One of the blacksuits raised his shotgun in the air and fired a single shot. Behind the deafening report I heard the ammunition pinging off bars above my head, and hoped that everybody was on the ground floor. Anyone left upstairs could have some ugly holes in them. The yard instantly fell quiet, the prisoners clamping their mouths shut to avoid drawing attention to themselves.
“Looks like you’ve made quite an impression,” Donovan risked whispering in my ear. I hoped this didn’t have anything to do with the previous day’s events, but judging by the way people were staring at me I knew it was a pretty pointless wish.
Eventually the screen exploded into static, a fizzing snowstorm that settled into a fuzzy image of a dark figure. The man was sitting in the shadows, but a single slice of light illuminated a flash of teeth and a crooked nose that I knew belonged to the warden. He sat forward and suddenly his whole face came into view. Unlike when he was standing in front of me, I was able to look into his eyes. But I wished I hadn’t. They were like black pools inside his head, vortices that seemed to suck me in. It was like staring into an abyss. I thought I could see planets in those eyes, galaxies of stars. I saw madness and chaos, I saw eternity. I saw my own death.
Then I blinked, and they were just eyes. Dark, yes, but normal. I realized I was drenched with sweat. It sat on my skin like a damp towel and I shivered in its grip. The entire room was cowering before the image of the warden, who resembled a giant staring down at his prey from the vast monitor.
“Obedience is the difference between life, death, and the other varieties of existence on offer here in Furnace,” the image spoke, the voice amplified through hidden speakers to a volume that made the ground vibrate. It was the same thing he had said on the day I arrived, and I don’t know why but I felt like he was speaking to me personally. After everything that had happened, I guess he probably was.
“Yesterday was a disgrace. Fighting in the canteen, a flagrant breach of lockdown rules, and one of my dogs had to be relieved of its pitiful existence because of two broken legs.”
I felt a sudden and surprising pang of guilt that the dog had been put down. They were monsters, but the whimper it made as it tried to stand up after the fall was still fresh in my mind.
“I know who was responsible, and so do you. But you are a colony of pests, you no longer have individual personalities. A crime committed by a few is a crime committed by you all, and therefore you are all subject to reprisal.” There was an audible groan in the yard. “So today, the trough room is out of bounds. No meals, no water. If you animals want to fight over your food, then you don’t deserve to eat.”
He smiled, and for a moment I felt myself sucked back into the pits of his eyes. It was like the world around me was unpeeling, dropping away, leaving blackness and madness in its place. I wrenched my head down, my stomach churning the same way it does on a roller coaster.
“For the moment I’ll forget about yesterday’s other incident,” the warden went on, sitting back so that his face was once again shrouded in shadow. “But pay heed. Any more infractions, any more fights, and the perpetrator will go to the hole for a week.” This time there were actual shouts of distress from inside the crowd of inmates. “And a week down there is as good as the electric chair. I hope I make myself clear.”
The screen fizzed again, then the static gave way to the rotating list of names for work duty. But nobody was paying attention. Something was building up from the center of the crowd, a wave of tension that threatened to break at any minute. It was cut short by another warning shot from the same guard, who stepped menacingly toward the unhappy inmates and aimed his smoking weapon at the nearest prisoner.
“You heard the boss,” he growled. “Shut up and get to work. If you ask me, you all got off lightly.”
Somehow the prisoners managed to batten down their tempers, and one by one they drifted off toward their stations. I was dismayed to see that Donovan and I were chippers again. My body didn’t feel up to lifting a pretzel, let alone a pickax, and the thought of being in a room full of people who hated me, all armed with mining equipment, didn’t really make me feel any better. There wasn’t even going to be any breakfast. I felt like my stomach had been surgically removed, leaving a gaping hole in my torso, and the thought of a day without food or water—even the gunk they served up here—was frightening.
We set off across the yard, but it was a good few seconds before either of us opened our mouths.
