Chapter 7: What the Breaker Bought
The corridor ran straight for sixty paces and then turned, and Hazel counted her steps because counting was the only thing in the dark that answered back. The unplated lock had failed open like the others, a tongue of steel hanging from the seal, and the air past it was warmer than the chamber behind her. Not warm like the sanctum. Warm like a body pressed too long against glass.
Her cuff gave a low pulse of light at her wrist. Enough to show the floor, the grit, the thin black leads stapled along the wall in bundles of six. She kept her hand on the left wall and followed the leads.
They ran into the corridor from the chamber the same way the plate feeds had run. Same hair-thin gauge. Same splice. She had told Tommie the breaker was the whole animal, and here it was again, a nerve laid out flat.
The corridor smelled of the compound. Sweet and faintly metallic, like the amber had smelled in the injector, and she stopped once with her palm flat on the wall until the smell stopped meaning anything.
At the turn the ceiling vaulted up and opened out. A bay. It had been a loading dock once, maybe, before the bond sealed it off, because rails still ran along the floor and a crane arm hung rusted from the roof, frozen mid-lift. The leads climbed the wall and split into rows.
Rows of cradles. Twenty of them at least, in two tiers, each cradle a sling of webbing bolted to a frame. Grey underlayers. Black bands at every temple.
Hazel stood at the mouth of the bay and did not move for a moment, because the woman in 11-7-B had said ten or eleven more, and there were more. She counted along the lower tier, then the upper, and the number kept going past twelve, past fifteen, and the number was not the part that stopped her.
The part that stopped her was that the cradles were full of people and the people were breathing in time.
Every chest in the bay lifted on the same count. Twenty-odd bodies taking air together, slow and even, and letting it go together, and the sound was like a single machine idling in a room built for wheels. That was the held note from the fourth corridor, she understood. They had been hearing it all along. It was not a tone the volume made. It was twenty people breathing on one clock.
She took two steps in. The rails were greasy under her boot. A house cuff lay on the floor by the first cradle, cut open along the seam, the grey cord hanging out of it. She crouched and turned it over. Somebody had scraped the graph off the face, the same way the thin woman had scraped hers. The cuff was small. A woman's.
She set it down and stood up because her knees had gone strange.
Naomi was not among them. Hazel looked twice along both tiers. Naomi had walked out, barefoot, wired into whatever was playing behind that band, and the bay did not hold her. It held the ones who had not walked.
On the upper tier, four cradles in from the end, a woman's head turned.
Not fast. The head turned on the pillow of webbing the way a sleeper turns, and then the eyes opened, and they were the wrong grey. Not grey like Hazel's. Grey like a lens in a housing. The woman looked down at her over the rail of the upper tier and did not blink and did not speak, and the whole lower tier turned with her, one after the next, a wave of faces coming round to the same angle, all of them looking at the spot where Hazel stood.
The breathing never broke time. Not once.
Hazel backed up one step and her cuff scraped the rail and the sound was very loud in there.
Then a hand closed on her arm from behind.
She did not scream. She had spent three years learning not to, and she turned into the grip with her elbow already up, and Tommie caught the elbow with his open palm and held it.
"It's me." He was breathing hard, the torch clipped at his shoulder throwing a pocket of white light across the cradles. Grease down one forearm. Rust on his knees from the shaft ladder. "Cage is still coming down. Two decks. Three minutes, maybe less."
She looked past him into the corridor, then at the tiers.
"Twenty-three," she said. "The woman said ten or eleven."
The faces on the lower tier were still turned toward them. Twenty-three sets of eyes, and none of them moved, and every rib in the room rose together and fell together.
Tommie swept the torch along the upper tier, then brought it back, and his jaw set the way it set when a schematic told him something he did not like. He walked to the nearest cradle and put two fingers under the black band at the woman's temple. She let him. Her breathing stayed on the count.
"It's a driver," he said. "Band reads the compound level and runs a current down the seam. Keeps them in step. Same as the plates, same breaker, all of it one bus." He pulled his hand back. "Power's dead. They shouldn't still be in time."
"They are."
Which meant the bay had its own feed, a line they had not found, and it was running them on something other than the breaker she had killed.
Tommie turned toward the corridor behind them. The grey light at the far turn had begun to pulse. Slow. Red. Running lights on a cage coming down a shaft, and the hum of the drive carried through the rock and into her teeth.
He looked at the rows, at her, and then at the torch in his hand.
"How long since the power died," he said.
"Twelve minutes."
"And they turned their heads when you walked in."
Hazel nodded. On the upper tier the woman had not stopped looking at her. The band at her temple was dark, dead as a stone.
"They're finishing," Tommie said. "Whatever Jelani's been doing in here, it's mostly done. He's not stockpiling. He's holding the last of it while the cage comes down." He swung the torch back down the corridor, where the red pulse was getting brighter through the turn. "Somebody's riding down to collect."