Shadow of the Factorum: The Interview

by K. A. Trent

“Then step outside.” Greta reached into the black canvas bag and produced one item I knew very well: a screwdriver. It wasn’t a magnetic screwdriver, it was a manual one for turning flathead screws.

  I tensed my body. She pulled the fabric of my dress away from my legs and ran the flat of the tool against my skin.

  “I’ll let you pick a spot.”

  She indicated my leg; I looked down and then looked away to brace myself for the inevitable pain.

  “Don’t want to pick? Alright, I will.”

  I felt it, a hammer blow penetrating my skin. The flathead smashed through my epidermis and tore through the muscle beneath. My back tensed, my wrists tried in vain to separate themselves though the hold of the flexi cord. I heard a scream but was it mine? Was that really me? It was an oscillating sound that echoed through the hardcrete room; I saw Layla step backward, her eyes wide.

  My sobs lasted far beyond the initial pain, my head rocked backward, I cried out at the ceiling. I’d been tortured before but I had never really gotten used to it. Does anyone ever get used to that sort of thing?

  My body convulsed and I tried desperately to free myself, but it was no use. I rocked from side to side as white hot pain seared through my leg.

  “We’re just getting started,” Greta laughed. “Hey, you won’t need to walk again. Why don’t we take one of those kneecaps off?”

  The flathead was underneath my right kneecap, I could feel it pushing at the tendon.

  “No, no come on, please,” I drooled the words; my face was soaked in my own sweat and saliva. “Please don’t-”

  The crunch of bone, the scream of pain, the metallic scent of blood on the air all came, but it didn’t come from me.

  I watched Greta’s eyes deaden and her form crumple to the floor. Layla stood behind her, brick in hand, exhaling and breathing rapidly. The look of shock on her face must have matched mine and she began to shake her head.

  “No, no what did I do?”

  “Layla please untie me,” I blubbered. “Please let me go, please-”

  The brick fell to the floor; Layla staggered away and dropped to her haunches by the crates.

  “I need to think,” she said quickly and to no one in particular. Her gaze was distant.

  “Layla please untie me,” I begged again. “Don’t leave me here. Please help me. Please let me go home.”

  “Shut up, I need to think!”

  “I want to go home!” I was crying now; if I’d started with any sort of dignity, it was gone now. “Please, I won’t tell anyone. Please. Please!”

  “Alright look I know what we’re going to do. Shut up okay? Stop screaming.”

  “Untie me, please!”

  “Astra, if you stop screaming and promise not to run, I’ll untie you.”

  “Okay, okay, fine, I’ll be quiet.” I tried to calm down, I suppressed the screams, but I couldn’t help the trembling. “Just- just let me go home.”

  “Look, no, I just killed a Black Swan operative. They’re going to kill us both. We have to run, Astra. We have to-”

  “No! Kerra will protect us, it’s what she does, and Donna-”

  “Your Kerra is a soldier, she follows orders. She’ll kill you if they tell her to. Has she ever been nice to you?”

  “How- What do you know about Kerra?” I demanded. “Have you even met her?”

  “We have eyes and ears everywhere.” Layla reached into the nearby crate and pulled out a switchblade knife; with a twitch of her finger she extended the blade. “I know for a fact that Kerra treats you like dirt. How do you think she’s going to react if she knows you ran right to the Black Swan?”

  “But I didn’t!” I argued, shaking my head and whimpering. “I was just scared, I-”

  “How is she supposed to know that?”

  “I-” I tried to argue, I tried to come up with something to say but she was right. There was no way around it. I’d run away from Donna and I’d ended up here, with them. What were they going to do to me? What if I hadn’t been so stupid? What if I had just stayed with Donna? We’d be heading home right now, I would be watching a movie or playing a game. Maybe reading a book. Now what? What was going to happen?

  “And now look at me,” Layla murmured, again to no one in particular. She looked around the room and her eyes finally rested on Greta’s body laying at our feet, purple blood oozing from her fractured skull.

