by J. S. Morin
Chapter 9
“Nothing improves a man’s hearing like pointing a gun at him.” -Cadmus Errol
Chipmunk and her compatriots had slipped one by one into an old warehouse in a run-down section of Level Four. The warehouse office was lined with filing cabinets, and the musty smell of old paper pervaded the room. On the desk in the center sat a pile of ledgers accounting for all the textiles the adjoining factory produced. It was after hours, the workers had all gone home, and now the owner owed Hayfield one fewer favor.
“Pick, this ain’t like you,” Hayfield said. He sat hunched on the edge of the desk, one foot dangling.
Pick spread his hands. “What can I say? Those old coins weren’t worth what we thought.” He slouched in the manager’s chair, Hayfield looming over him.
“They were worth more than twelve hundred tenar,” Rynn said. She sat perched on an idle radiator. It had a residual warmth which was fading by the minute, left over from business hours.
“You got alley-slapped,” No-Boots said, nodding in agreement with Rynn.
“Now wait a—”
“Kid’s right,” Rascal said with a nod. “You got done, and done dirty. What’s wrong with you, Pick?”
“Nothing, I—”
“Yeah, nothing’s wrong with him,” Rynn cut him off. She was looking down at her coil gun, the one she had hoped to duplicate several times over with the cash Pick was getting for them. She turned it over in her hands, adding up the cost of the parts. “I bet he got plenty for ‘em.”
Rynn leveled the gun at Pick.
Hayfield ducked out of the way as Rascal and No-Boots backed against the walls and Pick froze in place.
“Hey now, watch it with that thing!”Pick started to sweat, little beads sprouting in his hairline.
“How about you tell us what you did with the rest?” Rynn asked, keeping her voice level. “We’re all friends here, Pick. You can tell us.” She glanced down at the gun in her hand. “This bothering you? I wouldn’t shoot a friend—you know that.”
Pick looked all about the room, but no help was forthcoming. He swallowed, patting his hands in the air for Rynn to lower her weapon, and she pointed the barrel at the floor.
“You see, it was like this ... the fella I fenced the coins to, he was short, ya see? Said he knows a guy up north can make it worth my trouble to hand ‘em over on credit,” Pick said. He raised a finger to preempt the objections threatening to crush him from all sides. “I told him to go break rocks. He wanted the deal bad, so we worked out a barter. I’d take the twelve hundred he could spare and settle the rest in dynamite.”
“Dynamite!” Rascal and No-Boots exclaimed in unison.
“What’d you plan to do with dynamite?” Hayfield asked.
“Figured we could pull a bank heist or something else big, make up our loss and then some,” Pick replied.
“Where’s the dynamite then?” Rynn asked. “I’m sure I can figure a way to blow a bank vault without collapsing half the city. I’d be willing to give it a try. We could come out way ahead.”
“That’s the thing, see? I don’t got it,” Pick said. “I got boosted at the railyard. I was in a freight car with some weird machinery, figured it for the university. Rynn’s always good at stashing stuff, figured I’d get the dynamite to her. Turns out it was some daruu’s private toys. His collared pet comes to check the cargo while I was still inside, just about breaks my thumbs to get me to give up the boom-booms.”
“Some slave robbed you?” Hayfield asked, incredulous.
“He wasn’t just a slave, he was some sort of tinker. He was like a con man, playing his owner, or something. All that stuff on the thunderail, I think it was his. Like, his owner bought it, but he was the one who knows how to work it ... something like that.” Pick looked around as if to gauge who was buying his story.
“Pick...” Hayfield scratched at his beard. His pause quieted the room. “You been drinkin’? Maybe somethin’ stronger, even?”
“I know how it sounds,” Pick said. “How many human tinkers you see, right? I mean—”
“Oh, I believe him,” Rynn cut in. All eyes turned to her. She held up her pistol as evidence that human tinkers were not entirely unheard of. “I think Pick met my dad.
