Motus, page 14
Corun was beginning to suspect Malac’s wound was worse than it looked. From the sudden trembling in Corun’s mother’s hand, which sent some orzo to the bartop, she was just as concerned for his health.
“But aside from a few other concessions,” Ruth said, now somber, “I think the delegation went as smoothly as we could hope for. Shares will still flow to us, and we’ll be able to use that to purchase food. For now, all you have to worry about is taking your mother home and showing up outside the Smeltery in an hour.”
“It’s time I teach you amateurs how to mine proper mineshafts,” Malac said, coming to his feet with the aid of a pickaxe propped against the table beside him. “Mind if I borrow this, Corun, just for the walk to the Smeltery?”
Corun realized it was his pickaxe Malac carried. He’d nearly forgotten how the man had used it to fend off the compliance officers the night before.
“You won’t be doing any mining,” Ruth scolded as Malac made his way to the door.
“Despite what my ex-wives will have told you, I’m neither an idiot nor suicidal. I’ll lend my own pickaxe to someone who can swing it.”
With that, the old miner shoved open the door and stepped down to the paving stones, letting out a protracted grunt as he went.
When Corun looked back, his mother was standing, visibly steeling herself for what came next. Though, like a bit of dry clay, he worried she would crumble at the slightest provocation.
“I’m ready,” she said.
Less than a minute after the door closed behind Malac, a quivering woman stepped through and down to the paving stones. She seemed to shrink into herself, cowering beneath the oppressive weight of the rocks hanging above her.
Corun hurried his mother home before she could draw too much attention to herself. He knew that she, gossip monger as she was, would hate the thought of people recounting her mad dash through the Reardistrict.
He prepared her for the sight of her studio on the walk back, and she took the news of its ransacking well, though her true feelings may have been masked by the more imminent threat of a cave-in.
When they finally reached the studio, she stepped inside, pottery crunching beneath her feet. His mother’s personal things, clothes, a few books, and much of the kitchen supplies were scattered to the studio floor and tread upon. Most distressing of all was the twisted remains of her pottery wheel and the upended buckets of clay and water. Without either, she would no longer be able to work. The lack of something to do would drive her into severe depression, Corun knew. To her credit, she didn’t look distraught by the sight but gave it all a considering look before bending down to pick up a shattered pot.
While she picked through her belongings, Corun silently cleared a portion of the kitchen counter, recovered the kettle, and began boiling a pot of orzo from what few roast barley grounds remained in the upended tin. His mother continued her cleaning, pausing only once to sip from the mug he offered her. Even this, the preoccupation of cleaning her devastated studio, was more tolerable to her than stillness, silence, and nothing but time to think about all she had lost over the years.
As they worked, Corun took stock of what remained. The phonograph had been spared, though the long horn was bent as if bludgeoned by a truncheon. Her collection of recordings appeared intact, though the one they’d liberated from the Archives was nowhere to be seen. The only thing they’d left untouched was the one object in the studio that did not belong to her. Cassi’s typewriter was exactly as she left it the night before.
Except that wasn’t quite true. Corun distinctly remembered Cassi withdrawing the sheet of paper from her typewriter, the transcript of the board’s recording. But even as he approached, he could see a sheet of paper sticking up from the device with words printed in a clean line across it.
I finally found you.
Staring at the words, Corun inwardly snarled. Wolfram would undoubtedly recognize this paper as the same stock with which Cassi had orchestrated her smear campaign against him and the other board members.
Corun crumpled it and stuffed it into his pocket. He continued cleaning for a time, but the longer he waited, the more he felt the urge to check on Cassi. Despite what she’d said to him the night before, he wasn’t convinced Wolfram wouldn’t order compliance officers to break through the picket line just to reach her.
“I’ll take this back to Cassi before heading over to the Smeltery to start the dig,” he said as he donned his helmet, pocketed his facemask, and hefted the heavy typewriter in his arms. “I’ll be back to help you after my shift.”
