by J. S. Morin
There was a long pause. The two of them had never been close. They had run out of small talk.
“You think the rest of them made it?” Chipmunk asked.
Pick sighed. “I dunno, kid. I dunno.”
Chapter 13
“I keep a journal because sometimes the only person you can tell your troubles to is yourself” -Cadmus Errol
The wagon’s cloth canopy could not keep the brisk wind off of the riders in back. Madlin and Jamile sat huddled together under a blanket. Muscles grew stiff with hours of idleness and allowed the chill to seep bone deep. Madlin kept her pistol in her lap and peeked often out the back of the wagon, looking for signs that Lord Jahant’s forces still harried them.
They hadn’t seen them for two days, but in the aftermath of their encounter five nights prior, Madlin’s caravan had been haunted in the night by raiders sneaking into camp to stake their wagon wheels, steal food, and throw boxes of ammunition into the fires. The latter trick had only been managed once, and three of Madlin’s men had died. After that, Madlin redoubled the watches, and the raids stopped.
“You’ve been quiet all morning,” Jamile said. Madlin closed the canvas flap after the dozenth look behind them. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” Madlin replied.
“Why do you have to do that?” Jamile asked.
“Do what?”
“Pretend nothing is bothering you when it’s plain as wool that you’ve got something knocking about in your head,” Jamile said. “Those riders stopped harassing us days ago; you said as much yesterday.”
Madlin frowned. “They still might be back there.”
“You just need to get it off your chest,” Jamile continued. “I’ll listen.”
“I...” Madlin didn’t finish the thought, not even in her head. The next word, whatever it was, wouldn’t come to mind.
Jamile wrapped an arm around Madlin. “It’s a hard life over there. I know. Korr doesn’t like our kind, but we can’t give up. Our time will come, maybe not in our lifetimes, but maybe in our children’s. It’ll get better. That’s what you’re fighting for, isn’t it?”
“Am I?” Madlin asked. “I killed three kuduks last night, and left another in chains in the back of a pawn shop while we robbed it.” She felt Jamile’s arm stiffen around her. She was a nurse; hurting people—even kuduks—must have seemed monstrous to her.
“And your friends?”
“Dunno,” Madlin replied. She leaned in against Jamile.
“I see.”
“Yeah. My job. My plan. Sure, we bloodied the knockers a bit, but we split and ran. I only know one of my gang is safe, and that’s ‘cause he was with me when we got away.”
“Knockers?” Jamile asked.
“Head-knockers,” said Madlin. Jamile shrugged and shook her head. “You know, the officers from judicial enforcements? They carry around those clubs with the leather wrapped around them? Those are for knocking heads—human heads, mostly.”
“Oh, we just call them offies,” Jamile said.
“Yeah, the kuduks call ‘em that.”
“So it was these ‘knockers’ you killed?”
Madlin nodded. “Three of them. One shot from a gun I made myself. Had to leave it behind when we ran.”
“Which are you upset over? The gun or your gang friends?”
Madlin straightened. “My friends, of course.” She pushed Jamile’s arm away and scooted aside.
“I just know how you love those gadgets you create. You talk about them the way most women talk about their babies.”
“I can build it again. But how do I go to work not knowing whether my friends are locked up, waiting to get hanged for a shot I took?” Madlin asked.
“Trust your gut,” Jamile suggested. “Do you think they got away?”
Madlin shrugged. “Probably.”
“From what you’ve told me about them, they all sound like they know how to take care of themselves. Maybe you just need to remember that. Worrying angries the blood. There’s an instrument for measuring it, too, but I’d have no way to show you how it works. It’s all dials and a squeezy bulb and I couldn’t say quite how to begin making one.”
“So just go to work and act like everyone’s fine?” Madlin asked.
“Unless you’re prepared to go storming the enforcement office’s cells to look for them, I don’t see what else you can do.”
“I just feel so useless here. We’re a week from the mines, and I’m just baggage until we get there. We’re safe enough, I suppose, but Rynn...”
