So Eve laid out flat inside the pipe, trying not to breathe too loud or cough. She had a terrible itch in her right foot and contemplated using her other foot to scratch it. But the tool kit, communication device, or helmet might rub against the pipe wall and make a clanging noise.
“I hope they don’t find Dirk. Maybe he’s already inside that bunker and is safe. At least James has already gone to school so won’t be able to say anything to security. And Mother won’t say anything…I know that. Now I’m glad I didn’t tell her about the food bunkers and key. Thank the void gods I have that box she gave me…well and all the other things.” She gently patted her jacket pocket to be sure the shock gun was still there.
Eve silently went over her options while she waited for Miggly to leave. She’d taken everything from her room; one shock gun and the binoculars were safe with Dirk, the other shock gun was safe in her pocket, and the precious box was in her pack. She had the torn map, and the ancient book from the Archives, along with Dirk’s book. And security would not find extra food at her home because her mother had already cooked it in a mush pot.
“No, they won’t find anything unlawful at home,” she thought. Blakeley finally arrived several minutes later. He stepped from the management lift and said,
“Miggly, I came right away. I’ve found something amazing. Last night I was going over the diary. There was a reference in the book. It was only a single sentence so was easy to miss.” Blakeley gushed; he’d started to speak as soon as the lift door slid open, before Miggly had a chance to speak of his own find. “I hope it’s good news, because I have some startling news myself,”
“It’s that stone…Lightfighter describes it on page 877. I don’t think he intended to. It’s just a single reference about a green stone. That’s all he says, but at least we have something to look for now. What is your news?” Blakeley asked.
“Stevens saw those two entering the Boardroom Building last night out in the decay zone…Eve Overhearder and Dirk something…you remember them. He says they stayed inside for several hours before leaving. Of course he didn’t actually see them pass through the door, only go into the tunnel. But what else would they have been doing in there. He was sure they managed to get inside,” Miggly finished. But now Eve thought he sounded doubtful.
“What if they only went into the tunnel for hanky-panky? I mean they are mates,” Blakeley responded. “I mean how would they get inside without a biosample or the stone?” Miggly was going to interrupt but then stopped.
“Wait…what did you just say about a stone…what color was it?” Miggly asked. “I remember seeing someone once wearing a green stone necklace with a gold chain. I remember thinking it was an unusual thing for someone poor to have in their possession, so I made a note to check it out. But then I forgot because its owner was a very old woman who has since gone to recycle.”
“Blakeley, we have to check the recycle archives for the last ten years. It was about five or ten years ago. She’s recycled now, but we can find out who of her family is still alive. I’m sure they would not have had the necklace recycled. Let’s go check the records now,” Miggly spoke as they entered the lift. Eve heard him order the lift to take them to Level 10, and after the door slid shut, she began crawling through the pipe towards the safe Gerta had described.
●
During the entire conversation, Stanley stood in the lower bunker facing his entire department and the muscle, noting who was the biggest and strongest. He finally settled on an initial team of twenty muscle workers, including Iris, the Head of Welding and Repair, and her entire team.
Iris was a six foot tall mountain of a woman, with arms bigger than Stanley’s, pink-dyed, buzz-cut hair, and piercing aqua blue eyes. She wore a tiny clear glass ring in her nose, though Rita had explained to Stanley that it was not glass, but was called a diamond, and that they sometimes found them in the mines. Rita said though they were considered trash in the mines, she’d read in the archives that diamonds were of value in other places. Stanley had never seen anyone wear a ring in their nose, but thought Iris carried it off with class…that was what he was thinking as he admired Iris from across the room, while still thinking of how to keep Eve safe.
●
Eve was glad no one would miss her. She knew Steam would be busy moving that engine up from the bunker to the steam room floor for most of the day…the bigger workers doing the lifting, and the smaller ones keeping the engine from tipping over. Plus they would need another team to manage the chain pulley lines. No one would notice a skinny new kid like Eve disappear into that hole in the wall carrying an extra flashlight, a shock gun hidden inside her jacket pocket, and of course, her lighted helmet, communication device, and toolkit, always attached to her worker utility belt. As she slid through the pipe, Eve was in shock!
“I have the stone! They were talking about my green stone necklace! Miggly must have seen Grandmother wearing it. She never took it off until that day she went to recycle and gave it to me…or rather Father did after she was gone. Maybe I have Robin Lightfighter’s original ΩD stone! That must be why the stasis pod room door opened for me.” Eve continued thinking as she pulled herself through the pipe, while humming the spring song in her head. But she said nothing aloud, in case her sounds carried up to someplace near Miggly or Blakeley.
Eve followed the memorized directions given to her by Gerta. The AI had told her to turn left once she got to the bend in the pipe…away from the latched door leading down into the bunker with the new steam engine. She could hear Stanley ordering his crew as they hoisted and coaxed the precious steam engine up the stairs. Just before she turned left, she turned her communication device on. Stanley spoke immediately; Eve knew he’d been trying to reach her.
“Eve, they’re looking for you. I sent some folks to watch over your home and your fella’s home as well. They’ll stay in case someone needs a warning. Now you just go find some other bunker someplace and hold out until I find out what’s going on…you hear me?”