  The murder weapon laid beside her drenched in the same. “She’s... She’s dead.”

  I looked down at the body and then back to Layla.

  “Yes,” I said. “She’s dead.”

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  “You said you knew what to do less than ten seconds ago,” I said, trying to draw her attention away from Greta’s body. “Please, Layla.”

  “She’s dead…”

  “Layla!” I shouted.

  She blinked and pulled her attention away from the body, looking up in my direction. “Please untie me, we have to go.”

  “Okay. Okay.” She nodded and made a move toward me. I felt her cutting through the flex-cord with the switchblade, and suddenly I was free. I held my wrists out in front of me, rubbed them and flexed my cramped shoulders.

  “Just stay with me.”

  I started to rise from the couch and quickly remembered the gaping hole in my leg. Pain seared through my muscles and pushed me back down. I bounced onto the cushion and fell back onto my side, a cry escaping my lips as both of my hands clamped down on the wound.

  “Okay, okay, hold on,” Layla rushed over with a bright red box. From it she pulled a white cloth which she used to wipe up the excess blood. I whimpered as she placed pressure on the skin around the wound and clenched my hands together while she finished wrapping it up. The pain wasn’t unfamiliar, but I could never get used to pain. I’d avoided it at all costs.

  I opened my eyes and looked up, but it wasn’t Layla’s face I saw-- it was The Sand. The old man, down in the Factorum, patching me up as he had done so many times before.

  “You should really be more careful,” The Sand said to me. “One of these days here you’re gonna fall, and I ain’t gonna be able to fix ya’.”

  “If I climb, I’m always gonna fall,” I told him.

  I winced as he put pressure on the swollen ankle and reached into his kit. His hand re-emerged with a white pad between his fingers; thin, like cellulon, the material used to craft tablet screens. He placed it on my ankle, and the pain vanished.

  “Then stop climbing-- see what you can do on the ground. You might like it here,” his gruff voice suggested. “Pain’s gone, hurt’s still there. Mind you don’t do anything stupid.”

  “If I can’t climb, I’m no good to anyone.”

  “If that’s what you wanna tell yourself,” The Sand nodded. “But sometimes the people need you on the ground more than they do in the sky. You get a better view for what they need down here than you do up there.”

  “Come on!” Layla practically slapped my cheek. I snapped out of it and tried to stand. The pain was still there, I groaned and slumped back into my sitting position. She placed a hand beneath my arm and pulled me forward. My feet found the ground and we began to move toward the door that Greta had entered through. I limped along with her. The door creaked open and we stepped out into something I recognized: a factory.

  My eyes traveled up and down looking at the equipment in front of us. I knew the equipment, but it was old and decrepit; broken. The area had been reclaimed by nature; moss and vines clung to the sides of the massive presses and stencilers. Rays of light penetrated broken windows and washed the floor in large rectangular swaths. “I gave you some painkillers. They’ll kick in soon, numb you right up-- but don’t overdo it; you’re still hurt.”

  “Where are we?” I looked around in wonder. I had grown up in places like this, but they had been substantially darker. This was different somehow; smaller. The factory floor was a fraction of the size of the ones inside the Factorum.

  �
�It’s a textile factory on the outskirts of Luna,” she explained. “This district was shut down fifty years ago because we got everything we needed from the Factorum, so we didn’t really need this place anymore.”

  “So... You live here?”

  “Um, no.” Layla guided me through the rows of machinery, past a conveyor, and beneath a low-hanging beam. “It’s just a good place to set up shop; it’s not patrolled anymore, and you can’t get here off the main Luna transport grid. You have to walk.”

  “Of course,” I realized suddenly. “This is the factory district, it was built when Ereen was first colonized.”

  “Right. The outskirts of Luna are made up of the factory district, and from there they just built inward. Factories, farming facilities, material handling, just the essentials. Then after the Apostle Initiative, things changed. There were still factories, but only males could work in them. The outer sections became off-limits to women, and that changed a lot of the goods that were produced. It was a weird time to read about.”

  “But we got through it.”

