“Nell, this is Rua David,” Oliver said.
“I’m Nell Crane,” she said, extending one hand, overconfidently.
The young man took it in both of his, clasping her hand rather than shaking it. “I know, sweetheart. You’re fine. The others are expecting you.”
He released her and slapped Oliver on the back so hard that he almost doubled forward. “Good on you getting in so early. Can’t risk anybody seeing you—especially with the breakthrough we just made. Can you hear it?”
“Hear what?” Oliver said. Nell couldn’t hear anything.
“Good. We’re nice and insulated down there; you’d never know we’ve been dancing all night. And so have you, Kelly, by the smell of you.”
“Ah, now, stick on the kettle when we get down there, and I’ll be right as rain.”
The two started to move forward, and Nell followed them through the dimness, hugging herself. The air was murky and thick and blue-gray, almost like walking at the bottom of the sea or on a new planet with an atmosphere that only marginally tolerated your presence. She was sure the ceiling was low, she was sure the corridor was broad; but she wasn’t much sure of anything else. This building was an abyss.
“What is this place called?” she asked, hurrying to keep up without tripping over anything or herself. Kodak had burrowed his face into her collar; he was not enjoying this. Nell could barely hear something disturbing the air in the distance: a droning.
Rua led on. “The Lighthouse.”
Nell laughed cheekily. “Why? Because it’s so bright in here?”
“No. Because that’s what it was always called. Before us, before anything happened, when this city was a real city with real things to do and places to go and no disease and no war. We have to honor what came before us if we can hope to even come close to rebuilding it,” he said sternly. “It’s dark here for a reason. Once we go down lower we’ll have lamps. We have to keep it brighter in the workshop. And cleaner. Watch your step.”
Their guide took two steps down a flight of stairs and disappeared into the murk.
Oliver said, “You’re going to need to take my arm.”
“But then if I fall, you fall, too. There must be a railing.” By which Nell meant, “I do not want to have to touch you any more than I already have this morning, please and thank you.”
“Suit yourself. Just stick close to the wall.” With that, Oliver also disappeared into the dense, filthy air.
The rhythm of his bounding down the staircase almost synced with the distant thrumming, and for a moment there in the dark Nell thought it sounded a little like music. Rua had mentioned dancing.
She clung to the wall, the grit of filth immediately all over her hands, her skin crawling with the feel of it, and shakily began to make her way down the stairway, one blind step at a time. Her chest ticked louder with every step. Not too far below her, Oliver called, “Come on, Nell, it’s a flight of stairs; you’re not reinventing the wheel!”
“Piss off!” she shouted, stumbling a little over her boots.
“Over here!” called Rua, his tall figure shrouded in the grimy depths. “Two more small flights to go!”
How a still tipsy Oliver Kelly made it to the bottom floor without falling flat on his face, Nell would never know. Her own descent was nothing short of a miracle. For Rua it was clearly muscle memory; either that or those glasses had something extra built into them. Nell had fumbled gracelessly almost all the way, just a few feet from the bottom, before she tripped over her own feet and plummeted forward, Kodak digging his claws so tight into her coat that she could feel them pricking her skin.
As with all falls, her body came down incredibly fast on the outside, but incredibly slow on the inside. She knew she was going to land on her face. Maybe split a lip, wreck some teeth—
Somebody warm and soft caught her. Definitely not Oliver Kelly.
“Oh, I’m so sorry.” She leaped from Rua’s arms before his well-timed catch could turn into any sort of embrace.
“Happens to everyone at some point on the way down. Don’t worry. We’re almost there. If you take my hand, it’ll be much easier. The floor isn’t so great down this way.”
Nell clenched her jaw, her pulse racing from the adrenaline of the fall, the echo of the crash that didn’t happen running tremors through her. People seemed insistent on touching her, leading her places, taking her hand or her arm. She supposed that if there was any time she was going to let them, it might as well be when she was most likely to actually injure herself.
