B00DW1DUQA EBOK (28 page)

It was as much as he dared say.

‘That’s why we’re here,’ she said. ‘To make sure everything does.’

He nodded, even though she couldn’t see him. He thought about her words, wondering what, if anything, he should read into them. She was only saying what any master would say, that their job was essential to Engn. On the other hand, she was acknowledging the machinery was vulnerable if a flaw was introduced. Was she sounding him out, perhaps? Or just showing her allegiance to Engn? He couldn’t decide. He was still pondering when she stopped at another low door, the code ZA-1211 painted next to it in fading letters.

‘This way,’ she said.

She heaved the door open. A blast of hot air hit Finn on the face as he followed Ciara inside. A line of towering metal constructions, eight or ten of them, tall as trees, bulky as buildings, dominated the room they had entered. Fearsome heat slammed out from them: far hotter, even, than his father’s forge back home. This heat felt like a solid wall crashing into him. He didn’t want to go anywhere near them. The air was thick and hot, more like a liquid as he laboured to breathe it.

They walked down the centre of the room, the raging furnaces on either side. Workers swathed in thick, reinforced clothing and iron masks operated each furnace, tapping gauges, turning wheels. Finn watched as one heaved open a small hatchway, revealing the roaring, vivid red of the fire inside, too bright to look at directly. Finn looked away, feeling his eyes prickle from the intense heat.

A metal platform ran around the edges of the room, past the gaping hoppers on the top of each furnace. Finn watched as a swathed figure up there pushed along a heavy trolley on little wheels. The figure stopped at one of the furnaces, docked the trolley into some sort of mechanism and, with the turn of a spoked wheel, tipped the contents into the furnace.

At the far end of the room, Finn could see a doorway, guarded by an Ironclad. Another trolley was being pushed through and onto the high walkway. Finn knew, then, what must be in the trolleys. There would be four every hour on average. Five-hundred and seventy-six valves, each carefully constructed by someone sitting at that vast table down at the other end of the tunnel. He was nearly back at the Valve Hall. Just through there, maybe even in sight if he looked, would be Tanner and Graves and all the rest of them.

He had the perverse urge to run past the guard and back into that familiar room. Into his old life.

‘What’s wrong with you, Finn?’

Ciara had to shout to make herself heard over the furnaces, roaring in competition with each other. He had stopped and was staring up at the next trolley being pushed towards one of the hoppers.

‘The valves,’ he shouted back to her. ‘It’s just, I used to make them. Look what they do with them!’

Down at ground level, a worker pulled a lever that sent a river of blinding red metal spitting down a channel and into a mould. A set of twelve identical casts, each about the size of a heart.

‘Those are the pieces,’ Finn continued. ‘Don’t you see? They melt them down and make new parts so the people in the other room can construct more valves. Over and over again.’

‘You had no idea?’ She had to shout to him, her mouth close to his ear.

He shook his head. ‘I had no idea. I mean I worked out the valves were useless but I never imagined this.’

She looked at him for a moment. She looked as if she was calculating some tricky sum in her head.

‘Come on, we need to deliver these blueprints,’ she said. She strode off towards a waiting master in another scarlet robe.

Back in the hush of the tunnel, Finn leaned against the cold wall, breathing deeply, while Ciara locked the doorway shut. The skin on his face felt dried and cracked, like dead old paper.

‘What did you think they did with the valves?’ she asked as she turned to look at him.

Finn, exhausted by the heat of the Foundry, sank down on the floor. Ciara looked as though she was about to tell him off, hurry him along back to the Vault, but she said nothing. Instead she shook out her hair and retied the strip of cloth that held it back out of her eyes. Her face was flushed red.

Finn shrugged. ‘There was a man who left the day I arrived. I took his seat. He’d worked there for forty years making the valves. It was his whole life. And all for nothing.’

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘But why? It makes no sense.’

She shrugged. ‘It’s the way things are.’

‘It’s like they’re testing people for some reason.’

‘Yes,’ she said again.

She didn’t sound quite as cross with him as normal. Perhaps she was just tired. She held out a hand to haul him back up to his feet.

