Feed the Machine (27 page)

“There’s no one there. The building has a hole in the roof and the light comes in. No one is coming back here either,” Kin said, seeing Ash peering through the crack in the floor.

Then he walked over to Ash and rubbed his head against him.

“Hey buddy,” Ash whispered, scratching around Kin’s ears and under his chin. Kin purred and closed his eyes. Soon he was dribbling.

Between the days of hard labor and his full belly, Ash was ready to sleep. As he rubbed Kin’s ears and pressed his face against his fur, a deep relaxation came over him.

“How are you going?” Ash murmured.

“We have most of the materials Silver needs,” Kin said, his voice distorted by purring.

Ash sat up and stopped stroking Kin’s fur.

“What?”

Kin stepped off his lap and sat on the ragged carpet. He licked his shoulder before answering.

“I have been going outside the fence at night with my assistant Hello to collect material.”

“But… how?”

Kin stopped grooming himself and looked at Ash like he was slow.

“He’s a bird so he can fly over the fence. If any hazels come, I stay in the pile.”

“That is so dangerous.”

“For humans maybe.”

Kin resumed his grooming. Ash rubbed his face with his now-cold hands and tried to wake himself. He hadn’t managed to collect anything for Silver. There were too many guards, too many eyes watching. He had heard hints that things could be smuggled in and out but had no idea who was doing it.

“We need gold. A small nugget would be perfect. Jewelry if you can’t steal that.”

“There is no gold in the pile in any large amounts. Some in the broken circuits but there is no way to steal them without being seen.”

“Forget the pile. There is no gold there. You need to steal gold from Fat Man. Nuggets or jewelry.”

“How do you know there’s no gold in the pile?”

“Silver did a search before the tablet broke. Fat Man has it all now.”

Ash frowned and looked at his callused hands in the gloom. Silver had told him the tablet showed all the gold but failed to mention there was hardly any out there. What if it was the same for anything else valuable? He’d agreed to the plan of revealing all the collars Fat Man had locked away but he’d wanted to be rich and free before he did that. Use the tablet to send Raj off to find valuables, get him to buy them out of debt. Find more gold, platinum, maybe even sourcecubes. Get filthy rich and take down Fat Man.

He’d been blinded by dreams of gold and food and had accepted Silver’s brief explanation of what the tablet was and how it worked. She told him the hasdee chip seemed to know about everything and so she asked it questions. Nola verified it worked and he accepted his little sister was some sort of genius.

Who told him lies of omission.

He let go of that for the moment. Silver didn’t communicate much at all and if you asked her a question she’d often give you a very literal answer or none at all. In her mind she told him the truth: it can find all the gold out there. The next part about it all belonging to Fat Man wouldn’t have occurred to her.

“I don’t know how to steal gold. Some of the higher guards wear jewelry so maybe…”

He trailed off. So maybe what? Go on a theft spree that was likely to go bad?

“You need to think of something. There isn’t much time left.”

“What do you mean? We have all the time in the world now. It might suck to take months to find the holes to smuggle things out but we can afford the time.”

“Before Nola snaps and kills someone? Before one of the mines collapses with you in it?”

Kin resumed grooming, licking the same shoulder he’d already cleaned. Nola was definitely a worry and Fat Man’s mines had collapsed in the past but there was something else going on. Kin was lying.

“How much time do you think we have?”

“A week perhaps,” Kin said a little too glibly.

“That’s a very specific timeframe.”

“Hello has been watching Nola. She was cursing yesterday when she left the Golden Door. That’s a bad sign.”

“Are you lying to me?”

“Me? Lie?” Kin put on his best shocked face.

“That’s not an answer.”

“You’re not an answer.”

They sat there in silence a moment before Kin walked over and pushed his head against Ash’s hand. He relented and stroked down Kin’s back.

“Can you be a guard? They walk around.”

“Maybe.”

Ash’s mind drifted away from now as Kin crawled into his lap purring. Emi had said she’d worked in the Scour and before that she was a sorter. Now she worked at the Golden Door. So it was possible for slaves to change what they did. He hadn’t really thought about it but there must be some way to become a guard. But how?

Kin purred and snuggled into Ash but the relaxation from earlier didn’t return. He had a plan forming but it wasn’t a good one. It had a chance of working but an innocent person would be hurt.

The question was: how much bad can do you in the pursuit of eventual good?

Was toppling Fat Man worth an innocent possibly dying?

Chapter 44

Silver

She wished she had her cracking tool she’d invented but knew better than to return home to collect it. It was hidden in the special hiding place along with the tablet, the hasdee and the cube she’d found underground. Fat Man used bugs to spy on people and she was sure one was spying on her.

Maybe she should build another one, pretend she’d invented it now?

She looked at the shockstick on her bench and decided to use the vise like Michael and Ed had.

Silver glanced over at their tables and saw they already had the casing open. They’d damaged some of the internal circuitry when they broke them apart.

Ed was tracing wires, holding them with a tiny pair of tweezers and following their patterns. He was fifteen although he looked older. He sometimes stuttered but only when he wasn’t talking about their work. When it was work he was like the hasdee: a torrent of information that leapt all over the place.

Michael was working on cutting the casing off without breaking any more circuits. He was old, maybe thirty but he acted like Ed, making snorting noises to make them laugh and telling jokes about electrical resistance that were funny.

Silver had been put in a general repair pool of people but as soon as they saw her work they moved her away to a building set far back in Fat Man’s compound. Their room was a room
inside
another larger room.

