by Naomi Paul
She’d started to thread her way back to her scooter when she spied movement at the far end of the drive. A truck was turning off of Wan Po, headed into the Harrison complex. As it drew closer, Lian could see that it was an old-model vehicle: ineffectual muffler, mud-spattered grille, and—most importantly—canvas sides.
In the moment, she made a decision. As the truck rolled past her, she broke from the trees, keeping as low to the ground as she could, and jogged up behind the left rear tire of the truck. From this angle, the guards couldn’t have spotted her dash; so long as the truck driver hadn’t checked his rearview in that split second, she was safe.
Lian reached up and grabbed one of the cords holding down the canvas, then leaped onto the thin shelf provided by the back bumper. The truck vibrated and shimmied, and she wound the cord around her right hand until the skin beneath it turned white.
With a hydraulic hiss, the truck began braking for the guard station. Lian flattened herself against the Harrison logo painted on the back of the truck. Over the juddering engine, it was hard to hear the guard request the bill of lading, and harder still to hear the driver’s response.
Lian waited, willing her breathing to remain steady. Her palms were slick with sweat, and the cord slipped an inch or so in her grip.
This was taking so much longer than the previous truck’s admission. There had to be something wrong.
She tried to prepare herself, to choose a course of action now rather than in the moment. What would happen if the guard decided to inspect the truck’s interior? She could run, but could she make it to her scooter before being caught? She could stay, maybe take him by surprise with a kick to the jaw . . . but how much time would that buy her? And if she missed, how much time would she lose?
Swallowing hard, she relaxed her grip on the cord, readying herself for the sprint.
Then the guard gave the clearance, the gate lifted, and the truck started forward again. Lian counted to three, then pivoted to her right, coming face to face with the left outer wall of the truck. The toes of her right foot were all that touched the bumper; her left foot dangled in air. The cord dug deep into her hand. But if one of the guards happened to look at the rear of the truck as it passed, she’d be out of sight.
Somehow, she had made it into the Harrison complex. Chalk it up to dumb luck.
The truck took a left, out of sight of the guard station, and Lian pushed off with her left hand, feeling the canvas give a bit before springing back. She pivoted until, once again, both of her feet were on the bumper and her back was pressed against the truck’s rear, giving her a view of the north campus of the complex as they drove in the opposite direction.
It was pretty drab: windowless corrugated iron warehouses, each adorned with a ten-foot-tall H logo; portable outbuildings where Lian supposed the paperwork was handled; a dozen or more trucks parked or idling. She could see a couple of men in short-sleeved white dress shirts, walking quickly from one of the portables, arguing over whatever was written on the clipboard that one of them was waving. They seemed too preoccupied to notice her, but she tensed just the same.
The truck turned right and began to slow; a shadow moved over her as they pulled into some kind of hangar. Lian quickly let the cord unwind from her hand and jumped from the bumper, stumbling for a moment on the concrete before she regained her footing. She slipped back outside, around the edge of the hangar door, and stayed as low as she could while rounding the building’s corner.
There were no other buildings facing the rear of the hangar; no one was watching her. She took the opportunity to sit for a moment, steady herself, and consider the daring, thrilling, potentially very stupid adventure she’d just undertaken.
If she were caught here, she would probably face trespassing charges. Or maybe the guards would taze her.
Maybe she’d be found washed up dead across the bay in Big Wave.
But even if that didn’t happen, she’d certainly be grounded until her dying day. For her parents—her mother, especially—trust was everything. This whole escapade, if it were found out, would be a massive and unforgivable abuse of that trust.
Lian tried not to think about “what if” and to focus instead on the task at hand. Getting back on her feet, she jogged the width of the hangar and peered around its corner. The nearest warehouse was about twenty-five yards away. No personnel around. At a flat-out run, she covered the gap in seconds.
