Chapter 9: The Count Breaks
Then the woman on the upper tier came off the webbing, and the webbing came with her. Four bolts tore out of the tier steel with a noise like a shot. She went over the rail headfirst and hit the lower tier on the way down, and she did not put a hand out.
Hazel was already moving before the body landed.
Tommie had the torch up and the beam cut across the rows. Every face in the bay had turned. The count held. Twenty-two chests still rising and falling on the same slow clock while one woman lay crooked on the rails at Hazel's feet with her arm folded wrong under her.
"Don't touch her," Wendell said.
"She broke the count before you pulled anything." Hazel crouched, two feet back. "She moved on her own. That means there's something in there that isn't the driver."
"Means the driver's behind schedule on her." Wendell had one hand on the cage frame. "Means the compound finished and the band's still trying to run her. She'll do that again."
Tommie swung the beam to the west wall, along the brackets. "Wendell. Which bracket."
"Third from the crane root. Big one. Bolted through four courses of plate."
He ran. Hazel came up off her heels and followed, and the light went with him, and the bay dropped back into the red pulse off the cage. Behind her the tiers stayed in time. Twenty-two on the clock, one off it.
Tommie reached the bracket and put the torch in her hand. "Hold it."
She held it on the wall. He pulled a spanner off his belt and got the first bolt, then the second, and the plate rang when the bracket came loose. Behind it sat a grey box the size of a fist, welded into the wall steel, with a bone-colored lever lying along its side.
"Old dock line," Wendell called from the cage. "That's the tie-in. That's been hot since the charter."
Tommie put his glove on the lever. "If this is the bay's only feed, they go dark."
"They go dark either way," Hazel said. "The cage is here to collect them. That's the freight."
He looked at her once. Then he pulled it.
The lever came hard and then gave, all the way over, and something inside the box popped like a bulb.
The red pulse died last. The drivers went first, and Hazel heard it, a thin high tone dropping out of the air across the whole bay like a line going slack. The webbing rustled. Twenty-two chests stopped on the way up and never finished the stroke.
Then the silence, and in the silence the crane arm ticking as it cooled.
"Breathe," Hazel said. "Somebody breathe."
Nothing in the lower tier moved. She walked the rails with the torch, and the beam picked out faces and hands and the grey of the underlayers, and none of them did anything. A woman three cradles in had her mouth open. Her chest was flat and staying flat.
"Six of them are still going." Tommie was up on the tier frame, two fingers at a throat, then another. "Four. Shallow. It's not the driver doing it."
"It's them doing it," Hazel said.
"Right." He came down off the frame. "It's them doing it."
Wendell had not moved off the cage. He stood with his back to the open doors and the running lights washing his grey sleeves pink.
"You killed the dock line," he said.
"That was the plan."
"It rang the bell twice." He pointed up, past the crane root, where the leads had climbed. "First ring when your partner pulled the two-pole. Second just now, when he pulled the tie-in. I have been listening to that bus for six months. It only chimes on a dead volume."
Hazel turned to the cage.
The lights on it changed. The pulse stopped mid-beat and the whole frame came up steady white, a flat hard light that flooded the dock and put everybody's shadow on the floor at the same angle.
"That's not the running lights," Tommie said.
"No."
A hand had come onto the controls. Somewhere above them the shaft was still carrying the hum of the drive, and the cage door on the far side, the one that faced the dark, was still closed.
Then the comm speaker on the cage frame crackled, and a voice came out of it, flat and unhurried, a card-read cadence Hazel had heard exactly one time before, in a corridor with three plates on it.
"Volume eleven seven. Dock offload. Hold the bay."
Behind her, on the rails, the woman who had come over the tier rail put her good arm under her chest and pushed herself up off the floor.
Tommie got between Hazel and the cage with the spanner still in his fist.
Tommie got between Hazel and the cage with the spanner still in his fist.