North! Or Be Eaten (29 page)

“Knubis! The Overseer says you’re either to be moved to the coal piles or it’s the Black Carriage for you. Do you think you can keep up at the coal piles, girl?”

At the mention of the Black Carriage, the Knubis girl’s eyes widened and she redoubled her efforts with the scissors.

“Too late for that, girl. It’s the coal piles or the Carriage.” Mobrik was enjoying himself.

Janner’s insides boiled. His fingers curled into fists, and he took a deep breath, ready to pounce on Mobrik, grab the poor girl, and run for it. Then common sense once again interrupted his anger. Where would he go? He caught the Knubis girl’s eyes, and she shook her head.

“Don’t,” she said, looking at Mobrik, but Janner could tell she was talking to him. She didn’t want him to do anything rash.

“What?” Mobrik said.

“Don’t…call the Black Carriage. I’ll go to the coal piles, and I’ll work faster. It’s just, my hands…” She held out her hands. They were covered with oozing blisters.

“More gloves coming tomorrow.” Mobrik shrugged. “It’s a shame you should be abused so. Hard to work if your hands are worn through. The Overseer should take better care of his tools.”

“She’s not a tool,” Janner said, unable to contain himself.

“Don’t!” she said, this time looking at Janner.

Janner ignored her, reared his fist back, and let it fly straight at Mobrik’s face.

The punch never landed.

Figures burst from the shadows and corners and from under the tables. They dropped from chains that hung from the ceiling and rushed at Janner. They shoved him to the floor and punched and kicked and struck him with all manner of blunt weapons. Janner curled into a ball, clenched his teeth, and waited for the torment to stop. Stars swam in his vision, white pain sizzled through his spine and neck. Finally the blows subsided.

Janner lay on his back, staring at the ceiling, the chains above swaying to and fro like the pendulum on a clock. His nose and mouth were bleeding, a tooth was loose, and his ribs hurt with every ragged breath he took.

A face appeared above him. He expected it to be the Overseer again, grinning his yellow-toothed grin beneath the silly top hat, but it was a boy. With the mean look in his eyes, the dirty face, and the smirk on his lips, he looked so much like a Strander that Janner half expected to see a dagger in one hand and a hunk of toothy cow meat in the other. But instead of a dagger, the boy held a length of chain.

“We’re always watching, tool,” the boy said. “So do as you’re told, leave Master Mobrik here alone, and get to the paring. Understand?”

“I’m not a tool,” Janner said.

The boy let fly with the chain. It struck the ground beside Janner’s head so hard that sparks stung his cheeks.

“You’re a tool,” the boy said. He gestured to the other boys and girls standing about, all of them looking at Janner with hatred. “We all are. Now get up and get to work.”

Mobrik stood behind the children with his arms folded. “The Overseer said this new boy is to work until morning with no rest.”

The children smiled.

“Come on, Knubis,” Mobrik said to the paring girl, and she followed him to the coal piles.

“Get up, boy. What’s your name?”

Janner stood slowly, the bones in his back and shoulders cracking in protest. He wiped his bloody lip with a shirt sleeve. “My name’s…Esben.”

The boy with the chain stepped forward until he stood nose to nose with Janner.

“Your name is
Tool
. Remember that. My name, in case you’re wondering, is Maintenance Manager. That’s all our names.” He waved his chain at the others as
they slunk away into the shadows. “We maintain the machine and the tools that run it. If you work hard enough, you might get to be a Maintenance Manager too. The food’s better, the bunks are better, and you get to greet the new tools when they arrive.”

Janner stared at the boy with steady eyes, though he could feel one of them swelling shut with every throb. He chose to say nothing. It wouldn’t be long before he found a way out of this place, and this tool could go on maintaining his machine for the rest of his life if he wanted.

But right now, he had paring to do.

A
ll night, Janner stood at the long table and cut metal. Whenever he glanced up, he caught sight of shapes swinging from chains, from rafter to rafter like bugs. The Maintenance Managers were everywhere, supervising the “tools” as they worked.

Sometimes, an actual fork made it to the paring station, which reminded him that he hadn’t eaten in hours, nor had he had anything to drink. The hot air of the factory floor sucked the liquid from every pore and left his tongue dry as a dead leaf.

