The Society (A Broken World Book 1) (12 page)

"Let me get that for you. I saw that punch and you shouldn't be using your hand until after we get it looked at. It's probably broken."

I shook my head—the last thing I could afford was to have a doctor poking and prodding me. "It's just sprained. I'll avoid using it for the next day or two and it will be fine."

"You've broken enough bones to know the difference? That's a hard life."

"Yeah, that's the way of things here in the city. We all have tough lives—everyone gets broken in some way."

I was shocked at how easily the words came out. I hadn't been expecting to fall into my role so easily. I'd lied a dozen times just in the short time I'd been inside the city, but this was different somehow—it felt more significant.

"Where did you learn how to fight like that?"

I shrugged. "If you see enough people get beaten down by enforcers you eventually learn a few things."

I stepped through the door, hoping that he would let my evasions stand. All I needed was to make it through the next hour or so without saying anything to make him suspicious. As soon as he'd taken stock of the damage to the pipe room, he'd go back to his headquarters and I'd never see him again.

He was obviously smart and used to getting his way, so I expected him to keep pressing as we got inside the pipe room, but as soon as he stepped through the door he was suddenly all business.

One of the guards met us before we'd even made it out of my section of pipes, but Brennan just waved him off. I started checking the thermometers in my section of the room, hoping that Brennan would move on and leave me behind, but he simply picked the other cluster of pipes in my section and started double-checking that all of the valves were open.

"Get them all open, then we'll go through and inspect all of them to make sure that none of the rest of them are damaged."

I nodded, and went back to work, stopping from time to time to watch Brennan tap on a pipe with a wrench that he'd picked up somewhere along the way.

"It's not a perfect test, but it's possible if we've got a problem on some of these that I'll be able to hear a change in the pitch. Someday maybe we'll have x-ray machines that we can bring down to test welds and look for structural flaws. For now we do things the old-fashioned way—eyeballing everything and then stress testing different parts of the system under the most controlled circumstances we can manage."

I nodded and then paused. "What about the people in the foundry? If it got this hot here, it must have been terribly hot down there. I was so caught up with trying to keep the pipes from rupturing that I didn't even think about the fact that people might be dying down in the foundry."

Brennan nodded. "That's actually how we ended up down here. When the control room down there couldn't get any kind of response out of the girl Beth had on the telegraph, they contacted us. Tyrell headed down there to try to hold things together while I came directly here."

"How bad do you think it got down there?"

He stepped over to the ancient, corroded pipe that had partially burst and tapped on it. "Given just how hot this had to have gotten to deform like that, I'm guessing it got hot enough down there to have killed anyone who didn't get out in time. Hopefully they all got clear. We probably lost some of the machinery down there. Who knows how much work it's going to take to get us back into production again."

"You don't sound that worried about the machinery."

Brennan shrugged. "I am, but there's no use fretting about it until I get a report from Tyrell. We've got commitments we've made to the other leaders in the city, and every hour we lose puts us one more hour behind a schedule that we weren't sure we could hit in the first place. The only thing I can do right now is focus on getting the secondary power generation machinery back up and running again. I can't make more guns without a source to reclaim structural steel—which means I need the foundry—but until I get this location working again, I can't afford to power up the foundry anyway."

"Why not? The power from the stage one generator is what provides the electrical current to power the foundry in the first place."

That earned me a smile, which affected me in ways I wasn't expecting. I got the feeling that Brennan wasn't someone who smiled very often.

"It's true, but if I took away the power and the hot water both from everyone upstairs at the same time, I'd probably have a mutiny on my hands."

"That doesn't sound very much like the person running the last area I was in."

Even as I said it I knew it was the wrong thing to be saying, but Brennan just cocked his head to the side. "You might be surprised what the leaders of the rest of the territories worry about—most of them are holding on by a much slimmer margin than their people realize. Not that it matters though. The difference between them and me is that I'm looking for more than just dumb animals. We aren't growing a few handfuls of wheat or chopping down trees.

"I need the people inside the compound for their minds. We can't do any of this without a lot of hands helping, and most of them need to have a decent brain attached to them. You can make a man—or woman—work, but you can't force them to use their mind. I need skilled people. It's looking like Tyrell and I are going to have to start out almost entirely with people who don't have any skills. If this is going to work, we'll have to train them up into what we need them to be."

"Do you realize how egotistical that sounds? You make it sound like we're all just playthings. You haven't even asked me what my name is."

We'd moved on to Beth's section of the room. My comment earned me a scowl from Brennan's guard, but Brennan just paused to meet my gaze.

"You're surprisingly articulate—probably better educated than most of my people, even the ones like Beth who've been here with me almost from the start. You're also capable of taking orders, but you're not afraid to speak your mind. Just that would make you quite the find, but you're also a good enough fighter to take down someone more than twice your size, someone who obviously had experience as an enforcer at some point."

He looked away from me for several seconds before looking back, and once again his eyes were less guarded than they'd been when he first arrived. It made no sense whatsoever, but he seemed to care what I thought.

"You're not a pawn to me—none of the people inside of my compound are. I've been learning about you since the second I arrived down here. I guess I was so caught up peeling back all of the more important layers that I forgot to ask you for your name."

"So a name isn't important?"

The words could have come out mocking or insubordinate, but they didn't feel that way, and Brennan didn't seem to think that I'd crossed any lines.

"I've spent months now trying to turn people who've never had a day of formal education into a working middle class who are capable of creating everything from food and clothes to gunpowder and firearms. That's the kind of investment in human capital that nobody inside this city has ever made before now.

"To be honest, I'm not sure anyone on this entire continent, other than the ants, even bothers to invest in people anymore, but that's beside the point. If there's one thing I've learned since I started this project, it's that people can tell me anything they want about themselves. A name tells me absolutely nothing about someone. Changing your name is easy. Changing who you are—what you know and how you go about things—is hard. Not many people ever really manage it."

