Chapter Twenty-One

Like many such things the flaw in the metal wall seemed glaringly obvious once it had been pointed out to her, but her rational mind knew she might have walked by it a hundred times without noticing it. Up close the wall was even more intimidating, adding to its sheer size the frighteningly gnarled tangle of its twisted metal. It was a structure that was designed not just to keep people out, but to reward their attempts to get in with twisted, uneven wounds, the perfect kind to attract gangrene and slow death. Looking at the narrow opening, itself a ragged scar in the structure, she felt she had a better idea of why she had been given her task. She was short, thin, and limber enough to get through the opening without being wounded. Probably.

She was crouched next to a bush that sat some 30 meters away, next to Simon, who had traded in his lab coat for green combat fatigues that looked vaguely ridiculous on him. She had been surprised to be asked to undertake this task and even more surprised that Simon, an academic and an older man, would have been the one to lead her on a dangerous outing like this. But as she had made her way through the facility after her meeting with Clay, she had come to realize that the Colony was a greying organization. There were some younger people, and Clay talked of new recruits, but it was clear that the Colony was mostly a Colony of older men. In any event, she had been asked to keep the job to herself, and so she could only wonder why none of the younger, more fit members of the group had been sent.

She had been given time to shower, and had been provided with hot food and a change of clothes. In the small spare room that she had been shown to she lay naked in bed for a long while, staring at the ceiling above her, trying her best to feel and think of nothing. She had attempted to repress all of the feelings that were overwhelming her – her impatience, her fear, her exhaustion. Clay had promised her that, when her task was done, she would return to find a convoy ready to leave for her home immediately. And, to his credit, he had said with apparent sincerity that she could decline the task and they would help her all the same. Of course she felt she could not decline. Now, shivering in the damp dawn air next to this bush, she was preoccupied with questions, questions she did not want gnawing at her while she went on her mission.

“I don’t understand,” she said to Simon, who was craning his neck around incessantly, looking for guards. “What are you guys going to do without power?”

He shook his head.

“The lines you’re cutting were one of our earlier taps,” he said, “and they only provide about a third of our power. The others are buried deeper in the facility, and I’m afraid they might simply have to be left behind.”

He pulled out an old mechanical wristwatch, tied up with a shoestring instead of attached to a band, and stared at it, frowning.

“Still, it will be a significant hit. Things will have to change.”

“But you didn’t even know I was coming,” said Haojing.

“True. That was a happy accident, for him.” He sighed. “Plans have been in place for some time. Too long. You have to understand, our faction has… factions. As you can probably guess, disconnecting from our steady power source is not an entirely popular idea. Your arrival and our travel to your village are the chance he needed.”

He spoke quietly, his breath showing in the heavy, cool air.

“He has been unable to convince everyone that the time to move is now. So he is forcing the issue.”

“Because he cares so much about not stealing energy? Really?”

“Because we have been stuck, and the stasis is killing our group. And killing him, literally.  He’s running out of time.”

He leaned around from the bush one last time, then pushed her forward by the shoulder.

“And so are we. Remember the path. We will have scouts waiting for you at the edge of the woods. Good luck.”

With that, he gave her a firm shove out from the cover of the bush, and there was nothing to do but rush towards the gap in the wall. She came up to it and cast a glance back towards the bush, but Simon was already gone. She turned to the seam, grimacing at the sight of its jagged lines up close. Leaning back in an awkward stance, she shimmied through the gap, wincing as her eyes passed a few centimeters from the metal. As she spilled out the other side, her shirt caught on a twist in the metal, and she instinctively reached back to free herself. As she did she cut herself, a long thin gash running up the side of her hand just above the wrist. Emerging, she crouched down next to the wall, clutching at her wounded hand. She felt naked without her backpack, but it would have simply been too bulky for the trip. She wrapped her hand in the hem of her shirt, squeezing to stop the blood.

The area immediately past the wall looked more or less as it had been described to her, a kind of work yard dotted with various tools and carts, none of it particularly impressive. The yard was bounded by a brick building that stood four stories tall. It was deserted, as expected, but there were clear signs of recent activity, and she knew she must move quickly. Against the wall of another brick building some 50 yards away sat her target, an old tool shed. She crouched low and hurried to reach it.

