by M. E. Parker
Myron hopped to his feet as he heard the muffled sounds of his fellow slogs shuffling outside. He couldn’t breathe. The star. Sindra’s star. Of all times to have a domicile inspection, he was holding enough personal metal to be considered aiding the enemy.
“We’re missing one,” a voice shouted.
“Myron,” Rolf called from the quad commons. “Out!”
Myron yanked his cot back, groping the wall until he reached the set of loose bricks to stow his book. The bricks tumbled out onto the floor. He usually had more time to arrange them perfectly, to return each brick and strip of mortar to its place.
“Go drag his ass out of there,” Rolf shouted. “Wait. I’ll do it.”
Myron rolled up the book and shoved it into its spot in the wall. The postcard he tucked into his smock. When he tried to cram in the star, the bricks didn’t assemble right. In his hurry, he couldn’t get the fishing float to fit in either.
Heavy footsteps fell outside his door.
Without thinking, he arranged the bricks in the wall and threw the star along with the bob into the stove. Then he stuck his hand in and pulled a white-hot coal over the star to hide it. He bit his lip to stifle a scream; the pain of the coals on his skin almost made him lose his lights.
The fishing bob melted into a red blob on top of the coals. He would now have to find a new way to smuggle metal out of the salvage factory. Hopefully, a less painful method.
The door swung open.
“I’m sorry,” Myron said, rushing out into the corridor. “I burned my hand. Stoking the fire. Didn’t hear the inspection.” He put on his best empty gaze and showed Rolf his hand.
Rolf cracked a thin smile. “Don’t even have sense enough to use your stoker.” He strolled through Myron’s room, lifted the cot, peaked behind the stove, and tapped the walls randomly, until his eyes narrowed. “Whore’s hairpin, what’s that smell?” Rolf wrinkled up his nose. He threw his head back, sniffing the air.
Myron smelled it, too, coming from the stove. The fishing bob, “Just a lump of funny coal in my ration. Piece of brittle,” Myron said, playing stupid.
“Brittle?” Rolf grabbed Myron’s ceramic stoker and poked the coals. A strand of melted red string stuck to the end and followed the poker out of the fire. “What a mess. What are you up to? Making that funny gear this morning. Burning brittle in your stove.” Rolf turned on his heel at the door. “There’s something not right about you, boy.” He tossed Myron’s stoker on his cot and walked out.
Myron checked down the corridor to make sure the inspection team had moved on and fished the star out of the fire. He tore a piece off of his smock and wrapped his burned fingers. After getting dressed, he checked his hair again and put on his coat along with his dour, moronic public face before heading for his ration.
As he came to the bottom of the stairs, he ducked under the low archway that opened into the swill pen, what slogs in quad 14 called the stagnant courtyard bound by their four domicile buildings. Under a string of dim bulbs that stretched from the staircases of 14A to 14C, day shifters sat on benches around the chimney of a crumbling brick kiln and gnawed the only food they would get for the day. Most ate in silence, too tired to speak. Others murmured of the war and whatever news the Superintendent had offered during his daily admonition. A few slogs huddled in the dark corner conducting a discreet game of nub, played with four worn stones on a grid drawn in the dirt, with rations as the prize. Myron searched the crowd until his eyes found Sindra, who sat on bench eating her ration alone.
They glanced at each other briefly. Under the cones of yellow light, Sindra’s delicate features betrayed the defiance in her eyes, a quality that had inspired Myron from the moment he first saw her. And every time their eyes had met since, his stomach jumped with excitement. Her spirit was bigger than Jonesbridge. Mystery surrounded her as though she guarded a secret. She even looked different, healthier than the rest of them. Most slogs were torpid and gaunt, racks of bones with skin stretched over them, but Sindra had some color in her cheeks. She had curves, even a wiggle of extra flesh on her backside.
Myron sat on the bench a few feet away from her and whispered, as if talking to himself, “I looked for you today. When Rolf was riding me.”
Sindra stared across the swill pen away from Myron. “I saw you looking,” she whispered, concealing her smile.
