Metaltown

  Tear tracks made stripes down his dirty cheeks. “You don’t mean it.”

  She forced herself to stare him straight in the eye so he would know she wasn’t messing around.

  “I wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t.”

  He’d kicked her, hard, right in the thigh. So hard it had knocked him over. Any other time she would have beat the snot out of him, but instead she was grateful. It stole some of the pain from her chest, just for a minute.

  He’d snuck back inside, leaving her alone. Just like she was supposed to be.

  And then, for the first time since she was a kid at the orphanage, she prayed.

  Keep him safe, all right? Just do that one thing for me.

  * * *

  Shima opened the door on the third knock, just before Ty was about to turn around and leave. She didn’t know where she’d go. She was so tired she thought she might just lie down in the alley and let the cold take her.

  “Goodness, girl, you’ve seen better days.”

  Shima didn’t look much better, though. The woman’s hair was disheveled, her eyes red and swollen. She looked like she’d been crying. Ty immediately regretted knocking. If there was one thing she couldn’t stand, it was someone else’s tears.

  When Ty didn’t move, Shima grabbed her arm and pulled her in, checking the alley behind for any followers. Two children were on the floor. One was playing with a little rope doll Shima had made. The other was passed out on his stomach.

  “Sit down,” ordered Shima. Ty collapsed on the couch, only to have a bowl of corn mash shoved into her lap. The warmth made her numb fingers feel like they might crack. She wasn’t very hungry.

  “Did you run out of bandages?” Shima reached for Ty’s wounded eye—the stupid marks that had made Colin unable to even look at her, that had sent him straight to that greenback spy Lena Hampton. Ty jerked away.

  Shima set her teeth, scowling. “You need to keep it covered until it’s healed.”

  Ty shrugged.

  “Why aren’t you eating?”

  Ty looked at the pale mash, feeling her stomach turn. She handed it back to Shima.

  “Small Parts Charter took over the factory,” she said.

  The woman ran a thumb over her own eyebrow. “I heard that. Should I ask why you’re not there?”

  Ty dug her heel into the carpet, staring at the wall. “Too much to do. I don’t have time to mess around with that lot. I’ve got to find myself a job, remember?”

  Neither of them said anything for a while, and Ty was glad. She didn’t want to talk about it. It felt like more of that acid that had dripped on her face was being dumped in the empty cavity in her chest every time she thought about it.

  “I’m sorry,” Shima said finally.

  “Didn’t ask for your pity.”

  “Tough luck,” said Shima. “You’ve got it.”

  Ty turned away, unable even to get up off the couch and escape her. “You know what the worst of it is?” she heard herself say. “All this? The charter, and the fighting back, it’s all because of me. It all started ’cause I got hurt.” She could feel the resentment spreading through her, sour and sticky as tar.

  “And now you’re not a part of it.”

  She curled her fists into her pant legs. She didn’t need Shima making her feel bad. She didn’t need anyone.

  “We’re not so different, you and me.” Shima pulled her hair back, patting down the flyaways. “Before I came here, I worked as a nanny in a big house in the River District. Did I ever tell you that?”

  Ty slouched, fitting her body around the couch’s springs. Great. Story time. The babysitter was confusing her for one of the kiddies.

  “My employer was young, handsome. He had a baby girl, barely standing on her own when I got there, and a little boy who was in constant need of a time-out. They were broken people. The poor mother had died of the corn flu, and left a hole in their lives a mile deep.”

  Ty knew what it was like to feel that hole. It existed inside of her, right now.

  “The man ran a business, and worked too hard. Too many long nights. Too little time with his little boy, who pulled ten kinds of trouble trying to get his father’s attention. Still, though, when he was home, my employer was kind to me. He talked to me like I was a lady, brought me back little gifts from his business trips. I’d never had things like that growing up. We became close.” She glanced at Ty, as if checking to see that she understood what was meant by “close.”

  Of course Ty understood. She wasn’t an idiot.