Immediately she saw trouble. A pair of workers were ambling in her direction, dressed in the familiar coveralls, carrying scrap metal. She flattened herself down even further and pulled herself up to a stack of crumbling wood pallets. The camouflage was woefully inadequate, but she had no choice. In less than a minute they were walking beside her. They chatted gruffly, speaking with an odd accent she could not place. As they passed, she pressed her body against pallets, feeling the blood pump from the cut on her hand in little beading pulses. If one of them looked over, there was no chance they would miss her. But they simply moved on ahead, oblivious, limping along in worn work boots.

Craning her neck around, she got another glimpse of the shed. Every instinct compelled her to remain pressed in place, but as soon as they turned back the way they had come they would have surely spotted her. She cursed under her breath, then sprinted at full bore for the shed door.

She pressed silently against it, casting her eyes towards the direction the workers had come. She could see a crowd of them, digging a large hole, carrying bags of sand. Behind her the two workers who had passed were clanking around in a scrap metal pile. She reached down and tugged the door handle, but found it padlocked shut. Without panic, she reached into her sleeve and ripped the wire cutters Simon had given her from where they were duct-taped to her arm. She pressed their metal to the lock. The handle was slick with blood and for an agonizing second she fought to bear down. Finally the metal gave way, popping apart in her hand with a satisfying snap. Grabbing the lock carefully, she pulled the door open and slipped inside.

It was dark in the shed, but the crack between the door and the jar let in enough to get her bearings. For a moment she sat silently, crouching, again wrapping her bleeding hand in her shirt. She shrugged off the pain but felt immense frustration that she had not yet staunched the flow of blood. For a while she just held on, keeping steady pressure on the wound. At last, she saw the shadow of the two workers as they passed by the door, holding her breath and waiting. She counted out thirty seconds, then breathed out and let her hand fall. It was time to go to work.

The shed had been described to her as largely empty, but in whatever time had passed since the Colony had last infiltrated it, the contents had grown. The tools seemed antiquated even by the standards of the recent past. A push lawnmower with broken blades was pressed against the shed wall; rusting garden shears hung from a hook. Boxes of dirty bolts and screws of various sizes lined the floor. And everything was covered in soot, including the crucial floor mat that was her real interest.

She reached down and pulled up a corner, dirtying her hand with a layer of soot. Underneath she felt it, a metal utility hatch next to the exposed dirt of the ground around it. She moved to pull the mat up further and realized her dilemma. With the shed now far more full the mat was stuck on top of the hatch, which itself was obstructed. She moved a box, grunting, trying to find a place to maneuver it. Soon she realized she would have to completely rearrange the contents of the shed. For a few dismal minutes she was convinced that there was no path forward, and she worried that she would make enough noise to rouse attention. But with a little applied geometry and a lot of tiring effort she had freed enough of the space up to allow the hatch to open enough for her to fit through. She rested for a moment, noticed her hand was bleeding again, then shimmied down through the hatch.

In the darkness below her she searched for the ladder with her hand. Finding it, she began gingerly to climb down. When she released the hatch above her she was plunged into total darkness and for a moment she stood grasping the cold rungs and hanging in silence and darkness. After a moment she reached back into her jeans pocket and pulled out a glow rod she had been given by Clay. It was military-grade, designed for water rescues, and he had assured her it came from a batch that had been recently checked, but she still said a silent prayer as she snapped the seal. To her relief, it lit right up into a surprisingly bright blue glow. She waved it down below her and was taken aback – she could not see the bottom. Sighing to herself, she stuffed the glow rod into the waistband of her pants and started to descend.

When she reached the bottom she was greeted by a few smells, none of them good on their own and frightening in combination. The first was the musky scent of mildew that one might expect underground, the smell of moisture. The second was the sharp scent of burning, a metallic, chemical smell. It meant she was near her destination; it also meant she would have to proceed carefully.