“Don’t worry,” said Donovan, speaking loudly over the shouts and insults that were being fired at me. “Not the first time the canteen’s been shut down for a day and it won’t be the last. We’re used to it. Got sealed off for three days when the Skulls took on the Leopards. That was a full-blown riot though.”
What little measure of relief I felt was quickly snatched away when a kid I had never seen before ran up to me and shouted, “Nice going, moron.” I found myself pulling closer to Donovan as if his mere presence would somehow protect me, although I hadn’t forgotten the way he had walked off yesterday when I had been getting pounded. I sensed someone else running toward me and I flinched, but I recognized Zee’s accent and straightened myself, trying to pretend that I’d just tripped on the stone.
“Hostile crowd,” he said. “Why do I feel like today’s my last day on earth?”
“You’ll be fine, for now,” said Donovan as Zee fell into line with us. “Nobody will start a skirmish knowing it’ll get them a week in the hole. Never been a survivor after that long. The record is four days, and he was a hollow man afterward.”
There was a distinct rumbling of stomachs but I couldn’t tell whether it came from Donovan, Zee, or my own gut, which was still churning. It probably emanated from all three of us, a chorus of protest at a day without sustenance.
We marched in silence through the hole in the wall, past a blacksuit whose silver eyes promised a world of pain if we stepped out of line. It was only my second day, but I felt like an old hand at chipping, donning my visor with a world-weary sigh, flicking on my helmet lamp, and hefting the pick onto my shoulder to avoid piercing anybody’s foot. My muscles complained at the effort, but it was only a halfhearted gripe. They knew what had to be done.
Zee had been put with us today, and he stuck close by, following my lead and selecting his own tools. The blacksuit split us into teams, and once again we marched into the third room. Donovan and I staked out the same spot at the far end of the half-finished cavern, and I filled Zee in on the job description.
“Pound and clear, that’s it. Oh, and watch your head!”
The steady percussion of metal and rock began again in earnest. At times the noise sounded exactly like what it was—a load of kids smashing a rock wall. But occasionally a rhythm would start up, some mysterious force of coincidence turning the relentless plinks into a staccato tune. It would only last for a few seconds before once again fading out of sync, but it always brought a smile to my face.
It was only after ten minutes or so of painful chipping that I felt like I was being watched. I put the sensation down to the fact that people were still scowling at me, but it was so powerful it felt like something boring into the back of my neck. I swung around and scanned the inmates before me. Most were hidden behind visors and a layer of red dust, but there was one familiar face that turned away as soon as I saw it. It was Montgomery.
I laid my pick down on the ground and walked over, weaving my way carefully around the wooden posts holding up the ceiling. He tried to back away, then stopped, then turned, then lifted his pick as though to start work, then let it drop. Finally, he slumped his shoulders and acknowledged me with a nod. Behind the shine on his visor I made out bruised cheeks and a swollen lip, but his expression was as hard as ever.
“How are you?” I asked softly. He fixed me with a glare that caught me by surprise, like I’d been the one beating him up.
“I guess you want me to thank you,” he spat. I raised my eyebrows and opened my mouth, but I had absolutely n
o idea how to respond. “I didn’t ask you to help me. I’m not some charity case. What? You want a big reward for rescuing helpless little Monty? Well, you’re not getting one.” Flecks of foam dotted the plastic screen in front of him. “Now we’re not even allowed any food. A whole day. It’s your fault.”
He lifted his pick and waved it at me. It reminded me of an old man shaking his cane at a group of kids. I held up my hands in surrender, my eyebrows refusing to return to their normal position.
“Jeez,” was all I could manage. I felt the familiar burn of anger flare up inside my chest, but I swallowed hard and it faded. Monty’s face was creased in hostile determination, but I could tell that it was fear making him react this way. I hoped it was, anyway, otherwise he was an ungrateful little wretch.
I opened my mouth to try to reason with him, then thought better of it, turning my back on him and returning to my pick.
