“People will be carrying whatever they like for a few days,” Joel said. He coughed into his palm while Lyn looked on with concern. “We’ll appear weak if we don’t strike back.”
Mission had other concerns besides appearing weak. The people above thought a porter had attacked them. And now this with the farmers, so far from where they’d been hit the night before. Porters were the nearest thing to a roaming sentry, and they were being knocked out by someone, purposefully he thought. There were all those boys being recruited into IT. It wasn’t computers they were being hired to fix. It was something else.
“I need to get home,” Mission said. It was a slip. He meant to say Up Top. He worked to unknot his ‘chief. The thing reeked of smoke, as did his hands and his coveralls. He would need to find another color to don. He needed to get in touch with his friends.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Morgan asked. His former caster seemed ready to say something else as Mission tugged the ‘chief away. Instead, the old man’s eyes fell to the bright red whelp around Mission’s neck, the stain of a rope’s embrace.
“I don’t think this is about us at all,” he said. “I think this is bigger than that. A friend of mine’s in trouble. He’s at the heart of all that’s going wrong. I think something bad is going to happen to him or that he might know something. They won’t let him talk to anyone.”
“Rodny?” Lyn asked. She and Joel had been two years ahead of him, but they both knew he and Rodny from the Nest.
He nodded. “And Cam is dead,” he told the others. He explained what’d happened on his way down, the blast, the people chasing him, the gap in the rails. Hands covered gaping mouths. Someone whispered Cam’s name in disbelief. “I don’t think anyone cares that we know,” Mission added. “I think that’s the point. Everyone’s supposed to be angry. As angry as possible.”
“I need time to think,” Morgan said. “To plan.”
“I don’t know that there is much time,” Mission said. He told them about the new hires at IT. He told Morgan about seeing Bradley there, about the young porter applying for a different job.
“What do we do?” Lyn asked, looking to Joel and the others.
“We take it easy,” Morgan said, but he didn’t seem so sure. The confidence he displayed as a senior porter and caster seemed shaken now that he was a chief. It was how knees got wobbly when that last bit of weight went onto a heavy load.
“I can’t stay down here,” Mission said flatly. “You can have every vacation chit I own, but I’ve got to get up-top. I don’t know how, but I have to.”
•25•
Before he went anywhere, Mission needed to get in touch with friends he could trust, anyone who might be able to help, the old gang from the Nest. As Morgan urged everyone on the landing back to work, Mission slunk down the dark and smoky hallway toward the sorting room, which had a computer he might use. Lyn and Joel followed, more eager to help Rodny than to clean up after the fire.
They checked the monitor at the sorting counter and saw that the computer was down, possibly from the power outage the night before. Mission remembered all those people with their broken computers earlier that morning at IT and wondered if there would be a working machine anywhere on five levels. Since he couldn’t send a wire, he picked up the hard line to the other Dispatch offices to see if they could get a message out for him.
He tried Central, first. Lyn stood with him at the counter, her flashlight illuminating the dials and highlighting the haze of smoke in the room. Joel splashed among the shelves, moving the reusable sorting crates on the bottom higher up to keep them from getting wet. There was no response from Central.
“Maybe the fire got the radio, too,” she whispered.
Mission didn’t think so. The power light was on and the thing was making that crackling sound when he squeezed the button. He heard Morgan splash past in the hallway, yelling and complaining that his workforce was disappearing. Lyn cupped her hand over her flashlight. “Something is going on at Central,” he told Lyn. He had a bad feeling.
The second waystation he tried up-top finally won a response. “Who’s this?” someone asked with none of the formality nor the jargon radio operators were known for.
“This is Mission. Who’s this?”
“Mission? You’re in big trouble, man.”
Mission glanced at Lyn. “Who is this?” he asked.
“This is Robbie. They left me alone up here, man. I haven’t heard from anybody. But everyone’s looking for you. What’s going on down there?”
Joel stopped with the crates and trained his flashlight on the counter.
“Everyone’s looking for me?” Mission asked.
“You and Cam, a few of the others. There was some kind of fight at Central. Were you there for that? I can’t get word from anyone!”
Mission told him to calm down, which seemed an unfair thing to expect when he could hardly think straight himself. “Robbie, I need you to get in touch with some friends of mine. Can you send out wires? Something’s wrong with our computers down here.”
“No, ours are all kind of sideways. We’ve been having to use the terminal up at the mayor’s office.”
“The mayor’s office? Okay, I need you to send a couple of wires, then. You got something to write with?”
“Wait,” Robbie said. “These are official wires, right? If not, I don’t have the authority—”
“Damnit, Robbie, this is important! Grab something to write with. I’ll pay you back. They can dock me for it if they want.” Mission glanced up at Lyn, who was shaking her head in disbelief. He coughed into his fist, the smoke tickling his throat. They should be moving, not explaining this to someone else.
“All right, all right,” Robbie said. “Who’m I sending this to? And you owe me for this piece of paper because it’s all I have to write on.”
Mission let go of the transmit button to curse the kid. Joel laughed from behind the sorting stacks. Composing himself a moment, Mission thought about who would be most likely to get a wire and send it along to the others. He ended up giving Robbie three names, then told him what to write. He would have his friends meet him at the Nest, or meet each other if he couldn’t make it there himself. The Nest had to be safe. Nobody would mess with the school or the Crow. Once the gang was together, they could figure out what to do. Maybe the Crow would know what to do. The hardest part for Mission would be figuring out how to join them.
“You got all that?” he asked Robbie, when the boy didn’t reply.
“Yeah, yeah, man. I think you’re gonna be over the character limit, though. This better come out of your pay.”
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Mission said, careful to release the mic first.
“Now what?” Lyn asked as he hung up the receiver. She played her flashlight around the sorting room, the beam catching in the smoke and dancing across the ripples in the water. Joel’s boots had thrown the wet film into chaos. He had gotten most of the sorting crates moved up so they wouldn’t get wet.
“I need coveralls,” Mission said. He splashed around the counter and joined Joel by the shelves, began looking through the nearest crates. “They’re looking for me, so I’m gonna need new colors if I’m getting up there.”
“We,” Lyn told him. “We need new colors. If you’re going to the Nest, I’m coming with you.”
“Me too,” Joel said.
“I appreciate that,” Mission said, “but company might make it more dangerous. We’d be more conspicuous.”
“Yeah, but they’re looking for you,” Lyn said.
“Hey, we have a ton of these new whites.” Joel pulled the lid off a sorting bin. “But they’ll just make us stand out, won’t they?”