“Mama told me he worked in the patent office,” Rynn continued after a moment’s pause. No-Boots let out a low whistle. It was rare for a human to be given any sort of office job with the government. “I was slave-born, but he bought me and my mama our freedom.”
“Then how’d he end up—” Pick started to ask.
“Only thing he had to sell was himself.”
There was a long silence. Everyone seemed to be waiting for Rynn to continue. She knew her father better than any one-worlder could have in her situation. Cadmus Errol had raised her in Tellurak after her twinborn mother died in both worlds of a congenital illness that neither world had a cure for. Rynn had been left on her own in Korr.
“I don’t even remember his name,” she lied, “but I know he sold himself to a daruu here in Eversall. Tinkering’s in the blood. If Pick met a daruu’s slave who sounded educated and works as a tinker, that’s him.”
“Then how do we get the dynamite back from him?” Rascal asked.
Rynn shrugged. “I haven’t seen him since I was five. I doubt he’d recognize me.”
Rynn had hoped to work near the spark labs that day, or at least end up down near the utility rooms—places she could scrounge. Instead, she was stuck in the library wearing white cotton gloves, dusting bookshelves. She was to take a row of books down, lay them on a cart, dust the shelf and each individual book, then return them all to the shelf in the same order. Her eyes and throat itched.
Rynn placed another row of books back on the shelf where they belonged. The early hours of her work had been harried by a librarian’s assistant, checking each row she finished. Getting each row right without giving away her literacy was a fine rope to walk. Two dozen rows in, she had to explain a fabricated method to the increasingly suspicious assistant. The young kuduk had seemed incredulous that she could keep track of the stacked books without reading their titles, but laziness had prevailed in the end, and the librarian’s assistant wandered off to find some more interesting use for her time. Checking Rynn’s work had been pointless—she had yet to make an error. In the absence of supervision, Rynn’s mind relaxed and began noticing things. She started cataloging the locations of the library patrons; she read the spines of books; she started wondering if there wasn’t, perhaps, some way besides scavenging that might better arm her friends.
Runes for Stability and Achieving Motionlessness
The title screamed to Rynn. She pulled a glove off one hand and opened the book. Without pausing to read, she skimmed through the pages. It had chapters with headings such as “Anchoring Structures Against the Effects of Vibration and Unstable Loads,” and “Holding Objects Stationary in Mid Air.” She snapped the book shut, gasping in panic at the noise.
She felt as if she had used those runes on herself, so still did she hold, waiting for some sign that the librarian’s assistant or another other staff member had heard her. She heard footsteps—hard, clomping soles on the wood floors. Rynn put the book back with the others she had taken down from its shelf, and tugged her glove back on.
The librarian’s assistant poked her head around the aisle. “Rynn, I’m heading to the cafeteria for some lunch. I don’t want you lazing about while I’m gone, you understand?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Rynn replied. The head disappeared behind the bookshelf, and the footsteps retreated once more. As soon as the assistant was gone, she breathed a sigh of relief.
Rynn did not pause to think. The bottom of the cart she used for sorting books held her cleaning supplies—which subtly contained a few items not essential for cleaning. She found a ball of twine and tied Runes for Stability and Achieving Motionlessness shut. She left the end of the twine uncut, still attached to the ball.
After double-c
hecking for anyone wandering about her section of the library, Rynn scurried to the wall. The library was kept cool and dry by air pumped through vents about the periphery of the room. Rynn found the nearest vent and knelt next to it. It was a louvered metal panel, held to the wall by a screw in each corner. Rynn knew from experience that the screws were barely tightened.
She tugged a hair pin free from where it clipped to the hem of her dress—she appreciated them as little tools rather than for use in her hair—and jammed it into the slot on the back of the screw. The assembly looked like a miniature crank. It took just a moment for Rynn to unscrew all four corners and pull the panel away.
The shaft inside was not much larger than the book, but it was enough. Rynn looked over her shoulder; no one was coming. She took hold of the ball of twine and slipped the book into the ventilation shaft, carefully unspooling the twine as she lowered it. Barely breathing, she listened to it scrape along the metal walls, making occasional thuds as it hit a seam where sections of the duct were joined. She cringed, lowering it slower still.
