barely older than me, her deep chestnut hair lined with hints of gold. Then I glanced up at the fiery red glow in the distance, where she would be dumped into the inferno. "We need to move her out of the Chute."

"Z..."

"She's still alive, Xyla. We can't do nothing."

Xyla glanced over her shoulder, and even with her handkerchief over her mouth I knew she was biting her lip, debating. If we were caught here, we were dead. But if we were caught here with a dying woman from the Top? They'd throw us into the Incinerator and forget the Letter Trails altogether.

It didn't matter. I couldn't leave her.

"Please, Xyla. She's helpless. She's dying."

Xyla exhaled, eyes tight, then bent to the woman's side. "Alright, but quick. And just to the walkway."

I took her legs, and Xyla grabbed beneath her shoulders. I'd always imagined the people from the Top to be taller than even Xyla, with bellies swollen from food, but she was nearly as thin as I.

Together Xyla and I carried her to the thin metal walkway that lined the edge of the Chute, for K-guards who wanted to patrol the area without getting their boots dirty. The edge revealed machinery below so convoluted I had once believed Yaneli when she told me we lived inside a beast and the grinding and pumping machines were its organs, the smog its blood, and we the tiny mites that lived and died inside it.

"Set her there." I motioned to a place on the metal walkway, and we laid her down carefully.

Her eyes opened.

Xyla swore and recoiled, but I stepped closer and knelt at her side, taking one of her hands in mine.

"It's alright, I'm here. You... You're not alone." I squeezed her hand, and she turned to look straight at me. Her eyes were glazed— I had the strange feeling she was seeing something other than reality.

"Candice? Is that you?" Her voice trembled.

Xyla shook her head in warning, but I ignored her. "Yes, it's me. It's Candice." I'd held dying men and women before— often it was all I could do. But instead of soothing her, my words brought a sudden fire to her eyes. She gripped my hand so hard it hurt.

"Find Androcles. He needs to know the truth..." Her hand fluttered, reaching for her neck, where she pulled a necklace out from beneath her white uniform. A thin silver chain held an intricately crafted metal ship, small enough to fit in a single closed fist. Her hand shook, unable to remove it. I reached out and closed my hands around her fingers and the necklace.

"Promise me, Candice... Promise... "

Blood trickled from her mouth and she stared at me with the desperate look of the dying. I hesitated, and her hand tightened on mine, her eyes growing wild.

"I promise," I whispered.

There was a moment of recognition, of peace. And then, as if my promise was the only thing holding her to life, her hand grew limp in mine, her eyes unfocused. After a moment, I folded her hand against her chest, and then ran my fingers over her eyes, closing them.

She looked like a princess from a fairy tale, laid to sleep to awake another time. I made the sign of the cross over her body, as I had seen the priests of the Old Earth religions do, and then whispered, "Live in the Beast. Die in the Beast."

I wanted to stay there with her, but Xyla's hand landed on my shoulder, voice insistent. "Z, we need to move her back onto the Chute. Someone will notice."

I couldn't look away from the woman. What had happened to her? Who was Androcles? Who was Candice? What truth could someone from the Top ever need to learn? It was a paradise there... wasn't it? And yet the proof that it wasn't now laid before me. Either way, I'd just made a promise I could never keep. There was no world in which an A would ever meet a Z.

Xyla's hand suddenly reached out and caught my metal arm. Without thinking, I'd moved to tuck the necklace into my overalls.

"Z, you can't be serious." She glanced down at the necklace, voice hard in a way that sounded surprisingly like Yaneli. "They could kill you just for having a necklace from the Top. Put it back and let's get out of here."

I pulled my arm away, burying the necklace deep in my pocket. Then, because her eyes hardened, I added, "Grab her legs. I'll throw it in the Incinerator later." A lie. I wasn't going to get rid of the necklace. So what if having it could get me killed? Not having a letter could get me killed. I'd made a promise, and even if I were a Z, that meant something.

Xyla and I both bent, about to lift her, when a sudden high-pitched alarm shrieked over the Chute.

Our eyes met for the briefest moment, as the sounds of boots hit the metal walkways.

I'd once been caught in The Chute while the guards made a surprise inspection, and laid still beneath cold, bloated bodies, reciting page after page of the physicians guide, reminding myself that bodies were just machines made of blood and bone. But Xyla wasn't like me: she had a letter. She didn't know what it was to spend your whole life hiding.

"Go!" I shoved her in the chest, and waited until she'd disappeared into the smog. The K-guards were so close now that I could hear their voices, feel the vibrations of them drawing closer.

Run, run, run, my heart pounded out, begging me to flee. Instead I climbed up and stood on the edge of the railing, staring down at the woman from the Top.

Promise me, Candice.

"There!" A distant voice shouted. "Someone's over there!"

K-guards pounded down the walkways, phantom-like forms drawing closer. "We've got her!" one of cried out. They might kill, belittle and bully, but they would never know the Belly like I did.

I promise.

A gunshot fired.

I leapt over the side of the Chute, free falling into oblivion.

authorh.j.nelson