Feed the Machine (13 page)

But they turned off the path to the cells and headed towards the rich end of town.

Keep your mouth shut.

Hello sat on her shoulder, wings folded close to his body. The voice was telling her not to speak but curiosity was burbling in her belly, trying to force its way out.

“Where are we going?”

“To see your victim.”

“Oh.”

They entered the rich area and walked to a white mansion. It had marble columns next to both sides of the white door, much like Fat Man’s palace.

Sheriff Toll knocked on the door.

A thin servant opened it. He was dressed in an all-white suit.

“Please fetch Ms. Hartigan for me.”

The servant didn’t have time to comply. A pale old woman forced him aside, flapping her hands at him and telling him to move aside.

She stopped at the door and glared at Hello and Silver.

“This is them! That’s the crow that stole my gold!”

Sheriff Toll held out his hand with the ring and cut nugget sitting on his palm. Ms. Hartigan snatched them up.

“What happened to my nugget?”

“I had to cut—”

Sheriff Toll quieted her with a wave of his hand.

“Crows like to pick up shiny things. It was a small malfunction Silver here would like to apologize for.”

He looked down at her.

Say you’re sorry!

“I’m sorry,” Silver mumbled.

“When will they be hung?”

Ms. Hartigan said it like it wasn’t really a question but an expectation.

“We don’t hang children.”

“They
stole
from me. From me! I want action taken! These criminals—”

Sheriff Toll put up his hand and she stopped talking.

“We don’t hang children. It was a mistake and you have your goods back. That is the end of it.”

“It is most certainly not.”

Sheriff Toll turned around and walked away, Silver following close behind him.

“I’ll see her at the end of a rope! I will!”

She kept yelling until they turned the corner and left her street. Then they heard her front door slam shut with a heavy bang.

The Sheriff stopped and knelt down to Silver’s level.

“I know it wasn’t a malfunctioning crow. Don’t steal anything else. No jewels, no gold, nothing. And don’t hide outside Fat Man’s warehouses trying to work out how to break in, okay?”

Silver went to protest but then saw the look on his face. He was angry but also trying to help her.

Yes, very good, you got it!

“Okay,” she said.

“What were you doing with—”

Sheriff Toll stopped and closed his eyes before opening them again as though he’d just awoken. He looked down at Silver, his eyes unfocused.

Leave now!

Silver turned and walked away. Sheriff Toll took a step as though considering whether to grab her but then stopped, swaying in place. He squeezed the bridge of his nose between two fingers. He wiped away a small trickle of blood coming from one nostril.

Then she was around the corner and gone.

Chapter 22

“They do hang children.”

“I know.”

Silver typed code as an image of the hanging slipped into her mind.

Their mother warned them to keep away but she was working hauling buckets and couldn’t stop Silver and Hello creeping out of the house to the gallows. The Nicol family. Father, mother, boy and girl.

Screaming and crying.

Begging.

Four black bags. Four ropes.

Clunk and snap.

The boy was six and the girl five. Thieves. They and their parents were breaking into rich homes.

Sheriff Toll stood there with his grim face and watched it all happen without blinking an eye.

Theft was a death sentence.

Arguably so was
not-theft
if it meant starving to death.

Again, it all came down to numbers. An almost-certain chance of death if you didn’t steal versus the lower chance of being caught. One number was higher than the other and so it directed peoples’ choices and actions.

“Why did he let us go?”

“I don’t know,” Silver said, frantically writing code.

A small gray dot appeared on the screen in the center. It was meant to be silver to designate her but she hadn’t worked out the color values properly. Silver set a search to find the first five gold objects around her.

The hasdee flooded back information and the tablet temperature rose. Yellow dots appeared all around her, overlapping her dot.

She spent another ten minutes working out how to zoom in and out. The first gold was in the hasdee chip itself. She examined it but couldn’t see any gold. The rest of the gold was in broken circuits scattered around the room. Fragments only, too small to see, ultra-thin layers used to make electronics work.

“Thanks for getting the gold for me Hello. Oh, that’s okay Silver. My pleasure.”

Hello sat down in his usual spot and closed his eyes.

Silver ignored him and kept coding. Finding gold was no use if it showed every tiny fleck around.

Time slipped by as she found their last remaining fork and sliced it down, cutting weight away, making it smaller, working out the variables for length, width, volume and shape.

There were still hundreds of variables with no meaning. She guessed they might be color, composition, temperature, circumference, radiation… but who knew? It didn’t matter so long as she could find gold lumps in the Scour.

Silver swam back to the infinite ocean and sent her queries off. The water dropped away and left her standing on the dry dirt. Five lumps of gold appeared, clustered together near Fat Man’s house. They were underground.

No use. They belonged to him and would be under heavy guard.

She excluded Cago, guessing its general size and searched a ten-kilometer strip outside the city. One piece of gold appeared, nine kilometers away.

“That’s all the gold heavier than fifty grams and lighter than five hundred?”

The tablet temperature was barely moving now—the hasdee chip was flooding back the same volume of information but Silver was cutting most of it off.

She searched further out—within fifty kilometers.

Still one piece of gold. The temperature trembled up a degree.

She changed it to five hundred kilometers.

