Chapter 8: The Man from the Cage
The cage came down the shaft past the turn, and the light off it swung across the bay mouth a half second before the sound caught up. Hazel heard it in her back teeth. A freight cage, wheels grinding on the old rails, dropping slow with its running lights pulsing red into the dark.
It stopped at the dock.
That was what the rails were for. The bay had been built to take freight, and the freight was still coming.
Tommie pulled her back behind a cradle stanchion and killed the torch. His hand stayed flat on her hip bone, holding her against the frame, and she let it because the floor was greasy and her knees were still doing something strange.
The cage doors opened with a racket of chain.
A man stepped out. Barefoot. Grey underlayer, no belt, sleeves torn at the shoulder. Thin in a way the compound did not leave in a body it liked. A seam ran from his left temple down behind his jaw, and the hair above it had grown in grey and patchy like frost on glass.
He stood on the dock with the cage breathing red behind him and looked down the rows.
Twenty-three chests rose and fell on the same slow count.
"You killed the plates," he said. His voice was the one that had come out of the speaker in 11-7-C, deeper than the box that had carried it, dry as a hinge. "I heard the thunks. All three at once. Somebody finally pulled something."
Hazel stepped out from behind the stanchion.
Wendell looked at her without surprise, which was worse than surprise. "You."
"You told me about the shaft."
"I told you where it went." He came down off the dock, favoring his right leg, and stopped a few paces off. He had something in his left hand. A cuff, cut open at the seam, the same as the one she had found on the floor. He turned it over once and tossed it onto the rails between them.
"So." He looked past her at Tommie, then at the tiers. "You found the rest of the stock."
"Twenty-three," Hazel said. "The woman in B said ten or eleven."
"B counts what B is shown." Wendell crouched by the nearest cradle, lower tier, a woman with her graph scraped off and both eyes open and grey as lens housings. He put two fingers on her jaw, tilted her face, let it go. It stayed where he left it. "They add to the bay when the doors free up. Nobody tells B. B's a tenant. Tenants get told what keeps them paying."
Tommie came out of the shadows with the torch dead in his fist. "You came down in the cage."
"I called it." Wendell straightened, slow, one hand on the cradle frame. "Spent two hours in the seam between shafts with a splice wire learning which rung rings the dispatch. Nobody's scheduled down here. It came anyway."
"Because they're collecting," Tommie said.
"Because the bond has a bell on it that rings upstairs whenever the volume goes dark." Wendell wiped his palm down his thigh. "You pulled the breaker twelve minutes ago. That cage left the dock four decks up inside ten. Somebody wants their property."
Hazel watched the red light crawl across his face.
"You rode it down," she said. "So you're either theirs or you're running."
Wendell looked at her for a long moment.
"I'm leased," he said. "Eleven months. Corridor C, same as you heard me through the wall. My first three sessions were fine. Fourth one they moved my door feed over to the bus and I stopped being able to leave the corridor without the band telling my legs to sit down." He tapped the seam at his temple. Two fingers, light. "They graft the seam before they set the band. I got the seam. The band never went on because I kept my hand on the breaker plate every time they came down to fit it."
"So you've been sitting in that room," Tommie said, "for months, waiting."
"I've been sitting in that room listening to you two walk around my volume like it was a maintenance order." Wendell's mouth pulled. "That handshake on the doorbell wafer. I heard it. Nobody's handshook that plate in two years."
Hazel's cuff threw a low pulse, and in the light of it she saw his sleeves, the old burns down his forearms, the compound sweet in the air between them.
"The bay's still running," she said. "I killed the two-pole. They're breathing on the count."
"Course they are." Wendell turned and pointed up, past the rusted crane arm, to where the leads bundled and climbed. "The bond laid its own bus in this bay before the station ever cut a breaker into it. Founding contract. That's what bonded in perpetuity means. Your breaker runs the plates and the doors and the corridor lights. The bay runs on the old dock line, up under the crane rail. It's been hot since the charter."
Tommie followed the point with the dead torch and found the bundle where it met the roof steel.
"How do you know that," he said.
"Because I've been walking this bay at night for six months with a cracked cuff light and nothing else to do." Wendell's voice had no heat left in it at all. "I know where every line in here goes. I know the cradles are wired in banks of four. I know the dock line has one tie-in and it's on the west wall behind the brackets."
On the upper tier, four cradles in from the end, the woman who had turned her head when Hazel walked in put her hand on the webbing and pushed herself up.
The count broke.
Every chest in the bay stopped moving at once, and the silence came down so hard that Hazel heard the crane arm tick as it cooled.
"Ah," Wendell said, very quietly, and took a step back toward the cage.
Wendell's step back toward the cage was the only warning anyone got.