Fires of Invention

by J. Scott Savage

  At least Kallista didn’t say anything rude before pulling out her picks and going to work on the lock. But she did appear to be smirking as she worked. Apparently the locks on City Hall were stronger than the ones at the museum. As the minutes passed, Trenton grew increasingly anxious. Did the officers spend all night at the main entrance? Or did they occasionally make trips around the building, where they would discover two kids trying to break in?

  “What’s wrong?” he whispered. “Why can’t you open it?”

  “Because some annoying boy keeps whispering in my ear,” she snapped.

  Trenton bit the inside of his cheek, shifting from foot to foot. His eyes swept left and right, waiting for someone to come around a corner. Sweat dripped down the back of his neck, soaking into his shirt.

  “If you don’t stop that dancing, I’m going to shove one of these picks up your nose,” Kallista said.

  It was all Trenton could do to not yank the hat off her head and stomp it flat. “Clearly you inherited your father’s social skills.”

  She took the picks out of the lock and shoved them toward him. “You want to try?”

  “I don’t know how,” Trenton said.

  “Right. Because my father didn’t teach you; he taught me.” Kallista was so angry that her hands shook. “Maybe he didn’t teach me how to talk nicely or make friends with other kids. Maybe he didn’t teach me that it isn’t polite to say whatever I think. And maybe those things make me a bad person. But he did teach me everything I know. And even though he never said he loved me, I loved him.”

  She brushed at her eyes, and Trenton felt terrible.

  “I loved my father, and I trusted him,” she said. “I’m sick of having you tell me that he was sick or wrong or a killer. Either you trust him too, or you walk away right now and you don’t come back. I won’t listen to you say another word against him.”

  She glared at Trenton, tears streaming down her face.

  Trenton dropped his head. “You’re right. I’ve been a jerk.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “I’m sorry. I won’t say another bad thing about your dad. I want to stay, and I want to help you. But if you want me to leave, I’ll go.”

  They stared at each other for several seconds; the whole time, Trenton was sure she’d tell him to leave. With all of the bad things people had said about her father, how could he have added to her pain?

  Kallista lowered the picks. “I don’t want you to leave.”

  “I want to stay,” Trenton said.

  She smiled. “I’m glad.”

  Two minutes later, the lock clicked open.

  Tiptoeing through the halls, they peeked into room after room. They were able to eliminate most of them quickly. They had only desks, slates, and personal items—nothing of interest. A few of the rooms had filing cabinets, but the papers and slates inside weren’t anything they needed.

  They came across several maps, but none any more detailed than what they already had. At the end of one hall was a door that looked more solid than the others. Trenton tried the knob, but it didn’t turn.

  “Locked,” he said.

  That was odd. None of the other offices they’d checked even had locks on the doors, which made sense; theft was extremely rare in Cove. The idea of being a thief made Trenton feel guilty that he was the exception to the rule, but he tried not to think about that. After all, they were here to look, not take anything. At least that’s what he told himself.

  “It’s not just locked; it’s triple locked,” Kallista said.

  Trenton studied the door. The knob itself was locked. Plus there were two dead bolts, one at the top of the door, and another at the bottom.

  Kallista pulled a mining helmet out of her pack. “Someone really doesn’t want us to get in there.” She lit her helmet lamp and examined the locks under the bright light. “Guess what, though. We aren’t the first ones to try getting in here.”

  “What?” Trenton knelt beside her, and she pointed to several faint lines in the metal.

  “See these scratches? They were made by lock picks. You don’t get those from using a key. Someone’s picked this before.”

  “Do you think it was . . .”

  “My father wasn’t the only one who could pick locks,” Kallista said. “But he’s the only one I can think of who might have picked a locked door inside City Hall.”

  It didn’t take her nearly as long to open this door as the last one, maybe because she’d seen how the other lock worked, or maybe because it had been picked before. Either way, she’d been working on the knob for only a minute or two when the lock clicked open. The ones on the top and bottom went even faster.

  She pushed the door, and Trenton stared at what was inside. He pressed his tongue against the roof of his mouth, which suddenly felt too dry. “Are those what I think they are?”

  Kallista walked into the room and shined her light across shelf after shelf of books, paintings, pencil sketches, and reams of paper covered with tight lines of handwriting.

  Feeling sick to his stomach, Trenton stepped forward and looked at a few of the drawings. He’d been hoping to find schematics. Instead he found portraits and landscapes, paintings of people with wings on their backs, and some paintings that were nothing but blobs of color arranged in odd and unsettling ways.

  Turning away, he thought he saw someone standing to his right and was shocked to see the figure of a woman made of stone, hands raised above her head as though she were reaching for something. There were dozens more figures carved out of stone—some people, some animals, and a few of the fantasy creatures Kallista’s father had liked.

  “They’re called sculptures,” Kallista said. “My father told me about them.”

  Trenton had never seen so much creativity in his life. His hands trembled, and he thought he was going to be sick. “What’s it all doing here?” he asked in a shaky voice.

