Fires of Invention

by J. Scott Savage

  “Maybe it’s not,” she said. “But we’ve searched everywhere else for wing fabric. That sound could be a clue telling us the final piece of the puzzle is up there. My father did everything for—”

  “A reason,” Trenton said. “I know.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “In all this time, you’ve never gone up there without me?”

  Kallista shrugged. “I thought about going a few times, but . . . I don’t know. Knowing it’s so close to the outside—that so many people starved or died from the poisoned air—it would feel like entering a graveyard. But we have to at least look.”

  “When?” he asked.

  She took a deep breath. “There’s no point in waiting.”

  He had been afraid she would say that. “I guess it would be okay. If we’re careful.”

  As they climbed down the dragon and lit their helmets, Trenton tried to occupy his thoughts with things he wanted to adjust on the dragon and what they were learning in food production. But his mind kept slipping back to the feeling he’d had looking up into the dark feeder shaft, and to Kallista’s words.

  It would feel like entering a graveyard.

  As they walked into the mine shaft, he shivered and wished he had a heavier coat. They stopped outside the feeder chute they’d discovered the first time they were on that level.

  “We keep an eye on each other up there,” Trenton said. “If either of us starts to feel sick, we leave.”

  She nodded. “I’ll go first.”

  Trenton thought he should probably at least argue with her, but as scared as he felt, he didn’t know if he could have led the way.

  This chute wasn’t nearly as steep as the ones below, and not as long. Before he was ready, Kallista stopped crawling. “We’re here.”

  Trenton reached a hand near her ankle so he could pull her back if anything happened. “Do you see anything?” he asked.

  She crawled a little farther, then paused for several seconds before saying, “There’s something wrong.”

  “What do you mean, wrong?”

  But Kallista was already climbing out.

  “What do you mean wrong?” Trenton hurried after her, his heart racing. As he emerged from the mouth of the shaft, he found Kallista kneeling a few feet away. He turned toward her, and his helmet illuminated a shadow on the rock floor.

  “What is it?” he asked, rushing to her side.

  She stuck her hand into a groove cut into the stone so deep that she could reach inside it nearly to her elbow. The huge gouge was at least twelve feet long. Trenton ran his fingers along the edge—smooth, as though made with an extremely sharp tool. Scattered across the floor were pieces of rock blasted into glittering shards, some as long as his arm.

  Trenton sucked in a breath. “What is this?”

  “I don’t know,” Kallista whispered. “But there are more. Lots more.”

  Looking to his left, Trenton saw two more grooves as deep and long as the first. He stood and slowly turned around. The rock floor had been blasted and gouged as far as his light reached in every direction. It was as if some giant had used a pickaxe to attack the city.

  “What happened here?” he whispered.

  Kallista lifted her head. “Do you smell that?”

  Trenton sniffed. Other than rock and dust, he didn’t smell anything. He began to say as much but sniffed again. This time, there was something. He couldn’t tell what, but for some reason, it reminded him of the factories on level three.

  Kallista got up and started off into the darkness.

  “Where are you going?” Trenton said, trotting behind her. “Whatever did this could still be out there.”

  But Kallista had already found what she was looking for. A wall came into view. “There.”

  Trenton squinted, trying to understand what he was seeing on the wall, which looked oddly distorted. At first he thought it was simply a trick of the light from his helmet, but the closer they got, the more obvious it became that that wasn’t the case. Something—or someone—had twisted the rock wall into strange and terrible shapes. In some places, the stone looked like it had run like water before turning into rock.

  Kallista rubbed the wall, then pulled back and examined her fingers. Their tips were black. At some point a fire had raged here. Smoke—that was the smell. After who knew how many years since the level had been abandoned, the smell still lingered. How big would a fire have to have been to leave that much soot? But it couldn’t have been hot enough to melt the stone itself, could it?

  Trenton’s heart pounded against his ribs, and his mouth felt dry. “What happened? What did they do?”

  “I don’t know,” Kallista said, sounding out of breath. “But whatever it was, I don’t think we’re supposed to know about it.”

  Trenton noticed a discolored spot on the floor. At first it looked like more soot, but it was more brown than black. Dropping to the ground, he reached for the spot and froze, his fingers only inches from the floor.

  “Kallista,” he said, his voice shaking. “What does this look like to you?”

  She knelt on the floor beside him, and suddenly the two of them were holding hands, their fingers ice cold. “Dried blood. So much of it.”

  Trenton met her dark eyes. She looked drained and much too pale. He wanted to go straight down the shaft and never return, but he couldn’t do that until they investigated the rest of the level. Gripping each other’s hands tightly, they wandered through the large, empty space.

  The level below them had been abandoned at some point, either because the people had outgrown it or because they’d simply moved on.

  But that wasn’t what had happened here. Something had driven these people out, forcing them to burrow deeper into the mountain. Scattered about were the signs of a terrible struggle: blasted metal and stone, shattered glass, bits of rusted machinery they didn’t recognize that crumbled when they touched it.

