Feed the Machine (18 page)

Nola ran, leaving Jarrah standing in the dark watching the silver bug.

As soon as she was out of sight of the Machine the weakness that’d been creeping hit in a collapsing wave. Nola fell in the dirt, scraping her hands and face. She lay there for a moment, dazed, before getting back up and hobbling home.

When she saw the door to their slum she almost ran—she would have if she’d had the energy. She opened the door and slipped inside, closing it behind her.

Jarrah would tell the Sheriff. Or would he? He’d let her go. But Garrick? He’d tell on her. And if Carter woke…

Nola crouched behind the door and then sort of fell down to the floor. She sat there for a long time, weak, trying to breathe, trying to make herself move but she couldn’t.

She heard Silver breathing, her lungs congested but she was asleep and inside for a change. In the next room Dia slept too.

It was a bug nuzzling at her hand that got her moving. It had crept over, lured by the scent of organic matter soaked into her clothes. If she sat there too long they’d eat them right off her body.

She pulled herself up and hobbled over to the hasdee. There was a crack in the roof letting in a streak of light. She saw her clothes were soaked with blood, as was she. Her hands were a mess of blood and dirt.

She stripped off her clothes and fed them to the hasdee. It swallowed them silently. The dim screen advised there was food available. Her mother must have found something extra. She hit the button and six pap cubes dropped out into her hand.

Then she hit the fabric button. The hasdee shuddered and started jerking around, spitting out strips of gray fabric.

She sat down on her bed, naked, and ate her pap. Nola glanced into the second room. Her mother was asleep, her face relaxed, although the deep worry lines were still etched in the skin. Silver was asleep on her pallet, wheezing, her lungs sounding terrible. Her breaths shallow and staccato.

When she finished her pap she quietly crawled over to the hasdee with their tiny cleaning bowl and dripped water into it. She used the gray fabric and soap to wash the blood and dirt off her. When the strip was too dirty to use she dropped it into the hasdee and grabbed a fresh one it had printed out.

She felt a bug nuzzling against her leg. She brought it close to her lips.

“Make me a skirt and top to wear,” she instructed. It scurried off to the hasdee where the fabric was collecting. In the dark she heard the other bugs moving across to help.

The hasdee dripped water into her hands and Nola drank it, still faintly tasting blood and dirt. Then she crept back to her bed and pulled the thin blanket over herself. She had to escape but there was no escape. Char was a day of walking and they’d lock on Feed same as Cago. She’d be absolute zero no matter where she went and the silver bugs in the Char Machine would rip her apart all the same.

Unless Ash came back with something amazing, the entire family was going absolute zero. If that happened, Dia would make a deal with Fat Man to join his family. He’d pay off the debt but then they’d be his slaves forever. They’d be alive but what sort of life was that?

She tried to calm her breathing. In and out, relax. But when she closed her eyes the violence and blood was all she could see. Between her legs hurt from Danton’s fingers. Her arm was throbbing where Carter had held her.

Danton lunging towards her, his neck splitting open like an overripe fruit, hot blood pouring down her hand and splashing on her face.

Sleep slipped and pulled at her, dragging her down into blackness. Danton lunging disappeared. Another glimmer replaced it.

The knife. The handle engraved with
Wire Pub
. Stuck in Danton’s heart.

Chapter 28

“Where did you get it?”

“I didn’t steal it.”

“I didn’t say you stole it. I asked you where you got it.”

Silver closed her mouth and kept tapping on the tablet screen.

Nola sighed and resisted the urge to toss it in the hasdee like she’d done with the bug and cage.

Despite the horror of yesterday, the blood, the running, the fear, Nola had slept all night and past lunch like it was any other day. She’d awoken groggy, knowing all the terrible things that had happened but standing back from them, too tired to feel them completely.

The bugs had stitched the fabric together into a skirt and top overnight. She’d awoken, eaten a few pap cubes, saw her nails were rimmed with dried blood. She spent half an hour scraping the dried blood and dirt away, dropping the fragments into the hasdee and then wearing away the small piece of soap to eliminate the evidence.

She’d cleaned herself and dressed, slipping the new clothes on. They were a little tight but they’d stretch out. The entire time Silver had been working at her table, sometimes coughing, lost in her obsessed world. Hello was sitting with his wings folded and eyes closed.

It was only when she was somewhat clean, fed and dressed that the low-level fear sloshed over her. She had to take the bugs out, get them fed so they’d have pap later. But she couldn’t. The Sheriff and his deputies might be looking for her. Or worse, Fat Man. It was a truly dumb fear—they’d know where she lived. Cago wasn’t that big. If they wanted to get her, it was easy.

Before it could overwhelm her, she walked over to Silver to see what she was working on. She’d somehow acquired a small glass-screen electronic tablet. It was hooked to wires, the keyboard and a small battery. The cracked screen was covered in moving green dots.

Nola watched the green dots moving around. That was all it showed—a mass of green dots, some moving, others still.

“When I was talking to that bug yesterday it told me it could see the other bugs. That’s what I was doing before you threw it away,” Silver said, typing on her keyboard.

“I threw it away because the Sheriff has a rope with your name on it if you steal one of Fat Man’s bugs again.”

“How did he put my name on it?”

Nola didn’t bother answering. Silver typed in some more code. The screen flickered and some of the dots changed to red. There were a bunch of them near the top and a lone dot far down the bottom.

“What did you do?”

“These are the dots that aren’t moving at all.”

Silver swiped her fingers on the tablet, zooming in on two green dots sitting almost atop one another.

“Walk over there.”

