The Society (A Broken World Book 1) (2 page)

Nobody volunteered any information, and within seconds the warlord's men were back to hurrying people past the barricade. Apparently securing additional territory was more important than punishing someone for daring to speak the truth.

I took my place in a long line of people who were passing buckets of water from a large pump to a series of low wooden structures that seemed to have been constructed of scrap wood and garbage. The first few buckets emptied onto the shanties drew curses from the inhabitants, but the profanity rarely lasted beyond the time required for the people inside to come out and see the approaching fire.

A few of the occupants tried to dive back inside for some prized possession or another, but Piter's men were already moving inside the building and throwing people back through makeshift doors and windows, ordering them to form additional bucket brigades.

My mind was whirling. My briefing had mentioned that the grubbers would organize to put out the fires started in the bombing, but the sterile descriptions I'd read in the classified files hadn't prepared me for anything like this.

They had formed more than a dozen lines that I could see in the flickering light—some from one well, some from another—as teams of six or seven people manned the manual pumps that were emptying water into large basins. Each line emptied a gallon or two of water onto a nearby building each second, but that was next to nothing against the blaze that I could feel moving in our direction.

Any group of free people would have stampeded away—that was what my fellows from the Society would have done if faced with this kind of danger, but Piter's citizens held their places. They shifted around nervously, but they kept the flow of buckets moving, and a few seconds later a new trembling started working its way up my legs.

It felt like a herd of monstrous beasts were stampeding in our direction, but the people in my line actually seemed less nervous now than they'd been just moments before. It finally made sense when the first few drops of water started cascading down out of the sky.

The grubbers weren't just going to fight the fires with low-tech bucket brigades, they had roof-mounted systems for spraying water over everything in the fire's path. Now that I knew what to look for, I could see clouds of steam coming off of the fire further away from them. They wouldn't have been visible—even in the flickering light of the flames—for normal, unaided humans, but that was just one of the advantages that I'd carried into the city with me.

"Don't stand there and lollygag. The water cannons aren't going to be enough to save your sorry hides all by themselves. Douse these buildings or you'll all go up in flames with them when the fire arrives."

The guy who'd talked to me was a big bruiser in his late thirties with an eye patch and a club. I looked away from him to take one last look at the rooftop water dispersal systems, and was nearly knocked off of my feet by a blow to my side.

My elbow clamped down against my fractured ribs and I dropped down halfway to the crouch that had been drilled into me during my two months of unarmed combat training. The guard tapped his hand against his club and gave me a sadistic smile.

"I said get back to work."

I ducked my head, hiding subserviently behind a thin veil of long, dark hair, as I stepped back into line and accepted the next bucket full of water. The bruiser watched me for several seconds, making sure that I was really as cowed as I'd let on, before walking down the line.

"Bash is a monster. You going to be okay?"

The question came from a guy about my age who was two places behind me in the line.

"Yeah. I think he broke some of my ribs, but I can still keep up."

The woman immediately behind me shook her head. "Not for long—not if they're really broken. Donner, you hear that?"

The slender man in front of me grunted and then took a half step back towards me at the same time that the woman moved forward. She patted me on the shoulder as she handed off the next bucket of water.

"Your new admirer is named Jack and I'm Sally. Try to pace yourself. Don't fall out of line or Bash will beat you to within an inch of your life."

Jack moved up, splitting the distance between Sally and the person behind him. All three of my benefactors were already sweating and obviously tired, but none of them seemed ready to throw me to the wolves. It was the last thing I had expected out of three strangers. All of the briefings had agreed that grubbers were suspicious and cutthroat.

Some of the leading minds inside of the Society thought that grubbers were that way as a result of the endless gang warfare inside of their enclaves. Others thought that it was a result of some fundamental difference in their physiology and psychology, but everyone had seemed unanimous on the fact that I would need to be on my guard at all times.

I fell back into a rhythm swinging heavy buckets from Sally to Donner with my right hand and then accepting empty buckets with the left as they came back. The ribs were definitely fractured. The lance of pain each time I breathed told me that, but I knew I wasn't in any danger of complications—not with my new-and-improved body.

"You're from Jenks' territory, aren't you? You came through the barricade with us, but I've never seen you before. That means you used the confusion of the attack to slip over to our side."

I nodded, unsure where Sally was headed with her questions.

"You're going to want to keep your head down. Your best bet is to try to slip in with some of your own people and pretend that you were just swept up in the confusion when Piter came over and took control of this block. Piter doesn't like deserters—he says if someone will desert one of his rivals, they'll desert him further down the road."

We'd all been talking quietly—little more than whispers—but as Bash worked his way back up the line, all of my neighbors fell silent and focused on moving the buckets even more quickly.

I continued to take in my surroundings as I worked, keeping my head down to avoid drawing Bash's wrath again. The water falling on our heads from the buildings around us had grown from little more than a mist to a heavy torrent that seemed like it should be more than enough to stop the fire that was less than half a block away, but based on the way that all of the bucket brigades were speeding up, that was less of a foregone conclusion than I would have liked to believe.

A couple of seconds later a heavy jet of water shot out from the top of the building, seeking the edge of the fire, and the burst of steam that shot back at the people on the ground was hot enough to redden exposed skin. It probably would have scalded my entire brigade if not for the cooling mist of water still coming down from the building just behind us.

It was hard to tell for sure, but it looked like the other areas I could see were having better luck stopping the fire.

"Is there a wind driving it this direction? Why is it getting so close?"