“He didn’t look like he was bursting with gratitude,” said Zee, pulling up his visor and wiping a gloved hand across his brow. The move left a trail of wet dust on his forehead that looked like blood in the half-light of the room. “Did he even say thanks?”
I shook my head and Zee scowled over at Monty.
“That’s so out of order. We could have died yesterday saving his fat ass. We should have just left him.”
“Told you so,” said Donovan between swings. I ignored him, but they were both right. It had been a stupid thing to do. I’m no hero, no action star. I’m a villain, not a saint. I should have abandoned Monty to lick up after the Skulls, then we’d never have got on the warden’s bad side and we’d all have had breakfast. I took one last look at him—standing by himself, still holding his pick up like a weapon and staring at the floor—then started pummeling the wall again. I’m a little ashamed to say that this time, when I saw faces in the rock, I imagined they were his.
DOWNTIME
NOBODY IN FURNACE KNEW exactly how long work duty went on for. Donovan claimed that it was five or six hours—from breakfast to lunch—but that second day of hard labor felt more like a full twenty-four-hour stretch.
With no fuel to keep us going, we all quickly began to falter. The oppressive air of Furnace beat down on us like dragon’s breath—hot, stale, and at times stripped of oxygen so we felt like we were choking. It was the lack of water that really took its toll, drying us out like prunes and forcing us to lay our picks down every couple of minutes to avoid blacking out. I even found myself eyeing the sweat on Donovan’s forehead in the hope it would quench my thirst.
There were a couple of times I felt the world spin uncontrollably, the rush of vertigo like I’d just fallen off a cliff. I had to clamp my eyes shut and lean on my pick to avoid losing it completely. Other kids weren’t so lucky. Two passed out that morning, the second midway through a swing. He fell forward like a dead weight, landing face-first on a jagged strip of rock. The sight of gushing blood usually would have turned my stomach, but I’d already seen far worse than that here in Furnace. His prone body was dragged from the room by a blacksuit, a slick crimson trail betraying his route.
By the time the siren sounded—half a lifetime later—the rhythm of picks against rock had dwindled to a sorry tapping from the couple of inmates who still had the strength to lift their tools. We were so desperate to leave that we all pushed our way through the door before the echoes of the siren had faded away, and in less than a minute we’d dumped our stuff and were waiting in the equipment room for the order to move through to the showers. Obviously another group had beaten us to them, as the blacksuit showed no sign of letting us pass.
To avoid the growing sense of frustration, which could explode into violence at any moment, Donovan, Zee, and I drifted to the back of the room. For some reason it seemed calmer here, cooler, but I couldn’t work out why. The other guys felt it too; it seemed to relax them, loosen their tense limbs, and tease a smile from the corner of their lips. I found myself thinking of mountains, of all things, snow-tipped and windblown, as high above the world as we were below it, drenched in light and air.
All three of us took a deep, shuddering breath in unison, then laughed at the fact it had happened. Something about this spot was euphoric, and we all had to pinch our noses to avoid giggling helplessly. Fortunately at that point the blacksuit gave the order to move out, and the noise of our spluttered laughs was lost in the clomp of feet.
It was only as we made our way out of the room that I fathomed the source of our bizarre rapture. Looking back I saw the splintered black hole in the rock that led into Room Two. It was still sealed off with heavy wooden boards because of the cave-in, but there was no mistaking the nature of what was emanating from that portal.
It was fresh air.
AFTER THE HEAT and hardship of the chipping room the showers were like paradise. For once the cold water was a blessing, not a curse, and we all stood under the flow letting the icy blast cool and cleanse our bodies and gulping down as much liquid as we could. I swear more water went down our throats than down the drains that afternoon.
I thought the abundant supply of cool liquid might have kept things civil in the showers, but I’ve learned that in Furnace you can’t have more than a few minutes without cruelty of some kind. Behind the roar of the flow I heard jeering again, wolf whistles and laughter that seemed to be both muffled and amplified by the vapor in the air.
