The group looked at me. No one spoke. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Move out.’
Up close, the factory loomed like a monstrous shadow. Orange radiance from the street lights lit up the upper walls, while the ground floor was shrouded in gloom. ‘One on the gate,’ Ilmarin said quietly into my ear.
I nodded. I could have crept up and taken him down, but we could afford to take things slowly. ‘Saffron?’
Saffron leaned around the railings, staring into the shadows surrounding the front door. I could feel the spell working, a kind of rhythmic pull. Mind magic is hard to detect; it’s not easy to make out the details of a spell even when you know what to look for. Thirty seconds passed, a minute, then I saw a dark shape slump to the ground. The futures in which the alarm was raised vanished.
We moved up, the security men trailing us. Once we reached the door I clicked on my light, shining it down. The beam revealed a kid of maybe seventeen or eighteen, dressed in dirty clothes. He was fast asleep, breathing slowly and steadily, and on his head was a silver mesh cap.
‘That’s how it controls them?’ Sergeant Little asked quietly.
I nodded. The Council records on this thing had been thorough, and they’d contained drawings of similar devices. The cap was made of metal, crudely soldered, and it was clamped around the boy’s skull. ‘How long would it take you to get it off?’ I asked Saffron.
Saffron shrugged.
Which meant I couldn’t count on her to do it fast enough. ‘Cuff him and move him back to the perimeter,’ I said. This one hadn’t been carrying a gun; that would change once we got inside.
Little’s men removed the sleeping boy while Ilmarin worked on the door. It opened quickly and we moved in.
We picked our way through dark corridors. Junk and rubbish littered the floor, making it hard to find a path, and every now and then there’d be the crunch of something being crushed under an unwary boot. Each time it happened, Little would shoot a glare at the offending person, but I didn’t turn to look; all my attention was focused on the futures ahead.
There were signs that the factory was in use – footprints in the grime, splinters of wood and brick that had been kicked out of the way – but there had been no attempt to make the place more hospitable. There was no power, and judging by the smell, no plumbing either. Even if there had been, I didn’t think anyone would want to live here. The factory had an unwholesome feel to it, malignant and cold.
There was a metallic skittering, something small bouncing away down the corridor. ‘Hold up,’ Ilmarin said quietly. He put a hand to the wall. ‘Sergeant?’
‘I see it,’ Sergeant Little said, frowning at the scratches and pockmarks in the concrete. ‘Looks like an AP mine.’
‘They’ve got the place trapped?’
‘No,’ I said absently.
Behind me, I felt Ilmarin and Little exchange glances. Little bent down, picked up a ball bearing, sniffed at it. ‘It’s not new.’
‘You sure?’ Ilmarin said. ‘If there are mines here …’
‘This is years old,’ I said.
Ilmarin gave me a thoughtful look. He’d been with me the last time we’d come here, and there hadn’t been any mines. ‘He’s right,’ Little said. ‘Too much dust in the scorings.’
‘You hear that?’ one of the other men said.
We stood still, listening. After a moment I could pick it out: a steady throbbing sound. ‘Generator?’ Little asked.
‘I think so,’ Ilmarin said.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Little, have the men do their final checks.’
‘You’re still planning to be the first one in?’ Ilmarin asked me.
‘You don’t approve?’
‘I don’t mind backing you up, if that’s what you’re asking,’ Ilmarin said dryly. ‘But I have a shield.’
‘Well, I don’t,’ Saffron announced, ‘and I’m not going in first.’
‘Stay and cover the door,’ I told her. ‘You can pick them off from there.’
‘And Chimaera?’ Ilmarin asked.
The young Keeper was at the back of our procession, far enough away to be out of hearing for the conversation. ‘I meant what I said,’ I told Ilmarin. ‘I want these people alive.’
‘You do make life difficult for yourself,’ Ilmarin murmured, but his lips quirked in a smile. ‘Well, then. Shall we?’
I looked at Little and got his nod. ‘Let’s go kick the hornet’s nest.’
The main factory floor had been mostly cleared. The old machines, too heavy to be moved, still squatted like rusting statues, but the concrete around them had been swept clean, the rubbish piled untidily in the corners. In the centre of the floor were a pair of splintered wooden tables, and a dozen people were clustered around each, sitting on broken chairs and old packing crates. They were young and old, male and female, and they were all hunched over, working with feverish intensity. All wore the mesh headpieces that we’d seen on the boy outside. Above, catwalks ran from wall to wall. Yellow lights around the room threw off a dull glow, and in one corner a petrol generator was rumbling away with a steady chug-chug-chug.
Ilmarin and I walked out onto the factory floor. With the sound of the generator drowning out our footsteps, no one noticed us at first. Then a woman at the end of the table saw us out of the corner of her eye and looked up.
There was a moment’s pause, then every other person in the room looked up in eerie synchronisation. Twenty-four pairs of eyes stared blankly at us, then as one, they rose to their feet and began moving forward.
‘Well, we have their attention,’ Ilmarin said. ‘What’s step two?’
‘Step two is to take out the ones with guns,’ I said. I’d been hoping that their reaction to two apparently unarmed men would be to capture, rather than shoot. It seemed to be working, at least so far, but three at the back had pulled out pistols. If I wanted to avoid any dead bodies, I needed them disarmed.
The thralls had closed to within a few feet. Their arms came up, reaching to grapple. ‘Go,’ I said, and darted forward.
For an instant they hesitated, but an instant was all I needed. I slipped the attack of the first, knocked the breath out of the second, tripped him and threw him under the feet of the third. They tried to press around me and grapple, acting in unison. Against most people it would have been effective, but here it was the reverse. Normally it’s uncertainty that’s my biggest enemy in combat, the chaos and confusion cutting the range of my divination to a bare few seconds. But here I wasn’t really fighting a crowd, I was fighting a single entity that was using the thralls like fingers and toes, and I slid away from their attacks, using their numbers against them.
There’s a rhythm to battle, a cadence, almost like a dance. Every move has its counter, every strike its timing. Once you understand it, it doesn’t feel as though you’re attacking at alclass="underline" you just do what’s natural. Dimly, through the press, I was aware of Ilmarin hammering thralls with fists of air while they beat uselessly at his shield. A man swung at me with a broom handle. I like sticks, especially long sticks. The staff came out of his fingers as I twisted it, and a blow to his head put him on the ground.
Felling him opened a gap in the crowd, and I sprang onto a packing crate and up onto the table. Grasping hands reached for me but I ran down the table, kicking aside bits of metal and unfinished headpieces, then jumped down in front of the trio with guns. They had their pistols levelled but I could see in the futures that they weren’t going to fire, at least not yet. My stick cracked the wrist of one of them, sending the pistol skittering off across the concrete, and I kicked the second hard enough to make him fold over. The third backed up, still aiming the gun, and I closed, spun, took his ankle out from underneath him, then stunned him with a blow to the head.