It was going too slowly. The librarian’s assistant would be back soon—a lunch could only last so long. Rynn held the line in one hand and threw the ball of twine, letting it unravel as it bounced along the aisle. She tugged it back until she had the end, threaded it through one of the louvers in the vent cover, and reeled it back in until the twine was taut. With the book dangling in the twine she held in one hand, Rynn pushed the vent cover back into place, screwed it back down, and resumed lowering the book.
“Rynn!”
Rynn jumped at the sound of her name. She turned to see the librarian’s assistant coming down the aisle toward her.
“What are you doing over there?”
Rynn had the vent and twine blocked by her body. “I thought I heard rats, ma’am,” Rynn replied. “Sounded like it came from the vents.” She let go the twine. It snaked out through her fingers, slipping through the louvers until, at last, it vanished.
Thooomp.
The sound echoed up from the vent. “See?” Rynn asked.
The librarian’s assistant rushed over and took the kneeling Rynn by the shoulder, thrusting her aside. The kuduk woman looked Rynn over, but it was a cursory inspection.
“That didn’t sound like any rat,” the librarian’s assistant said. She gave Rynn a stern, accusing look.
Rynn shrugged. “I can go ask Garvi to look into it once I’m done here.”
“Did you try opening that vent?” The librarian’s assistant pointed at the hair pin on the floor.
“Open it? It doesn’t even have a handle.”
“What’s that hair pin doing there?”
“Must’ve fallen out. Thank you, ma’am.” Rynn picked it up and pinned back a random lock of hair.
“Go see Garvi then. But finish up quick.”
Rynn nodded several times until the assistant went away. She breezed through the rest of the dusting, taking note of other titles she might steal in the future.
It had been a small matter convincing Mrs. Bas-Klickten that Rynn needed to venture down to the maintenance levels. After all, the librarian had requested she do so. As she went down flight after flight of stairs in the maintenance wing, Rynn began to feel more at home. Gone were the airy trappings of academia, filled with the sounds of enlightened kuduks who looked at her as either a piece of furniture or an animal. Gone as well were the wood paneling, the mosaic tile work, and the brass-plaqued paintings. She was in a world stripped of pretense, where steam pipes had red stripes painted around each joint, and cold water pipes bore blue ones. It was one place where the workings of the university did exactly what they were meant to do, from boilers to spark switches.
In the hallways above, Rynn shuffled about, eyes downcast, taking small, quiet steps and trying to avoid notice. Feeling once more in her element, Rynn strode confidently. Her thick-soled work shoes clomped on stone floors and metal walkways. She exchanged greetings with the other freemen she met as she passed. While there was little call for Rynn to venture into the guts of Klockwerk University in her official capacity, she was well known there nonetheless.
“Where’s Garvi?” she asked one of the plumbers.
“Down in the tool room. He’s foul today, best not bother him.”
Rynn nodded in reply, but didn’t change her mind. Bothering someone usually involved adding to their troubles. Rynn expected she’d be cheering him up.
There was a good chance that anyone on their first trip below would get hopelessly lost. One conduit shaft looked much like another, and landmark equipment like the freight lifts and the university dynamo could only be seen from a short distance away. But Rynn could have drawn a map of the place.
The tool room was a hub of activity. There were three humans inside, and one kuduk. Rynn didn’t want the kuduk to see her, so she ducked around a corner by a pile of spare water pipes.
“I don’t care,” said the bass voice of the kuduk. “Get the spark connected back to the labs before morning, or I’ll have your hide.”
There was a muttering of replies as the human staff placated the maintenance supervisor of the practical sciences department. The kuduk stormed out of the tool room and slammed the door behind him.
“... rotten, lazy sweat-stains... ” he muttered as he passed Rynn’s hiding place.
Once he was gone she pulled open the tool room door. “Garvi, I gotta talk to you,” she said.
