SSCS 03: Installment 3 of 35
Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
This is Installment 3 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…
And there was no roof, the factory – as much as I could see of it beyond high walls, both brick and smudged, dusty glass – open to the sky. There were no banyan trees. But when I made myself take a breath and head for the rickety stair, I found a dandelion poking out of a crack on the third step up, brighter than the lion on the trash heap and offering a yellow smile rather than a snarl and a flash of teeth.
…Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
Installment 3: 19.0315
I climbed the stairs slowly; I would have said carefully – they did rattle or crunch a bit when you stepped on them – but the weight that dragged me back was mostly nervousness. Beyond the smudgy fog of the nearest glass wall on the ground floor, shadows moved. There were people here, but they were silent and it was too easy to fool myself into thinking they were only ghosts, that I’d been turned out from my place and then been abandoned to a ghost factory – that maybe I was a ghost now too. Halfway up the stair, a wind whistled through a crack in the wall, stinking of exhaust and brick dust with something else underneath, greenish and fetid. There was a door at the top of the stair, leading somewhere the walls blocked off, but it looked like little better than pieced-together clapboard, too flimsy to shield anything real. When I pushed on it, it swayed and wobbled a bit before swinging inward.
“You, sacrifice girl, get in here. You’re late.” A gnarled old hand shoved something cloth at me before a hunched form I didn’t get a proper look at stumped off behind a patched bamboo screen. I didn’t see properly partly because I’d been enveloped in a sudden heavy cloud of steam that billowed forth when the door opened, tasting like salt and metals and seeming to be coming from somewhere deeper in the workshop. I looked at the cloth in my hands. Indigo – artist class. My hands shook. I was too old for what I’d heard of the long, rigorous training and apprenticeship, and artist class didn’t get a second chance.
“I came when the bus brought me. I’m sorry, I don’t –”
“Brought Selmi, too, and she’s already here. Isn’t she?” The hunched form came back around from the screen, this time carrying a strange assortment of metal objects. The woman was ancient, her face more wrinkles than actual features. But then she glanced up at me, her eyes beady and black, and I found myself drawing back from the spark and fire they held. She scowled. “Get that on, quick. You’re late.” She stumped away in a different direction, still talking. “Minister himself commissioned a new piece, and the last three girls they sent us jumped off the rail deck, one after the other, like they were reading from a script that said ‘suicide after tea.’ And not a one of them got half a corner done on the template before-hand. You’d better know how to piece things together, or we’ll all-of-us find the manacles waiting, no matter how long since we made our posting.”