Sally double-checked to make sure that Bash was too far away to overhear, and then shook her head. "Piter's men were slow getting the water flowing on this block. The fire-fighting equipment is all supposed to be standardized, but it never is. Part of that is because everything is jury-rigged, but it's also because none of the warlords are too keen to make it any easier than they have to for someone to come in and take over their territory."

I finally understood. "So Piter marched us all over here knowing that he might lose some of us, but he doesn't care because at the very least he's created a firebreak that should save his territory."

"Exactly. Anyone he really values is still back at his headquarters making sure that water keeps flowing up to the suppression systems on the top of our buildings. Why, was it different here? If so I wouldn't have expected you to try to run away."

My instructors had all warned me of the danger of getting too close to the grubbers—especially at the start of my mission—but I'd still stumbled into exactly the kind of casual conversation that was most dangerous to me.

"No—it's all the same here in Jenks' territory. I'd heard stories though that it was different on the other side of the wall. It's silly, really. I guess everyone always says things are better somewhere else, but it's all just a bunch of lies designed to make us believe that we could escape and be free if the breaks all went our way."

Donner laughed. It wasn't a pleasant sound—more raspy than it should have been—but that wasn't as concerning as the way that Sally looked at me.

"Freedom. Listen to you, child. You sound like one of those bloody ants all lazing around like mindless drones inside the comfort of the city they build on our blood and bodies. There isn't any such thing as freedom. At least here in the city we know how the world works. That batch out there is too stupid to come in out of the rain."

The heat coming off of the fire had continued to increase while we'd been talking, and I suddenly wondered how often the pumps in the building malfunctioned. When it came to the crumbling technology so common to the grubber cities, it wasn't a question of
if
something would break down, but rather
when
.

If it happened while we were dumping our buckets of water into the inferno raging mere yards away from us, we would all be killed instantly. The icy water coming out of the sky was the only thing keeping the fire at bay, and even that wouldn't have been enough to save us if not for the fact that a recently arrived breeze was blowing most of the steam away from the bucket lines.

I picked up the pace even further, ignoring the pain in my chest, and I wasn't the only one. We turned the makeshift wooden buildings before us into a water-soaked barrier between us and the flame, a barrier that smoked as the water evaporated away.

It seemed as though we were standing there in that line for hours. Bash and the other enforcers came through at regular intervals and cycled the people in the front of each line to the very back, but it wasn't out of mercy. As the heat continued to grow, it got to the point that the people in the front of the lines couldn't withstand more than five or ten minutes before becoming so dehydrated that they started collapsing.

I was covered in soot, exhausted, and singed in more than one spot, but still I moved water down the lines, lines that were shortening as the heat drove us back. The shorter lines were a blessing because it freed up more people to form additional lines and increased the amount of water being thrown at the fire, but they also meant that the fire was that much closer to consuming the tall metal building at our back.

Everything hung on the edge of a knife for several minutes, and then the rest of the inferno was beaten down to the point where the closest buildings added the water from their big cannons to the single stream that had been battling our little corner of the blaze.

Between one heartbeat and the next, the fury seemed to go out of the flames. They were still going, still dangerous, but they lacked the intensity that had come within a hair of destroying all of us.

Piter climbed up to the top of the pump in the middle of the square behind us. "Once again, you've all shown why our little community is the premier group in the entire city. I thank you all for your service tonight, my good citizens. You're all released to go back to your homes. Those of you who work directly for me can take an extra hour to report to your posts tomorrow morning."

I had lost track of the passage of time, but between the disruption of having bombs dropped on the city and the time spent fighting the resulting fires, I was sure that Sally and the others had all lost more than an hour's worth of sleep. Piter was just as contemptible as my briefings had said he would be. For the briefest of moments I considered assassinating the pompous windbag before moving on to my actual target, but I shook off the thought.

There was little doubt as to my ability to get to Piter if I put my mind to it, but my purpose inside the city was too important to risk on an ill-conceived assassination. If I succeeded, then Piter would be dead, but it wouldn't make any kind of lasting difference in the lives of Sally and the others.

My three bucket-brigade companions had turned out to be much kinder than any of my briefings had led me to expect, but Piter's death would just mean that one of his men would step into his shoes, and institute a reign of terror for weeks or even months until he felt like he had enough control over the territory to risk relaxing his grip.

As much as I wanted to do something to repay the kindness I'd been shown, that wasn't the answer. I needed to carry out my mission so that the Society's military wouldn't be forced to raze the entire city to the ground.

I joined the throng of individuals heading back through the barricade, grateful that each step moved me that much closer to my ultimate destination, and didn't realize my error until after I was already through the barricade. I stuck out just as much back in Jenks' territory as I did in Piter's, but at least back on the other side of the barricade I was one new face among many.

Bash grabbed me by the arm and pulled me out of the stream of humanity within seconds of my crossing through the barrier. My instructors had taught me half a dozen ways to break free of that kind of hold, but the pain from my broken ribs took me by such surprise that I didn't even consider executing any of the techniques that had been drilled into me.

By the time that I pushed the pain back into a corner of my mind and locked it away, Bash had pulled me into one of the tiny pathways that wound around the wooden shanties that took up the space between the buildings on either side of the alley.

"You're not from our territory."

Bash's voice carried over even the bedlam from so many people heading back to their homes, but it didn't stop me from hearing someone approaching from behind. I turned my head far enough to confirm the presence of another enforcer—a slender guy with a long scar that ran from his temple down to his chin.

"I—I'm from Jenks' territory."

"I'd like to believe that, but you have to know that Piter doesn't like deserters. I think you're only admitting to being a deserter because you're trying to hide something worse."