“Why don’t you take a quick nap, and check in on her,” Jamile said with a hopeful smile.
Madlin swallowed hard. She didn’t want to go back. She knew Rynn’s life was carrying on, even as she went about her own. Whatever memories Rynn formed would be her own, whether she witnessed them firsthand or not. But the uncertainty was giving her fits.
“There’s no room in the wagon.”
Jamile reached out and drew Madlin close once more. Madlin fell asleep in Jamile’s arms, head pillowed on her chest.
Chapter 14
“Paranoia is a lazy man’s word for being well prepared.” -Cadmus Errol
Rynn woke early, still dressed in Chipmunk’s clothing. She dug at gummy eyes and tried to will a night’s sleep into her head. That had as much effect as she expected it would—namely none—so she pressed on with her day despite worrying most of the night through.
Rynn’s work uniform lay over the hot water pipe. The heat had dried it after a soapless soaking that passed for washing by Rynn’s reckoning. One thing she had learned while working for kuduks was that they thought humans smelled no matter how much bathing and laundering had gone into removing all scents. If kuduks sweat, Rynn had never seen it, and the slightest hint of sweat was enough to make a human seem unclean. She took her uniform down and stripped out of Chipmunk’s clothes.
Usually as Rynn dressed for work, she boxed up Chipmunk in the back of her mind and left her behind in the workshop. That morning she felt more like Chipmunk dressed for a covert mission as Rynn. Instead of slogging off to the university with resignation, she found herself alert—the hypersensitivity she normally felt when she could be caught at any moment, and had a gun in her hand.
There was no way she could get through the day with her brain grabbing the loose ends of a spark wire. She took a detour on her way to work. As she came to a cross-tunnel, she took a left down the Rikmun Memorial Tunnel instead of her usual right. The flow of traffic was against her, as more people lived down that end of the Rikmun than worked there. Rynn dodged around human workers heading to jobs on the upper layers via the stairway at the other end of the tunnel.
When she finally reached her destination, she paused for a moment outside. It was always comforting to see the emblem of the Church of Eziel displayed over the double doors that led into the nave. It bore the same “CE” mark formed into the shape of a square that her father—that Cadmus Errol—used in Tellurak as his trademark. It was the mark that told the observant twinborn that Cadmus Errol was one of their own. Most of the twinborn working for her father had sought him out after seeing it.
Rynn strode inside, casually brushing her hand by the poor box as if perhaps she had slipped a coin or a bank note inside. She felt no guilt in the deception, since so much of her gang’s hauls ended up being dispersed among the poor anyway. She just disliked being thought of as thick-fingered with her money.
She walked down the aisle among the pews, looking up at the vaulted ceiling which had been carved from the stone by human hands. It didn’t look as pretty as kuduk work, or defy the look of stone entirely like daruu works, but that was the point. It showed the human worshippers of Eziel what their kind were capable of.
“Rynn, what are you doing here?” a familiar voice called out to her, echoing through the empty church.
“Just wanted to talk to you, Pious Henlon,” Rynn answered. She rarely saw Rascal in his public capacity. She suspected that other
s saw him differently, but whenever she looked at him in his brown, shapeless woolen robes, all she saw was a liar and a thief—though one she trusted.
Rascal did not make his reply across half the church, but walked over and took her by the arm, guiding her into the vestibule. “What? You know we shouldn’t be talking here.”
“I wanted to know whether you’d made it out,” Rynn answered, “and if you’d heard from the others.”
Rascal shook his head. “We all had jobs to do. I saw No-Boots go chase you outta the pawn shop, but I threw some coal on the fire and steamed. Nothin’ I did was stoppin’ them knockers.”
“Well, Pick and I got down the lift like we planned. Hayfield and No-Boots blew it on foot.”