Rua’s hand was so completely unlike the mannequin hand: warm, soft, with some calluses. It closed around hers confidently, without implication, and led her through the dark. She stumbled after him, relieved that she was no longer swimming alone in this black sea.
The sound was getting louder. She was almost sure now that it was music. Someone was doing something terrible to—a guitar maybe? There must be a lot of drums wherever they were going.
There was a thick plastic curtain that made an unpleasant noise, industrial, heavy. Nell pushed through it. A few feet farther was a tall, heavy door; the plastic sheet had just been a shield against the dust. Rua stepped ahead to open the door, turn on the light. They walked through; the door closed behind them.
Then the whole world was bright again. Nell pulled her hand free and rubbed her eyes. Kodak lifted his head from the crook of her neck.
The room was vast and white and clean, as though they had slipped through a tear in their rotting world into a blank canvas, a fresh void. A cool breeze whispered from a spinning fan on the ceiling, high above them. A chill rolled over Nell’s skin; she hadn’t felt something like that in a long time. The air felt fresh.
Cleaning solution lingered on the edge of Nell’s senses; she could nearly taste it. Like bleach and, under the bleach, lavender. Like a place that had been cared for, constructed. As if all the badness of this building’s past was being scrubbed out. The walls were lined with shelves and glass cases full of silver boxes of all shapes and sizes. This was an inventory.
These were the computers.
Spread out evenly on the clean white tables were tiny parts, silvery things, and delicate tools. Thin wires lined up by color, by size. So many small things. But none of this was what Nell was really looking at.
Three people were dancing near the wall farthest from where they came in. Whatever was blasting through the air was definitely music. Delight, when it arrives out of no place at all, is like an electricity that runs through passages in bones and out through hands and up into mouths. It is a beautiful shock. Nell nearly screamed with joy.
One of them shouted, “Turn off the light!”
“Calm down. I’m doing it, I’m doing it.” Rua laughed and flipped the switch on the wall again. The room went black.
Something was projected onto the wall. Images of stars. People. Or at least they looked like people. A crowd, a band, drawn in moving pictures. A million colors against the fresh, clean dark of the room, alive, racing past. It looked as if someone had split open a crystal and cast a torch through the prism.
Nell’s eyes filled with hot tears, and she stretched her arms above her head. Rua and the other three were dancing without inhibition, eyes locked on the display on the wall.
The images moved with the music; yes, that was what it was. But Nell had never heard these instruments before. These thrumming strange rushes: fractals of light in a broken violin, someone playing a heart like a drum, like ten beautiful drums, repeating melody, looped and looped and escalated. Like something shattered but shattered right. She didn’t even feel that she was in her body anymore.
A voice rang out. Not a human voice. Almost, but full of stars. A computer’s voice. She loved it.
It sang out three words—One more time—a mantra, and the others sang along and waved glasses in the air. They knew this song. Again and again it sang, and Nell lifted her voice along with it, understanding it immediately.
For a moment the be
at disappeared, a soft, tender lull of electric tone ran beneath the voice, and they slowed their dance in reverence, chanting, “One more time, one more time.” In the dark, Nell could see that Oliver wasn’t dancing. She didn’t care.
The beat reappeared slowly, crept up out of nowhere, and the five picked up their movement until it peaked and they were lost, each, in the sound and the color, the strangeness and newness of it. It glittered in the air, if sound could glitter. Nell’s whole body shone; her machine heart was beating a pulse exactly in tempo. This music was far from the janky accordion and double bass of the Bayou, the flat guitars, the salvaged, busted instruments and torch songs from dead times. This was so different. It shone. Nell wept, a smile splitting her face until it ached, as she sang easy new words with these strangers.
The song ended with three dense strikes of a bell.
The screen flickered off, and Nell was in the dark again; but the world was more illuminated than when she began. She was sweating but not summer, city sweating. She thrummed, not yet ready for this to be over. She looked around, waved her arms a few more times, hoping the galactic orchestra would pick back up, but nothing. It was over. The pace of the world was slow again.