"Skye. My name is Skye—just in case you decide it matters at some point down the road."

I had exactly three days of experience as a spy, but even I knew I was playing a risky game. I needed to avoid notice so that I could figure out how to find and destroy Brennan's prototype energy generator. The last thing I should be doing was having extended, probing conversations with the man I'd been sent to stop.

Despite all of that, I couldn't make myself look away from those deep, brown eyes. There was plenty to Brennan, things that were obvious at first blush to anyone, but I was starting to realize just how much more there might be underneath the surface.

He held my gaze for several seconds before smiling again. "Well then, Skye, I'd like to offer you a job. We're going to need to get things cleaned up here, but once that is done I think that you'd make an excellent bodyguard. Tyrell has been pressuring me to add to my guards. Would you like to follow me around and make sure that nobody twists my head off in a fit of rage?"

Chapter 10

I didn't know what to say.

I knew what I was supposed to do. Being Brennan's bodyguard was the perfect opportunity to get access to wherever he was keeping his prototype generator. It was the kind of masterstroke that only happened once in a hundred missions. It even redeemed my earlier hesitation when I'd had a chance to kill Brennan but failed to take it.

It was the perfect in, the perfect way to advance my mission, but it took conscious effort to get a response out. Brennan was the enemy. He was the man who was developing a weapon capable of breaching the energy barrier protecting the Society from external threats. He was a grubber who was getting dozens of people killed every week in a crazy drive to rebuild this city into something more than a primitive, hunter-gatherer society.

His efforts would have been admirable if he'd been guided by the precepts, but he wasn't and they weren't. He represented everything that I'd been taught to despise, but something inside of me was yelling that I would be making a mistake if I said yes.

The odds were that I was going to be able to finish my mission regardless of which choice I made. The only question was how quickly I was going to be able to do it. The difference was that if I said yes to the job he was offering me, then I was going to have to betray his trust at some point down the road.

Actually, that wasn't true. I was going to betray his trust sooner or later no matter what, but if I did it after getting to know him, it would be all the harder to go through with my mission.

Hearing about it all back in the administration building had been easy. I hadn't known any of the people I would be betraying, so it'd been a purely intellectual exercise. That wasn't the case any longer. The people I'd met so far since arriving in the city had been a definite mixed bag, everything from Piter and Bash to Beth, Billy and the trio from the fire brigade, but they were real people. They had hopes and dreams. They had worries and people they loved, people who loved them in return.

I forced out a yes, and made myself smile, but I wanted to scream. I was going to go through with the mission because that was what I'd been trained for—the reason that I'd been entrusted with my franchise and a set of nanites that were the next best thing to priceless. I agreed because it was what the Citizen-President would have wanted me to do, but the truth was that there was something about Brennan that made me want to believe in him.

The next couple of hours flew by in a blur. The various gang leaders and warlords wielded an incredible amount of power, but up until I saw Brennan, I hadn't really appreciated that power. Having the power to have someone killed was what the leaders like Piter used to keep their territories under control, but as terrifying as that could be for those caught in his territory, it was nothing compared to what I observed as Brennan got started with the repairs to the pipe room.

I'd half expected him to do everything himself—after all, he was supposed to be the boy genius who'd built this territory up to something worth noticing—but instead he called in the experts. A steady stream of people came through the control room shortly after Brennan sat down at the telegraph and began sending messages back up to the headquarters.

A pair of welders showed up asking to be shown the damaged pipe. I expected Brennan to show them to it—instead he had me do it. The same with the crew that arrived shortly after that with dozens of heavy steel bands for shoring up any pipes that looked like they had gotten hot enough to start deforming.

I had no idea if something like that would even work—the band that had given way and gone streaking across the room to embed itself in Del's chest hadn't been equal to the stresses our near catastrophe had placed on it, but then again, it had stopped the weld from giving way completely. If the pipe had completely burst open we all would have been burned alive.

Before he'd sat down at the telegraph, Brennan had led the rest of us through a complete survey of the pipes, so I had a pretty good idea where the problem spots were. I half expected to resent being told to go supervise the various teams being sent down to assist in the rebuild, but the exact opposite ended up happening. Pointing out the bulges we'd detected made me feel useful in ways I'd never experienced before.

It wasn't pleasant work. We'd gotten the valves all opened up to the point where the room had finally cooled back down, but I was suffering from steam burns and still nursing a broken hand. Under normal circumstances I would have been all too eager to head back home, turn on the vid display in my room and let the automated repair crews begin the cleanup, but that wasn't a possibility this time.

Here in the city there weren't any semi-autonomous robots to call in. There was no teenage supervisor—working the lowest of the low jobs in order to earn their franchise—with a hand-held processor to guide the robotic work crew. None of that existed here because Brennan's ancestors had bombed each other back almost to the Stone Age and we'd refused to let them advance technologically due to their history of weaponizing any and all advancements.

If something was going to get done here in the city, then it was going to be done with muscle power, and bulky, inefficient equipment that took twice as long to accomplish half as much as the automated systems back home.

Despite all of that, there was a satisfaction to working with my hands—or hand—that was undeniable. We surveyed the pipes with primitive bubble levels, and then we wrapped thick metal bands around every spot where the heat had permanently swelled the pipes. Once I'd pointed out all of the areas that Brennan and I had identified as being problems, I'd hit the limit of my knowledge, but rather than being shuffled back out of the way, someone handed me a wrench and I spent an hour tightening up the bolts that bound the bands around the pipes. I couldn't snug them down all of the way—not with one hand at least—but I made it so that the big guy who was responsible for bearing down on the wrench didn't have to waste as much time on the easy part.