Ninth City Burning (6 page)

Rae shifts her feet and slowly begins to turn. Her gun has fallen from her hands, which she holds before her as though she has never seen such things in all her life, and with good reason: Above each of Rae's fingers dances a single white-gold flame, as if she has somehow swapped her digits for candles. I raise my eyes to meet hers, and see the same pale fire licking across her cheeks and forehead, darting in the manner of pink flames over coals. Her voice comes out thin, strained. “You have to go,” she says. “You have to go right now.”

“Rae,” I say, pleading, but she stops me with a scream, a fierce and desperate thing to hear.

“Run!” Rae cries out with all her might even as the flames on her face whirl and spread. In an instant, she is consumed in white-gold fire, fire that burns hotter and brighter until it erupts with a concussion that lifts me from my feet.

I have a glimpse of the woods where my sister once stood, now alight in flames of molten gold, but the sight recedes from me, slowly shrinking until all I can see are dark trees. More woods and meadows pass in the same manner. It is not until I spy tracks below me in the snow that I understand I am being borne along against someone's shoulder and that I am screaming Rae's name. In my ear, I hear Apricot Bose breathing, “She's gone, she's gone, she's gone,” in time to her own running feet, then the ground thuds beneath me, and I see the Ridge rising over my head. Could my senses have been so addled as to miss traveling all this way?

“I can't carry you up there,” says Apricot breathlessly. “You have to climb, Naomi.”

Beside her, Lester is reloading his rifle. He raises it and fires into the trees, summoning up a howl from inside. The Nworkies have given chase, it seems. From the top of the Ridge come answering cracks of gunfire, and a bugle calling. Distantly, my thoughts tell me this can only mean Half-Moon's Niagaras have mounted an attack, and indeed that is the signal sounding: battle already joined.

There is a new sound, too, over the cries and blasts. It is distant at first, but builds in speed and degree until it has become a steady booming, the sort a giant would make running at full tilt. I wait for some monstrous creature to come breaking through the trees, but what I see instead is an even stranger vision: blue lights, thin and sharp as needles, stabbing over the horizon into the sky, each flashing only a moment but so powerfully as to pierce the very clouds.

I know I must rise now, rise and fight, if I am to survive. I make a fist and find the pistol, Rae's present to me, already in my hand.

T
he last five minutes of your shift are always the worst. I won't say longest because they're each sixty seconds apiece, just like every minute since the beginning of time. They seem longer, sure, but that's not what's so bad about them. What's so bad is that you've been watching the fish rolling around on the conveyor belts for like sixteen hours, getting gutted and beheaded by little blades, then stuffed into cans and drowned in oil and sealed up and cooked to superhigh temperatures and labeled and boxed, and you're just waiting for it all to stop; only when it finally does, you don't feel like it's really over. You
feel
like it's
you
down there on the belts, and the reason everything seems still is because now
you're
the one moving along with all those little fish, waiting for the rotating saw to come and slice your head off. So when the bell rings at the end of the shift, I don't just run off like everybody else. I stay at my station a minute and let my brain work out which way is up and everything. If people ask, I say I'm dizzy, and that's not like a complete lie. But it's also a good excuse to not leave right away.

From my station, I watch everyone filing out, dumping their gloves and goggles and hairnets and aprons in separate containers to be cleaned and sterilized and so forth, all in a rush, like they've got someplace important to be or something, even though the first railbus back to town doesn't leave for fifteen minutes. Most of them are kids about my age, that is, seventeen. Pretty much everybody does a rotation or two at the factories once they get out of school, even if you're like me and you actually made it all the way through. Not like school necessarily gets you anywhere. Or experience, either. There are plenty of people who work the factories their whole lives and never even make foreman, and I bet half of them did as much school
as me. I can see a few of them, the lifers, there among the younger kids. Not so many, though. It's just that the older you get, the more likely you'll end up at the Front instead of in good old Settlement 225.

When pretty much everyone is off the factory floor, I head for the door, making sure to go the way that takes me by the cookers, so all the cans I pass are basically ready to go except maybe for the labels. At the last corner, I stumble and knock a whole bunch of cans off the conveyor. I make a big show of being like embarrassed over screwing up the line of production and whatnot, and I'm real careful about picking up every single can and dusting it off and checking it for dents. I put the good cans back on the belt and toss the dented ones into a bin labeled “nonconforming.” There are a lot of nonconforming ones.