I wiped the drips from my eyes and glanced across the shower room to see who was being persecuted this time, but I needn’t have bothered. Monty was pressed up against the wall farther along the same row as me, while a pack of inmates sucked up water with their mouths and spat it at him. The poor kid was trying to cover something on his upper arm, and when he raised his hand to block a spout of spitwater I saw what it was—a brown birthmark the size of a grapefruit and the shape of a heart.
One of the kids stepped right up to Monty, cheeks full, and let loose a veritable torrent right into the kid’s face.
“Nice tattoo, lover boy,” he shouted through a twisted grin. I felt that familiar tug of anger, a beast inside me that wanted to be unleashed, but I fought it, reminding myself how Monty had reacted earlier. Besides, he spotted me staring at him and his green eyes narrowed in a way that once again made me feel like I was the one tormenting him. It was an expression of defiance, one that warned me not to help him. I didn’t really understand it, but I respected it, and turned my back to let him know. I was glad I did, as the wet thump and cry that sounded from behind me would have been too much to witness.
Colder than glaciers, and dressed in clean new uniforms and paper shoes, we marched from the shower room into the courtyard. An armed blacksuit stood in front of the tunnel that led to the trough room, but I wasn’t too upset about the thought of not going in there again after yesterday. Instead, Donovan led me and Zee across the yard toward the stairs.
“Things get heated down here when the trough room’s out of bounds,” he explained. “Hundreds of prisoners all starving and thirsty and bored is like dynamite waiting to go off. I don’t think anything will happen, not with the warden’s warning and all—no one’s gonna blow if they’ve been promised a week in the hole—but best to stay clear just in case.”
I wasn’t going to argue with that. We reached the stairs and traipsed upward, but not before I noticed another door tucked beneath the stairwell, the gap in the rock so narrow that it was almost invisible. Two inmates stood outside, casually leaning on the wall. One was a Skull, the other had two black lines across each cheek—a mark I’d seen on another couple of prisoners.
“What’s in there?” I asked, pointing. Donovan bent down to peer through the steps and nodded when he caught the eye of the inmate with the painted cheeks. The guy tilted his head in Donovan’s direction in acknowledgment.
“That’s the gym,” he replied, continuing up the stairs. “But don’t get your hopes up. That’s private property, owned by the Skulls and the Fifty-niners—the guys with the lines on their faces.”
??
?Why Fifty-niners?” Zee asked as we reached the second platform. Donovan snorted.
“Ask them, it’s how many people they killed during the Summer of Slaughter, before they got sent down. There’s fifteen of them so you do the math. They claim to have been one of the biggest gangs in the capital, east of the river. Don’t believe it myself, though. They weren’t big enough to take on the Skulls when they got here, just arranged some kiss-ass pact where they both control the gym. Ask me, fifty-nine is their combined IQ.”
We reached the fourth platform with a series of huffs and puffs, each of us using the banister to pull ourselves up.
“They let a handful of people in to use the equipment, including yours truly,” Donovan went on. “But nobody else gets in. They use it for cards and organized skirmishes. Floor in there is permanently red, if you follow me.”
“Who wants to use the gym anyway,” grumbled Zee as we hauled ourselves onto the fifth level. “Get worked hard enough in here without worrying about weights and rowing machines and all that crap.”
“It’s okay for you,” Donovan replied, turning and flexing his arms at us. It looked for a minute like there were a couple of melons where his biceps should be. “You don’t have a body like this to look after.”
We laughed, but like all good moments in Furnace it was short-lived. As we neared our cell, two spotty faces emerged from behind the bars and blocked our way. It was Kevin Arnold and one of his lieutenants, a scar-faced kid called Bodie. Donovan seemed to expand when he saw them, his body swelling as he tensed his arms, and for a second the Skulls looked anxious.