Of Metal and Wishes (4 page)

My father’s assessment is so blunt that Melik flinches like he’s been slapped. I wonder how the words translate into his Noor language. I’m not sure, but I notice he doesn’t translate what my father said for Tercan, whose head has sunk back onto the table. I turn my attention back to him, the reason all of us are hunched beneath my father’s brightest lamp. My hand trembles only a little as I gently touch his arm. “Let us help you,” I whisper.

His eyes lock on to mine, and they are full of hapless innocence, of pleading animal fear. He stares at my face, searching for some sign of malice, maybe, for any hint that I might want to harm him.

I do not look away.
I can forgive you for today,
I think.

He blinks a few times and nods. “Sleep,” he says raggedly. “Yes.”

I lower the sponge over his face, and he inhales while he looks hopefully up at me. It doesn’t take long for his eyelids to flutter and for his breaths to stretch long and deep. The muscles of his arms and stomach relax. His face loses its strain, its worry.

“You should probably return to the floor,” my father says to Melik. “You can pick him up when your shift is over.”

I look up at Melik, who is watching Tercan’s chest rise and fall. He left his shift to bring his friend here, and every minute he’s away shaves a few coins off his daily wage. He needs to get back to work, and he knows it. He squeezes Tercan’s hand and releases it. He squares his shoulders. “Please send someone if he wakes, or if something happens.”

“We will,” I say to him. I’m being rude; I should shut up and let my father do the talking. But Melik’s mask of calm confidence has slipped as he looks at Tercan’s foot again. He blinks away the shine of tears. “If he needs you, I’ll come fetch you myself.”

He rewards me with the faintest shadow of a smile. “Thank you . . . Wen.”

With one last glance at his friend, Melik is out the door, and I can hear the clomp of his boots as he sprints up the hall. He’s right to hurry; Mugo does not look kindly on workers who abandon their stations even for a minute, and Melik has been gone for at least half an hour.

As much as I mistrust the Noor and wish they’d never come to Gochan, I find myself hoping Melik does not get fired for this offense, this crime of helping his friend.

“He speaks our language very well,” comments my father. “Only a few of them do. He’s had some education.”

I assist my father to reassemble Tercan’s foot, knitting the boy’s skin back together with tiny, perfect stitches my mother would have been proud of. All the while I wonder about the rust-haired boy. Why did he come here if he’s educated? Working in a slaughterhouse, of all places?

Then I remember he is Noor and there aren’t many paths open to him.

Tercan’s crushed foot takes three hours to put back together. We drench it once again with antiseptic, splint it, and wrap it in a clean bandage. I hope we have done enough, and that he’ll be able to keep his foot.

When we’re finished, I scrub my hands, which are aching and raw. My father says we’ll let Tercan sleep off the opium and then give him a bit more by mouth to take the edge off as he wakes.

While my father tidies up, I climb the stairs to my room and pull a small white seashell from beneath my sleeping pallet. I turn it over in my hands. I need an offering and I hope this does the trick.

I tell my father I’m going to go to the cafeteria because I’ve missed my dinner. Minny, the cafeteria worker whose young son my father healed of a nasty infection a few weeks ago—using his own money to pay for the medicine—will surely give me some bread or rice to tide me over until morning. My father agrees readily, saying he thinks I’m getting too thin.

Nobody’s thinner than he is, but I guess I should be happy that he’s worried about me. I march up the hall. I’m not really coming down here to eat, though. After everything that’s happened tonight, I wonder if I’ll ever be hungry again. It’s not that Tercan’s wound was so terrible. I mean, it was, but I can handle that. What I can’t handle: the nagging fear that I had something to do with it. Perhaps Hazzi’s trick with the lights has gotten to me. Or maybe it was my father’s unexpectedly serious expression as the old man told him the Ghost favored me. It could be the whispered stories, the fervent prayers, the hope in Jima’s eyes as she scribbled her wish. I don’t know, but I can’t shed this feeling, this guilt, and I know only one thing that will help.

The administrative hall is dark. The workers may be toiling full steam ahead on the killing floor, but the bookkeepers, secretaries, and administrators are all safe in their beds, or maybe out in the Ring seeking other kinds of entertainment. My footsteps make hardly any noise as I sweep past the entrance to the killing floor and head straight for the altar. I can already see the candles glowing in the gloom up ahead.

I will talk to the Ghost of Gochan. With all my heart, I hope he doesn’t answer.

I KNEEL NEXT
to the altar. The tallow candles are burning low. One has gone out, and I lift Jima’s offering candle and tilt it to light the wick, then set it in the small pot that holds the old, spent candle. Now there are thirteen again.

It takes me only a moment to realize that the rest of the offerings are gone. The cakes, the bracelet, my coin. The prayers, too.

I pull one of my most treasured possessions from my pocket. I plucked this seashell off the white sand at the edge of the southern sea. My parents took me there for a vacation when I was a little girl, before the markets crashed and wiped out my mother’s inheritance, before she had to go to work as a tailor and seamstress for women she’d gone to school with, before my father lost his position at the regional hospital and had to take the job at the factory. I still remember the roar of the waves, the crash against the rocks, the salty taste of the water on my lips, the burn of it in my nose.

This tiny, swirled shell holds all those memories. It’s a good offering. Nicer than a lot of the trinkets and tokens left for the Ghost. Few people around here have even seen the ocean. I don’t know if that matters to a dead person, though.

I set the shell on the table, right at the center. “This shell is a happy memory, from a long time ago. I’m going to give it to you.”

I look around, hoping no one will overhear. I can’t believe I’m actually doing this, talking to the air as if it will hear me. But I am thinking about Tercan, lying in my father’s clinic, his foot swollen and misshapen, and I need to know it isn’t because of me.

“Tell me something, Ghost,” I say to the darkness.