The giant Harrison logos on every building were starting to intimidate her. She moved away from the front of the warehouse, down the vast length of its corrugated iron side, looking for a way in. Near the back corner, she spied at some distance a standing ashtray. It made sense that smokers would not want to walk halfway around the building; there must be a nearby door.
Lian walked toward the ashtray until she could see on its other side a black door with a metal handle and two locks. She was on high alert; at any moment, someone could walk out here to spark up a cigarette, and she’d be spotted. She could probably outrun a smoker, but . . .
Lian flinched as the caged fluorescent bulb over the door lit up and a bell inside the warehouse clanged wildly. Lian’s heart leaped into her throat. No one was here; she hadn’t even touched the door. How had they found her?
Turning, she banged hard into the ashtray, knocking it over and sending a cloud of ash into the air. Swatting it away from her stinging eyes, she ran forward, rounding the back corner of the building, coughing and half blind. She didn’t know which way to run; she doubted that any direction was safe, or that she could fight anyone off in this state.
After about a minute, though, she’d rubbed the ash from her eyes, and nobody had grabbed her or shot wires into her. She edged away from the back of the building, where the loading bay doors stood open, and peeked back around the side wall. Distantly, she saw a truck pull up and park at the front of the warehouse, and people in black coveralls began to climb out of the back.
The light, the bell . . . they weren’t an alarm. They were nothing more than the signal of a shift change.
This was the best chance she’d have of slipping in unnoticed. She went back to the side door and quickly righted the ashtray, grabbing a handful of cigarette butts off the ground and replacing them. Better to leave as little evidence as possible. Dusting off her hands, she gingerly tried the door handle. If this didn’t work, she’d have to find a way to sneak in the front, and that would be a much harder proposition.
The door resisted for a moment, then gave with a satisfying click. Lian opened it just wide enough for her to slip through, and then gently let it shut behind her. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the darkness inside the warehouse; she was in some sort of service hallway, with a bathroom and a supply closet and an empty glass case where a fire extinguisher belonged. To her left was a ladder that led to an overhead gantry, so she climbed.
From this vantage point in the shadows, she could see much of the vast warehouse floor, with a clear view to the front entrance. The new shift workers had disembarked and were shuffling in. Lian couldn’t be sure from this distance, but some of them looked very young: small framed, thin, maybe even junior-high age. And yet, all of them walked with the awkward, shuffling gait of the old and arthritic.
The previous shift—also in those black coveralls—was being herded to the doors and into the idling truck by a pair of bulbous, bearded men, who shoved and dragged the workers around, cursing at them to hurry up, and threatening a variety of punishments for disobedience. A skinny older man stumbled and was rewarded with a vicious boot to his ribs.
Lian winced at the impact. It seemed like the horror stories she had read about gang masters on illegal sites like this were true. She wanted to scream out, to protest the brutality, but giving herself away now would do nothing to ease the workers’ suffering. Instead, she pulled out her phone and took a slow sweep of the scene below, recording it all on video. This would make 06/04’s collective blood boil, she knew.
As she swung the pho
ne to the near wall of the warehouse, the viewscreen showed two guards, uniformed and armed like the ones at the gate. One of them was nodding vigorously as he yammered into his walkie-talkie. After a moment, he holstered the radio and snapped his fingers; half a dozen guards trotted toward him.
“Fan out!” he barked. “There’s an intruder in the building!”
NINE
A chill ran down Lian’s spine. She’d been so careful, kept so quiet, and they’d still managed to detect her. The image of the dead girl washed up in her mind, and for a moment, she thought of surrendering herself, begging for a less dire end.
But then she rallied: no one had laid a hand on her yet, and that meant there was still a chance—however slim—that she could escape. Focus, she silently screamed at herself. Find a way out. Now!
Below her, she could see that one of the guards was headed toward the service hallway. Even if he didn’t head up the stairs, she didn’t think she could make it down them and out the side exit without being caught. That meant that the only option was to continue along the gantry one way or another, hugging the wall and hiding in shadows—deeper into the belly of Harrison’s beast.