I've been doing this a couple of times each week since I started over in canning, just denting a few cans here and there so they can't be boxed. I've got a whole bunch of ways to do it. Like I might leave something on the conveyor belt so it gets backed up, and the cans start falling off, or maybe I'll let one of the cardboard storage boxes get a little wet so the bottom falls out when I try to pick it up. Little things like that. I'll bust one or two at my station, too, but only so no one gets suspicious. On my performance reports my error rate is listed as “good,” and you only have to be “acceptable” to avoid getting stuck with demerits.

I keep playing up the clumsiness a bit, fumbling with my gloves and apron as I rush to join everyone else filing off the floor. Hardly anyone even looks at me; they're all just this huge, exhausted herd. We lumber out the big doors and over this bridge where you can see half the factory complex, just this mammoth stack of boxy buildings and domes and steam spewing everywhere from big tangles of pipes and whatnot.

Somehow, Hexi finds me in the crowd, which is like a feat because I look about the same as everyone else. I mean, I'm a little taller than average, but I have the same short haircut most factory workers choose, my straight black hair cut down to a bristly fuzz, and in my brown floor uniform, I'm not very remarkable. That doesn't keep Hexi from picking me out right away, though.

“Hey, Torro!” Hexi calls in her high little voice. My full name is Troshosho, so you can see why Torro is easier.

Hexi is friendly as anything. Like she could make friends with a rock,
and the rock would send her birthday cards. “How do you always find me right away?” I ask her.

“The smell, boyo. What was it today, tuna?”

I was afraid it would be something like that. “Herring.”

“I'm only kidding you, don't be so
sen
sitive. Half the people here smell like fish, or didn't you notice? Anyway, at least you can wash the fishiness off with a shower or two. I'm going to be red for a week!” She holds up her hands so I can see the stains she got from canning red beets.

“A shower or
two
? What do you think I do all day?”

“Basically the same thing I do all day. You going to eat? The kiddos are probably waiting for us.”

Everyone working at the factories gets two meals here per day plus one credit for the eateries in town. You can use your extra credit here, too, if you happen to be insane. The factory caf is a huge room in the middle of the complex, with rows of tables and servers spooning different colors of slop onto segmented plates. Some of the slop is seasonal, like when we're harvesting potatoes, the starchy slop is slightly better. Fortunately, we're behind our quotas on both red beets and fish, so Hexi and me won't have to eat what we've been canning since like 1600 yesterday.

Today's slop comes in three colors: orange, brown, and green. The orange is like sliced carrots or something, and the brown is mystery meat with mystery gravy. The green could be broccoli or peas, but I'm not going to think too much about it. When Hexi holds out her plate for her serving of slop, I notice her looking at the red splotches on her arms with a lot less like jolliness than before.

“It really doesn't look that bad,” I say. “Two more weeks, and we're done anyway. Just twenty more days. Maybe you'll rotate somewhere better.” Where I really want to go is the fishing fleet. I guess that's sort of strange given my present feelings on fish. But I just imagine myself out there with nothing but the ocean for a hundred kilometers in every direction, old S-225 nowhere in sight, and I think, that's for me. It's tough work to get, though, fishing. There's a lot to learn, so if you don't get into it early, you probably never will. My chances would have been better if I'd left school a few years ago, which is sort of a dumb way of doing things if you think about it.

“With my luck, I'll probably end up in textiles,” Hexi says, sighing.
“At least then I can get dyed a few colors besides red. I really think green is my shade, don't you?”

“You know you never told me how you picked me out back there.”

“That? I don't know. I guess you just walk different from everyone else.”

“Different how?”

“I don't know, just different. Do you see the kiddos? I'm totally lost.”

Hexi has this great brain for remembering people but couldn't find her way out of an empty box. Like she doesn't know where our table is, even though we sit in the same place every single day. It's a good table, so we've got to make a point of claiming it regularly. Spammers, Mersh, and Isslyn are all there already, working away at their piles of slop.

Spammers greets us with his usual “Good morning, chummies!” He likes to be chipper in a sort of sarcastic way. It's his like preferred stance toward life in general.

“What's wrong with Mersh?” Hexi asks as we sit down. Mersh looks like he's on the verge of complete and total collapse.