Her comment stoked his worry that she might have seen the star when Rolf held it up, which would spoil the surprise. Myron studied the faces around him, all occupied with their rations. He scooted a little closer to Sindra though he kept his gaze on the ghosts pacing by the staircases. “What’s wrong?” Sindra’s face usually became more animated when she was with Myron.
“Can’t sleep,” she said as if to no one.
“Why not?”
Sindra opened her mouth to speak but took a bite of bread instead, waiting for a slog to walk past. “I can’t take this.”
“What?”
“What they do.”
Myron scooted closer.
“Wish I’d catch the wet lung if it meant they’d leave me be.”
Myron studied her face as she spoke, hoping for a glimpse of the untamed girl he had grown accustomed to. Her inner fire fueled his; he was certain that he would shrivel away if this place had robbed Sindra of her spirit.
“Never thought I’d miss the tracks. The smell of tar and rockweed and the rail-walking vagrants with turnip breath. I guess I was sheltered from the bigger world and all its problems.” Sindra moved over on the bench casting Myron an admonishing glare.
Myron knew the rules. Industry slogs of opposite gender must not commingle alone. This mandate also applied to slogs of the same gender should such proclivities exists between them. He scooted over on the bench, to the very edge, squeezing his hand around the star.
“I have to get out of this place,” Sindra whispered.
Myron had trusted Sindra from the first time he had seen her, but in recent weeks she had reciprocated the trust by opening up to Myron about her past. “I know where we can meet. Away from here, at least for a little while,” Myron whispered. The spot was an abandoned chapel with crumbling wooden walls and remnants of stained glass. The roof sunk almost to the tops of the pews in places. The only problem, it stood well beyond the slog compound perimeter, a boundary only legally crossed by ghosts on patrol.
“Meet—as in alone?”
“Yes.”
The abandoned chapel, now swallowed up by needle grass and briar vine, stood in the shadow of Iron’s Knob. Myron pointed to the promontory shrouded in smoke nearly five hects away, the most prominent landmark inside the area bound by the Great Gorge. On one side a gently sloping hill and dry creek bed, the other a jagged cliff face that made Iron’s Knob resemble the tip of a pickaxe blade jutting out of the ground.
“Outside the compound? No way.” Sindra shook her head.
He understood her apprehension with nightmares of the stretcher always in the back of his mind, but her reaction disappointed him. Myron imagined a rail-walker like Sindra—a scrapper who fought with orange shirts the first day she arrived—would jump at a chance for adventure. Unless she didn’t feel he was worth the risk.
“Don’t worry, I go all the time.”
Her eyes grew wide. “If we can we get out of the compound, why stop at the chapel?”
Myron had the same thought when he first ventured beyond the compound. “Not possible. Legend doesn’t pay that gorge its due. No way across. No way through. Only one way—and that’s over.” He glided his hand through the air.
“So how do we get past the ghosts on patrol?”
Then he saw it, the same look in her eyes he had seen when she bit that ghost on the arm five months ago, a glint, as though her eyes laughed at the thought of getting caught.
“Only if you don’t mind getting dirty,” Myron said.
“Myron, if you land me another minute in that stretcher for this,” Sindra whispered. After a moment, she looked at
him in a way that Myron took for interest, and then she nodded.
“There’s a wooden grate on the ground behind 14-B,” he pointed to the domiciles across the commons. “An abandoned maintenance tunnel. The ghosts don’t even know it’s there, but we’ll have to go one at a time.” Myron had grown comfortable with the risk, confident that he had memorized the patrol patterns. He knew how much time he had to get through the grate and get it covered again. Adding an extra, uninitiated person doubled the risk. “Are you sure?”
Her face glowed with anticipation. “Yes.”
Myron glanced at the crowd gathered in the commons, gnawing on rations and swapping stories about another work day on the salvage line. Two ghosts strolled in front of 14-B. “There they go. After they cross, count to thirty, stand up, and walk to the stairs for 14-B. Make sure nobody notices you. Then sneak behind the building.”
