5

Whenever eight-hour and twelve-hour shifts coincided, tens of thousands of workers flocked to the lifts all at once, transforming the sterile silence of the transport hub into a thirty-minute pandemonium. Amblers kept to their yellow lines, towing wagons and trolleys and hundred-foot containers, and the living stampeded through them, lost or late or both. Supervisors shouted at each other. Men in suits scurried between men in orange overalls as if ashamed of themselves.

The convoy bullied their way into the atrium, blowing their whistles, and the living gave way. Down here, everyone was paid for by the Houses of the Dead; they knew the engines like amblers knew whips.

They stopped before a massive sign declaring NO AUTOMOBILES. PENALTIES APPLY. Sam stepped out into the crossfire of a hundred curious glances. Her coat of gold-and-black was an inkdot in a sea of orange. The laneway to the mass transit lobby was an artery of bobbing heads, clogging up before the labour office and the auction stage like blood pooling at wounds.

The engines began to pull away. Perched on his precarious platform, the auctioneer looked miffed. He banged his gavel apathetically as the pressurized steam drowned out his voice. “Twenty-two seventy-five an hour!” he boomed. “Do I see a twenty-two ten, twenty-two ten, twen-yes, twenty-two ten to the bloke in grey, no no that one, the other one, yes twenty-two ten, do I see a twenty-one fifty, twenty-one fifty…”

A man in muddy overall pushed his way up. “Twenty!” he shouted. “Twenty!”

“Twenty we have a twenty, twenty seeds an hour ladies and gents, twenty seeds an hour for the go-getter in brown, yes he wants to work ladies and gents, at twenty an hour, twenty an hour for a shift in two-five-o-six, what a deal! Twenty an hour, we have twenty an hour, do we have nineteen-fifty, going once –”

The engines took a shortcut through the crowd. Dozens dove out of the way and onto the stage. The auctioneer banged his gavel at them as he swigged from an orange flask. A man yanked it out of his hands and drank it all.

Sam squeezed her way closer to the ambler lanes, where the chances of stampede was reduced. Cargo became luggage under a certain size, and so hundreds of amblers still used the passenger lifts. One in ten wore the bright-pink overalls of the House of Porphyry, carrying semiprecious gemstones in what looked like trays of glass. Each had two white-robed pyros as escorts, the living hired to guard the dead.

“Move along, please,” one said.

The queue before mass transit lift #3 was two hundred long but seemed like two thousand. A mess of stalls selling grilled mushrooms took up a third of the lobby; Sam did not remember seeing them on the way down. There was no telling where the queue began and ended, so she found a spot against the wall and watched the food. The portobellos were thick and drenched with sauce. They must smell nice.

The coming of the lift brought shoving, yelling, and arms flying. Shoving against bodies on all sides, Sam cut to the front just in time to watch the doors shut. The mechanical counter reset to five minutes. She was wedged in on the left by a huddle of supervisors and on the right by a loaded grill.

She was happily chewing on a skewer when someone tapped her on the shoulder. She spun around, sauce everywhere. Moeffe Bant glared at her.

“Oh. Hi,” she said, still chewing.

“What are you doing here?”

“Maestro business.”

“Like what?”

“I’m not at liberty to –”

“You with the Finleys?”

“No but –” something about Bant’s expression made her cold. “No.”

Bant shoved his way into the crowd and was gone. Sam ate the rest in two bites. Portobellos were only good when hot.

The lift came and the queue surged forward, pushing Sam at their crest. She kept a hand over the cheque stashed deep in her pocket. The cabin shook as she stepped over the threshold. It has never done that before. The man next to her put out his arms like his life depended on it, hitting her in the face. She was wedged in. There was no backing out.

Something heavy struck the lobby. A clattering wave rippled through the sheetsteel roof. Plaster and dust fell onto two thousand swivelling heads. It was suddenly quiet. Yelling, in the distance.

Another crash, louder, metal on metal. The lift doors began to close but was shoved open by fifty pairs of hands. Someone cracked their whip in the air, and Sam felt splatters on her cheek. Blood. The man in front crushed her between a metal crate and three more bodies. Arms were everywhere, pushing, grabbing. The crush of people sent dozens underfoot. Sam felt herself sinking and clawed desperately at the nearest arm. More yelling. The lift shook again.

The far wall disintegrated. The carcass of a steam engine rolled into the lobby in a rain of steel and glass cushioned by a dozen bodies. Hundreds of rolls of black tape, slick with oil, unfurled from the smashed cabin and caught fire.

A giant stepped over the wreckage.

The cost-benefit of alchemical augmentation plateaued at four manpowers. Every Maestro, necromancer, and apprentice knew this. This giant defied logic. Where Lucia was willowy and thin, this thing was muscle stacked on muscle, naked except for a loincloth. Steel fibre bulged like veins under its purplish skin. Its head – comically small – looked like a pebble sunken between sledgehammers. A harness, like a pyromancer’s kit, rose from its back with a steam whistle protruding at the top like a little flag.

The giant rocked the engine like a toy. More tape fell out with a mangled corpse. Its roar resembled a chorus of leaky valves, seeded with a loud banging as if some metal appendage had come loose in its chest.

Two orange shapes converged on it, running atop the crowd. Their speed was such that every leap covered thirty feet and would have broken the neck of whomever bore the force of their calves. The giant tore a door from the wreckage and threw it at them. It veered way off course, missing its mark by a hundred feet and plunging into five people instead.

The three collided and the giant fell out of sight. Sam could hear the tearing of metal and screaming, but a man next to her was loudly reciting the Book of Combustion, and another was screaming that his arm was broken, will somebody help. She wrapped her elbows around a steel bar and clung to it with her entire body, only then realizing it was the girder of the ambler section, a block of cage-like compartments where amblers were coded to stand. The bars were locked but they were just wide enough…

She squeezed into a slot where two amblers stood with bundles of silk. There was no space for a third, but the silk was soft and Sam sank into it as the crowd surged. The amblers were perfect barriers, neither giving way nor backing off. To them Sam might as well be another bundle.

The shriek of a steam whistle cut through the lobby, followed by the crescendo of a boiler exceeding its pressure cap. Two orange shapes darted into the lift, crawling on all fours atop a hundred heads. They have lost their horn-rimmed glasses. One had a massive gash across its torso, but the infusion pooled at the wound, viscous and squirming like some live thing, refusing to spill.

They began plucking hands from doors like weed from a field. Yelling. Screaming. Bits of nail, tossed into the air like confetti. The lift began to shut. More yelling. A whip lashed out, lassoing one around the neck. The ambler went rigid from spine to heel as steel anchors shot out from its elbow, shoulder, chest, ankle, latching indiscriminately onto floors, walls, flesh. Then it yanked. A man in orange overalls fell out of the crowd. The whip loosened.

The gap was ten inches wide when the lobby exploded.