Directly opposite her, across the vast width of the warehouse, were a series of upstairs rooms that opened to the walkway. Lian decided that would be her best bet; if she could find an unoccupied room with a window to the outside, she’d risk the drop to the ground below.
The walkway across the front wall of the warehouse was a thin and perilous-looking affair. Not only was there a gap of maybe six feet where the railing had gone missing, the whole path was too well lit. If anyone on the factory floor looked up, there was a good chance they’d notice her edging along the gantry.
The better bet was along the back wall: shadowy, with large sections hidden behind pipes for, she guessed, an air conditioning system that clearly wasn’t running. Here, the walkway overhung the loading dock below; she’d have to be quiet so the guards beneath her feet didn’t notice, but she’d have much more space to maneuver.
Lian permitted herself a quick glance down the stairs as she moved back past them. She couldn’t see anyone, but she could hear the squawk of a guard’s walkie-talkie. It might only be a matter of seconds before he decided to check the second floor. She pulled up short behind a thick duct pipe, scanned to her right, and then made a mad dash for the safety of the next one.
The stop/start pace was infuriating, and doing it silently was nearly impossible. When she finally made it to the corner of the warehouse, Lian allowed herself a moment to rest on one knee, grateful that she’d gotten this far unscathed.
She heard a shifting footstep behind her and before she could turn, rough hands took hold of her. One covered her mouth, tightly enough that she couldn’t move her jaw. The other locked onto her left shoulder, the forearm across her chest. She felt the attacker’s breath on the back of her neck, and then she was being dragged into the inky corridor. Her feet scrabbled on the metal but found no purchase. She wanted to bite down on the hand but couldn’t; wanted to shout but did not dare.
This must have been what that poor dead girl’s final moments had been like.
Her assailant yanked her to the left and into a dimly lit storeroom. The hand on her shoulder released and moved to shut the door; she tried to twist out of the hold, but instead she was spun until her face was inches away from her captor’s.
He wasn’t a factory guard at all. He was a boy of no more than nineteen, his hair greasy and his skin smudged with dirt. His eyes were wild, almost shining in the gloom. An uneven patch of stubble decorated his chin and, from the stench of his breath, Lian doubted he had brushed his teeth this week.
“Jiao?” he hissed in the darkness. “Jiao?”
There was such desperation in his voice. She shook her head “no” as much as his panicked grip on her mouth would allow.
“Have you seen Jiao?” he asked. Lian felt prickles in her chest, up and down her arms—this young man’s hysteria was almost infectious. She tried to speak, as loud as she dared, but it came out high pitched and muffled, lost in his hand.
“What did you say?” he asked, finally loosening up on her jaw and taking a step back.
Lian kicked out at him, the toe of her boot driving right into his groin. He hit the floor and went fetal, making little whimpering noises.
She stepped past him and grabbed a broom leaning against the wall near the door, holding it between them like a staff. “What I said was that I was about to boot you in the crotch. Maybe you should have listened better.”
The boy coughed and held himself for a moment, then slowly put his palm down on the floor and brought himself up into a sitting position. Lian tensed and brought the end of the broomstick within inches of his throat.
“Don’t,” he mumbled, leaning away. “Please don’t tell the guards I’m here.”
She gave him a quizzical look. “Yeah . . . likewise.” They weren’t hunting her, after all, she realized—he was the intruder they were chasing. She’d just happened to stumble into this warehouse at the worst possible time for her stealth mission. Fantastic.
They had a common enemy, though, so that was someplace to start. Cautiously, she lowered the broom and offered him a hand getting up.
“What’s your name?” she asked. “What are you doing in here?”
He held up a hand to quiet her, then steered the both of them behind a dilapidated filing cabinet.
“Hey—” she began, but he shook his head and motioned to the door. Now she could hear it, too: guards on the upstairs walkway, calling to one another, their footfalls growing louder.