His mother gave him a distracted nod in response.
The five-minute walk to Cassi’s home gave Corun a much greater appreciation of a compactor’s strength. The cumbersome typewriter strained his muscles and nearly slipped from his grasp, though his sweaty palms weren’t doing him any favors. A moment after he knocked, footsteps sounded from within her small residence. Corun repositioned his hold on the typewriter and schooled his face into a warm ambivalence. Even if she dismissed his concerns, returning her typewriter was a convenient excuse to see her again. She didn’t need to know how his heart thundered, and throat tightened.
When the door swung open, he was at first aghast to see her shrouded in the bright red suit jacket of Director Wolfram. Only then did he notice how she rubbed her hands up and down her arms. Her hair was disheveled, and a yawn interrupted her greeting.
“Good . . . morning”
“Did I interrupt your beauty sleep?”
When her yawn came to its natural end, she tilted her head, indicating that he should come inside.
“After the events of yesterday, you’re lucky I didn’t sleep through your knock.” She stepped aside as he lugged the typewriter up and into her quarters. “You didn’t have to return that. I could have come to get it.”
“My mother’s studio is not fit for visitors. The place was ransacked after we left. This was about the only thing they didn’t destroy.” He couldn’t quite keep the sorrow from his voice, and she immediately covered her mouth with a hand.
“Oh, Corun. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s my fault,” Corun said. “I knew they might come looking for me, especially after our interaction with Wolfram in the Archives.”
“I wonder why he didn’t break this too,” Cassi said as she accepted the typewriter from him, easily hefting it over to her table and setting it down.
“I suspect he wanted you to find this,” he said, fishing the crumpled paper out of his pocket. He handed it to her. She smoothed the paper on the table and considered the four words.
“Corun . . . I don’t think this is for me. I’m certain he didn’t see me at the studio. This is for the person he thinks was responsible for all those pamphlets.”
“If not you, then . . .”
“Your mother,” she said, the words giving her visible pain as she spoke. “He found the typewriter in her studio along with the map from the Archives. What else was he going to conclude?”
“That’s ridiculous. She never leaves her home.”
“Knowing that would require him to do research, and trust me, he prefers to leap to conclusions.”
As if thinking of their time in the Archives made her skin itch, she lifted the jacket from her shoulders and threw it back under the bed, exposing a white blouse and shorts that ended midthigh. Unfazed, she responded to his questioning gaze, though hopefully not his quickening heartbeat.
“It got a bit chilly last night. I guess they were short staffed at the Air Handlers and forgot to keep the fans going.”
“It was probably intentional,” Corun said, trying to keep his eyes from wandering to her exposed skin. “The Foredistrict will have gotten much colder, as far from the Smeltery and Reactor as they are. It’s a good reminder that they wouldn’t last very long without us to keep it going.”
“That does sound like something Ruth would do,” she said, smirking. “Have you heard from her? Did the delegation come back safely?”
Unsure what to do with his hands, Corun rubbed them together as he paced the small room and relayed Ruth’s account of the meeting. All the while, he tried to keep his thoughts on the subject at hand. But he couldn’t help but worry for his mother. Even though dozens of laborers separated her from Wolfram’s clutches, Corun was sure the man would find a way to express his anger, as misplaced as it was. It did not bode well for his mother’s business or mental health.
“I’m surprised they went along with it,” Cassi said when Corun’s recounting finally ended. “Still, this is everything we were hoping for, right? We can start ascending. Did she say when?”
“She told me to meet the other miners beside the Smeltery. They’ll be gathering there any minute now.”
“I should get ready then.”
He looked at her, unable to hide his puzzlement. “You’re a compactor, Cassi.”
“They still need compactors, don’t they? What else are they going to do with all that slag?”
“From what Ruth told me, they intend to keep the slag to a minimum. They’ll extract all they can from the ore. Otherwise, we’ll soon run out of places to store it.”
