36. The Factory Ruins (Patreon)

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The mob is an octopus, pulling people from their houses. Its shape billows and compresses as people stream in and out. Hallon is forced to go around as its appendages decide where to go and what to do. The air smells of acrid smoke, sulfur and iron, of burning meat.  This is more than a riot, she thinks. It’s an uprising. But how it’s connected to the Calamity, she doesn’t know. The only way to find out is to ask Eratosthenes, and that means tracking down Milo.

Five masked people pop out of an alley. Each holds a rifle. The fifth carries a rocket tube on their back. They take their bearings and run east. Hallon hesitates before moving on. If the Silent are fighting out in the open, the streets are likely to become too dangerous to travel. The rooftops may be safer.

She heads for an open door. The building’s entry leads into a corridor lined with doors and a ramp leading up. A young girl on the second floor squeaks at Hallon’s passing, but no one else is around. She follows the ramps up seven floors to the rooftop where the view takes her breath away.

The source of the fighting she’d heard in the distance suddenly becomes evident. Red flares mingle with gray and black smoke. There’s the telltale rat tat tat of machine guns, the thud and shake of explosions, and voices raised in fear and anger. Above it all, five armored dirigibles hover over No Town. Their gun ports open and spark, as the bullets sizzle through the air.

A candle lights from a nearby rooftop, and a rocket punches through the nearest dirigible’s armor. An airman and his rifle come loose, falling to disappear among the buildings. The dirigible’s guns focus on the source of the rocket and chew up the stone. It flashes its signal lights, and the message is carried down the line. The other airships turn their attention to the rooftops too, and Hallon runs for the door before she’s spotted. She’ll have to risk the streets after all. The girl on the second floor is still there, still surprised to see Hallon run past.

Back on the street, Hallon picks out a pain-staking path through the fighting. She skirts the No Town market. Even at a distance, she hears the growl of a great many people occupying the plaza. Two streets further on, moving from cover to cover, she detours around a group of Silent organizing themselves in an alley. Another fighter joins their squad, having come up through a grate in the ground. They communicate through hand talk before closing the grate and moving on.

Hallon kicks herself for not taking the time to learn more about the passages under the city. She promises to remedy that later—if there is a later—but for now she sticks to the streets, while all around her No Town goes mad.

###

An Army camp squats on the ruins of Groud’s Factory and Metalworks, surrounded on all sides by a shifting, murmuring crowd of Gloop. The soldiers use what’s left of the walls for cover. They have enough firepower to decimate the Gloop, but not before the Gloop can overrun the walls and tear the soldiers apart. The two sides eye each other warily.

Hallon watches from a kitchen window on the fourth floor of a building nearby. Glass shards and rock dust cover the room’s surfaces. A mural of Sacket is painted on one of the walls, his face dotted with debris. Fortunately, there’s no blood anywhere. The apartment’s residents must’ve been elsewhere when the factory was bombed.

An hour passes, but the situation doesn’t change. Neither side appears to want a confrontation, but they can’t leave each other alone. There are interactions at the boundary between them, but it’s too hard to see at this distance. Hallon will need to get closer to find out what’s going on; to get a better look at the factory grounds and learn what’s happened to Milo. She decides to risk it. There’s a laundry basket by the door, and she finds a sky-blue scarf among the clothes. It smells of someone else’s sweat, but the color is pleasing. She wraps it around her head to hide the fact that she’s not tattooed.

The adjacent buildings have Silent guards at the doors and snipers in the windows. A squad of their fighters carries a machine gun and ammunition to their comrades inside. Hallon’s hackles rise as she passes into view of the guns, but nothing happens. Her disguise is good enough.

An enterprising young man works the edges of the crowd to hawk skewers of grilled goat meat. He offers one to Hallon, but she refuses. It doesn’t smell like goat. He moves on to look for other customers, paying no mind to the guns on either side of the standoff.

