“Never look one of the bosses in the eye,” the bull said. “Never speak unless you are spoken to, and always answer at once. If you don’t know the answer, say so. Say I don’t know, boss. Go on, try it.”
The bait-runners gave up an uncoordinated mumble.
“Smarter. Quicker.”
I don’t know, boss!
“Fucking awful,” the bull said. “A bunch of crickets could do better.” He was a tall man with a pot belly and a bald patch he tried to hide by combing his glossy black hair sideways. There were sweat patches on his white shirt under his arms. He strutted down the line, staring fiercely at the men and women, striking any who dared meet his gaze. 17 looked at her feet, trembling with fear and anger. When he reached the end, he turned and yelled, ‘You all listen up! The people coming here are some of the most important on the planet! They can erase the Factory at a whim. I have ten days to bring you to some sort of civilized behavior. You will lay down your lives for them if necessary. You will give up everything you have, at once and willingly. You will cut off your dicks, cut out the hearts of your children! And you will sing out loud and clear when I ask, or I’ll send all of you to the mines. Let’s hear it once again!” They all sang out.
I DON’T KNOW, BOSS!
Doc fed 17 private information about the visiting bosses. The training was so hard, he had to visit her in the hour before lights out. It was the first time she had seen him outside his shack. He had pics of each boss, and told 17 which family they belonged to, how they stood in the complicated hierarchies. They were all men, all very young. None of them seemed to have proper jobs. They climbed mountains around the North Pole, sailed catamarans in the southern ocean, spent their winters on the wide, white beaches of the Archipelago. They all looked the same to 17. Tanned skin, broad white smiles, buzz-cut blond hair, good cheekbones, firm jaws. She was good with numbers, not people. She still hadn’t got their names straight in her head when they arrived.
The whole Factory got the day off. For the first time in a hundred years, the machines were stood down. The silence hummed in 17’s head. She wondered if it was like the silence of the up and out. The foremen handed out flags and streamers, and people waved them as the cavalcade of limousines swept through the main drag to the compound where the bulls lived.
There were fireworks that night, fans of colored stars exploding under the dome. Calcium red, copper green, sodium yellow, cobalt blue. The next day, the bug hunt started.
17 was teamed with a couple of older men, who made it clear they had no time for her. She didn’t care. She knew that she could shine only as herself, not as part of a team. She knew every bit of the sewer tunnels, didn’t need to look at the corroded plates that marked every intersection as she blew through the perimeter of the area assigned to her team, making a wide arc that pivoted on one of the Factory’s waste treatment plants. There were always plenty of mussel beds and pack crab nests there, and she had a feeling that the haunt would need something to eat other than the three kids it had snatched.
It was dark and warm in the tunnels. Only a few of the lights worked, a broken chain of dim red stars stretching away under the low curved roof. 17 sloshed through knee-deep scummy water. Water fell thunderously in one of the tunnels; huge islands of stiff foam whirled on the currents. Pack crab nests bristled along the waterline there, built of scraps of plastic and metal. The entrance hole of each nest was blocked by the swollen claw of its resident; desperate cyclers risked getting bitten or poisoned to tear up the nests for the scrap they contained. Barnacles floated their feathery sieves on the water, snatched at her wet suit. She edged past a reef of razor-edged mussels, paused at a Y junction.
One way led to the cooling water inlet complex, the other toward the labyrinthine drains beneath the pulp-holding tanks. Something was moving toward her, coming toward the junction. She put her head close to the water, heard slow sloshing footsteps, jammed against the wall, ready to blow her whistle. But it was something stranger and more fearsome than the haunt or any bug.
It was one of the bosses.
“Hey,” he said breathlessly. “I saw some sign back there. Parallel scrapes on the bricks of the roof? New, cut right through the black slime stuff. My proximity radar gives too many signals because of the currents, but it must be close, don’t you think?”
17 nodded. She had forgotten all of the bull’s etiquette lessons.
The boss grinned. “That’s why you’re here, right? You’re not on my team, but you guessed it would hang around here.”
She nodded again. He was taller than Doc, well muscled and lithe, and impossibly young. His black and pink wetsuit was clean and new, not a rip or patch on it. His gun was slung on one broad shoulder, his breathing apparatus on the other. His grin was very white in his tan face; his hair was so blond it was as white as new paper. She could smell his cologne through the stink of the tunnels.
He said, “I’ll bet you know every centimeter of this place. We’ll clean up. Raphe will be pissed. Where do you think it might be?”
17 pointed down the tunnel that led toward the cooling water inlet.
“You lead on,” the boss said. He kept talking as they sloshed through the water, moving with the current. ‘You’ve lived here long? No, wait, I bet you’ve lived here all your life. You know, I’ve been further north than this, but it’s bleaker around here than at the pole. Just the forests and the sea, and the sea is covered with ice pack. And the mines further inland. I saw the pipes that carry the ore slurry from the air, like black snakes through the forest. That was before the weather closed in. Sleet and lightning? I suppose it’s the iron in the rock. I’m not surprised the place is domed; only haunts and ghouls and bugs could live outside. Now, where do we go from here?”
They had reached another Y junction. Both tunnels sloped steeply upward away from them. The inlet complex fed seawater to the cooling system from concrete surge baffles and was half as big as the Factory itself. 17 had never been this close to the outside before, and didn’t know where to go next, but she didn’t want to look stupid, and so pointed to the left-hand tunnel. But they had gone only a little way when it split again.
The boss saw her confusion and said gently, “I’ll go right and you go left. We’ll meet back here in ten minutes. Oh, I bet you don’t have a watch. Here.”
He stripped a black chronometer from his wrist. “I have a chip,” he said. “This is just jewelry.”
17 took it. It was very heavy. The casing was titanium or chrome steel or some other impossibly rare alloy. Certainly the crystal beneath which black numbers counted the seconds was a cultured diamond.
The boss said, “I don’t know your name.”
“Katrina.”
She said it without thinking.
The boss made a funny little bow. “Katrina, I’m pleased to be hunting with you. If you see anything, blow hard on your whistle, and I’ll be right there.”
Two minutes into the tunnel, she knew that the haunt was close. Pack crab nests crushed. Fresh scrapes from the thing’s spines on the ceiling, on the walls. A breeze chilled her face. It smelled as fresh as the boss, clean and wild. The smell of outside. The light ahead was daylight.