This time the temperature almost hit one hundred before the screen zoomed out and yellow dots appeared all over it. Silver had seen bastardo maps of the Scour before. They all varied as they were made by people who guessed distances wrong but all had the same basic shape. The light in the middle, the Gap, cities scattered around in the enormous circle surrounding it before you hit the edge and the endless nothing.

The yellow dots made a map of the Scour for her.

Maran had only one dot, Tempest had so many they overlapped. There were gaps where she knew there were cities. Obviously they didn’t have any gold nuggets sitting in vaults.

There were only three nuggets outside cities at all. One at nine kilometers from Cago, the other two on the far side of the Gap. The closest one was only fifty-five grams. A long walk into dangerous territory for something so small.

She increased the upper weight limit but all it did was make more gold appear in the cities. If she reduced it too much then a thin haze of dots appeared across the Scour, turning the screen into a solid block of yellow. The temperature ticked up and she had to stop it searching before it overheated and shut down. The dots vanished.

“So much for gold,” Silver said, swiping her fingers on the screen. A colored trail followed them.

“I like gold.”

“I know.”

“You should like gold too. It’s shiny.”

His piece said Hello closed his eyes and appeared to go back to sleep.

Hello had risked his life (and their necks) to steal the samples she needed but it had come to nothing. It appeared gold was rare in the Scour and what there was had already been collected, pooling in the cities, melted into blocks for rich people to keep.

If she could touch a diamond (unlikely) would it show the same thing? Glittering cities and a vast empty Scour?

Silver tapped away at the tablet, idly selecting different variables to create the same map she saw before.

Males older than twenty-two but younger than twenty-four.

Blue dots appeared across the map. The cities were a small blur—most young men were out of the cities digging in the Scour. A cluster of dots in Scab territory.

Thirteen-year-old females.

Green dots this time. Some of the cities didn’t appear. No thirteen-year-old girls living there.

Silver considered making an exact map to sell to bastardos. Knowing the precise distance between cities and boltholes scattered about the place was often the difference between life and death. Don’t carry enough food and water and never make it to the next town. Carry too much and move too slow, risking extra nights in the Scour and attacks by hazels, Scabs and whatever else lived out there.

“No point, not enough money quick enough,” she said, wiping away the map.

She began picking random variables and mapping them. Heartbeats higher than one hundred and ninety beats per minute. A scattering of purple dots appeared across the screen. People working hard… or running for their life. There were two to the north within twenty kilometers.

On impulse Silver checked on the Dorrit family. Bell Dorrit’s variables were still moving around but even further out of alignment now. She needed heal urgently.

Silver wiped Bell away and brought up the map of gold again, staring at it, waiting for some new idea to arrive. There must be some way to use this incredible flow of information.

The screen flickered. Dots began multiplying as the tablet sent a blur of queries to the hasdee chip by itself. Anything eighty-four grams. Things twenty-two point four degrees in temperature. Dots appeared, covering the screen. They were cut away by new instructions. Exclude objects larger than five centimeters wide. Exclude objects colder than five degrees.

Silver watched a message appear, spelled out in dots.

GO HERE NOW

A purple dot appeared, blinking on and off.

Then all the dots vanished except for that one and hers.

Silver tapped the screen but the tablet refused to show anything else. It was locked. She typed code but the tablet was refusing to speak. Eyes closed, fingers in ears, humming a song, not-gonna-talk-don’t-talk-to-me over and over.

The purple dot was just over two kilometers away, northwest of Cago.

“Hello, wake up.”

Chapter 23

Silver crept past the guards at the gate expecting one of them to shout out at any moment to stop her but they didn’t. They ignored her. She was just another kid walking out to scavenge in the Scour. It was midafternoon and she knew she had to move fast if she was to reach the purple dot and get back before the gates closed.

She passed out of the three gates, out of Cago and away into the Scour with no one giving a damn.

Within minutes she was behind the pile and out of sight of home, following a snaking path between two imposing hills of junk. They were always moving, turning over and rolling towards Cago. Every now and then a piece of metal would slip and roll down the junk dune. Sometimes it would cause a small avalanche of metal and rubble as the dune inched its way across the land.

The junk paths were another puzzle in a list of thousands. The dunes moved randomly but there was also an underlying pattern. People had rough maps of the junk and the myriad pathways within. The junk moved like ripples in water, a perfect pattern emanating out from a central dropped stone.

Silver let the thought come and go. When the hasdee chip was working before she could have made a perfect map of the no-junk areas (the paths) if she was careful with her coding. Perhaps if they weren’t so close to Feed she could have sold it to scavengers so they could find their way. Now the hasdee chip was deaf and mute and she was down to two dots. Hers and the purple one.

“Can I fly yet?”

“Does your wing hurt?”

“It’s okay.”

“A little further first.”

Hello nuzzled his head against Silver’s cheek, his feathers tickling her.

She rushed, estimating her walking speed and the distance to the dot. She could stay thirty minutes and make it back before the gates closed.

At the one-kilometer mark she started coughing, a wretched bark ripping her throat raw and making her double over. It passed and soon she was gulping air, feeling as though a metal band had been wrapped around her chest and only now was being released.