A few steps into the darkness and she found it. Before her was a chaos of wires, thick electrical cords running into the ceiling above her, a few disappearing into the floor. Junction boxes lay in uncoordinated piles on the floor; a fuse box dangled precariously from the wall, hanging by a few screws. Many wires were patched and spliced together with black electrical tape. In spots she could see burn marks on the wall; a discarded fire extinguisher spoke to some past effort to stop a fire. Every once in a while, she heard a spark or pop from somewhere, and each time her heart jumped. She grimaced in anger. Not only was she going to risk electrocution, she was sure her efforts would make no difference to the Colony’s efforts to hide. No one could have been monitoring this space closely, and if they had, it would be nearly impossible to detect the tapped lines in all this chaos.

Still, a deal was a deal, and if they followed through she was getting a bargain.

“If you want to shake up your organization that bad, Clay…” she said, then got to work.

She pulled out a folded piece of cardboard on which one of Clay’s loyalists had sketched the wiring scheme. She crouched a bit away from the largest mass of wires, still mindful of getting shocked. For a long while she counted connections, straining in the light of the glow rod to follow wires as the snaked and looped around. At least a half-dozen times she studied one at length only to lose track of it in the tangle, and she groaned in frustration. Finally she felt confident that she had found the right wires. She followed them to one of the junction boxes, then gingerly stepped over and crouched beside it.

She was to pull a wire from its connection to the junction box, then find the two wires which led to the Colony’s base and cut them. Immediately she saw the problem: someone had wrapped the main connection to the junction with a thick mass of black electrical tape. She could not cut the wires without disconnecting the junction box first, or she would be electrocuted. But whoever had wrapped the cord in tape probably had a good reason. For a while she sat and stewed. Finally, she slowly began to unravel the tape, at times using her wire cutters to gingerly cut through the parts she couldn’t pull off by hand. Terrified that she was about to come into contact with exposed wire, it was achingly slow work. At last she had unspooled it all. As she suspected, the cord’s casing was worn away beneath the tape, though she could not say if it was therefore dangerous to touch. Not looking to take any chances, she grasped the cord firmly well below the frayed part, and tugged at it. For a brief moment she strained against the corroded fixture, and finally it popped off.

She examined the other end of the junction box. She was to move quickly, as somewhere, something had probably just lost power. The wires coming out of the box were no less convoluted than the rest of them, and for a brief moment she worried that perhaps she had disconnected from the wrong direction. The work was so comprehensively shoddy and haphazard that she had no reason to trust that the directions she had received at the Colony would work; they had implied competence. But as usual there was nothing to do but dive in. She examined wires, trying to match the diagram in the poor light. Finally she brought her wirecutters up to the casing of one of them, holding it there for a split second.

“Well, it’s been real,” she told the room, then cut the wire.

Not having been engulfed in cardiac arrest-inducing electricity, she moved quickly to the other wire and cut it too. She turned to reattach the input to the junction box. This was a trickier matter than disconnecting, as she had to try and push the wire back into its junction without grabbing too close to its connector. After a few aggravating attempts, she felt it click into place. There was no way to be sure if she had accomplished her task, no immediate feedback of any kind. In any event: it was time to go.

She left the wirecutters behind, out of a desire to avoid carrying anything incriminating, not that she had any idea what she would say if she had been caught. She also left the glow rod at the bottom of the ladder, then climbed rung over rung until she felt the hatch overhead. She glanced down at the glow rod, its thin blue light burning steadily far below her feet, then pushed the hatch open. As its groaning weight gave weigh, she felt her anxiety drain a little. Being trapped down in that space would have been a particularly unpleasant experience, a terrible way to die.

She crept up to the door and tried to peek through the crack, but could make out nothing but a thin line of daylight. She glanced around the shed. For a moment she contemplated moving the boxes and equipment back to their original positions, but quickly abandoned the idea. Whatever she might gain in covering her tracks would be lost in staying in that exposed position. She pressed her ear to the door and listened, but heard nothing. She waited a beat, then slipped outside.

Before she could cast around to check her surroundings, she felt rough hands grabbing at her from behind. She kicked and tried to shrink from under the grasp, but quickly one of the arms that held her snaked around her neck in a choke hold. As she flailed helplessly, she spotted another figure approaching her from the front, and then the world went black.

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