“I didn’t think about that,” she said, and Corun ached to see her hang her head in defeat. She was the one who’d started them in this direction. It wasn’t right that she wouldn’t be able to see it through to the end. Most of all, he wanted her beside him every step of the way.
Then his eyes wandered to places he had been trying to avoid. The pale skin of her neck transitioned into a chest and shoulders that were far broader and muscular than any he’d seen on a lady, or man in the Foredistrict for that matter. It was the body of a laborer, and it took all of his considerable willpower to look away. Only then did he remember Malac’s words as he’d left the Thermal Neutron.
“Have you ever considered becoming a miner?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said with a bitter laugh. “Just as soon as I sell my place and all my possessions. I told you before, those pickaxes and lamps don’t come cheap.”
When he didn’t respond, she looked up to see him smiling.
“I happen to know of a certain miner recovering from a stab wound. I overheard him say he’d donate his gear to the cause.”
“Malac would do that? Lend the gear to me?”
“If you can swing a compactor’s hammer, you can swing a miner’s pickaxe.”
Cassi’s face lit with an eager smile. “Okay, then I should definitely get ready.”
Corun returned her smile until she lifted an eyebrow and looped a thumb through the shoulder strap of her blouse.
“Oh, of course,” he said, blushing as he all but fled the room.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
There were only a handful of miners present outside the Smeltery when they arrived, talking among themselves as they polished their pickaxes or cleaned their carbide lamps.
Malac was at the head of the pack, deflecting questions about the night prior. A look of consternation crossed his face when a miner continued to press the issue.
“I know it’s not what you signed up for, but we’re all in this together now. If you want to keep getting paid, it’s the only way.”
“You’re asking us to spend weeks away from the city. What good are those shares going to do us up there? I say we mine what’s immediately around us. Keep us close to home should the compliance officers get any ideas. I have a wife, and I’m not comfortable leaving her behind.”
“It’ll be months yet before you’re too far away to make it back at the end of your shift. We’ll discuss it when the time comes. And if you don’t like it, you’re free to trade places with someone guarding the picket line. Corun, there you are.”
With visible relief, Malac extricated himself from the circle of miners to approach them. He still used Corun’s pick as a cane, and a stain of fresh blood blotted the fabric of his shirt.
“You alright, Malac?”
“I’ll be fine. But I’ll be needing some chalk. Can you fetch me some from the Smeltery.”
Corun glanced at Cassi, who looked far more nervous than she had when breaking into the Archives. He decided to spare her the trouble of asking herself.
“I can do that, though Cassi would also like to help. I was hoping you’d lend her your pickaxe.”
Malac looked her up and down and scratched his chin consideringly.
“This isn’t as simple as bashing slag over and over again until it’s slightly denser slag. There’s technique involved.”
“I’m a quick study,” she said, squaring her shoulders.
“Then I’ll leave it to Corun to teach you everything you need to know. He learned from the best, his father, and well, his father learned from me.” The sly grin he gave them fell away as he reached for his back pocket, winced at the motion, then repeated it slowly.
He withdrew a key and slapped it into her open palm. After giving her directions to his house and where to find his pickaxe, helmet, and carbide lamp among the mess, he chuckled as he watched her sprint away.
“That one’s trouble, boy. Careful she doesn’t hurt you, and I’m not just talking about an errant pickaxe swing.”
“Relationship advice from you, Malac?”
He patted Corun’s shoulder. “My three ex-wives would agree with me in this instance. Though I was the one they called trouble. Now make yourself useful and bring me that chalk.”
Corun walked the dozen meters that separated him from the Smeltery. The building was only just starting to show signs of activity as laborers, hearing of the imminent supply of ore, began to prepare. Walking up one of the short ramps meant for a wheelbarrow, he waved down a familiar smeltery technician, Hesson, from the new Reardistrict union.