Sindra’s eyebrows narrowed as she eyed the commons, an open courtyard bound on four sides by Quad 14’s domiciles, with only one opening where the brick path of the commons joined the main road to the factories.
Myron counted as another ghost emerged from the fourth floor corridor with a clear view of the area behind the building. “If you’re not out of sight by then, you got problems.”
Sindra’s lips tightened into a straight line. “Got it. Where is the grate exactly?”
“Right under where the catcher net starts.” Myron hated the suicide nets that circled the building just above the first floor, put in place for the higher floors. The need for their existence reminded him more of his drudgery than extra shifts on no rations. If there was one crime the Superintendent of Industry harped on in his admonitions more than duty shirking, it was suicide: the ultimate shirk. The selfish, unpatriotic, treasonous act of unilaterally removing a producing slog from the line, was a decision no slog was allowed to make. Sacrifice now, rejoice later. There will be plenty of time for the betterment of life when the war is won.
Myron scooted farther over from Sindra on the bench when he noticed Saul looking their way. Saul stood with his hands behind his back surveying the swill pen the same way the ghosts did, except that Saul was a slog, and lower in seniority than most of the slogs in quad 14. He made everyone’s business his business.
“Saul is as bad as the ghosts,” Myron said under his breath. “So don’t move from this bench if there’s a chance he’s watching you.”
“Wait. What do I do when I get there?”
“Move the grate aside, hop down and slide the grate back over. I’ll go first. That way I’ll be there.”
Myron glanced at Sindra. Her eyes, peculiar and round, the same color as shin pine needles, absorbed their surroundings as if she had seen the swill pen for the first time. That look made him forget all dangers—that he might be being watched—and he leaned over and kissed her, nothing more than a peck, but it surprised them both so much that Myron did not look back for her reaction. Instead, he stood and waited for the ghosts on patrol. When the time came, he made his way for the tunnel.
Chapter 4
Hunkered down in the crawlway of the abandoned tunnel—with only a sliver of light from the grate—reminded Myron of hiding from the orange shirts when they came for him as a kid. Holed up in the potato pantry where it stank of mildew and soil, his knees up against his nose, his mother insisting to the Civil Guards that she had no children. When they discovered her lie, his mom fought them until they buried a vegetable hatchet into her forehead. The blood on the kitchen floor was still fresh in Myron’s mind.
He waited, patiently at first, biting his fingernails, counting the correct number of seconds to time the patrols. As all the things that could go wrong paraded across his mind, he lost count—and his train of thought. Panic settled in. Two patrols had passed and no Sindra.
Above him, boots marched over the grate—the third patrol since he had arrived. A few moments later, he heard another set of softer foot falls.
“Myron,” Sindra whispered from above the grate.
“Down here.” All the tensed muscles in his body relaxed at once. With one hand on the rusted ladder, he wiggled a finger through the grate and slid it aside. “Hurry.”
Sindra hopped into the hole, landing in Myron’s arms. “Saul kept watching me,” she whispered through heavy breaths. “What is this place?” She rubbed her hand along the darkening wall, tapping at a box with red and yellow buttons permanently pressed inward as Myron refitted the tunnel cover overhead.
“My guess, a maintenance tunnel. From the Old Age. Looks like when they salvaged all the useable metal out of it,” Myron said, making a crunching noise, “the whole thing collapsed right in on itself.” He looked ahead into the darkness that concealed a network of twisted crawl spaces and air pockets. “I’ve seen one other grate, one like this one, over by the salvage factory, but I’ve never been able to get close enough to it.”
Myron groped for a hand-crank flashlight similar to what Rolf used during exit procedures, something he had unearthed in an old bunker near the Gorge. He cranked the flashlight a few times, and a yellow beam splashed across the rocks ahead. “Come on.”
They crept through the tunnel, sliding into openings and twisting through sagging chunks of earth and concrete. Myron felt Sindra’s hand on his back, tethered to him all the way, until the gray light of dusk filtered through the lattice on the entry hatch ahead. The opening on the chapel end of the tunnel had a heavier, hinged cover that creaked when Myron swung it open, and they emerged at the foot of a bell tower, long robbed of its bell, standing guard over the ruins of an old chapel.