That’s where she’d met Ed and Michael and been given a thousand toys to play with.

She’d also met Miss Honey.

She was short and round and very pale with blond hair and laughed a lot. She gave them new projects, sometimes more than one a day and she talked with them about what they’d discovered.

She was the one who brought the shocksticks in this morning and explained what they were. She sat at her desk and always had a smile for them if they looked at her.

She’s a poisonous liar.

Silver ignored the voice and wandered over to Michael’s table. He’d managed to remove most of the shockstick internals and was using a fine cotton thread tied to a metal stand to keep them suspended so he could examine them. Silver saw the internal circuitry was bonded with the inner casing, wrapping around three-quarters of it. There was a small gap aligned with the recessed button that turned it on.

If she could cut a hole in the empty spot and use a light gas solvent, maybe she could detach the circuit from the casing.

She’s planning on killing you. Take something sharp and stick it in her throat.

Silver returned to her workbench and picked up her fine cutter. She turned it on and adjusted the beam to minimum thickness. Behind her she heard Michael snort.

Good, now kill her with it.

“I’m cutting this open, not doing anything else,” she murmured.

Kill her and escape! Something bad is going to happen!

Silver didn’t doubt it. Although the voice refused to specify what the bad thing was, her mind had returned to the countdown she’d discovered. Hefnan had been torn to pieces by bugs and now there was a giant box of bugs sitting by the Machine. Their ancestors had made the Machine to provide for all and to ensure everyone contributed but why would it not print a much-needed new generator and water pump?

People were worried but none of them knew about the countdown. They’d covered the box with a large canvas and kept it under guard and generally returned to their lives of scrounging to feed the Machine. It was a mystery—like the glow over the horizon. They talked about it sometimes but largely ignored it.

Where did these come from? They look new.

The voice was temporarily distracted from murder as Silver drew the cutter down the handle of the shockstick.

“They
are
new,” she said.

Behind her Michael snorted and she heard Ed laugh. Sometimes when he snorted he’d say
wheee
after it. Snort-wheee! Snort-wheee!

Yesterday the guards in the mess hall had given a demonstration of the shocksticks. They had hauled a random man from the table and shocked him. He’d fallen to the ground shaking, his jaws clenched, grinning as all his muscles tightened at once. It was ten minutes before he could move again.

Normally the guards carried heavy clubs. Now they had all been replaced with the shocksticks. In the last two days the guards had taken to shocking people at random and laughing about it.

They must be using the junkcube to produce more sourcecubes. One of them was shocksticks.

Silver cut a tiny hole and worked the tip of a tool inside it. Then she used a metal stand and a clamp to hold the tool in place. When she cut through she didn’t want the handle piece falling inside.

A moment more and she had the piece removed and the guts of it exposed. Next she put on a breathing mask and squirted a small amount of gas solvent into the casing. She waited a few minutes and then probed the edge of the circuit with a tool. It lifted from the casing, the glue that held it weakening and becoming liquid. Silver used more solvent, waited five minutes and removed the casing with her cutter.

By the time she was finished Ed and Michael were gathered at her table looking at the exposed circuitry.

“Powerful battery good for ten thousand shocks,” Ed said.

“Grip grip grip activated so the one holding it doesn’t get shocked,” Michael added.

“You can make it stronger so it kills,” Silver said, pointing at an inhibitor circuit.

Don’t tell them that! Turn this one up to kill and use it on Miss Honey!

“You can make it stronger so it kills!” Ed called out to Miss Honey. She smiled at him and stood up at her desk.

Two nights ago Hello had fluttered down out of the dark when she was walking to the showers and told her he and Kin had managed to collect most of the materials needed to build the cutter compass. Now they needed gold. Silver was sure she could request gold from Miss Honey and tell a lie about why she needed it but it would be Ed and Michael who’d ruin it all. Both of them shouted out things to her all the time. She was sure Michael was in love with Miss Honey. If Silver said she needed to make gold wire then Ed and Michael would be loudly asking questions about it.

“What have you found dear?”

Miss Honey touched Silver on the neck. Her fingers were cool. They felt nice.

Don’t tell her a damn thing.

“That’s an inhibitor. We can disable it. These will be able to kill.”

“Can you do it without pulling them to pieces?”

“She can, she can!” Ed, getting too excited. Michael had returned to his bench to work on the inhibitor circuit. If he could fix it quicker than Silver then Miss Honey would be happy with him.

Silver looked at Michael frantically working and then at Ed, his mouth hanging open and eyes twitching. She wanted to show them the hasdee chip and the tablet. They would be the only ones who could swim in the information like she did. But not if they were dead.

It will only hurt him a little.

“Miss Honey, I need eighty grams of gold to make wire.”

“Why do you need that? Why?” Ed again.

“You wouldn’t understand. You’re not clever enough.”

The corners of Ed’s mouth turned down, his forehead wrinkled and he started crying. He ran back to his table.

He’s upset.

Miss Honey watched him go, her face smooth. Then she turned back to Silver.

“Do you need the gold wire to modify the shocksticks?”

“I need to make a special tool to disable the inhibitor. The gold ensures I don’t accidentally murder myself.”

“We wouldn’t want that now, would we? I’ll get you the gold tomorrow.”

She touched Silver on the arm and then walked over to deal with Ed. He was sobbing into the table, his face and neck bright red.