One of the three dashed across the room to switch the light back on. The bursting lily whiteness swept over Nell, and she was in reality, faced with three strangers, a room full of computers, and something very important to do. Oliver was wringing his hands, making his way over to a kitchenette.
“Would you look, it’s Nell Crane.”
“Haven’t seen you in a while, Nellie.”
“Is Ruby not around? Was hoping she’d come down.”
A chorus of moderately familiar voices.
The girl at the door called over, and Nell recognized her now in the stillness. It was Sheena Blake: cropped, sleek black hair and straight teeth, lithe as a cat and twice as aloof. Biomechanical left leg, revealed in beautiful contrast with her right by rolled-up loose denim shorts. It was gray, an older model, one of the more classic designs Nell’s father had put together. It would never break, all titanium casing and impenetrable wiring. Sheena was a mechanic or, well, a computer mechanic, Nell supposed, suddenly irritated and feeling very much, even in the glare of these lights, in the dark.
“What did Ruby tell you?” Nell did her best to conceal her concern, still breathless from the dance.
“Nothing really. She never tells me anything about you. She just said you were working on something mental, and she didn’t have the time for it.”
Sometimes things were very blunt but also very sharp at the same time. Nell felt as if she’d been struck with a knife-hammer. She wanted to say, “Well, she never tells me anything about you either, Sheena Blake.” But instead, she said, “We’ll work it out.”
“Of course you will. She, like, loves you.” Sheena rolled her eyes with these words and moved back toward the group.
Oliver and Rua were standing with the other two strangers around the kitchenette in the corner.
“This is Tim,” began Rua, more imposing now than he had been in the dark. “He’s—”
“The confectioner? I saw your presentation at the Youth Council.” Nell was baffled. “Marrying Mara Cahill?”
The lad smiled, warm. Sandy skin dappled with island clusters of freckles, face soft around the edges, neat black dreadlocks wound into a ponytail. It took a moment for her to notice that his ears were scaffolded with machinery. They’d been designed to match his skin, but there was a tiny green light at the center of each conch that flickered as the sound around them rose and fell.
“Confectioner, not really. Mara? For show. We’re great friends. Keeps the mayor distracted. As long as they think we’re moving along, making cakes, everything’s fine. Smoke and mirrors, you know. Day job stuff. Down here’s where the real work is.”
“What real work?” Nell asked.
“That music you just heard? I found and restored that. Pulled it up out of code. The video appeared with it on the screen, so we rigged it to an old projector. Someday we’ll play it for the whole city!” Tim’s laugh was husky. He was so forthcoming that Nell found herself disarmed; she liked him.
She cast a quick look to Oliver, who was setting out mugs and teabags.
“I’m not sure about the film, lads,” he said, almost shakily. “It’s a bit much, you know? You won’t be able to show that outside here.”
He was well familiar with this place, with these people. These were his friends.
“What do you mean, ‘It’s a bit much’?” Tim snorted. “It’s beautiful! You’re probably just a little sore from no sleep.”
Oliver shook his head, pouring hot water into mugs, “Look, you think it’s beautiful. But depictions of the future like that from before the Turn, well, if they’re overwhelming to me, then I can only imagine what they’ll make the council feel like. The music is really great, but the pictures—all those images of people—it’s too futuristic. It’s not going to sit well.”
Tim turned to him and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Look, buddy, I know you’re . . .” and the two began to speak in low tones.
“Don’t mind them. Oliver’s only coming around to some of our newer advancements; they can be quite surprising. I’m Nic Fern,” said the last person, flannel clad, a bobble hat on their head, short tufts of mousy hair sticking out from under the wool, both feminine and boyish at once. Their voice was tender and gentle, almost a whisper. They extended a hand; both of theirs were porcelain coated and painted with thin green vines—newer models. Nell shook their hand, and it was warm—definitely newer. Some of the latest releases had thermodynamic fibers installed nearer the surface so they matched the owner’s body temperature.
