SSCS 03: Installment 12 of 35
Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
This is Installment 12 of this year’s SSCS. If you want to start at the beginning of ‘Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About’, go here! If you want to know what the heck an SSCS is, go here!
Previously…
Before I could protest my confusion, or that I didn’t even know where Jack worked in this maze of workshops and screens, she raised her voice to a level that was too thin to be a bellow but still much too full-bodied to be a screech. “Jack! Jhanni hasn’t eaten lunch in three days! Take her to the noodles place three blocks away!”
…Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
Installment 12: 20.0316
***
Following Jack down the rickety steps bolted into the concrete wall, I found myself groping blindly for anything to say. He’d smiled at me when he’d come to fetch me, just as though it was perfectly normal for people here to be ordering him around and he wasn’t bothered in the least to be babysitting the newbie. But he hadn’t said anything, and had stopped before we’d made it out of the workshop maze to scribble something on a scrap of paper he then stuffed into a pocket of his tunic. I was interrupting his work.
But instead of asking what he’d been working on, my mind kept flitting back to the shape of his hands – yesterday? – daubing the salve onto my own. And the back of his neck looked smooth and warm against the thick, black cut of his hair. I was probably blushing again, and was still feeling lost, when I chanced a look up from the crumbling steps to glance around the roofless courtyard of the factory. The sky overhead looked pale purple with haze or clouds. There were rusty doors along one wall I hadn’t really seen before, painted dark green once but now the chips and cracks and around the hinges showing a vivid red-orange in the wan light. And then the foggy glass of the greenhouse. Some leaves had pressed up against one of the panes, smearing the condensation, like the hands of a child wiping away the moisture to peer out.
“What do they do in there?” I asked.
“Hnn?” Jack looked back at me, his gaze unfocused and smile reflexive. But then he saw where I was looking and nodded. “I have no idea.” He cast me one more smile, this time dazzling in its whiteness and his dark eyes laughing. “I’ve never managed to get even one word out of any of the ones I’ve seen who go in there. But turquoise is…what is turquoise?”
“Academic-class,” I answered. I’d looked it up after I’d got home after the first day, trying to fit more pieces together to tell me about this Factory. But how did artisan-class making bells or gates or…whatever for the Minister fit together with professors working in a foggy greenhouse? How many other factories even had professors? Or scholars maybe? In a greenhouse. Did the Minister – or the City Proprietor maybe – like rare fruits not grown in the other greenhouses?
“What about those?” I nodded to one of the rusty doors we were now passing. There was a funny groove at the base of the wall they were set into, a cement gutter that just had a brass grate set into the wall at either end.
“Oh, those just go down to the machine. You’ll probably see that pretty soon.” Jack’s lips pinched together and he added, “assuming you’re here long enough.” He shook his head, lifted one shoulder in a half-shrug. “Sorry. It’s not really that interesting, except for the bits they have us add. Mostly it’s just gears and struts and struts and gears. It ought to be interesting, but –” He wrinkled his nose and pushed the front gate open for me to step out of the factory and onto the street outside.
From this side the factory wall seemed very shear and high, blank except for the door and the lantern over it. I looked up but couldn’t see the rail deck and couldn’t see why anyone would be walking by this way at night.
“Don’t worry. They’ll let us back in.” Jack gestured that I should turn right, then fell into step beside me. There was no sidewalk – this lane being too small for any of the busses to get through – and the uneven cobbles forced me to keep my eyes on the ground for the first several yards. They were very black, and shining slick like there’d just been rain. Once I’d got my footing steadier, I finally looked up, to find we’d reached the end of the Factory wall and that the cross-avenue here was broad and straight, maybe straight enough to see all the way to the River. I couldn’t see quite that far, though, because the clouds had lowered and there was a thin curtain of rain marching up the street toward us.