“You’re through – get back!”
A hand that reeked of grease and toil clamped down over her mouth, protecting her from the air beyond. Juliette couldn’t breathe. Ahead of her, a black patch of empty space appeared, the cloud of concrete dissipating.
And there, between two bars of iron, stood a dark void. A void between prison bars that ran two layers deep and all around them, from Mechanical straight to the Up Top.
She was through. Through. She now had a glimpse of some other, some different, outside.
“The torch,” Juliette mumbled, prying Raph’s calloused hand from her mouth and hazarding a gulp of air. “Get me the cutting torch. And a flashlight.”
2
“Damn thing’s rusted to hell.”
“Those look like hydraulic lines.”
“Must be a thousand years old.”
Fitz muttered the last, the oilman’s words whistling through gaps left by missing teeth. The miners and mechanics who had kept their distance during the digging now crowded against Juliette’s back as she aimed her flashlight through a lingering veil of powdered rock and into the gloom beyond. Raph, as pale as the drifting dust, stood beside her, the two of them crammed into the conical crater chewed out of the five or six feet of concrete. The albino’s eyes were wide, his translucent cheeks bulging, his lips pursed together and bloodless.
“You can breathe, Raph,” Juliette told him. “It’s just another room.”
The pale miner let out his air with a relieved grunt and asked those behind to stop shoving. Juliette passed the flashlight to Fitz and turned from the hole she’d made. She wormed her way through the jostling crowd, her pulse racing from the glimpses of some machine on the other side of the wall. What she had seen was quickly confirmed by the murmuring of others: struts, bolts, hose, plate steel with chips of paint and streaks of rust – a wall of a mechanical beast that went up and to the sides as far as their feeble flashlight beams could penetrate.
A tin cup of water was pressed into her trembling hand. Juliette drank greedily. She was exhausted, but her mind raced. She couldn’t wait to get back to a radio and tell Solo. She couldn’t wait to tell Lukas. Here was a bit of buried hope.
“What now?” Dawson asked.
The new third-shift foreman, who had given her the water, studied her warily. Dawson was in his late thirties, but working nights had saddled him with extra years. He had the large knotted hands that came from busting knuckles and breaking fingers, some of it from working and some from fighting. Juliette returned the cup to him. Dawson glanced inside and stole the last swig.
“Now we make a bigger hole,” she told him. “We get in there and see if that thing’s salvageable.”
Movement on top of the humming main generator caught Juliette’s eye. She glanced up in time to spy Shirly frowning down at her. Shirly turned away.
Juliette squeezed Dawson’s arm. “It’ll take forever to expand this one hole,” she said. “What we need are dozens of smaller holes that we can connect. We need to tear out entire sections at a time. Bring up the other excavator. And turn the men loose with their picks, but keep the dust to a minimum if you can help it.”
The third-shift foreman nodded and rapped his fingers against the empty cup. “No blasting?” he asked.
“No blasting,” she said. “I don’t want to damage whatever’s over there.”
He nodded, and she left him to manage the dig. She approached the generator. Shirly had her coveralls stripped down to her waist as well, sleeves cinched together, her undershirt wet with the dark inverted triangle of hard work. With a rag in each hand, she worked across the top of the generator, wiping away both old grease and the new film of powder kicked up by the day’s digging.
Juliette untied the sleeves of her coveralls and shrugged her arms inside, covering her scars. She climbed up the side of the generator, knowing where she could grab, which parts were hot and which were merely warm. “You need some help?” she asked, reaching the top, enjoying the heat and thrum of the machine in her sore muscles.
Shirly wiped her face with the hem of her undershirt. She shook her head. “I’m good,” she said.