Hallon takes a steadying breath before plunging into the crowd. She looks for gaps, slides between people, and wedges her way deeper in. The crowd shifts, and she lets the flow take her, anchoring a foot in order to pivot towards the barricade. She gets close enough to see the fear in the soldiers’ eyes. Their guns are at the ready, their fingers on the triggers. If they fire now, there’s no way for Hallon to dodge or hide. The crowd is thick around her, smelling of smoke and unwashed bodies.

Beyond the barricade, soldiers dig through the rubble. Two rows of bodies are laid out in the open. In one line are the Untainted, in the other Gloop. The bodies are ugly and disfigured by the explosion, but none appear to have Milo’s shape.

The soldiers pull another body from the factory ruins. There’s a flash of green on the man’s forehead, and he’s laid down with the other Gloop. Someone in the crowd must recognize him—she wails. The woman doesn’t do anything except weep. That’s what the crowd is doing, Hallon realizes. They’re waiting to see if there are loved ones among the dead.

The Gloop wait patiently. When the sun goes down, they start fires in metal barrels for light and warmth. The soldiers use electric lights and keep working.

There’s a fuss in the camp when the soldiers find some machinery. They take the broken metal parts to a closed tent. A dirigible arrives soon after, and the crowd tenses in fear, but the gun ports stay closed. The tension eases, but only a little, replaced by the feeling of endless waiting. Of holding one’s breath in anticipation and fear of what might happen next.

Hallon’s feet ache. She’s thirsty and hungry—even the not-goat skewers are tempting—but she doesn’t leave, doesn’t want to give up her spot in the crowd. Milo’s in the factory ruins. Maybe.

Another body is recovered. A soldier carries it through pools of light and dark to lay her down with the Gloop. People ask who it is, but there’s no way to make out her features. Two soldiers confer. One shakes his head, but the other picks up the body and walks it towards the crowd. He’s maybe thirty years old, his hair thinning early. The dead woman in his arms isn’t anyone Hallon recognizes.

“Rania Thalat.” The name swirls through the crowd. Someone, somewhere, starts sobbing.

###

The crowd opens to make room for a young child carrying a stack of round teacups in one hand and a kettle in the other. She fills a cup with tea and waits for Hallon to take it. The tea is spiced and heavily sugared—too much so—but Hallon’s body welcomes the sustenance. While Hallon drinks, the child fills the cups one-by-one for those nearby. When the people are done drinking, she places their cups back onto the stack, so that she can refill them for the others waiting their turn. When everyone’s had their share, she moves on.

The soldiers change shifts.

Two more bodies are found, but neither are Milo.

A man taps Hallon on the shoulder and hands her a cucumber and parcel of tomato wedges wrapped in newsprint. His smile shows that he’s missing all his teeth. Hallon nods in gratitude. The tomatoes are lightly salted. She closes her eyes as she savors them.

The crowd, quiet for the past few hours, begins to buzz. It parts for something big passing through. “The Scholar is here.”

Hallon stands on her toes to look. All she has are Milo’s stories of the man who is essentially the mayor of No Town.

He steps out in front of the barricade, easy as you please, and his retinue joins him. The soldiers point their guns, but he smiles as if to say, “How amusing.”

Slaeman, the Scholar’s assistant, is with him and whispers in his ear. Behind them both is Karam. The Scholar gestures, and Karam is sent fearlessly jogging forward to present a document to the soldiers. Hallon cranes her head to see what happens next, but so does everyone else in the crowd. She’s forced to duck and slide to poke her head through a gap and force it open with her body. No one complains. They’re all too busy watching.

A soldier looks over the document and hands it off to another to run it deeper into the camp. The Scholar chats with the people nearby while he waits. He knows all their names and asks about their families. He must’ve said something funny, because they laugh. The joke circulates through the crowd, but Hallon only gets a piece—the punchline: “But then they realized it was supper.”

An officer walks into view, a captain or a colonel. He strides like a man with too much to do, so a captain then. The Scholar talks to him and gestures towards the crowd. The captain nods along, shakes his head, nods again, and motions for the Scholar to join him as they walk towards the bodies of the fallen Gloop. The Scholar talks with the captain earnestly, no doubt negotiating the release of the bodies to their families.