‘You think they’re trying to find out who would make a good master?’ he asked. ‘Or who is really a wrecker?’

She paused before she replied. She didn’t look at him. ‘Could be either of those.’

Finn spoke before he had chance to stop himself. ‘Because I think it’s both. I think they’re looking for people who can work it out, but also for those carrying out deliberate acts of sabotage. For wreckers. I nearly did that myself. But it’s too obvious, isn’t it? Too easy. You’ve got to be cleverer than that to really have a chance to destroy Engn, haven’t you?’

She looked at him sharply. He knew immediately from her face that he’d made a terrible mistake.

Ciara stared at Finn, looking as if she was going to reply. But instead she took her lamp, wound it furiously, then marched away down the stone tunnel.

‘We need to get back,’ she called over her shoulder.

After a moment, Finn raced after her. ‘Ciara, what is it? I’m sorry.’

She didn’t reply. Instead she hurried on ahead of him.

‘Ciara, I don’t understand,’ said Finn. ‘Look, there’s no-one else down here. You can tell me.’

‘Oh, you’d love that wouldn’t you?’

She turned abruptly so that he almost ran into her. The light cast her features into eerie shadows, making them shift and flicker, as if her whole face was warping and writhing.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Finn.

‘Was that the plan, you and the masters? Befriend us all, check us out, try and get us to admit we belong to the wreckers, that we’re plotting some terrible crime?’

‘No!’

‘And in return, what? You get to be made a master too? Is that how it works? One ring for each wrecker you name?’

‘Ciara, I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Course, you don’t even need any proof. You just say someone’s guilty and that’s it, they’re never seen again. It doesn’t even matter what I say does it? How much I deny being one of them.’

She turned and set off again, back towards the Hub. Finn, angry now, grabbed her by the shoulder, making her stop. ‘Ciara, I am not working for the masters. I’m a wrecker too. I promise I am. I hate this place.’

‘And you would say that, wouldn’t you?’

‘It’s the truth.’

‘Then you’re going to be in big trouble when I tell them all about this conversation.’

‘You can’t,’ said Finn.

‘Oh, I think I can. Because if I don’t, I’m just admitting my supposed crimes, aren’t I?’

‘But I want to help. Changing the blueprints could be our only hope to break the machine.’

Once again she was about to say something stopped herself. That
was
the plan, he could see it in her expression. But she couldn’t admit to it without trusting him completely. And she obviously didn’t.

‘Ciara, please,’ he said.

‘I’m not stupid, you know Finn. Arriving in the middle of the night like that and all of a sudden that Master’s looking after you, getting you a new number. Do you think it isn’t obvious what’s going on? That you’re their little spy?’

‘It isn’t like that. I mean, yes, I knew Connor before. But he’s not like the others. He’s one of us, I swear. We’re working together. He arranged things so I could come here, but only to meet you. So I could help.’

He regretted his words immediately. He only suspected she was a wrecker. If she was really working for the masters, for Engn, he had just condemned Connor.

‘Is that right?’ said Ciara.

He thought about retracting his words. Perhaps he could pretend he was just trying to lure Ciara out into the open with wild claims. But what would he do then? Just go back to how he was? He’d be stuck in limbo again, perhaps for good.

‘Listen, you mustn’t tell anyone I said that,’ said Finn. ‘It’s a secret agreement. Only three people in the whole world know about it and the other one isn’t even in Engn.’

Her eyes narrowed as she looked at him. ‘And what makes you think you can trust me?’

Finn shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I just thought, if I didn’t say something I’d end up staying here for ever, wondering who my friends and who my enemies really are. Perhaps you are working for the masters and perhaps they’ll set the Ironclads on me when I get back. But at least I’ll have tried.’

She went very quiet. The purple light faded to an inky blackness. She didn’t wind the torch back up.

‘We should get back,’ she said after a while.

‘What are you going to do? What are you going to say?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Then you do believe me.’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘But if you were working for them you would report all this to them immediately.’

‘Perhaps I’m stringing you along, to see who else is part of the conspiracy.’

‘Look,’ said Finn. ‘I’ll prove it to you, OK? I’ll prove I’m a wrecker. Then you’ll have to believe me.’