Tramping through patches of gray snow, Myron led Sindra under a collapsed doorway that opened into the vestibule of a forgotten world. On the south side of the building, a stone wall crumbled beneath the splintered remains of an ornate roof trestle. On the north side was a row of arching windows that would have once diced sunlight into iridescent shards through panes of stained glass. Scant remnants of the windows lived on in glittery patches in the soil, but nothing remained intact to keep the icy wind at bay.
When Sindra first saw the chapel, she twirled, and her smock rose high around her waist. Just seeing her smile made the trip worth the risk for Myron. She continued to explore the chapel with the flashlight as though it were her new home, peering under the pews, checking the view out the windows. She ran her fingers across the carvings on the petrified altar that stood half-buried in needle vine at the front of the sanctuary. With both arms spread like a bird making an unsure landing, she glided from the altar to the front row of seats and sat on the pew. After a glance over her shoulder, a habit every slog in Jonesbridge developed in time, she dug through a fold on the inside of her smock and pulled out a length of pork strap and ripped a hunk off with her teeth.
“Where’d you get that?” Myron’s mouth watered.
“I don’t want to talk about it. If I think about that I’ll lose my appetite. Here, you take the rest.”
Myron wondered how far he would go for extra rations. Some nights, in a fit of delirium, his blood low on sugars, he fantasized about breaking the window out of the commissary and raiding the place, shoveling everything he passed into his open mouth and then getting so sloshed on rot-onion and rye he would forget what he had done. He came close a month ago, after a double shift on reduced rations.
“What happened to your fingers?” Sindra reached for Myron’s burned hand.
He grabbed his hand to hide the burlap strip and fidgeted for a moment before he looked into her eyes and placed the star he had made for her in her hand.
Sindra glanced down at the shape, her eyes, her entire face lifted when she held out the star. She turned it over and ran her finger along the inscription. “What does it say?”
“Sindra’s Star.”
“Old Nickel—she was sort of a mom to the rail-walkers—used to say that stars are anchors for the soul.” She gave him a hug. Myron couldn’t remember the last time he had hugged someone, bodies connecting for a time, as thoug
h her softer parts dulled the edges of his bones.
“Look, Myron,” Sindra fought back tears. “I—I don’t think I can make it in Jonesbridge. We’ve made it this far. Let’s keep going.”
Myron often felt that way when he came to the chapel. Sneaking out of the compound granted a sense of freedom, but the only boundary that mattered, the Great Gorge, dug to keep the enemy at bay, imprisoned the workers of Jonesbridge by surrounding them with an impassable crevasse spanned by only one highly guarded bridge. The Great Gorge began as a natural oxbow lake dug ever deeper and wider—deep enough for midday darkness, or so the legend went—where all of the noxious muck of Jonesbridge drained. “The Gorge,” Myron said with a sigh.
“Okay then, why can’t we just stay out here—on the fringe?”
Myron took Sindra’s hand and turned it over to look at her tattoos. “You’re an Industry slog now, and if you get caught out here, you’re not some rail-walker wild woman anymore. You’re a duty shirker. And a traitor to the Alliance.” Myron thought of Martino floating in the canal, fighting the image of Sindra facedown in green froth. “And there’s nothing to eat. No clean water. No nothing out here.”
Not much would grow in the barren shadows of the mountains, at least nothing edible, but what did grow pricked the feet and shins with spiny outgrowths and thorns. Their branches, except in the case of the shin pines, bore nothing but fingernail-sized brown leaves in the spring, the only thing distinguishing them from the razor wire encircling the commissary roof to keep out would-be thieves. Everything else, old-timers called shin pines, which were really pinyon pines stunted by the toxic soil keeping them from growing much higher than a man’s leg—just tall enough to scrape the shins.
On the other side of the Gorge, the tops of the surrounding hills and mountains had been completely removed, strip-mined all the way to a smooth layer of rocks, making the scrub and briars on the hills in the Jonesbridge valley look like beard stubble on the otherwise smooth face of the countryside.