“Yes, Sir…thanks. Please warn Dirk. I’ll stay in touch,” Eve said; she turned off her device and scooted through the pipe, this time making better time because she knew the way, and was no longer afraid of pipe crawling. “I hope Gerta got the directions right, because this pipe is really small. I hope she knows I can’t squeeze through if it’s too tiny. I’m not made of liquid metal like she is,” Eve whispered to herself as she made the turn, this time in the opposite direction.
The last time she had not turned left because the pipe seemed too small. And now it was getting even smaller as Eve continued to pull herself through it, knowing that if she got stuck, she’d be in trouble. After what seemed like too long, and after she’d had to remove her utility belt and shove it, and her pack and lunch bucket ahead of her, Eve finally began to once again feel cooler and dryer air.
“Thank the void gods…at least this leads somewhere. I thought I’d have to live in this pipe forever,” she whispered to herself. Then her helmet light began to flicker, and then it went out, leaving her in black darkness in a tunnel so small she was having trouble breathing. Eve started to panic, then breathed in, and started humming to herself, continuing to push through, though it was becoming more difficult with each push. Finally, right after tears started sliding down her cheeks, and when she’d started to think about her short life inside a dark pipe, she saw a faint light ahead and whispered a silent thanks to those invisible void gods out there beyond the plasmon dome shield.
This time it wasn’t a grate. The shiny metal pipe opened directly into a still-dark room before Eve could adjust for the end of the pipe. She fell through the opening head first to the floor with a heavy thump, her utility belt, lunch bucket, and pack dropping down ahead of her. She could hear her lunch bucket pop open and then she heard what must have been some of her morning buns roll across the floor. Eve felt around in the darkness for several seconds, then unlatched the flashlight from her belt. But then she dropped it, and it rolled off to some un
known dark place, making it necessary for her to crawl around on the floor, groping, for what seemed like forever to finally find the flashlight wedged between what felt like a trash brick box and a metal chair.
“Now I understand how Alice feels,” Eve mumbled. Alice was the elderly blind lady who sold day-old bread in Lightfighter Square. “I found you, you little beast. Don’t go rolling off again,” Eve spoke to her flashlight after she’d pushed the knob to turn on the bright like. It had a brand new battery so would last, she hoped, long enough for her to look all over the huge room, and maybe even get back through that pipe.
Although now that she knew security had a watch note out on her, she thought maybe she would be hiding inside this room for a long time. Thankfully she had a little food and water with her. But Eve was more worried about Dirk and her family. “What will happen to Dirk if they catch him? What about Mother and James; what will they think when security shows up at home asking questions? Will security send them into the void? I have to find the supplies before harm comes to them. Once I find the supplies, they’ll stop the security search.” Eve continued mumbling to herself as she examined the space around her.
She noted some things had fallen from her pack, so she instinctively reached to her neck to touch her necklace, checking to be sure it was still there. She examined both sides of the green stone to be sure it was undamaged, still sitting on the grey concrete floor.
“Why is one side smooth, and the other scratchy?” she asked as she looked more closely at the green stone. “It almost looks like someone tried to sand off something on this side. I wonder what was on this side. Maybe it had that symbol on it…ΩD, and someone sanded it off to keep it a secret,” Eve said aloud. She shoved the green stone back inside her shirt, and stood.
This time Eve was not bruised from her fall, but was covered in grey dust from the thin dust film icing the floor. Several other things had fallen out of her pocket and pack. She gathered up her lunch, shock gun, and rubber boots, snapped her utility belt back around her waist, retied her braid, and passed the light across the entire room to check for anything else that had rolled away as a result of her fall.
She noted the room was empty except for one single broken chair and a trash brick table; Gerta said it would be empty. But it did not matter because her destination was not the huge empty room; it was the door the AI had called an office. “Maybe like my boss’s office,” she thought. Eve found the door marked Manager’s Office, an odd door with still-intact glass windows on the top half and what she assumed was wood on the bottom half. She could only guess the wood had lasted so long because of the controlled temperature and humidity in the room. The sign, on the other hand, was plastic so would last forever no matter the room’s conditions.
As Eve walked to the door, her motion activated a light device and the room lit up brightly from several long bulbs attached to the ceiling of the almost empty room. She looked up at the lights, turned off her flashlight, and approached the door, noting she was still in her socks. Eve removed her hide boots from her pack where she’d left them from the previous night, stepped into them, and walked to the door.
“This must be the door Gerta was talking about. There will be a safe someplace inside,” Eve spoke aloud to herself. Her first perusal of the room had found it also empty of people or AIs…even the housekeeping variety. She reached out to turn the tarnished brass doorknob, slowly opening the door. For some hilarious reason she asked,
“Is anyone there?” Then she laughed aloud. “Of course no one is here; no one has been here for probably centuries.” Eve quickly scanned the office, noting a startling, dark wooden desk with a huge picture of a bird carved into the center. She already knew from Dirk’s picture book it was once called an eagle, and that it was huge…and extinct…maybe everywhere. Its dramatic wings were spread out across the desk top. She stopped momentarily to admire it before going on to examine the rest of the office.