“I guess them two’re missing, then,” Rascal replied. He looked to the altar and shook his head. Rynn had never puzzled out whether he was a true believer or just keeping up appearances. He never showed signs of being particularly pious when they were working a job, but his share of the haul never seemed to stay in his pockets, either.
“What do we do?”
“You and me do our jobs today,” Rascal said. “I got people who count on me being here; you got people who’ll get all curious if you don’t show up. We had a plan, we stick to it. Rally at the stadium, 7 o’clock, back row on the home side.”
“You think they made it?”
Rascal shrugged. “I hate betting on friends. Feel like an ox winning; feel like an ox losing. Just show up at the game tonight.”
Rynn had hoped for more reassurance. She said her goodbyes and left the church. She had to hurry or she would be late for work.
Rynn ended up taking the lift to make up time, despite the half-tenar cost. The car was crowded due to one shaft being shut down for repairs. All during the cramped ride, she tried to peek at newspapers carried by the other riders. Rumors had spread about the robbery and shooting the night before, but it had happened too late to appear in the morning edition.
The lift ride cut enough time off her trek to work that she arrived at the university several minutes early, despite her detour. As she collected her bucket and scrub brushes, her thoughts kept wandering to Hayfield and No-Boots. Her co-workers on the university custodial staff arrived and a few exchanged greetings with her, but Rynn couldn’t remember the conversations. The social gossip from the lower layers, and inquiries as to whether anyone had heard the latest performance of the Eversall Women’s Choir were just noise. The words were just curtains to hide the vacant lives within.
Mrs. Bas-Klickten called them together to read the day’s assignments. It was part of the routine. Rynn had memorized the rotations, which changed as often as the weather... two layers underground. As her patron read out the others’ assignments, Rynn played out the end of the workday: she would head to the stadium in her work uniform; there would be no time to stop by her apartment to change, and she was not sure that changing was even advisable; she would get there early before most of the crowd gathered, so she could watch the entrances and spot her friends as they arrived.
“... Rynn, you will be cleaning the floors in the law department in the morning, and the history department after lunch.”
Hearing her own name jarred Rynn’s attention back to the present.
“Isn’t that Clari’s shift?” Rynn blurted out before she thought better of it.
“Look around. Do you see Clari here?” Mrs. Bas-Klickten asked. She slapped a clipboard against the palm of her hand, startling Rynn and the other maids and janitors. “Pay attention when I speak. Clari broke her foot and will not be with us any longer. You’ve inherited her rounds. Best be on your task today, because the law professors are sticklers, unlike those grease-stained tinkers in the practical science department. Understood?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Rynn replied.
She shuffled off with the rest of the workers, and they dispersed among the halls of the school. Rynn stifled a yawn, mindful that she had angered Mrs. Bas-Klickten once already and didn’t want to risk a formal reprimand for sleepiness on the job. She steered herself away from her normal route and into the footsteps that Clari habitually trod.
Rynn tried to throw herself into the work, but it was just not the sort of job that was good for keeping the whole of her mind occupied. The same qualities that allowed her to spend her days listening to lectures on spark, gear, and steam kept her from drowning her worries in soap suds. She attacked the floors of the law department with a furor, but soon found herself out of breath and doing more resting than cleaning.
She didn’t know the law professors, either by face or name, and the subject matter was opaque. She tried to listen in, perhaps to get the same education in law that she had in the sciences. Ideally, the professor would have lectured on the legal standing of humans; it was a subject that might come in useful one day. Humans were not without rights, even those that were slaves. However, humans rarely benefitted from those rights because kuduks held the system in a strangle. By controlling the cogs of the legal machinery, the kuduks made moot what the manual said they should do.
Unfortunately, the law professor was droning on about applying patent law across national boundaries. In the age of airships and with thunderail travel becoming a daily part of life even for working class kuduks, conflicts in patent regulations were blah blah blah and more blah.
Boring.