Nola stepped across the room and watched one of the green dots move. Then Silver stood and walked over to her. The two green dots moved together.

“Holy fucking shit,” Nola said. “The fucking dots are us! People.”

Silver returned to the table and typed more code in. Their two green dots turned blue. Then the screen flickered and zoomed out.

“The dots are collars I think. Dead people don’t move. So there are some up there and one down there.”

Nola leaned on the table and looked at the screen again. There was nothing but dots but it wasn’t hard to work out. The top of the screen was Fat Man’s end of town. The mass of red dots must be collars. There were so many the dots overlaid each other into a bubbly mass. She touched her own collar. There must be something in it sending a signal.

On the right side were lines of green dots, equally spaced in unnatural straight lines. Fat Man’s mines where his slave family worked.

She looked at the lone dot at the bottom.

“So that’s a collar sitting out in the pile. How far is that?”

Silver looked at her and sniffed, her nose sounding blocked.

“Not far outside the fence. Can I come?”

“How are you feeling?”

“I’m good,” she said and then started coughing hard. Nola gave her the last of the water the hasdee had to spare. Silver stopped coughing, sipping it down. Hello woke and began stepping amongst the circuitry and wires, touching anything shiny with his foot.

“Are we going out?” he asked.

“No flying until we’re outside the fence,” Nola warned.

Hello looked at her with his black eyes and then fluttered his feathers.

“Not the boss of me,” he mumbled.

“Yes, we’re going outside,” Silver said.

Nola called the bugs to her and stuffed them in a bag that she connected to the belt of her skirt. She picked up a small and very worn pack, checked it for holes and put it on. She didn’t have a cutter—they’d have to dig the old-fashioned way with their hands.

Silver wrapped herself in hasdee strips to cover her skin. She was the palest of the three siblings and burned easily.

They left home, Nola leading the way to the gate, Silver carrying the tablet. She avoided the path between the Wire Pub and the Machine. Dia would be carting shit back and forth there all day and she’d kill Nola if she found out she’d taken Silver into the Scour. She didn’t want to be seen by anyone either. The Sheriff and his deputies would be out in force today walking around to show their strength.

They cut behind buildings and down alleys until they reached the gate. Silver kept up, sometimes sneezing, wiping her nose on the back on her hand. Hello sat on her shoulder, wings tucked close to his body and looked around with his shiny black eyes.

Although the day was hot, a coldness came over her as they passed out the gate and walked into the Scour. She hadn’t been outside Cago in six months and only then to get the bugs fed. Inside the gate it was safe but restricted, bound in by high fences and lights. Outside the gate was dangerous—but no more free. In one direction was the Gap and death and in the other was the edge… and death.

Once they were out of sight of the gate, Hello took off, stretching his wings and flying into the sky, circling over them. There must have been a breeze there that hadn’t reached the ground. Nola looked up to see him turn into the wind, rising high. She’d had a pet once, a bird too. Traded her away for food and medicine. A dull pain burst and quickly faded.

“We’re getting closer,” Silver said, looking at the tablet.

The immediate area outside Cago was clear—the bugs made sure of that—and the pile started beyond the ring of dust. It was concrete rubble with a few bits of iron sticking out.

They reached a low hill of junk, still within sight of Cago. Nola slipped the tablet into her pack and climbed, helping Silver up behind her.

Most of the material here had smooth edges, eaten down by bugs collecting materials. But there was always more junk—it was forever moving inwards, churning over like a slow-moving wave.

They crested the hill and climbed down the depression on the other side. Once they reached the bottom, Nola checked the tablet. Their dots were on top of the other one.

“This is it,” Silver said, looking down at the ground.

Nola passed the tablet to Silver and started lifting junk, careful not to dislodge too much of it. It was light metal and concrete rubble in this area. Anything good had long ago been picked clean. Silver sat down on a piece of concrete and swung her legs. High above, Hello sailed the air currents.

Nola dug, pulling up pieces of aluminum, rusted iron, a sliver of laminated wood that somehow the bugs had missed. She lifted a sheet of metal and caught the smell of something rotten.

“You might want to look away. There’s a dead body under here.”

“I’m okay,” Silver replied.

Nola pulled back the metal sheet, holding her breath.

A man, dried and desiccated. His skin was brown like leather. He was grinning, his skin pulled back from his teeth. Every drop of water had been sucked out of him. Nola finally breathed. There wasn’t much smell. He’d been preserved by the heat, drying out. There was dried blood on his chest and a hole ripped through his clothes. Nola pulled at his shirt. It stuck to his body before tearing away. Something had pierced a hole through his lung and out.

Probably Scabs, although it was unusual for them to leave behind the silver collar that sat around his shrunken neck. They always took those if they could.

She had no idea who the dead man was.

Nola picked up a long sharp piece of metal and tested the weight of it.

“Look away now,” she told Silver.

“I’m okay.”

“Don’t blame me if you get nightmares.”

She took the metal and pressed the tip of it against the corpse’s neck above the collar. Then she pushed down. The skin cracked, like it had hardened into thin wood, and the piece of metal slid through. The head lolled to the side as the spine gave way, the dry bones separating.

Nola poked and prodded a few more times, the dry skin cracking and tearing away until the body was decapitated. She tried to use the metal to slide the collar off but it was stuck. She grabbed it with her hands, twisting it. The collar held for a moment, the body moving too and gave way. She slipped the collar off and stood. It had black dried blood stuck on the inside edge.

“Time to collect our reward,” Silver said, clapping her hands together. Then she sneezed.

Nola slipped the collar into her pack, wishing she had water to wash her hands. She felt like she had death all over her.

“One more thing.”