  Each of the items in the room had a tag attached to it. Kallista turned one of the tags around and shined her light on it. Block letters read Helen Karnoff, confiscated 3/35. They checked several of the other tags. All of them had the name of the person the item had presumably been taken from and the date it was found.

  “I guess now we know what happens to things like the drawing your friend made,” Kallista said. “They get locked away here, where they can’t affect the citizens of our great city.”

  How could she be so calm in the face of so much unapproved material? Trenton felt trapped by the abominations surrounding him. The room was packed from wall to wall. Some of the art was covered with so much dust that it could have been there for decades.

  Kallista picked up a stack of fragile-looking pages, blew the dust from them, and studied the writing. “I think this is what my father called poetry.”

  “Where did all this paper come from?” Trenton asked. His lips felt numb, as if the creativity in the room was suffocating him.

  “A very good question.” Kallista studied the pages. “This is much higher-quality paper than the stuff my father made from hay.”

  Trenton had no idea how there could be this much paper. But then he thought about all of the trees in the orchards of level one. The branches were pruned regularly, and surely some of the tress were replaced now and then. What did they do with the leftover wood?

  “Most of this stuff is really old,” he said. “The paper must come from food production. But if they had the ability to make this much paper back then, why force everyone to write with chalk and slates now?”

  Kallista put the pages back on the shelf. “Do you know what a printing press is?”

  “I think so,” Trenton said. “Metal blocks with letters on them get lined up in the right order, then you rub on ink and print a page. Isn’t that how books are printed?” He took a deep breath, reminding himself that the things in the room couldn’t hurt him.

  Kallista nodded. “My father told me about when the printing press was first invented. He called it one of the most important steps in the democratizat
ion of knowledge.”

  Trenton wrinkled his brow. “The what of what?”

  “The democratization of knowledge. The printing press allowed people to share ideas more broadly than they ever could before. Scientists could share ideas with lots of other scientists. Scholars could distribute their work widely and cheaply. Stories, textbooks, and religious materials were all available to anyone who could read.”

  That made sense. But he still didn’t see what she was getting at. “We still have books.”

  “But who prints them?” Kallista asked. “And who writes them? City officials. We have printing presses, but without paper, what good are they? As long as the city controls the paper, they control the communication. From the looks of this room, that wasn’t always the case. But at some point, the city seized all of this and started limiting paper to control the flow of knowledge.”

  Trenton started to shake his head. Why would the city want to stop people from writing things or printing books? Why would they want to stop people from sharing what they knew? Yet, as he stared at pile after pile of paper and books, pages, and paintings, he couldn’t think of any other reason to withhold paper.

  Walking toward the back of the room, he noticed a painting that was nearly as tall as he was. “Your father would have loved this one,” he said, staring at a great green beast shooting a stream of fire at a crowd of people fleeing in terror. It was so real looking that he could practically feel heat coming out of the frame.

  “He would have.” She touched the edge of the frame. “I wonder . . .” Grabbing the huge painting, she pulled it from the wall. “See if there’s anything behind it.”

  Trenton squatted down and looked, but all he saw was dust and shadows. “Nothing there,” he said.

  Then he looked more closely. Was there something pushed into the corner? “Hang on.” He reached as far as he could, and his fingers closed around a dark leather binding that had been nearly invisible leaning against the wall. “I see something,” he said, grabbing the item and tugging.

  It was a book, nearly two feet by two feet, bound in old, dark leather.

  Kallista leaned the painting against the wall, and together they opened the book. Inside was a series of maps drawn in extreme detail.

  “What was it doing back there?” Trenton asked.

  “Someone hid it. Someone who knew I’d look there.”

  They turned from one page to the next. The maps were the best they’d seen, but they showed no hidden rooms, nothing Trenton and Kallista hadn’t already explored.

  “Looks like we’re out of luck after all,” Trenton said. He started to close the book, but Kallista gasped.

  “Wait,” she cried, pulling the book back open. She pointed to a line of barely legible writing in one corner. It was so small that Trenton was surprised she’d noticed it at all. He leaned over the book and squinted at the tiny print.

  “A-M-E . . .” He turned to Kallista. “Amelia,” he read. “It says Amelia. What does that mean?”

  Kallista’s voice was so quiet that he could barely hear her. “It’s my mother’s name. My father left this for me. It’s another clue.”

  With his head turned, Trenton noticed something new. He ran a finger along the inside edge of the first page. It was rough.

  “Point your light here,” he said.

  Kallista twisted the helmet, and under the bright light, they could clearly see a tiny shred of paper sticking out from the binding where another page had been. No, not one page. Two.

  “Someone tore two pages out,” Kallista said.

  Why would they do that? What did it mean? All at once, Trenton remembered Mr. Sheets’s words in the elevator the night Trenton had found the first tube.