The room also had shelves filled with those same disc-like devices Gerta had described as data files. There was also a data pad on the desk, so Eve, unable to resist the temptation, grabbed a capsule labeled Mining License Data, and popped it into the side of the device like Gerta had shown her. Instantly, words appeared from the past, projected as holographic images on the office floor. But the images looked really boring; she was staring at a long list of numbers with labels like “The Tax Liability of CLOCK, Inc.,” and “The Estimated Coal and Iron Deposits in Mine #566.”
She removed the capsule from the data device and set both down on the top of the desk, careful not to touch the beautiful eagle with its wings spread, branches in one claw and arrows in the other. “Now what is a safe and where is it? It sounds like something used to keep things safe…so maybe it’s a box, or an enclosed container with a lid and lock on top.” She looked around the room until she spied another door with a metal knob. It did not have a place for a key, so she reached out and put her hand on the knob, moving it from side to side. The door opened on her third try, moving inward to reveal another room.
“This is one of those closets we all had back long ago when people still had things; it’s like the room James sleeps in,” Eve explained to the silent carved eagle. She imagined it squawking back to her, though she had no idea what sort of sound an eagle made. The closet contained a few clothing items, including a short, black hide coat hanging on a metal thing. The coat was made of some animal hide, but not goat hide like hers. The heavy coat was still shiny, like new. It had a still-functional metal zipper and zippered pockets. Inside one of the pockets was a plastic badge with the name Raymond Sneider, Human Resources Manager on the front. “It must be the name of the owner, though he or she is certainly long dead,” Eve thought.
Eve slipped the coat on, zipping it up and examining all the pockets. It was too large for her; she thought it would fit Dirk much better. “Dirk doesn’t have a hide coat so this is perfect for him. But of course, he has to come up with a believable story as to how he came by such a strange treasure,” she told the silent eagle. “Maybe I’ll have to rub dirt and rocks on it so it appears old.” The eagle seemed to nod in agreement.
As she was unzipping the jacket she looked down, noticing a box-like, white metal object that appeared to be stuck to the stone floor. “This looks like what could be a safe. Now let me see if the password and numbers work to open it…and how do I open it? I wish Gerta had explained this better.”
Eve spent the next fifteen minutes trying to open the safe. She sat on the grey concrete floor in front of the safe door, her legs crossed, twisting a knob with numbers on the front. She got that the numbers were supposed to be the code numbers; she understood that the knob with the letters should be used to spell out the password. But each time she twisted the knob to the numbers or code word it did not open. She tried various combinations…first the password then the numbers, and then the reverse order. Nothing worked. She finally gave up for the time being and decided to explore the office again…maybe ask the silent eagle for advice.
“Maybe the directions are hidden inside a desk drawer or someplace else…at least I hope so,” she told the carved eagle. Eve sat on an ancient green chair, munching on a piece of flatbread spread with butter. The chair was covered in something she also thought was hide. It moved around when she first sat down, causing her to tilt and fall on the floor. But once she understood how the chair worked, she kind of liked it…she thought it was very efficient if the manager wanted to stay sitting but move all over the office on those tiny metal wheels on each chair leg.
Now that she was in no danger of being discovered by Miggly, Eve relaxed and ate the rest of her flat bread, some hard cheese, an egg, and a stale morning bun. Although she had nothing to drink, a file cabinet against one wall contained a single sealed metal can filled with some liquid with a label identifying it as organic iced tea. The can made a fizzing noise when she opened it using a can opening device from her tool kit. It tasted slightly bitter but did quench her thirst. Af
ter lunch, Eve almost nodded off on the larger green chair; but then she shook herself awake. “I have to keep going…security is after Dirk, and maybe even Mother and James. I can’t fall asleep.”
Eve opened the drawer in the front, middle part of the desk. The drawer contained a treasure trove of still-working, long yellow pencils with real erasures, a tiny metal device to sharpen the pencils, and a fascinating thing that could write in ink, but did so apparently without refilling it with pitch ink, unlike her own pen. There were also other things…like a plastic ruler, and a device that spit out tiny metal objects if you pushed it down hard…it said stapler on the top. As she riffled through the drawer she found a photograph.
“Who is this? Eve asked, holding what she knew was an old photograph. They still had some of those in the archives, old pictures of previous citizens, but usually only the important ones. The picture showed a man of middle age wearing the same black jacket Eve was now wearing, and a tall woman who might have been his wife; she was wearing a blue cotton dress and had a necklace of some white beads around her neck. The two small children both had dark brown hair, and wore what appeared to be identical dark green clothing. She guessed it was their school clothing, because the shirts had writing on the front pockets…CLOCK Unified School District.
Eve started to set the picture of Raymond Sneider, Human Resources Manager and his family carefully back into the drawer. But then she noticed the frame around the picture moved slightly. “Now this is interesting. Maybe there’s something hidden behind this photograph,” she mumbled to the carved eagle, as she turned the frame over, moving each tiny device away from the picture to release the back side of the frame. The frame front came off, clanging onto the desk top, but thankfully the glass did not break.
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