  Shima hunched over her knees, resting her chin in one hand. “He sometimes said he’d move me into his big house, and we’d live there as a family. I didn’t tell any of the other staff. It was a secret he and I shared. It was the best secret I’d ever had.”

  Her voice was quiet now, reminding Ty that there was only one person she’d ever shared her secrets with, and now a wall of stone and a Hampton stood between them. No one knew her like Colin, and when he was gone, no one knew her at all.

  The haziness on her left side grew suddenly annoying, and she turned to face the woman more fully.

  “So what happened?”

  “Our arrangement was not as exclusive as I thought.” She tapped her mouth with her fingers, sighed. Her face disappeared behind her hands. “He held frequent business meetings at the house. That man will stop at nothing to make a deal.”

  Ty didn’t need to ask what that meant either. She remembered her nights at the Board and Care, the feel of another’s weight on top of her, their breath in her face. Things weren’t so different in the River District after all. She felt for the knife in her waistband, running her fingers over the steel to calm her nerves.

  “So you quit,” Ty guessed.

  “I stayed on. For the children. The little girl. The boy … he’d already learned too much from his father, I suppose.”

  “But…”

  “It’s complicated.” She stood suddenly, taking Ty’s bowl back to the pot and dumping the contents inside. When she spoke again, her voice had softened. “It’s complicated, loving someone so much you’d swallow hot coals every day just to see them done right.”

  Ty understood. She could have hopped a train, gone to Rosie’s Bay like Hayden had all those years back. She’d thought about it more than once. It wasn’t like she had anything worth staying for.

  Especially not now.

  “Now who’s pitying who?” Shima asked, gauging Ty’s response. “Don’t bother. He sacked me soon enough. His son—that rotten little bastard—did something awful to his sister, and when I got in the middle of it my employer sided with the boy, and turned me out.”

  “What happened to the girl?” asked Ty. She remembered only glimpses of her own mother, flashes from her time before St. Mary’s. A silver hairbrush. Her chiming laughter. An exotic perfume—something dark and spicy—that Ty had spilled across the floor. But those memories were only the dreams of a lonely kid. No Metalhead could afford perfume.

  “She grew up, I guess.”

  “Do you think she misses you?”

  Shima returned to the couch and collapsed again. “I know I miss her.”

  They sat in the silence, facing the wall, both missing their old lives so much it made the air between them heavy, palpable.

  “What am I supposed to do now?” Ty whispered.

  Shima grabbed her hand, and Ty didn’t even flinch.

  “Fight, because it hurts too much if you stop.”

  27

  LENA

  Lena spent half the night alone, cold and hungry, curled up in Mr. Minnick’s office on a lumpy tweed couch. The foreman’s chair beside her sat empty. Now that people knew who she was, they couldn’t trust her. Even Colin was keeping his distance. Being someone felt a lot worse than when he’d told his friends she was just a sub.

  In the middle of the night, a bone-rattling buzzer rocketed her back into high alert. But as suddenly as it started it was over, leaving a strange, screaming silence
in its place. She held absolutely still, as if waiting for the floor to drop out from beneath her. A moment later the building plunged into darkness.

  The power to the building had been shut off.

  A chorus of protests sang out from the floor. Though she knew where she was, the familiarity of the dark, enclosed space was too strong. The muffled jeers from outside too reminiscent of another time.

  Bile boiled in the pit of her stomach.

  She stumbled to the door, clumsy fingers fumbling with the handle. Finally she jerked it open and swallowed the tepid, metallic air from the floor. It filled her mouth and lungs and pushed down the panic attempting to break free.

  The emergency lights flickered on—one set of overheads in the far corner of the room. Their dull glow was just enough to create an obscure canvas in shades of gray. A winding, snakelike belt. Monstrous silver machines and black barrels. Not many people were left. Twenty, give or take a few. Counting them did nothing but increase her anxiety, and make her question, as she had a thousand times, what she was doing in a place she didn’t belong.