  “Yeah, we did. Not you. You’re not one of us.”

  Did she really need to constantly remind me?

  “Up through here,” she said as she pointed to a breach in the factory wall, near the front door.

  It looked as if an explosion had torn through in eons past; cracked hardcrete pointed outward and structural beams reached toward a parking lot not unlike the one Kerra and I had once parked in. She looked from left to right as we made our way through the breach and stepped onto an aged platform overlooking the lot, overtaken by rusted old vehicles, plastered to the ground with their lev systems long since depleted.

  Beyond the old decrepit lot, stretching out in the horizon, stood dozens of other buildings not unlike this one and all in the same sad state. This looked nothing like the Ereen I had come to know; Ereen was a highly advanced city, much if it smymetrical. This was old, it was haphazard, standing shattered across the horizon, like a row of broken teeth. I couldn’t believe that people had once lived and worked here.

  “We can’t stay here.” Layla pushed me along toward a set of old metal stairs leading down to the lot. “The Black Swan will look for us here first. We have to move back toward the city. If we can reach the Ulnar District, I know a woman that can help us.”

  “Help us how?”

  “Everyone on Ereen is tracked-- everyone. We have to get new ID bracelets and new professions. And you- your makeup, it still looks good, how long does it last?”

  “A few weeks?” I shrugged. “Donna gave it to me.”

  “Right. I don’t think we’ll be able to get anything that good out here. It’s expensive, and like it or not, we just dropped into the lower class. I can’t spend my currency; they’ll track it right back to me. We can get other makeup.”

  “I think I can make it work.”

  “You’ll have to. If we get caught we’re as good as dead. Where we’re going, you’ll be even deader. Turn down this street here.”

  “Wait,” I reached and grabbed the sleeve of her jacket, she turned and looked at me, maybe a little surprised. “I need answers.”

  “Keep going.” She tugged me along down the sidewalk and led us in between two buildings. An old refuse bin loomed over us as we made our way toward the other side. The ground ceased to be concrete for a moment, and was instead a combination of small dense rocks overgrown with weeds. There was more nature here than woman-made structure and it was odd to see.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “I keep hearing the name ‘Black Swan’. You’ve tried to kill me twice. Who are you? What is the Black Swan? Why would I want my makeup to last here, when what I want is to go home?”

  She didn’t answer for a long time; she led me out of the alley and ducked behind another building peeking out from behind the corner to make sure that the path was clear. Finally, we reached what looked like a massive hardcrete trench with slanted walls and a smooth center.

  “Come on,” she said. “Into the aqueduct. I followed her down the hardcrete wall with my belly pointed inward and my palms gripping the cracks so as not to fall. I knew better than anyone that a fall from this height-- even down a diagonal surface-- could easily kill me, and The Sand wasn’t out here to mend my broken bones. I doubted that Doctor Fitz would be willing to help me after all of this, either.

  We finished descending the wall and stood in the center, the suns of Ereen beating down on us, the beams fueled in their intensity by the bleached white walls overshadowing us. “We don’t want to be out in the open for long-- run until I say stop.”

  She began to run and I kept pace beside her. I felt like I was barely able to do so; the pain in my leg was gone, but the numbness made it difficult for me to keep my feet. It was like my leg was wrapped in lead. I saw her glance to her left a few times to make sure that I was still with her, and I honestly thought she was surprised that I was able to. This was becoming a trend outside of the Factorum.

  We shot through the aqueduct or a good ten minutes; I could sense that she was running out of stamina when she finally stopped at a round drain inset to the side of the slanted wall. It was large enough for the both of us to walk into without ducking down, and it led us into pitch darkness.

  “The Black Swan was what the resistance was called, back in the day,” she explained. Her voice echoed, barely louder than our footsteps sloshing against a narrow stream of water running through a trench ingrained in the crete long ago.

  “The Apostle Initiative wasn’t what it seemed at first-- They didn’t know that a complete takeover was planned, you know? But some people, they knew. The Black Swan was a women’s rights movement designed to push back the patriarchy. It didn’t work, at least not at first. It turned into a resistance cell, and eventually it’s what won the war.”