Lian and the boy huddled behind the cabinet, waiting for the door to fly open. Again, she had to wonder whether she could connect with a fist or a boot or a broom before she was taken down.
But she never got the chance. The guards didn’t venture into the blackness of the corridor, and after a minute or so she relaxed, unable to hear them anymore. The boy stayed vigilant and stock still for a long moment, and then he too seemed to unbend.
“I’m Zan,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “I broke in here to find my sister, Jiao. You don’t know her?”
“I’m a stranger here myself. I got in by the side door, and I’ve got no idea how to get back out.”
“The dockside,” he said. “At the rear of the building. If we can slip out through a loading bay, there’s a path to the seawall. That’s how I got in.”
Lian bit at her lower lip. “There are bound to be guards on all the doors. How are we supposed to make it out?”
Zan smiled; it was just off kilter enough to make her nervous, though he was clearly trying for reassuring. “You’re a size Small, I’m guessing.”
He crossed to the other side of the storeroom and began rooting around inside a bin, tossing her a pair of black coveralls and selecting one for himself. She leaned the broom back against the wall and stepped inside the uniform; the material was rough, instantly itchy, and carried a powerful chemical stink that made Lian dry heave.
Zan went first out of the room, surveying the hallway as he skirted its wall back toward the gantry. After a quick look, he signaled to Lian that it was safe to follow. They crouched behind a duct pipe, and he pointed out the nearest staircase, an enclosed spiral that would deposit them in a recessed area downstairs. He took a deep breath and then moved, low and quiet, to the staircase and started down. She waited until she couldn’t see the top of his head anymore, and then imitated his moves.
The factory floor was hot and loud, and thus blessedly easy to blend into. Lian kept her head down, watching Zan’s feet as he moved purposefully past the chugging machines that tooled and dyed and sweated heat into the thick, still air. It was plain to see how her clothes had absorbed such a toxic smell; the warehouse was dotted with enormous vats emblazoned with the symbol for hazardous chemicals.
They marched to the loading bay doors. The gang masters were occupied elsewhere; the guards had convened near the front doors to reth
ink their strategy. Zan jumped off the platform and then offered a hand to help Lian down.
As soon as her feet touched the ground outside, she felt an urge to run flat out, but they kept their inconspicuous walking pace all the way down to the ladder at the seawall. Her heart leapt to see it; if she hadn’t chanced upon Zan, she’d never have known that this was an option. She climbed down first and he followed, pointing to where the fence line began to curve back in toward the Harrison complex, eighty or a hundred yards distant.
Here, out of sight of the buildings, they broke into a trot over the rocky beach. When they reached a pile of driftwood and scrub brush, Zan moved it aside to reveal a hole where the wire fence had been snipped and bent back upon itself. Lian went through first, snagging the cuff of her coveralls on a bit of gnarled metal and swearing until she remembered that she didn’t care about preserving them at all.
Zan squeezed through after her, and the two of them stood outside the treacherous sprawl of the Harrison complex at last.
“Okay,” Lian said, ignoring the chemical taste that seemed to have coated the inside of her mouth. “If I have my bearings right, we should head this way, around the south campus. Stick to the trees and look for the dirt road that lets out by the main drive. Then we just need to walk far enough in to get to my scooter, and we’re home free.”
Being on the other side of that razor-topped fence made all the difference: Lian felt clear headed and triumphant, and the long trek back to the driveway seemed to take no time at all. They didn’t make conversation, though. Talk could wait until they were miles from this place, when they could compare notes and Lian could learn about Zan’s missing sister.
They let an exiting truck pass them as they hid, and then Lian jogged up to get the scooter while Zan played lookout at the mouth of the entryway. She righted the bike, strapped on her helmet, and zoomed down the drive to collect him. He didn’t even wait until she’d come to a complete stop before swinging his leg over the seat and gripping her waist, and then they were off, back up Wan Po, toward civilization.