“Mersh has decided he doesn't need to sleep like the rest of us,” says Isslyn. “That's just what we need, some sleep-deprived dickhead running shipments from the fields.” Isslyn's actually a sweetie most of the time, but when she thinks you're doing something dumb, she can be a real pain in the ass. She says it's for your own good. “Hel
lo
, Mersh? If you die in some fiery wreck, I'm going to kill you, you hear?”

“I'm not going to crash,” Mersh says defensively. “I'm like the best driver in my shift.” Mersh is always bragging about how great he is at practically everything, but this might actually be true. Those drivers are terrible. “And it's not my fault if I'm tired. They set the required runs too high. There's no time to sleep.” He stabs a little at his slop. “I'm telling you, I'm ready to go and join the Legion.”

Nobody says anything to that. We all just kind of look at each other, nervous-like. The Legion is supposed to be this incredible army. They're off fighting the biggest war of all time, and we're expected to be really like pleased about that because the people they're fighting want us all dead. Everyone is always going on about how heroic the Legion is. That's basically required. We're supposed to talk a lot about how grateful we are to be able to work all day and support the war effort. They're always looking for new recruits to go out and fight, but most people aren't too keen on becoming heroes. People from our settlement go all the time, of course,
but the thing is, none of them ever come back. Not one. Never. So when Mersh starts talking about joining up, we all get pretty scared. Like, we all
think
about it now and then. If we're sending the Legion all this food and whatnot, they can't have it that bad is what we think. But Mersh is the only one who's ever serious about it. That's what scares us. Mersh is an idiot most of the time, but we've known him forever, and we don't want him to just disappear on us.

“What?” says Mersh, like he knows what we're thinking. “You're telling me the Legion couldn't be better than this?” He looks sort of longingly up at the murals covering the cafeteria walls, which are all huge paintings of these strapping young men and women wearing romantic-looking suits of armor and gazing heroically into the distance, with like sunrises and mountains and waterfalls and whatnot in the background. The same good-looking people appear on posters all around the settlement, sometimes in their armor charging into battle, but sometimes in smart little uniforms building houses or sitting in classrooms or just laughing together. The posters always have slogans like “Fighting for You” and “Be Part of the Adventure” and “Building Your Future.”

“Come on, Mersh,” Spammers says. “You can't really go in for all that crap.” When it comes to the Legion, Spammers is what you'd call a skeptic.

“Yeah,” says Isslyn. “Those poor slobs in the Legion are probably looking at paintings of handsome kids working in fields and factories and stuff and thinking how great it is to be
us
.”

Everyone else laughs, but Mersh only gets more sullen. “At least they get enough sleep and plenty of food. And after five years with the Legion, you can leave and start a no-quota settlement.”

One poster you see everywhere has the slogan “Your Tomorrow Starts Today.” There's always a bunch of people walking off into the distance, you can't see where really, and one at the back with a hand out to like invite you along. The person at the back changes from one poster to another. Sometimes it's a tough-looking guy, and sometimes it's this busty girl in a uniform that's probably a few sizes too small. Mersh actually stole one of the posters with the busty girl. He keeps it under his mattress. I bet that's what he's thinking about now, starting a new settlement with that busty girl, who probably isn't even a real person.

“And you believe that
why
?” Spammers is getting angry now.

“Don't you remember the last time the censors came?” Mersh says.
“They had that guy, the one who started Settlement 401.
He'd
been in the Legion.”

“And you believe that
why
?” Spammers says again. “Because he had like a scar on his cheek? Haven't you ever wondered why they never bring anyone from Granite Shore?”

Granite Shore is what people here call Settlement 225. It isn't an official name or anything, but it sounds a lot nicer.

“Maybe they just didn't want to come back to this shit hole,” Mersh mutters. He's been stabbing and mashing at his slop, but now he stops and smiles this sly smile, like he's got some big secret. “No reason we can't improve things a bit for ourselves, though. Right, kiddos?” He opens his jacket to show us something big and white and craggy. A sugar beet, just sitting there like a bomb.

Hexi instantly starts panicking. “Mersh, what are you
doing
?”

“We always lose a bunch from the truck on the way in.” He's just smiling more, like no one would ever believe how smart he is. “This one fell off while I was pulling into the dock. What do you think it's worth?”

“I have no clue what you could mean,” I say. I jam a big spoonful of the green slop into my mouth and talk over my food, like I could not care less about his stupid beet. “I guess if anyone catches you stealing, it'll be worth a whole assload of demerits.”