Lizzie reached out one hand to a patch of floor just beyond the door. She scraped her finger across the foamcast. It came up dusty. “And how long you think it’s been, you, since anyone was here, them?” She heard her speech sound Liver again, the way it did when she was upset. She hated that.
Vicki said, “Someone will come to check on the security breach. Some tech supervisor dispatched by TenTech. The dust isn’t significant—it doesn’t mean no one ever comes. The whole air filter system could have blown at the same time as the rest of the ’bots, and spewed all its accumulated dust back in again.”
Lizzie frowned. Arguing made her feel less hopeless. “But the ’bots been malfunctioning, them, for a long while. Look at all them ruined cones…”
“Not that long. We found the whole cones in the top tier of crates, remember.”
“And how do we know, us, that these cones even work?” Lizzie demanded. She sat up straighter, hauled one out of her sack, and turned it on. Immediately it radiated heat. She switched it to light, then both at once. “It works.”
“Well, good.”
“Maybe whoever comes will let us keep these few cones.”
Vicki just looked at her. The hopeless feeling washed back over Lizzie again. No, of course they wouldn’t let her keep the cones. They were donkeys. They would arrest her and Vicki for breaking in, and stealing, and whatever else they decided to, and Lizzie and Vicki would go to jail. Her baby would be born in jail. And the tribe wouldn’t have heat after all for the winter, and so would have to migrate south, like most other tribes had already done. Well, that wouldn’t be so bad, the weather was warm in the south and there weren’t so many people left after the awful Change Wars that there wasn’t room… but Lizzie’s mother and Billy wouldn’t go. Not if Lizzie were in jail here in the north. Would it be up here? Sometimes they sent people to distant prisons. The donkey cops could send her anywhere.
She said miserably, “They still control us, them, don’t they? Despite the Change. And the Cell Cleaner. And… everything.”
Vicki didn’t answer. She just sat there, a renegade donkey herself, living with Livers, watching the insane forklift lift and transport and stack empty air while damaged cones rolled past and clattered into corners.
They waited all night, sleeping a few hours on the factory floor. Toward morning a cone rolled into Lizzie and nudged her from fragmented dreams into fragmented wakefulness. She shoved the cone away and considered disabling the forklift. But why bother? She curled up tighter around the still-unfamiliar mass of her swollen belly. The factory floor was cold. Beside her, Vicki snored gently, but Lizzie couldn’t make sleep return.
She sat up. During the night more of her tunic had disappeared. The belt she wore tied under it, now riding high over her belly, was made of a nonorganic synthetic from before the Change. From it hung a pouch of the same material, holding her tools. If only she had a tunable lasersaw! A lasersaw would have cut them out of here in no time. But only donkeys had lasersaws. That had been true even during the Change Wars, when there’d been warehouse looting and fighting and what Vicki called “the monumental civil upheaval of a dying order.” Donkeys stayed in their impenetrable enclaves, and their lasersaws stayed right in there with them. Besides, a lasersaw wouldn’t get them through the outer security shield. Nothing but a nuclear weapon shattered that kind of Y-shield.
The factory lights had stayed on all night. Probably they were programmed to do that whenever the building detected human presence. In the soft glow the ’bots performed busily, doing everything wrong. Stupid machines.
But no stupider than Lizzie had been, her.
As long as she could remember, Lizzie had felt to herself like two people. One of them had always been asking questions, pestering her mother and Billy and later Vicki, tearing through the pathetic educational software at school, taking ’bots apart whenever she could, listening, listening, listening. There was so much she wanted to know. And until Vicki and the Change, no way to find it out. So when Vicki Turner had left the enclaves and come to live with Livers and given Lizzie a good terminal and crystal library, there was everything to learn. Lizzie—one of the two Lizzies—grew almost frantic, working the terminal every waking minute, trying to make up for lost time. And when she had—when she’d first learned how to use the Net, and then how to master it, and finally how to dip it for any information she wanted, anywhere—when she’d learned all that, it was like she was drunk. Drunk with power, drunk with doing. She’d designed the weaving ’bot for the tribe, and dipped unshielded warehouses until she found all the necessary parts to build it, and located the abandoned factory for their winter home, and gotten pregnant by a boy she’d never see again and didn’t need to. Lizzie Francy had decided she wanted a baby, just like she’d decided she wanted a weaving ’bot, so she got it. She could do that, she could do anything, and nobody better tell her otherwise, them!
But every minute, underneath, there was this whole other Lizzie that nobody saw. Who was scared all the time. Who knew she was going to mess up eventually, it was only a matter of time. And then everybody would know that she was really a fake, and couldn’t do anything right, and didn’t belong. This second Lizzie was frightened to datadip important corporations like TenTech, and afraid that once her baby was born she wouldn’t be able to take good enough care of it, and terrified that Vicki and Billy and her mother would somehow go away and leave her all alone. Alone with a baby. Which two other girls her age in the tribe, Tasha and Sharon, managed just fine, but which Lizzie Francy couldn’t. Because Lizzie—this other Lizzie—only wanted to curl up in a ball and stop being the person a whole tribe looked to for answers stolen from a Net she didn’t really own after all. Donkeys owned it. Just like they always had.
Sitting with her back against the cold foamcast wall, watching ’bots destroy Y-cones, she suddenly couldn’t take the two Lizzies inside. Both making her throat tight and her head hurt. I can do anything! I can’t do anything right! Both pressing on her chest. She had to get up, get away from them both.
She left Vicki sleeping. Vicki looked beautiful sleeping—she always looked beautiful. Genemod. Lizzie would never look like that. She was too short and her chin looked funny and her wiry black hair stuck out in all directions because she pulled at it while she was dipping. But Vicki was asleep and Lizzie wasn’t, so it was up to her to do something about their situation. Something, anything.
Restlessly she prowled the perimeter of the huge room, where fewer cones rolled underfoot. Past the main doors, that she had spent a futile hour last night trying to dip. Past the panel over the narrow air-filter ducts, which Vicki had pried open. The air-filter system had indeed blown with the rest of the programming. Lizzie’s bare feet smeared dirty tracks on the floor.
But then on the far wall she noticed something that, in her exhaustion and discouragement, she’d missed last night. Eight feet up from the floor, a metal panel about a yard square, the exact color of the gray foamcast wall.
Not storage, not way up there. Not the sealed Y-energy housing; that was clearly marked and anyway impenetrable. This panel didn’t look impenetrable, at least not from down here. Small bolts secured each corner.
Lizzie stalked the second forklift, busily lifting and sorting and packing empty air. When it rolled to a stop at the end of the assembly line for another nonexistent load, she climbed aboard its flat squat motor housing. It took her three minutes to reprogram the machine to carry her to the wall, lift her up seven feet, and stand motionless while she unbolted the nearly invisible panel, putting the bolts in her pouch. The panel, made of some light alloy, she set carefully behind her on her metal pedestal.