After explaining what he needed, the senior technician waved for him to follow, and they entered the wide building.
“You’re the one who brings the pots for firing, right?” he said as he led the way to the kiln. “We use the same kiln to burn off carbon dioxide from calcium carbonate. It usually sits here until we get enough of it to justify the energy expenditure.”
Corun looked down at the loose powder inside a metal canister. “Where does it all come from?”
“The Air Handlers, mostly. They use lime, that’s calcium oxide, to pull excess moisture and carbon dioxide from the air if the farms can’t keep up. Once it gets here, we heat it, pull the water and carbon dioxide back off, and capture it in storage.” He gestured at a vent pipe extending from the side of the kiln and into what appeared to be a cooling apparatus and then a compressor and tank. “We send most of the calcined lime back, but keep some here for aluminum extraction, as a flux to remove impurities from iron, and we mix it with coke in an electric arc furnace to make . . .”
“Calcium carbide,” Corun said, tapping the canister of his headlamp. When it reacted with water and released its acetylene gas, it would once more become slaked lime. It amazed him just how many uses the simple ingredient had and how readily it was recycled. He wondered if he was even now using some of the same stuff they’d mined out of the rock hundreds of years ago. It had lit the way for thousands of miners, cleaned the air they breathed, and helped produce all the metal they needed to survive. It was no wonder Cassi feared the city was so close to collapse. All it would take was for this one ingredient to be accidentally thrown out with the slag, and they would be helpless.
One thing was certain. They needed to find their origins, and they needed to do it fast before another catastrophe befell the city.
With Hesson’s guidance, Corun took a couple handfuls of the calcium carbonate and followed the man to an extruder. The white powder was compressed inside the whirring machine and pushed out a narrow tube as a brittle but compact white stick of chalk.
With three five-centimeter pieces of chalk in hand, Corun returned to the site of the new mineshaft and handed them to Malac. The miner had once again moved to the front of the crowd, nearest the rock wall. The number of laborers gathered at the new dig site had swelled to nearly a hundred people, and their collective voices bordered on deafening. Malac dealt with their inane questions with his usual tact, telling them to shut their mouths before he did it for them. Despite the man’s visible injury, most dared not tempt him to follow through on his promise.
Cassi returned just a moment later with Malac’s lamp already affixed to her helmet and carrying his pickaxe reverently in both hands despite the decades of wear it showed. Corun was quick to wave her over as she scanned the gathered masses.
When the steady stream of miners arriving on site petered out, Malac craned his neck to get a headcount. After a minute of quietly moving his lips, he nodded and shuffled over to the rock wall, against which a long, flat metal rod leaned. But this wasn’t just any metal rod. Notches in the metal marked each centimeter of its length. A short glass tube filled with colored water sat near its center, a single bubble floating at its peak. This was a paver’s level, or at least it used to be. This level was a bit shorter, as if someone had lopped off the top half meter of its length.
Malac took up the level and used it to draw a chalk line across the rough wall from the jagged edge of the paving tiles to the tip of the level. When he lifted his arm over his head, his other arm clutched at his bandaged side, as if trying to keep his innards from spilling out his stab wound. He repeated the process a level’s length farther down the wall and connected the two lines at the top to form a perfect square.
“Alright, quiet down,” he called over the hubbub, then proceeded to wince and curse as he held a hand to his side again. Looking up, he stared back at all the wide eyes regarding him. “I’m only going to say this once, because it will literally kill me to say it twice. So, listen closely. It may have occurred to you that there are far too many miners here to work side by side in a narrow shaft. But this isn’t the mines, where we work one shift and have no need to travel more than a couple meters a day. This time, we work around the clock. We will break into three shifts with thirty miners per shift. That’s still far too many to fit into a two-and-a-half-meter-wide space, you say? Well, I’m not finished.” He motioned to a pair of men. “Quickly, everyone find a partner, someone you’re willing to work beside for months at a time.”