  “Most folks think of the food-production level as one, the city proper as two, power generation as three, and mining as four. What they’re forgetting is—”

  Trenton’s father had cut the man off, and Trenton had forgotten all about it until now. But he didn’t need to hear the rest. Suddenly everything he’d wondered about the first level made sense—the marks on the ceiling, the fact that he couldn’t find any sign of an outside tunnel.

  “Food production isn’t level one,” he said. “There are two more levels above it.”

  25

  The next morning, Trenton came out of his room, lost in thoughts of the hidden levels. He and Kallista had decided to climb the air vent that night, an idea that both excited and terrified him at the same time. When he stepped into the kitchen, his father and mother were waiting for him. His father had not yet left for work, which meant this was serious.

  “We’d like to talk to you,” his father said. “Have a seat.”

  Trenton’s stomach dropped as he took his place at the breakfast table.

  His mother wheeled herself to the table and spooned some eggs onto her plate. “You’ve been going out a lot lately.”

  Trenton nibbled on a piece of toast, but his appetite was gone. “I’ve been, um, you know, doing homework and stuff.”

  His father stared at him from across the table, and Trenton’s heart thudded against his ribs. Did they know? Had someone seen him coming out of City Hall the night before? Had Angus been spying on him?

  “Is there anything you want to tell us?” his father asked. “Something going on in your life we should know about?”

  The toast formed a scratchy lump in the back of Trenton’s throat. “Like what?”

  Trenton’s mother glanced at his father before returning her eyes to Trenton. “Mrs. Patsy came to see me yesterday.”

  The snoopy old neighbor lady down the hall. What had she seen? What had she heard? How much might the old woman know? He looked from one parent to the other, trying to read their faces.

  “What did she say?”

  “That you’ve been coming and going with a girl,” his father said.

  Trenton tried to swallow the bread but choked. Mrs. Patsy had seen Kallista. She knew he was working with Leo Babbage’s daughter. Did she recognize her? Had she told the authorities? He imagined security officers searching Kallista’s father’s shop at that very moment. For everything he’d said about the dragon, the idea that the plans—and the foot—might be destroyed made him shake with anger.

  “When can we?” his mother asked.

  “What?” Trenton asked, realizing he’d missed something.

  Trenton’s mother laughed. He looked from one parent to the other. Instead of being furious, they both seemed happy. What were they smiling about?

  “When can we meet this girl?” his mother asked. “And why haven’t you told us anything about her?”

  “What are you talking about?” Trenton asked, more confused than ever.

  They wanted to meet Kallista? Did they want to question her?

  Trenton’s father chuckled. “You’re a little young for a girlfriend, aren’t you?”

  “Of course,” his mother said. “But he’s not too young to have a friend who’s a girl. I met you during my first year of mining training. You looked so cute in your mask and hat.”

  Trenton slumped back in his chair, finally able to breathe. They didn’t know what he’d been working on, and they thought Kallista was his girlfriend.

  “What’s her name?” his father asked, digging into his food.

  “Her name?” Trenton’s mind spun. How many Kallistas could there be in the city? Even if they didn’t recognize her first name, they were bound to ask for her last name, and if they learned it, the conversation would go in a completely different direction. Desperately, he blurted, “Simoni.”

  “The girl from school,” his mother said with a delighted smile.

  His father nodded. “The redhead. I knew it.”

  “Have some more eggs,” his mother said, piling food on his plate, although he hadn’t touched what was already there. She put a finger to her chin. “Why don’t you invite her to dinner tonight?”

  “Dinner?” Trenton froze with a fork of eggs halfway to his mouth. “Tonigh
t?”

  His mom wheeled away from the table and opened the pantry. “You never bring any of your friends home. We think it’s time you did. Tonight is beef and potatoes night. I know just the recipe I’ll use.”

  “Sounds wonderful,” his father said. He got up from the table, patted Trenton on the shoulder, and grabbed his helmet and mask. “I look forward to meeting her.”

  Trenton dropped his fork onto his plate. How had he ended up agreeing to bring Simoni home to meet his parents? Especially on the same night he was supposed to climb the air vent with Kallista? He almost wished they’d discovered what he was really up to.

  • • •

  They’d moved from harvesting potatoes to asparagus that morning. Picking was easy, but they also had to wash and trim the spears and then band them into bunches.

  An hour before lunch, Clyde returned. Dark rings circled his eyes, and his mouth twitched every so often. Trenton started toward him, but Clyde shook his head and quickly took his place in line to Trenton’s right.

  Several instructors walked over, but when they saw that Trenton and Clyde were working quickly, they moved away.

  As soon as the teachers were out of earshot, Trenton whispered, “How are you?”

  Clyde gave a tired smile and nodded. “I’ve been worse. Can’t remember when exactly, but I’m sure I must have.”

  Simoni leaned toward them. “How did you get released so quickly? I was afraid they’d keep you longer.”

  “I told them it was an accident,” Clyde whispered. “That my mind was wandering and I didn’t realize what I was doing. Since it was my first offense, they went easy on me.”

  As Clyde cut a handful of spears, his hands were shaking ever so slightly. His fingers were swollen and seemed to move stiffly.