Janner’s hands ached. He had done his share of work with rakes and shovels and knew well the feeling of a blister forming beneath the skin. If his hands hadn’t been covered in soot, he would’ve seen the red spots that would soon swell and fill with fluid. He was glad Tink had been spared this fate.

Whenever his eyes drooped, he shook his head and pinched himself to keep awake. As he struggled to close the scissors on a sliver of stubborn metal, he thought of his sweet mother, her strong, easy way of giving him affection and comfort. While he ground the handle of a blade, he thought of Podo’s booming voice, of Oskar’s flop of hair. When he tossed the reworked pieces into a barrel, he thought of Leeli’s curious calm and the magic in her songs. And when he bent forks, he thought of Tink’s insatiable appetite. Even as the memories of his family kept him company, they made his heart heavy and lonesome.

It was a miserable night.

At dawn, Mobrik appeared. Janner looked down at the little creature blankly, realizing that in a few short hours, he already looked and acted like the other exhausted children of the factory. He had to escape, and soon, but for now, all he wanted was a bed and something to eat.

“Follow me, child. The Overseer needs to ask you a few questions.”

Mobrik led Janner back down the long hallway and into the big, empty room. They crossed to the door in the far wall, and Mobrik knocked. They entered an office with a large desk, where the Overseer sat, still wearing his black top hat. He smiled, yawned, and patted the whip that lay coiled on the desk.

“Forgive me,” he said. “I just woke from a delightful night’s sleep. My bed is so soft, you see, and large. I trust you found your work enjoyable? The paring station affords much movement and variety, I believe.”

Janner was now fully awake. He wanted to leap across the table and knock the silly hat from the Overseer’s head. He wanted to haul the man downstairs and make
him
pare the bad blades for an hour. But most of all, he wanted the man to open the portcullis and let him go. Let them
all
go.

“Now,” said the Overseer, dipping a quill into a bottle of ink, “I need your full name. In case your parents ever find replacements for you.” Janner paused, remembering the punch in the stomach the last time he spoke to the Overseer. “Oh, it’s all right,” said the man. “You’re allowed to tell me your name.”

Janner cleared his throat. “My name is Esben…Esben Flavogle.”

The Overseer scratched it into his ledger without bothering to ask how it was spelled. “There. Mobrik, show the tool to his bunk.”

Below the main factory floor where the furnaces roared lay a dormitory. Bunk beds lined the walls. Janner saw hundreds of children, either snoring in a deep sleep or climbing wearily out of bed to face another day in the factory. No one spoke or laughed or even made eye contact. Mobrik allowed Janner a drink of water from a cistern, then pointed him to an empty bunk and left.

The mattress was lumpy but far more comfortable than the sandy floor of the burrow. Janner realized as he drifted away that he hadn’t slept in a proper bed since the day the Fangs had ransacked the Igiby cottage. In Peet’s castle he had been quite comfortable on the pile of blankets and animal skins spread on the floor, but it hadn’t been a bed. Since then he had slept on the hard ground every night. As he drifted to sleep, he felt the inside of his swollen lip with his tongue and wondered if his tooth would still wiggle in the morning.

When he woke, he smelled food.

But it wasn’t the smell that woke him. A bell clanged and clanged and clanged, and it was several moments before Janner was awake enough to realize that a boy beside his bed was making all the racket. The boy had pudgy cheeks and wore a tattered red cap that seemed about to slide off the back of his head.

“All right, all right!” Janner snapped, pushing the bell away from his ear and sitting up.

“Time for breakfast, tool,” said the boy, and he marched off to annoy someone else.

The dorm room was busier than it had been that morning when Janner collapsed into bed. Children pulled on boots, washed their faces with water from a trough, and
sat at a long wooden table, spooning a watery broth into their mouths. The bell-clanger made his rounds, but otherwise there was very little speaking. These children’s spirits had been broken. Who knew how long they had toiled in the factory? Some were old enough to have whiskery fuzz on their chins, and others were barely as old as Leeli. Janner couldn’t understand why the Overseer used only children for the labor. Couldn’t an adult work longer and faster?