  They passed foundations where buildings had once stood, and occasionally they found something recognizable—a bent spoon, a broken gauge, the head of a hammer. But more often than not, everything was so melted and misshapen that it was impossible to determine what anything used to be.

  At one point, Trenton thought he saw a tree branch, bleached nearly white. He reached for it, but Kallista yanked him back. He looked closer and realized it wasn’t a branch at all, but a bone. A human leg bone.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

  The air was so cold that his breath plumed in front of his face, and the only sound came from the whirring of the air exhaust system in the center of the cavern.

  “Hold on,” Kallista said. “I see something this way.”

  Thirty or forty feet ahead, the wall of the cavern appeared to bulge inward. As they drew closer, they discovered a pile of rocks forty feet high and equally wide reaching from floor to ceiling. The rocks were held together with mortar, forming a complete seal.

  “This has to be the original entrance,” Kallista said. Moving to the right of the rocks, her light reflected off a section of wall that had been polished to a smooth, black surface. Carved into the rock and painted in gold letters now dimmed with age and smoke was the word COVE. She ran her fingers across the letters. “The founders carved this.”

  The rumbling sound came again, much closer this time. It seemed to come from outside the entrance, a deep roaring that raised goose bumps all over Trenton’s body. He put his ear to the pile of rocks and felt a vibration.

  “It’s the wind,” Kallista said. “Maybe the weather got messed up from all the pollution, making huge storms outside.” She pulled his hand. “Let’s go. I don’t want to stay up here anymore.”

  Trenton didn’t want to either, but he thought he saw something else carved into the wall on the other side of the entrance, and he had to read it. Moving closer, he discovered names cut into the rock, one below the other in tightly engraved letters. There were three tall columns, each stretching from over his head down to the ground. Hundreds of names.

/>   “Are these the founders?”

  “I don’t think so.” Kallista’s voice was barely audible. She ran her fingers over something carved next to the lists of names.

  Trenton looked closer. Engraved beside each name were two numbers. “What are those?”

  Kallista chewed her lower lip. “I think they’re years.”

  Cove years counted from 01 to the current year, 150. The number beside the first three names was 01, the year Cove was founded. The next two names had 02. Slowly, the numbers increased, until, about a third of the way down the first column, the number reached 29. The rest of the names had that number—the rest of the first column, the second, and the third. Trenton stared at the list, trying to understand what it meant.

  Why did most of the list have the year 29 beside them? All at once, it came to him, and his chest tightened until he could barely breathe.

  He turned to Kallista, his heart pounding. “Are they . . . ? Does it mean . . . ?”

  “It’s a list of the dead.” Kallista clasped her arms across her chest. “Those are the years they died.”

  Trenton looked back at the list. Three people dead the first year. Two the second. Some years had a few deaths, some none at all. Until year 29, when . . . He turned away and faced the destruction. The fire, the blasted rock, the destroyed buildings, the stains on the ground. All those names, hundreds of them, all dead the same year.

  Something terrible had happened here. Something so awful he didn’t want to think about it. His throat felt the size of a straw.

  “We have to leave,” he gasped. “We have to get out of here now!”

  34

  As they walked toward the chute to climb back down, Kallista pulled Trenton to the left. “Stay away from the exhaust fans.”

  He looked around and realized they’d strayed toward the center of the cavern. Frigid air blew in his face, sucked past by the fans. He rubbed his arms. “You were right. It feels like we’re walking through a city of the dead.”

  “We are,” Kallista said. “And whatever happened here, the city has created lie after lie to cover it up.”

  They reached the opening, and Trenton was all too glad to leave the level behind him. He climbed out of the chute, back to the old mine shaft below. Immediately he stopped shaking. The air on this level wasn’t as cold as the air above, but that wasn’t the only reason.

  “What did you mean back there about lies?” Trenton asked, moving away from the chute.

  Kallista held up a finger. “First of all, I don’t remember ever hearing about a war in the city.”

  “A war?”

  “You know, where people fight each other? Kill each other?”

  “I know what the word means.” He’d read about wars in school. According to the history texts, they were the result of change. When people stopped doing things the way they’d always been done, fighting was inevitable. “But what makes you think that what happened up there was a war?”

  Kallista snorted, the sound echoing in the eerie darkness of the mine shaft. “You think those people died from illness or pollution? That was from violence—inside the city. Weapons, fire, explosions. What else could have done any of that?”

  She was right. Whatever had happened there had been violent.

  “The Book of Chancellors is a lie,” she said.

  Trenton gasped. The Book of Chancellors was the most sacred document in the city. To call it false was practically criminal.

  “We read the beginning,” Kallista said, the night we broke into the museum. “Did you read anything that could explain what we saw up there?”

  “No,” he admitted.

  According to the lessons they’d learned in school, the first years of the city were spent starting farms and mining coal, the people working together to create a magnificent machine. If the Book of Chancellors wasn’t true, what else might be a lie?

  “Of course we didn’t see anything about it,” Kallista said, breathing hard now. “They took it out or changed it because they didn’t want anyone to know what really happened.” Her face flushed. She snapped a piece of coal from the wall. “Have you ever wondered why we have to climb through coal chutes to get to both of these levels? There must have been openings to them at one time, but they were sealed off. The shafts, too. My guess is that my father is the one who cleared them.”