Hallon realizes that Karam is no longer anywhere to be seen. He’d walked with the others into one of the pools of dark but didn’t emerge on the other side. She searches for him, and only the barest flicker of a boot heel gives him away as sneaks through the camp, mixing patience and boldness in threading between the soldiers’ gazes. His goal is the closed tent where the Army is keeping the equipment salvaged from the rubble. The Scholar must want to know what they’re collecting, which makes Hallon want to know too.

Milo had been unhelpful in that regard. All he ever said was that the factory did interesting work in addition to making toys and other knick knacks. Hallon wasn’t interested in his secret project—she was just glad he’d landed into work he enjoyed—but now she wishes she’d paid more attention.

The soldiers find another body, and Hallon loses track of Karam to make sure it’s not Milo. They take the body to the Scholar. He shakes his head, saddened. His voice carries to the crowd. “Miriam Thalat.”

The man next to Hallon sighs. “Both sisters then.”

“A tragedy,” the woman behind him says.

The negotiations finish, and the captain takes the Scholar on a hurried tour of the damaged factory, keeping well away from the mystery tent. Along the way, Karam rejoins the group and whispers into the Scholar’s ear. The Scholar’s glance towards the tent is just that; giving nothing away.

They pass Hallon’s section of the barricade.

“—no hope for survivors,” the captain says, “but I hope you appreciate the effort to dig your people out.”

“Surely there’s hope,” the Scholar says. “And where there isn’t hope, at least closure.”

“Yes, yes. We agreed. The bodies will be returned as soon as possible. We only have to wait for—”

They move out of earshot, but not before Hallon catches Karam’s eye. He doesn’t recognize her at first, but then his eyes widen. She points to the street, and he nods. That settled, she fades back into the crowd, people gladly trading places to be closer to the barricade. Milo’s not here—Hallon’s sure of it. Well, mostly sure, but the odds have gotten better body by body. Her best bet for finding him now is through someone more connected than she is.

It’ll take time for Karam to get away from the Scholar, but Hallon doesn’t doubt that the boy will find her when he can. In the meantime, she’ll set up close by—somewhere Karam can find her and she can still hear the names being called out. Just in case.

There’s still the sounds of gunfire and explosions in the distance, but the fighting might as well be in another world for the people waiting here. They’ve had their anger drained from them, replaced with sorrow and loss. At least for now.

###

Hallon sits in front of Ali’s House of Brass, her legs stretched out and her eyes closed. A man, presumably Ali, snores just inside. Nearby, a couple whispers the latest rumors to each other. If they’re to be believed, half of the High Council is dead.

She doesn’t mean to, but Hallon dozes off, coming awake at the sound of a convoy making its way down the street. The gossipers quiet as they watch the column of armored cars and trucks pass. Hallon scrambles to her feet, but the Silent hidden in the buildings don’t open fire. The vehicles approach unimpeded, and the soldiers at the barricade push the crowd back to open a corridor for the convoy.

In short order, the equipment from the mystery tent is loaded onto the waiting trucks. Next are the bodies of the Untainted dead and then the soldiers themselves. The Army don’t break camp. They leave behind their tents, their tools, and electric lights—everything that isn’t a weapon. When the last of the vehicles departs, the crowd holds its breath, but the Silent let them go. The gun ports on the dirigibles stay quiet. Blessed nothing happens.

A sigh passes through the crowd. One person moves and then another. Like ice beginning to thaw, a flow of people moves towards the Gloop dead and towards the rubble to continue the digging. Just because the soldiers have given up, doesn’t mean that the people of No Town have.

Hallon catches a glimpse of the Scholar striding away, stony-faced. Karam waves to her but keeps pace with the rest of the Scholar’s retinue. Well, he’s seen her and knows where she is. Karam will come back once his errands are done. In the meantime, it’s best to be useful. She rolls up her sleeves and makes her way towards the ruined factory.