  “If that’s true, then why are you terrorists?”

  “Terrorists, freedom fighters, same thing,” I could feel her shrugging even in the pitch black of the drain pipe.

  “Today, we want to keep Ereen pure. People keep saying ‘Oh, let’s let some men live on Ereen.’ Or, ‘Hey, let’s bring this transgender girl over from the Factorum and let her play house!’ No, we’re not about that.”

  “But transgender women are part of Ereen’s history, the goverment even said so,” I argued. I felt like I was arguing with a spectre. Reaching my hand out, I managed to touch a bit of the crete wall beside me; I ran my fingers along it, a reminder that we were still here on solid ground and that we hadn’t fallen into an endless pit of blackness, falling forever.

  A perfect metaphor for my life.

  “That’s true,” she acknowledged. “During the war, a lot of transgender women died for us; back then it was proven that they definitely were women, just born in the wrong bodies. We let them live with us, under strict rules, of course. The Black Swan kept them in line and they were better for it.”

  “You say ‘we’ like you were there.”

  “You’re a quick-witted little thing aren’t you?” She didn’t sound amused.

  I kept my mouth shut for a while as we walked; the last thing I wanted to do was upset her. She could leave me here, alone in this tunnel. I would have to walk forward or back and I didn’t want to think about wandering around in that destroyed urban area on my own.

  “I’m hungry,” she said suddenly. So was I.

  “I don’t have any food,” I stated the obvious. “What are we going to do?”

  I was hungry too; I’d been hungry since Greta had brought the takeout food to the hideout. The pangs in my stomach were ever present and building by the second. I regretted not grabbing what was left of the egg roll when Layla wasn’t looking.

  “We’re heading toward the Nocht,” she told me. “It’s kind of an underground community-”

  “Isn’t that a myth? I read about it in a book.”

  “They let you read. That’s cute.”

  “If you hate me so much, why not just let me g
o my own way? I don’t even want to be with you, either.” I wanted to be back with Donna, maybe she would take me back if I apologized for all of this. Maybe.

  “Are you kidding? If they find you, they find me. Besides, what are you going to do without me? How are you going to eat? Where are you going to sleep?”

  “Are we going to sleep in a drain pipe?”

  All jokes aside, she wasn’t wrong; the pain in my left leg was starting to return, I could feel the throbbing sensation returning, a drum beat just below my upper layers of skin that would quickly become a stabbing pain as muscle continued to tear. We had to stop soon. I had to heal.

  No, we had to keep moving.

  The darkness was giving way; I hadn’t noticed it at first, but now it was becoming more apparent. The walls of the tunnel around us were becoming more visible as the tunnel began to come to an end. The walls were a dull brown at first, bathed faintly in a dull orange light, but eventually they became brighter and we emerged into an atrium lined with orange running lights: three strips spaced evenly up the side of the hexagonal chamber. In front of us there were four separate passageways, each one lined with a different color of strip light and each one just as ominous, from where I stood.

  For a moment I could have thought myself back inside the Factorum with its painted orange walls and yellow-striped caution lines. I paused for a brief moment and took in the scene; this was so much like... that place. I closed my eyes briefly, opening them again and trying to convince myself that I wasn’t back down there. The feeling was creeping up on me, it was wrapping its fingers around my consciousness and trying to pull me downward into that pool of despair that I had just so recently learned to wade through.

  Calm down.

  Not now.

  “Wait, stop,” Layla said suddenly. She placed a hand on my shoulder just as I took in the pain building in my leg and placed a sweaty hand against the cold crete wall for support. “Here, take this.”

  She removed her denim jacket and removed the Black Swan pin from the lapel before handing it to me.

  “Put it on, pull the hood up. You don’t want people to recognize you.”

  She was right; I shrugged into the jacket and pulled the cotton hood up over my head, it nearly enveloped my face. The sleeves were a little loose on me, the waist hung a bit too low. I hoped it would be enough.