  “They were sealed to keep people from coming up here.”

  “And to keep people from knowing the truth.” Kallista pointed toward the dark opening of the chute they’d climbed through. “Whatever happened up there was so horrible that the leaders must have sealed the upper levels, changed the Book of Chancellors, and have been lying about it ever since.” Her helmet light bobbed as she spoke, casting unsettling shadows around them. “I think my father found out about the upper levels, and he was killed to keep him quiet.”

  Trenton nodded slowly. “And now we know the truth too. If anyone finds out—”

  Kallista glared at him. “We tell no one.”

  “Let’s get back to the foundry,” Trenton said, walking toward the mine entrance. “I want to turn on a whole bunch of lights.”

  “And I want to start Ladon’s furnace so we can get warm.” Kallista headed for the entrance too, but then stopped, turned around, and looked deeper into the mine shaft. “Did you see that?”

  Trenton turned too. “See what?” He stepped beside her, and his light glinted off something metallic on the wall.

  Together they walked deeper into the tunnel. The walls and ceiling were covered with a gold mesh-like material connected to the beams in the walls and the ceiling, Some of it had pulled loose. He knelt down to touch it.

  “It feels like metal.”

  “But it’s flexible, like cloth,” Kallista said, twisting it between her fingers. “I’ve never seen anything like it in the mines.”

  Trenton yanked at the fabric as hard as he could. He might as well have tried to tear a piece of steel. “It’s strong.”

  Kallista pulled a knife from her tool belt and ran the blade across the surface of the gold material. It didn’t leave a mark. She pushed harder and harder until the blade snapped.

  Suddenly all thoughts of the destruction above them had disappeared. They looked at each other—eyes wide—and, at the same time, said, “Wings.”

  • • •

  The metal was exactly what they needed—light, flexible, and so strong that they had to use a blowtorch to cut it. The mesh bent almost like cloth, but it was fine enough that the air would flow over the surface instead of going through.

  Over the next few days, they collected as much of the fabric as they could carry, then carefully welded it onto Ladon’s wing struts. Kallista was the better welder, so while she worked on the wings, Trenton installed a pair of leather harnesses to hold them in their seats in case they had any more accidents. It was exhausting, but Trenton was almost sure it would work. Still, something bothered him.

  “Isn’t this amazing?” Kallista asked as she welded the last piece in place. Trenton grunted, and she looked up from what she was doing. “What’s wrong? Aren’t you excited to test the new wings?”

  He tried to smile. “I guess.”

  Kallista put down her tools and swung under the wing to sit beside him on the scaffolding they’d made. “You’ve been quiet all day. Are you worried about crashing again?”

  “It’s not that.” He twirled a screwdriver in his hand. “You always say that your father had a reason for everything he did. Well, what if his reason for having us build this wasn’t to actually make the dragon?”

  “I don’t understand,” Kallista said. “Why else would he have left the plans and all of the clues we’ve found?”

  Trenton ran his hand over the surface of the wing. “This material could have saved my mother. If it had been installed on the walls of the mines she was working in, the collapse might never have happened, and she wouldn’t be crippled. She was lucky. A lot of people haven’t been—they’ve died down the
re.”

  “It’s strange that they stopped using it,” Kallista agreed.

  “No.” Trenton slapped the handle of the screwdriver against his palm. “Strange would be if there were only one thing that’s off. But it’s more than the gold fabric. Yes, they stopped using the material in their mines. But they also stopped using the coal crusher and the turbines. I’ve noticed at least a dozen other little things used on this level that aren’t around anymore. Things that would make our equipment safer, faster, and more efficient. I’m sure I’ve missed a lot of other things too.”

  He got up and stared at the buildings around them. “Doesn’t it seem like a coincidence that we’ve discovered a better metal, safer mining equipment, and a way to generate power that would let us create twice as much electricity with half the coal, all while building this dragon?”

  Kallista chewed her lower lip. “I’ve been so caught up in finishing the dragon that I didn’t think about any of that until now. But you’re right. My father wanted us to see all of this. That has to be why he left those things out of the plans.”

  “I’ll bet there are a lot more improvements, too,” Trenton said. “The question is, why? Why would the city intentionally leave behind better technology and replace it with equipment that’s less efficient and less safe?”

  “Do you think it has something to do with what we found up there?” Kallista asked, pointing toward the level above them.

  He nodded. “I’ve been thinking about what you said. About the Book of Chancellors and how it could have been changed or faked to rewrite history. But what if the record wasn’t changed?”

  She snorted. “You’re saying that they somehow forgot to mention hundreds of deaths when they wrote up the yearly reviews?”

  Trenton held up a hand. “Of course not. But what if the city wasn’t founded in 1939, like we’ve been taught? What if it was founded almost thirty years earlier? Maybe the war on the first level was so terrible that they decided to start over. They dug out a new level, sealed off the first two, and pretended that none of the other stuff ever happened. They could have even started over numbering the years.”