Second Shift - Order

explosion.

The explosion. Cam. The package. The delivery.

Mission wobbled and clutched the railing for balance. He thought of the ridiculous fee for the delivery, a fee that perhaps was never meant to be paid. He gathered himself and hurried on, wondering what in the depths was going on, what kind of trouble his friend might be in, and how to help him. How, even, to get to him.

The air grew thick and it burned to breathe as he arrived at Dispatch. A small crowd huddled on the stairway. They peered across the landing and into the open doors of one-twenty-two. Mission coughed into his fist as he pushed his way through the gawkers. Had the wreckage from above landed here? Everything seemed intact. Two buckets lay on their sides near the door, and a gray fire hose snaked over the railing and trailed inside. A blanket of smoke clung to the ceiling; it trailed out and up the wall of the stairwell shaft like water from a giant faucet defying gravity.

Mission pulled his ‘chief up over his nose, confused. The smoke was coming from inside. He breathed in through his mouth, the fabric pressing against his lips and lessening the sting in his throat. Dark shapes moved inside the hallway. He unsnapped the strap that held his knife in place and crossed the threshold, keeping low to stay away from the smoke.

Eli, one of the senior dispatchers, met him in the hall. He had a basket of scorched paper in his hands, a mournful look on his face. The floors were everywhere wet and squished with the traffic from deeper inside. It was dark, but cones of light danced around like fretful things.

“Look what you’ve done,” Eli cried to Mission. “Look what you’ve done.”

Mission hurried past him and toward the flashlights. The smoke was thicker, the water on the floor deeper. Bits of pulp worth saving floated on the surface. He passed one of the dormitories, the sorting hall, the front offices.

Lily, an elder porter, ran by in slaps and spray, recognizable only at the last moment as the beam from her flashlight briefly lit her face. There was someone lying in the water, pressed up against the wall. As Mission approached and a passing light played over the form, he saw that they weren’t lying there at all. It was Hackett, one of the few dispatchers who treated the young shadows with respect and never seemed to take delight in their burdens. The glimpse Mission got revealed half a face recognizable, the other half a red blister. Deathdays. Lottery numbers flashed in Mission’s vision.

“Porter! Get over here.”

It was Morgan’s voice. The old man’s cough joined a chorus of others. The hallway was full of ripples and waves, splashes and hacks, smoke and commands. Mission hurried toward the familiar silhouette, his eyes burning.

“Sir? It’s Mission. The explosion—” He pointed toward the ceiling.

“I know my own shadows, boy.” A light was trained on Mission’s eyes, a physical lash of sorts. “Get in here and give these lads a hand.”

The smell of cooked beans and burnt and wet paper was overpowering. There was a hint of fuel behind it all, a smell Mission knew from the Down Deep and its generators. He had lugged a massive filter once that reeked of this. And there was something else: the smell of the bazaar during a pig roast, a foul and unpleasant odor.

The water in the main hall was deep. It lapped up over Mission’s halfboots and filled them with muck. Drawers of files were being emptied into buckets. An empty crate was shoved into his hands, cones of light swirling in the mist, shapes moving and kicking up splashes, his nose burning and running, tears on his cheeks unbidden.

“Here, here,” someone said, urging him forward. They warned him not to touch the filing cabinet. Piles of paper went into the crate, heavier than they should be. Mission didn’t understand the rush. The fire was out. The walls were black where the flames must’ve licked them with their orange tongues, and the grow plots along the far wall where rows of beans had run up tall trestles were all ash. The trestles stood like black fingers, those that stood at all.

The porter beside him, Mission couldn’t see who, cursed the farmers before leaving with a load. Amanda was there at the filing cabinet, her ‘chief wrapped around her hand, managing the drawers as they were emptied. The crate filled up fast. Mission spotted someone emptying the wall safe of its old books as he turned back toward the hallway. There was a body in the corner covered in a sheet. Nobody was in as much of a hurry to remove that.

He followed the others toward the landing, but they did not go all the way out. The emergency lights in the dorm room were on, mattresses stacked up in the corner. Carter, Lyn, and Jocelyn were spreading the files out on the springs. Mission unloaded his crate and went back for another load. He asked Amanda what had happened, if this was retribution of some sort.

“They came for the beans,” she said. She used her ‘chief to wrestle with another drawer. “They came for the beans, and they burned it all.”

Mission took in the wide swath of damage. He recalled how the stairwell had trembled during the blast, still saw the bodies falling and screaming to their deaths. Something was going on. The months of small violences had ramped up like a switch had been flipped. He wasn’t convinced that this was about the beans at all.

* * *

“So what do we do now?” Carter asked. He was a powerful porter, in his early thirties where men find their strength and have yet to lose their joints, but he looked absolutely beat. His hair clung to his forehead in wet clumps. There were black smears on his face, and you could no longer tell what color his ‘chief had been. All signs that he had been present for and had fought back the fire.

“Now we burn their crops,” someone suggested.

“The crops we eat?”

“Just the upper farms. They’re the ones that did this.”

“We don’t know who did this,” Morgan said.

Mission caught his old caster’s eye. “In the storehouse,” he said. “I saw— Was that—?”

Morgan nodded. “Hendricks. Aye.”

Carter slapped the wall and barked profanities. “I’ll kill ‘em!” he yelled.

“So you’re…” Mission wanted to say Lower Chief, but it was too soon for that to make sense.

“Aye,” Morgan said, and Mission could tell it made little sense to him as well.

“People will be carrying whatever they like for a few days,” Joel said. He coughed into his palm while Lyn looked on with concern. “We’ll appear weak if we don’t strike back.”

Mission had other concerns besides appearing weak. The people above thought a porter had attacked them. And now this with the farmers, so far from where they’d been hit the night before. Porters were the nearest thing to a roaming sentry, and they were being knocked out by someone, purposefully he thought. There were all those boys being recruited into IT. It wasn’t computers they were being hired to fix. It was something else.

“I need to get home,” Mission said. It was a slip. He meant to say Up Top. He worked to unknot his ‘chief. The thing reeked of smoke, as did his hands and his coveralls. He would need to find another color to don. He needed to get in touch with his friends.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Morgan asked. His former caster seemed ready to say something else as Mission tugged the ‘chief away. Instead, the old man’s eyes fell to the bright red whelp around Mission’s neck, the stain of a rope’s embrace.

“I don’t think this is about us at all,” he said. “I think this is bigger than that. A friend of mine’s in trouble. He’s at the heart of all that’s going wrong. I think something bad is going to happen to him or that he might know something. They won’t let him talk to anyone.”

“Rodny?” Lyn asked. She and Joel had been two years ahead of him, but they both knew he and Rodny from the Nest.

He nodded. “And Cam is dead,” he told the others. He explained what’d happened on his way down, the blast, the people chasing him, the gap in the rails. Hands covered gaping mouths. Someone whispered Cam’s name in disbelief. “I don’t think anyone cares that we know,” Mission added. “I think that’s the point. Everyone’s supposed to be angry. As angry as possible.”

“I need time to think,” Morgan said. “To plan.”