  Neither the Brotherhood nor the police had attempted to take the factory by force. But there were other ways to smoke them out.

  Eyes adjusting to the poor light, she returned to the office and pulled open the top drawer of the foreman’s desk. Inside, a bottle of liquid and a narrow glass figurine of some sort had been set atop a cluster of papers. She palmed the figure and riffled through the documents, lifting them close to her eyes to read. Incomplete pay ledgers, blank end-of-shift production reports. There was a thin piece of paper at the bottom, and on it was scratched a name: Astor Tyson. Beside it read: “Call McNulty IMEEDEATLY.” Clearly it was important, even if the person who’d written the note had had the spelling capabilities of an eight-year-old.

  She removed the small piece of paper from the drawer, frowning down at it. McNulty’s name was familiar—Hayden had had mentioned it when they’d met at Colin’s apartment. No one else makes a run on Metaltown. Not even McNulty. Perhaps he was another charter leader. If so, he might have been just as corrupt as Mr. Schultz. Maybe this Astor person was in on it, too. Lena shoved the paper into her pocket on the slim chance that she would be able to look into the issue when this was over.

  After neatly stacking the remaining papers, she continued to another drawer, searching for a flashlight or something to quell her grumbling stomach. The figure remained in her hand, her thumb rubbing small circles over the smooth glass. She hummed softly to herself, lost in the task of sorting.

  But when something shifted by the door, the song was swallowed.

  “Don’t stop because of me,” said Colin, leaning against the frame. Heat flooded her cheeks.

  “How long have you been standing there?”

  Even in the dim light she could see his smirk. “Just twenty, thirty minutes tops.” He made his way to the couch and collapsed, draping one long arm over the back cushion. “I see you’ve found Minnick’s dope pipe.” He pointed at the figurine in her hand.

  “Dope … oh, yuck.” It slid from her fingers and shattered violently against the floor. She grimaced and wiped her gloves on her pants, then fought the sudden urge to sweep it up.

  Colin’s chuckle rolled through the room, a breath of warmth in a cold, dark space. How could he laugh with everything going on?

  “I thought you were avoiding me.” She wished she hadn’t said it the moment the words left her mouth.

  The couch settled under his weight as he adjusted his position.

  “I’m here, aren’t I?” He tapped the seat next to him, and gradually she made her way over, sitting carefully, so as not to encroach on his space. “You’re good. You know that, right?”

  “What?” Her gaze found his, even in the low light.

  “Your voice.” He looked away. His fingers were tapping on the back of the couch behind her shoulders. “You could make a lot of green singing like that. Not that you’d need it.”

  Good God. She really had been absorbed in the task. She hadn’t realized she’d been actually singing. Still. It felt different from when her father or his associates complimented her. Genuine.

  “Oh,” she said.

  He scratched his neck. “You didn’t say much earlier about our list of demands.”

  In the afternoon, Colin had gathered those who’d chosen to stay and compiled a list of requests they would take to her father when the time came. Lena hadn’t said much; in all honesty she doubted the great Josef Hampton would ever see them. Their only audience would be their cellmates at the county jail. Of course, her father would never allow her arrest. Unless he wanted to teach her another lesson.

  “It’s a good list,” she said, remembering the items. Pay twice a month and extra for overtime, two breaks a day, protection from the hot room chemicals and from firing in the event of sickness, and a new, fair foreman that wasn’t “pervy,” as they put it. Someone had asked for clean water to drink, but they’d all laughed like this wasn’t even a possibility.

  She’d been so embarrassed, she hadn’t been able to look anyone in the face after that.

  “Don’t call them demands,” she said. “My father doesn’t respond well to people telling him what to do.”

  “I guess you two do have something in common.”

  She supposed he had her there.

  “So what do I tell him?”

  When she leaned back, his fingers skimmed over her hair, and she tensed.

  “T-tell him you have some concerns about the Small Parts factory you’d like to discuss.”

  He snorted. “I’d say that’s pretty obvious by now, isn’t it?”