‘And how will you do that?’

‘I don’t know. Destroy some of the machinery. Change a blueprint so that something breaks or explodes.’

‘And then when they find out I’m responsible for checking your work, I get the blame. Is that it?’

‘No.’

‘Come on. I’m leaving.’

She wound the brass handle on the light again, flooding them in the harsh purple light. She set off, pulling herself away from him. Neither spoke again until they reached the Vault. He watched her warily as they strode past the tables, expecting her to go up to one of the masters and tell them everything. Instead she made her away to the side room where she and the other women slept, not even looking back at him.

Finn worked diligently for the next few days, saying little or nothing to anyone. He exchanged a few words with Aelth, but only ever about some detail of the blueprints. No masters, no Ironclads came for either of them. Ciara and Aelth continued to exchange meaningful glances every now and then. Once he caught Aelth watching him, his pen in his mouth, scowling. Maeve and the others behaved as they always had, getting on with their work, not talking.

The question was, how could he convince Ciara and Aelth they could trust him? The puzzle occupied his days and nights. He turned it over and over in his mind as he copied out the plans by day and as he lay on his low wooden bed at night. Ciara was right: she would be held responsible if he introduced a deliberate mistake. Yet if he didn’t do something they would never accept him. The best he could hope for then would be for their scheme to work. But as far as he could tell they didn’t have one of the masters on their side. It might be years before they were ready. And by then they might have convinced themselves they didn’t need to try.

It came to him a week later what he should do. He was returning one of the volumes of blueprints to its slot half-way up one of the towering metal bookcases. As Aelth had shown him, he waited for the shuttle to return so he could dial in his new code. He gazed around the room for a moment.

The workers were all huddled over the great tables, concentrating on their blueprints, paying him no attention. Up above them, strung between the bookcases, was the mesh of cables from which the array of naphtha lamps hung. There were pipes, too, running along and down some of the cables to feed the liquid fuel to the lights.

Finn was thinking back on Aelth’s words, about the dangers of overloading the shuttles. He wondered what would happen if you tried. Would the mechanism just break? Or would it explode? Perhaps the shuttle would shoot out of its mounting. The mesh of cables supporting the lamps would probably stop the machine flying too far, but it would do some damage to the lights, the pipes, everything.

It was suddenly obvious what he had to do. It was so simple. Simple and safe. He knew, he was sure he knew, what Connor’s plan was. What it was he, Finn, had been brought here to do. He didn’t need to join the other wreckers; he could do it all himself. Connor couldn’t tell him, of course, that would be too dangerous for him. He had just waited for Finn to work it out. He stood there for long moments, heart beating, face flushed, while he thought about it. It was only when Maeve, standing behind him for her turn on the shuttle, tapped him on the shoulder that he realised the book-engine was sitting waiting for him.

‘Are you just going to stand there?’ said Maeve. ‘Or are you going to do something?’

‘Sorry, sorry,’ said Finn, and dialled in his number.

He waited a week, refining his plans in his mind. He’d only get once chance; he had to get it right. That night, the working day over, he pretended to go to sleep like everyone else. Instead, he stayed awake, eyes closed, stomach churning with dread at what he was about to do. He slipped in and out of a half-sleep from time to time. Confused dreams came to him. Shireen, still looking as she had on that long-ago day in the clearing, spoke to him in urgent tones, but he couldn’t understand what she was trying to say. She looked worried about him. Her words were just becoming clear when a blaring horn in the distance made Finn jerk awake with a gasp.

He sat up in bed, looking around, listening. He could hear only the gentle breathing of those around him and, beyond that, the hiss of the naphtha lamps in the Vault. When things were busy, people worked at all hours, like in the Valve Hall. Three shifts of twelve hours. But it was quieter just now, and the night shift wasn’t running. No-one was allowed into the book halls. Which made it the perfect opportunity.

He stood up and dressed as silently as he could. His heart thudded; it seemed incredible that no-one else could hear it. He ran through his plan one more time. If it worked, it would all be over. This would be the end of Engn. It might even be his last day here. The prospect was alarming and delicious at the same time.