Rynn knew that her father had worked in the patent office. It was a high honor for a human, since nine humans in ten couldn’t even read. Though she was fuzzy on the actual mission of the Patent Department, her father had seen invention upon invention in sketch form and turned many of them into working devices. She was pretty sure teaching humans the latest in firearms and naval technology wasn’t what the kuduks had in mind.
The latter thought helped Rynn immensely. She knew that Madlin had gone to sleep to look in on her, unable to bear the worry, but Rynn felt she had a stake in Madlin’s mission for her father as well. She went over the inventory of the caravan in her head, taking stock of the weapons and ammunition they had brought along—including the loss of the rifle that Jamile had dropped in their escape. She plotted their journey on a map in her head and tried to gauge the opening offer she should make for the mine.
I need to figure out if they know what they have. I don’t want to offer too much more than they think it’s worth. Maybe I can convince them we know about iron in the mountain...
Rynn worked through lunch, though she wasn’t certain she would have been able to hold down a meal anyway. The law wing was larger than the practical science wing, and the lecture halls spaced farther apart. She didn’t do as thorough a job as Mrs. Bas-Klickten implied she should, but none of the faculty complained to her by the time she had finished.
The history department was a depressing place. While Rynn’s concept of history revolved around wars and scientific advances, what she heard through the doors of the lecture halls was nothing but politics. Worse, it seemed to be talking about the study of politics. It was almost enough to make one believe that history was the study of historians. One day, some dusty old historians would study the ones talking in that lecture hall, and the incestuous loop would continue.
There was a thought that nagged Rynn, more specific than the wide-reaching worries about Hayfield and No-Boots: Why today?
Clari had been working at Klokwerk University for years longer than Rynn. She was the one who showed the new girls the job, same as Fenner did for the young men. She hadn’t gotten to be front car on the rail by being absent. Rynn hadn’t remembered her ever taking sick.
Maybe they want me out of practical sciences. The thought was worrisome, since it would have meant that she had fallen under suspicion. If they suspected me, they’d have just called the knockers and I’d be in a cell. It couldn’t have just been about Rynn, then. She wished she had heard the day’s assignments. If the practical science wing had been skipped altogether it might mean that they wanted all the cleaning staff away from the area. Perhaps even s
tudents would be kept out if they had brought her coil pistol to Professor Hurmbeck to examine, the way they had brought him her coil rifle to dissect.
But when the rifle had been sent for examination, no one had shut down a wing of the university over it. What was different?
No-Boots salvaged the dynamo off the rifle. The pistol still had it attached!
Rynn’s scrub brush stopped moving as she squeezed her eyes shut, frustrated with herself. It was the sleepless night that had gotten to her. It had taken her hours to even properly pose the puzzle to herself. It should have come to mind immediately. It was the sort of things Cadmus had always hammered into Madlin: figure out the problem so you know what solution to look for.
So, they don’t suspect me, but now they know someone is arming rebels with new aether-and-spark weapons. Professor Hurmbeck is probably smart enough to figure out how it’s made, too.
That last was the final rivet in the trolley: she had to get the gun back. An inside heist was always easier than a blind job, but this would be Rynn’s first time as the one on the inside. She’d need her friends’ help, but that wasn’t something to worry about yet. She’d be seeing them in two hours’ time.
The stadium was as empty as Rascal’s church had been that morning. A few attendants were sweeping the rows of stone bleachers—Rynn felt an urge to lend them a hand, but resisted. Some of the groundskeepers were busy raking the dirt off the field, making for an even playing surface, while others walked wheeled boxes around, depositing chalk in a pattern of regular lines, marking the extent of the playing area.
Rynn picked her way up to the top of the bleachers, where the cavern walls rose up and made the turn to a domed ceiling. The upper reaches of the stadium were laced with steel catwalks hung with lights. Most of the stadium’s budget went to keeping the spark flowing into the building for the spectators to see the action. Rynn hoped that enough light spilled onto the spectators’ entrance that she could identify arriving fans. She didn’t particularly care about the action out on the pitch.