Maddeus wasn’t a decent man. But he looked out for her. He always had.
She put thoughts of her erstwhile guardian from her mind, before they could threaten her. Night was the time for those thoughts, when she was alone in her nook in the hold, and the black sadness came for her. For now, she would only permit herself the hard, sharp thoughts of a survivor.
The others were grouping up now, and together they hurried further into the building, with Bess leading the way.
Ashua flexed her hand on the grip of her pistol and followed. This place unsettled her. She’d spent her life in the bomb-torn ruins of Rabban, and later in the close, dusty streets of Shasiith. She’d never seen anything like this, and it made her feel threatened.
But she’d deal with it. The way she dealt with that golem, and the fact that Jez had turned into a daemon right in front of her eyes. Because that was how she lived. She took the world as she found it. She didn’t expect a thing and she didn’t give a whole lot back. What was, was, and that was pretty much all there was to it.
The corridor bent ahead of them, and the golem disappeared. Ashua hung back, keeping her eyes peeled for soldiers. She heard shouts and gunfire, and Bess roaring, and then a wet rending sound. A Sammie screamed briefly for his mother.
By the time Ashua came round the curve of the corridor, the screaming had stopped and the floor was bloody. Bess was chasing a couple of guards, who were fleeing for their lives. Pinn kicked someone’s detached arm out of his path.
They came to a junction where three corridors gathered in, their curves flowing into one another as if they were liquid frozen in place. Bess was waiting for them, the guards having escaped her. Bree and Grudge caught them up there, Samandra reloading as she came.
‘They’ll keep their heads down for a little while,’ said Samandra, thumbing ov?, thumbier her shoulder to indicate the way they’d come. Grudge was backing up the corridor behind her, his autocannon slung low on his hip. ‘Won’t be long in followin’ us, though. We’ll have to fight our way out like we fought our way in. And they’ll be waitin’ out there in numbers, you can bet on that.’
‘Bess,’ said Silo. ‘How tough you think these walls are?’
Bess put her fist through one.
‘Reckon we can make our own exit when the time comes,’ said Silo.
‘Colden!’ Samandra called to her hulking partner. She pointed at the hole in the wall. ‘Now why can’t you do that?’
‘Ain’t strong enough, I guess,’ came the humourless reply.
Samandra winked at Silo. ‘Colden. He’s a real card. Keeps me in stitches.’
Silo showed his customary lack of reaction.
‘Apparently you Murthians ain’t exactly a laugh a minute yourselves,’ Samandra commented.
‘Ain’t much about our situation that’s funny,’ Silo replied.
Ashua was used to Silo’s inscrutable manner by now. At first she thought he was arrogant in his silence, a haughty freed slave aping the style of the Sammie nobles. Later, she wondered if he was just dumb. But she’d noticed the quiet respect the others gave him, and she’d seen the way they all accepted his command without question. Even Crake, who was the smartest man on the crew in her opinion. So maybe there was more to Silo than he showed.
They came across a few more Sammies as they made their way deeper into the power station. Not all were guards; some were technicians, or perhaps scholars of some kind. They let those ones go, but nobody who was armed escaped Samandra’s shotguns. She was almost casual about the way she took them out. Ashua admired her callousness. There was no room for sentiment in their world.
There weren’t many Sammies on the inside, and the intruders kept up such a rapid pace that nobody had time to organise against them. The corridors curved and branched, rarely straight and rarely displaying a sharp angle, running like veins through the building.
The rooms they saw had all been cleared of furniture and debris, but what was left was fascinating enough. There was a long chamber with formations like stalactites hanging down from the ceiling, black and glittering, made up of millions of tiny cuboids that lit up in curiously organised ripples. There was a room of many platforms, a three-dimensional maze of smooth dark ceramic, and a room full of sunken trenches that twinkled with blinking lights.
Then Samandra, who had been scouting ahead, came hurrying back down the corridor. She beckoned to them, a strange smile on her face.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ she said. ‘You gotta see this!’
Forty-Two
Ain’t right, thought Silo. Ain’t right at all.
The room that Samandra had led them to was no more remarkable than any other he’d seen in this place. But there was a large elliptical hole in the far wall, where once there might have been a window. The raucous noise of machinery came from beyond. And it was through that window that they saw the thing which had got Samandra so excited.
They looked out over a chamber of breathtaking size. It must have spanned the whole width of the power station’s central building, because it was possible to see the massive flanks of the hourglass structures at either end. The sloped sides of their lower halves swirled with gas and lightning, and every few seconds the vast rotating arms that stirred them went swooping by with a low rumble.
The near side of the chamber was taken up with dozens of black oblongs, standing upright and arranged in staggered rows. They were five metres on their longest side. Slow lightning writhed beneath their surfaces.
Beyond them, the floor suddenly dropped away, and a narrow bridge reached over a wide trench to a small semicircular platform. There, Silo could see what looked like a bank of panels and controls. They were dwarfed by the machine that loomed over them, as if they were the keyboard to some monstrous pipe organ. It was the machine that drew his eye and appalled him. A dreadful engine, unlike anything he’d ever seen before.
It was a mass of thrashing movement. Pistons pumped in and out, brass arms rotated, gears clanked and shifted. In amid the more familiar elements were stranger ones. Cylinders of bottled lightning, flickering inside coloured gas. Rows of spikes that tilted rapidly back and forth in sequence, and shot sparks when they came near the conducting rods that stood opposite. Globes that crackled with energy. Fields of tiny connections which shivered and switched back and forth.
The metal parts he could understand. The lightning fascinated him. But that wasn’t the problem.
The damned thing had muscles.
At first he couldn’t be sure of what he was looking at. It was only as he watched them stretch and flex that he recognised them by their movement. They were muscles, giant muscles sewn into the machinery, bulging and loosening with the tug and thrust of the parts around them. Taut diaphragms stretched in the spaces b?tetween the metal. Tendons pulled. The fleshy parts were a deep red-black, and glistened with lubrication.
Pinn watched the muscles pumping, an expression of utter disgust on his face. Eventually, he gave his verdict. ‘That is bloody horrible.’
‘If there was anythin’ needed blowin’ up in this whole city, I reckon it’s that,’ said Malvery.
Samandra pointed down at the bridge, and the small semicircular platform at the other side. ‘There,’ she said.
Silo grunted his agreement. ‘Move out!’ He ushered them towards an oval doorway at the side of the room.
The doorway led to a gallery overlooking the engine chamber, and from there they found steps leading to the chamber floor. The chamber seemed even larger from down here. The vast ceiling had the same dark, supple grandeur of the corridors they’d passed through. He could appreciate the size of the hourglass structures now: their brass-and-bone shells towered to either side of the great machine. The whole place was like a temple, and it might have been wondrous, if not for the repulsively organic engine throbbing and churning at its heart.