Janner sat at the table, and a boy placed a bowl and spoon before him, along with a cup of water. No one looked at him. No one spoke. The only sound was the chorus of hungry slurps from the twenty or so children at the table.

Janner cleared his throat. “Hello.” He waited for an answer. A few of the children glanced at him but kept eating without a word. “My name’s Esben. Esben, uh, Flavogle. Just got here.”

“We can see that,” said the boy directly across from him. The boy raised his bowl to his mouth and sucked up the last drops of soup. “You’ll find there’s not much to talk about after a while.”

“What’s your name?”

“Doesn’t matter. I’m a tool, just like you.”

Janner rolled his eyes. “I’m not a tool.”

The boy shrugged and left the table.

Janner turned his attention to his soup. It didn’t look very appetizing, but his mouth watered. He picked up his spoon, but fiery pain shot through his hand, and he sucked air through his teeth. Blisters. They cracked and oozed on every finger and all across his palms. Gingerly he picked up the spoon again and ate his soup in silence, surprised to find that it was quite delicious. He was also surprised that when he finished his soup, the serving boy appeared with a fresh bowl and removed his empty one. Janner devoured the second bowl, and then a third, so famished that he forgot the pain in his hands. When he was finished, he got up from the table, not sure what to do or where to go.

“Back to the paring station, tool,” said a voice from behind him. Mobrik the ridgerunner stood at his elbow. Janner was strangely glad to see him. “It’s my job to make sure the new implements learn the system. You eat soup, then you wash your face, then you head back to the factory floor to do your job. Understand?”

“I guess so.”

“Then go,” Mobrik said, turning away. Then he stopped and said, “I nearly forgot. These should fit you.” He reached into a pocket of his suit coat and tossed a pair of thick leather gloves to Janner.

“Mobrik—wait. Thank you. I need to ask you something.”

“Do you have any fruit?” Mobrik asked.

“No.”

The ridgerunner walked away.

Janner saw several Maintenance Managers leaning against the wall, watching him, and took a deep breath. He would escape. He just had to wait until they weren’t watching him so closely. Maybe later that day, once they saw that he could work fast, they would forget him long enough that he could break away and get out.

“The paring station, then,” Janner said to himself. “I hope Tink is faring better than I am.”

Another hot, miserable night passed on the factory floor. Another night of blasting heat, roaring flames, creaking wheels, and painful hands.

Janner spent the first several hours thinking of his family, but that proved too saddening. Then he thought about his T.H.A.G.S. and about the books he had recently read. He recalled the characters from the stories, the settings, the themes of the books. But his mind kept slowing to a thoughtless sludge, a world where all that mattered was the hiss of the machines and the cutting of metal. Whenever his table of misshapen blades and forks was close to empty—but never completely empty, to his great frustration—a child appeared with another full wheelbarrow. Whenever Janner attempted conversation with the children, they never answered or met his eyes. He wanted to grab their faces and force them to look at him, to acknowledge his presence, to act as if they were still human.

At last, a pure yellow light crept in through the windows near the ceiling. It diffused the orange-red glow of the furnace fires and torches, changing the heat-choked air of the factory. Dawn.

A Maintenance Manager appeared and said, “Shift’s over, tool.”

Janner, covered in sweat and soot, dropped the shears to the floor. He staggered past the machines to the dormitory stair, pushed through the double doors, past the crew of sleepy-eyed children on their way to their stations, and collapsed on his bunk without bothering to eat.

He woke to the clanging of the bell beside his ear. It was the same boy with the same satisfied grin on his face. Janner ate two bowls of soup, carefully pulled his gloves over his blistered hands, and trudged out the doors and up the stairs to the paring station.

He couldn’t imagine spending another day in the factory. His hands hurt, his back was tired, he hadn’t seen the sun in days, he missed his family desperately, and most
of all, he could feel his mind
shrinking
. There was nothing to talk about, laugh about, or think about, except the machines. Every child who crossed his path frightened Janner more, because he knew that if he remained in the Fork Factory for long, he too would forget who he was. His eyes would glaze over, he would pass his days in mindless repetition, never thinking, never dreaming, forgetting that a wide, bright world lay outside.