I sit and wait—for what, I don’t know, but every passing moment of stillness calms me.

The only sounds that come to me are from the killing floor. Muted by the thick metal door that separates this corridor from all that death, but still distinguishable. Lowing. Squealing. Grinding. Whirring. I’m sure this factory is much quieter than Gochan Two, with its crashing metal monsters, but it’s as loud as any place I’d ever want to be. I keep listening, though, trying to hear beyond this noise to whatever lies beneath it, just in case.

After a few minutes I cover the shell with my hand. “This is your last chance, Ghost. I’m thinking you don’t want my offering.”

Immediately there’s a faint metallic scraping, a pause, and then tapping. One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . I look around, trying to locate it. Am I imagining it? Could it have come from the killing floor, or—

It stops.

I lift the shell from the table and stand up. “It’s factory noise,” I mutter. “And I was stupid to come here.”

I am answered by a faint metallic ping.

“Ghost?” I whisper, dread rising in me like floodwater.

This time it’s louder. A single, pinging tap. I put my hand against one of the many pipes that line this place. They’re like intestines, tubes and coils everywhere, running along the ceilings and walls. A factory like this, which has been repurposed at least three times in its existence, has a lot of unused bits and pieces. I don’t know exactly what these pipes are for, but I do know that one of them just pinged. I tap a pipe with the blunt tip of my fingernail, and it makes a hollow, mournful thunk.

I am rewarded with another ping. I shiver and pull my hand away from the pipe, noticing for the first time how fast my heart is beating. “Let’s try this,” I say. “Tap once for no, twice for yes. Will you?”

I absorb the distant sounds of killing while I wait. Finally—
ping
. . .
ping
. I have my answer. “Do you want this shell?”

Ping . . . ping.

I wiggle my tongue, trying to pry it loose from the roof of my mouth. “Are you real?” I can barely hear myself, but the Ghost doesn’t seem to have trouble. His answer is two distinct pings, louder than before.

For all the world, it sounds like someone is tapping the pipes. How would the Ghost do that? Shouldn’t he be just an apparition or something? Then again, somehow he takes the offerings and prayers . . . but still, this could very well be someone playing a cruel joke on me. Not a ghost, but someone with flesh on his bones and an evil sense of humor. I circle the thick column that partially hides the altar from the rest of the open area outside the cafeteria. There doesn’t seem to be anyone here. I pad across the floor and peek into the cafeteria, where a few bedraggled-looking Noor are sipping hot tea on their ten-minute break, which they get once each ten-hour shift, in addition to a twenty-minute lunch. They don’t see me peering through the window. Their heads are low and their brows are furrowed. I wonder how well they know Tercan, and how Melik is faring. He’s right at the edge of manhood, rawboned but obviously strong. I’m betting they put him at one of the carving stations, where his muscles could be put to good use, where fingers and the tips of noses can be sliced off in an instant of distraction. I rub my sweaty palms against my skirt. I don’t want to have to try to reattach Melik’s nose to his face. I hope he’s good with a knife.

No one seems to know or care that I’m here. I sneak back over to the alcove and become aware of the nonstop pinging. It sounds almost . . . frantic?

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I needed to see if anyone else was around.” I try to get over the fact that I am attempting to talk to a ghost. “I didn’t mean to walk away in the middle of our conversation.”

The urgent pinging stops immediately. I hope that means he’s forgiven me.

“Thanks,” I say. “Now . . . you told me you were real.”

Two sharp pings.

“And you haunt this slaughterhouse of ours.”

Two sharp pings.

“I . . . I’m sorry, but wouldn’t you like to be somewhere else? This is not a good place, and I would think there might be some other, nicer place for you.” I recall someone at the funeral saying my mother was in a better place. I certainly hope this isn’t as good as it gets.

Only one ping this time.

“You like it here?”

There are several moments of silence, then two pings.

“To each his own,” I murmur, placing my hand against the pipe. My tight, dry skin is soothed by the cold metal, and after a few moments I lean my forehead against it. “I have questions for you that go beyond a simple yes or no.”

I really say that to myself, but through the pipes I feel more than hear two pings.

“Are you alone here? I mean, you don’t have any . . . ghosty friends?”

One ping, a small, forlorn sound.

“Are you lonely?”

Two pings, and I can almost feel their sadness vibrating through the pipes and up my arms. “I’m lonely too,” I whisper.

Silence. In the distance a man shouts in Noor. I draw in a deep breath. “But now I have to ask you an important question.” I am nearly choking on my own heart, which seems to have risen into my throat. “Tonight there was an accident. A boy got hurt.”

Two pings. The Ghost already knows this.

A trickle of cold sweat slips down the neck of my dress, making me shudder. “This boy, his name is Tercan. He . . . embarrassed me in the cafeteria today.” My cheeks are burning just thinking of it. Did the Ghost see this, too?

Two hard, staccato taps.
Ping. Ping.

He did.

“I was angry. I challenged you.”

He taps, an acknowledgment that he heard me.

“That boy had an accident tonight. On the killing floor. His foot was crushed. Even if he doesn’t lose it, he won’t ever walk without a limp, if at all. It was a terrible injury.”

Two taps. And they sound cold now, not sad. Hard.

“Did you do it?” My voice comes out louder than I mean it to, and it echoes faintly in the open space.

There is silence for a long time, long enough for me to wonder if the Ghost has cut the slender thread of sound that connects us, if he’s gone off to haunt some other part of the factory.

But then I hear it, in the darkness, in the not-so-quiet. It carries easily over the thrumming din of the killing floor, over the harsh in-out of my own heavy breaths.

Ping.

I relax, sagging a little as I hold on to the pipe. Accidents happen. This was an accident.

Ping.

I drop the shell on the table and sprint down the hall.