“The Irons take nothing off-site,” the foreman assured them. “They’re looked over as they leave.”
“He could put it into a smaller container,” Pol suggested, “something easily smuggled out.”
“Unlikely. They’re not that smart.” Gyde turned back to the foreman. “Besides Irons who else is on a construction site?”
“The foremen are Bronze, as are the architects, masons, and inspectors.”
Pol was watching some of the Irons. They were lifting heavy stone blocks with pulleys. Sweaty work. They were suited to it: drab, dark, smelly, hairy. He didn’t see this level of Irons very often. The ones in public service were the nicer ones. Almost a third of these poor animals had some kind of minor deformity—a twisted ear, a split palate, a drooping eye. Mongrels.
Pol clenched his hands at his side. He was not one of these.
When they were alone, Pol said, “I don’t think we can completely eliminate an Iron. Not yet.”
Gyde pursed his lips. “Irons don’t read and write. Not this class, anyway. House servants maybe, but not these.”
“What if our suspect was a house slave who got demoted? It’s possible, particularly since our friend has a problem with authority.”
“What would you suggest, my tenacious partner?”
“There.” Pol pointed to a long, unattractive apartment building. Clearly Iron housing, it was as modest and institutional as the state produced, painted a leaden gray like the clouds. Gyde’s expression was one of contemplated misery.
“We should look while we’re here,” Pol said flatly. “It might trigger an idea.”
Gyde shot him a look that said he felt this was as fertile a use of time as the Archives had been. “I’ll give it twenty minutes. You realize we can have Research check for any Iron construction workers in the city who can read and write?”
“We should do that as well.” Pol headed for the housing.
What was he looking for? For the thirty-some years that were missing from his brain? He wasn’t sure, but he had learned not to ask questions and this was one way of avoiding them. Even though he’d spent time as a household Iron, he really knew little about this class. Instead of asking, he would see for himself. Thoroughness was a good cover for ignorance.
From the look on Gyde’s face as they entered the building it occurred to Pol that his partner might know even less about Irons than he did.
The interior smelled putrid. It was the kind of stench Pol had become unaccustomed to in his short time in the privileged world of the Silvers. It smelled of the sweat of despair, the self-loathing of the unwashed. The narrow cement hallways were empty except for bundles of rags here and there that turned out to be children. Some of the apartment doors stood open, and as Gyde and Pol moved silently from floor to floor, Pol could see why. The apartments were tiny boxes, filled with the discarded trash that Irons used as clothes, furniture, or household items and crowded with bodies, even now, when the majority of the Irons were at work.
Pol, who insisted on stepping through the open doors and glancing around, saw no signs of literacy, no signs of any mentality that could calculate, plan, sneak past guards, or formulate obscure theories worth writing on walls. They might as well have been monkeys for all the intelligence he saw. And there was something else that bothered him.
“Children,” he said to Gyde with a disapproving tone. They were peering into one apartment where a dark-headed baby was attached to a startled female’s breast. Two others, toddler age, were playing listlessly on the floor.
Trick number two in avoiding detection: if you must ask a question, don’t phrase it as such; simply open the topic for discussion.
“Disgusting isn’t it? They let them breed at will, this class. It’s their mortality rate. Can’t even procreate right.” Gyde, who did not appreciate having to be here in the first place, let his abhorrence fully vent. “I’ve heard half of ’em are born monsters. Have to kill ’em right out of the womb. Racial garbage. Besides, you know the state—they always need more slaves.”
They were four stories up when the air-raid sirens went off: jolting, the way they always were, no matter how many times you heard them. Sometimes Pol heard them even when they weren’t there.
“Scarp!” Gyde cursed.
From all sides, Irons flooded the halls. Gyde and Pol were caught in a panicked stampede. There was no time to get out of the building, to search for another shelter. They were trapped in a crowd that pushed through the narrow corridors and stairwells like a tide through a funnel, going down, down, down.
The bombs began to hit as they reached the cellar. Someone lit a lantern.
Pol could feel Gyde next to him, muscles stiff as a ramrod. In the flickering light, the old warrior’s eyes were closed: closed against the sight, wishfully closed against the smell, of a hundred terrified Irons, panting, rank, braying, groaning, moaning. The light flickered in and out. The bombs were close. Then they were very close. The building shook. Dust was in the air—from the ceiling, walls, corridor, coating Pol’s throat.
How easily it could happen: a ceiling collapsed and you were trapped under a ton of rubble. If you were lucky, you died in the first few minutes. If you were not, you lived for days in the crushing dark until done in by your wounds, by starvation and thirst. It happened every day in Centalia. It was as common as rain.
Trapped with a hundred Irons in a cramped basement during a bad air raid—it was a Silver’s worst nightmare.
The bombs drew closer and Pol found himself flat on the ground. Through the clogging dust that was the first round of liquefaction of the building he was in, Pol saw a female not far from him. She was huddled over a bundle, her face looking upward plaintively, as though to hold the ceiling in place. The bundle in her arms shifted and stretched. Coverings parted to reveal a young boy—bare from his waist to his toes, struggling against his mother’s frightened grip. He was wailing, but Pol’s ears were ringing with the sound of the explosions.
They must be hitting next door. The enemy loved to hit construction sites. That was another reason that hardly anyone but Irons worked them and perhaps why the state was so low on slaves.
The boy’s right foot was clubbed, a fleshy mass. If the state had let him live they were desperate for warm bodies. The mother felt his struggles, reached down, and gathered his arms around her neck, pulling him to sitting. He was two or three years old. He clung to her, looking at Pol. His thumb went into his mouth. Staring eyes. Mother.
Something came surging across the chasm. He had been held like that once, hadn’t he? He’d had a mother. She… She had left him before he was very old, he was pretty sure, because his memories of her were faint, but he’d had one. In a house, a private home, she had held him in just such a way. And then later there had been a father. Hate flared in his heart. Yes, he was very sure there had been a father.
But the lives of Silvers were dedicated to the state: they didn’t have wives, homes, children, mothers, fathers.
He buried his face in his forearms. If this scarping noise didn’t stop he would kill someone!
“Get up!” Gyde said. Pol felt a toe in his side, nudging. “What’s the matter with you? Are you hurt?”
Pol looked up. The Irons were shuffling from the room. The air raid was over. Gyde wanted out at all costs, was going to leave him here in a minute if he didn’t move.
Outside, the air was hazy with dust. Gyde might have upbraided Pol for making him go in that hellish place except for the fact that right in front of them the construction site—where they’d been standing minutes ago—was a smoking pile of beams and steel and the occasional bloody limb of a construction worker.
Gyde looked at the site briefly, rubbed his reddened eyes. “If that scarping terrorist dies before we catch him and I lose my merits… !”