“Not now, kid. I got problems of my own,” Garvi replied. He was fifty or so, clean-shaven with short grey hair. His coveralls were grease-stained, and his belt hung heavy with tools.
“I can make it worth your while,” Rynn replied. She turned to the two mechanics who were still in the room. “You fellas clear out.”
A nod from Garvi dismissed the pair.
“Whatcha need, kid?”
“I need vent duct 433 ignored until morning,” Rynn replied.
“I’d have to nursemaid it, make sure none of my lads get ambitious.” Garvi shook his head. “Not tonight. No deal. I’ve got a spark circuit to fix.”
“I’ll fix it. You keep that duct off the cleaning schedule for twelve hours.”
Garvi looked at her with an appraising eye. Rynn looked right back without blinking. “Whadda you know about spark?”
“More than you,” Rynn replied. “I’ll find the line break and have it spliced faster than your best mechanic could.”
Garvi’s eyes narrowed. “What’s down that vent that’s so important?”he asked.
“If I don’t get that line spliced and the science labs powered back up in three hours, I’ll tell you,” she countered.
“Deal.”
Rynn stayed after hours. She had gone back up to finish her workday with Mrs. Bas-Klickten before venturing down to troubleshoot Garvi’s spark problem, but even the loss of nearly an hour hadn’t put her over her limit. Garvi had been impressed enough that he didn’t press her for any more information about what was left in the vent.
It was not Rynn, but Chipmunk who returned to Klockwerk University in the quiet hours of the night. Like nearly every part of Eversall Deep, it was serviced by spark and sewer lines that required maintenance tunnels. These were tunnels that Chipmunk knew especially well.
Most of the items that Rynn purloined from the university in the daylight hours had to be retrieved from the debris traps of the sewer pipes. It was filthy work, but kept her from having to enter the university itself to retrieve her haul. However, books were incompatible with water, so she hadn’t been able to use that method, even if she’d had the means to sneak it out of the library.
Chipmunk’s coat concealed the bulk of her coil gun. Rynn could talk her way around being discovered in the university after hours, but Chipmunk was more inclined to blast her way out of any trouble she found. She put her goggles down and wrapped a scarf around her face before she popped the hatch that separated the tunnels from the university’s maintenance annex.
The university tunnels we
re quiet—not silent, but limited to the artificial noises of the boilers and dynamo that Chipmunk barely registered consciously. She waited to hear the irregular beat of footsteps interrupt the mechanical symphony, but none came. She traced her way along the pipes—she always found her way better by pipe than memorizing turns. Wending her way among the interwoven tangles of steam, spark, and waste lines, she headed for the ventilation pumps.
When she found vent 433, there was a man seated on a stool next to it. He had his elbows propped on his knees, and was tapping his foot to unheard music. Chipmunk did a quick scan of the floor for the nearest sewer grate, and spotted one just a few paces past him. The coil gun was quieter than a pistol, but it would still make noise when the ball bearing buried itself in the far wall. But if there was no one around to hear ... well, that wouldn’t make for much of a problem.
Just a backup plan, she told herself. He’s as human as I am.
Chipmunk stepped out of concealment and walked right up to the man on the stool. “What are you doing here?”
“You Rynn?” the man asked.
“No,” Chipmunk lied. She kept her voice gravelly, trying to hide her gender.
“Then get lost,” the man told her. “This area’s off limits.”
Rynn pulled her coil gun and aimed it at the man’s head. “It’s your night off.”
“Whoa, what do you think you’re—”
“Get out of here,” Chipmunk ordered. The man didn’t say another word, but leapt from his stool and ran for the nearest tunnel.
Chipmunk re-holstered her weapon and went to the panel at the bottom of vent 433. Unlike the ones on the upper levels of the university, it was maintenance only—no louvers. She had a proper screwdriver along, and made quick work popping the panel loose. Inside, the book was battered but intact. It had fallen on its spine and the back cover had torn loose, but the pages were there. She didn’t bother untying the twine or spooling up the loose end, but stuffed it all into a sack she had brought along.