  Perhaps so. “Tell him you’d like to invoke collective bargaining.”

  “Fancy words.”

  “It means you want to sit down with him and negotiate for more rights.” She was struck by the sudden memory of the story she’d read at home about the rebel leader Akeelah wanting a seat in the Northern Assembly. Perhaps he just wants their voice heard, Darcy had told her. She couldn’t help thinking Colin’s plight wasn’t so different.

  “But what if I don’t want to negotiate?” Colin’s fingers slid over her hair again, though from his faraway gaze she doubted he’d done it on purpose. “What if I know what I want?”

  She swallowed.

  “Then you say it as honestly as you can,” she said. “And hope he listens.”

  His shoulders rose as he breathed in, lowered as he exhaled.

  “Thank you.” The way he said it made her sit taller. Made her lungs expand. She felt like she could take on her father herself just then.

  “You should know,” he added. “We’re not going to stop until we get what we came for.”

  “I know.” She couldn’t help but admire his commitment, but she wished there was another way. The sooner the charter went back to work, the sooner her father would ship weapons off to the Advocates. He might agree to Colin’s demands just to get employees back on the floor. This victory would only mean a greater loss, more soldiers dying for a war they couldn’t win, and the burden of that knowledge pressed her down into the lumpy seat.

  Still, it wasn’t as if the press could go on forever. They couldn’t live here, locked inside a factory with no lights and no heat and no food. They would have to face Josef Hampton eventually.

  She wanted to tell Colin—tell anybody—what her father was doing, if only so she wouldn’t be the only one carrying this enormous secret. But she didn’t know how to start. The words stayed locked in her throat, a family issue to be handled by family. Even after he’d admitted to treason, it still felt wrong to expose him. Wrong, and dangerous. He’d struck her for mouthing off. What would he do if he knew she’d really betrayed him?

  She didn’t know what to do. Even with the entire charter downstairs and Colin right beside her, she felt alone.

  Glancing over, she found him lost in his own thoughts, chin buried in the collar of his shirt. She longed to read his mind.

  “Wha
t’s a safety?” she asked. “I heard you say it before.”

  He brought his arm back down to his side. It seemed to put more distance between them and she wished she hadn’t brought it up.

  “It’s just this stupid Metaltown thing,” he said, heel beating a rhythm into the linoleum. “It keeps you protected from anyone who tries to mess with you. It means that if they do, they mess with me.”

  Her mouth formed a small O. It didn’t sound stupid. It sounded like more than her own family would have done for her. Still, she found herself thinking of Ty, the only other girl she’d known here, and she doubted he’d had to do the same for her.

  “You don’t think I can take care of myself.”

  “It’s not that,” he said, mulling over his words. “It just helps sometimes to have a friend here.”

  A friend. Was that what they were? She didn’t have any friends, not real ones anyway. No one she would invite to have lunch or tell about her day. The thought that Colin had a whole charter of friends who would raise their fists in his defense made her warm behind the neck.

  “I’m not sure the others agree with your choice.”

  He breathed out through his nostrils. “They’re scared of you is all.”

  “Scared of me?” She laughed. “That’s the oddest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “Is it?” He shifted to face her. “Your family makes more money in a day than we’ll make in a year. If one of us looked at you wrong, you could have us jailed, or fired, or…”

  Guilt curved her spine. Regardless of what Ty had done, Lena knew that forcing her to leave had been harder on him than watching thirty other people march out the back door, and for that, she felt responsible.

  She shoved the feeling aside. Firing the girl didn’t equate to being shut out with the wolves.

  “You wish she hadn’t left.” It tightened Lena’s throat to say.

  “She messed up,” he said, shoulders flinching. “Even after what happened with her job. It just doesn’t make sense. Street rules are the code she lives by. She’s never done anything like that before.”

  Lena frowned. She knew why Ty had done it. Because Lena had hurt Ty, and now Ty wanted to hurt her. Because she thought Lena was a greenback spy. Because Lena had gotten her fired from Small Parts.