Nic petted Kodak on the head. “Hello there, fella.”
“He’s very tame,” Nell assured them. Kodak nuzzled closer to Nic, happy for the attention.
“I know Ruby well. A lot of my day work takes me to the parklands. I work in the horticultural studies center in the Old Central Bank. There’s not many of us there, but we’re getting things done.”
“Oh.”
Ruby seemed to have connections to absolutely everybody. Yet she had never introduced Nell to Nic or anyone else, really. Nell knew the least of all the people in this room, and it was beginning to feel worse than walking down that flight of stairs.
“And . . . what . . . do you do here?” The words were painful on Nell’s tongue, thick with ignorance. Oliver and Tim still spoke, hushed, with their backs to the group. How she hated this feeling clueless.
“I’m in charge of images. Some of these machines are full of pictures. You should see them.” Nic’s voice was flush with excitement, and they took a steaming fresh cup of tea from the counter and passed it to Nell. “Now that we have the projector set up—took forever, man, to clean it and rebuild it; finding a bulb for it that wasn’t smashed was the worst—but it was worth it; now we can see them in much greater detail. So many photographs of people’s faces. Renderings of paintings. Animals that are long gone. We can learn so much, you know. Some of the smaller computers have digital cameras that still work, too.”
Nell took the cup and nodded mutely. The boys reemerged from their chat just then, and Oliver noticed Nell’s bewilderment and laughed. “Poor Nell has been a bit out of the loop, lads.”
“Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? If everybody knew, something would leak, wouldn’t it?” Rua leaned back on the counter. “We’ll tell everyone when the time’s right. When we have something more than tunes to show for ourselves. All undercover, underground for now. We’re no use to anyone working in a rotten old building anyway, could do with a cleaner space, someplace we’d be proud to show people around. Until we shine ourselves up a little, we can’t get found out.”
“But we won’t get found out,” snapped Sheena Blake, “because if we do, we’ll know who the leak is.” She looked straight at Nell, intense and accusatory.
“Look, I’ve no interest in uprooti
ng this, this, whatever this is,” Nell stammered. “I’m here to get something that will help with what I’m working on myself. That’s all.”
She wished they were dancing again instead of talking, though this was not at all an appropriate moment to ask them to play the song again.
“And what is it?” asked Tim. “Go on.”
Nell drew breath. “I—I actually can’t say just yet. It’s—it’s extremely confidential.”
The four computer restorers collectively made an oooooh noise before descending into scattered laughter, part mockery, part curiosity.
“Really, lads,” Oliver said. “She hasn’t even told me yet.”
“And I won’t,” Nell said, firmly. “Not until—not until it’s finished.”
But oh, she would eventually have to tell people, wouldn’t she?
“I can respect that,” said Tim. “I mean, from what Sheena says about how Ruby reacted, it seems pretty unconventional, right? I’m assuming it’s something to do with your father’s work, yeah?”
“Yes,” Nell said, face straight. “Yes. Totally unconventional. Really can’t talk about it.”
“I’m not sure how I feel about selling one of our restorations for a project I know nothing about.” Sheena’s words were steely.
“Ah, come on now,” Nic said. “How many times have you talked somebody out of their relics and computer scraps when they brought them to your family’s garage, without telling them why? How many times has Ruby lifted odds and ends from her father’s repair shop? You’re not all that transparent yourself.”
Sheena scowled and drank deeply from her mug, knitted brows peeking over the top of it. When she surfaced, she whistled low. “Rua, what do you think?”
“It depends on what she wants,” he replied. “I mean, Oliver wouldn’t have brought her to us if he didn’t believe it was for a good cause.”
Oliver shrugged coolly. “It’s up to you.”
Nell was practically invisible. This was the opposite of music, the opposite of dancing with strangers, that unspoken safety. The strange bond she’d formed with them, gone. They all knew one another so well, and she was a stranger, an interloper, a novelty. She hated it.
Spare and Found Parts Page 11
