The Society (A Broken World Book 1) (22 page)

I shook my head. "Don't make me stay down here, Alan. I'll go crazy."

He looked back towards Tyrell's room, obviously desperate to get back to the rest of the guards. "Okay, it's not like I can force you to stay here—even Jax doesn't win against you half of the time. You want to go up to the surface, then go up to the surface. Just please promise me that you'll stay inside the compound and that you won't start any fights. If you get killed on my watch, Brennan is never going to forgive me."

"Assuming he survives."

That earned me a frown. "Don't talk like that or you'll start a panic. It's bad enough to say things like that down here. Don't you dare say something like that up on the surface. I've seen Tyrell bring people back that I never expected to make it. Brennan is tough—he's going to be okay.

I nodded in agreement, but my heart wasn't in it.

A few minutes later I was standing outside the headquarters building wondering what to do with myself. I didn't know very many people inside the compound. Jerome and Del had probably been kicked out after Del had nearly got us all killed and Jerome had tried to kill Brennan. Billy never said more than four words together at a time, which kind of precluded him from carrying on a real conversation, and the guards were all going to be circulating through the compound in an effort to calm everyone down.

That just left Lexis and Beth. Lexis was probably back inside the factory throwing herself into her work in an effort to distract herself from the accident. If I'd been a real friend, I probably would have gone to her and tried to reassure her, but I needed some kind of distraction myself.

I turned toward the bore and a few minutes later found myself inside of the foundry. Somehow I'd assumed that everyone would be working rather than just standing around. I should have realized that they'd all been present when Tyrell had received the news that Brennan had been injured. Even if that hadn't been the case, the rumor mill had probably spread the bad news through the entire compound within minutes of Brennan being hurt.

The foreman, a short, boxy man whose name I'd never caught, hurried over as soon as I stepped into the cavern that contained the foundry. "What news, miss? Is Brennan going to be okay?"

I shook my head. "It's too soon to tell. Tyrell is with him, but when I left Brennan was still breathing and there wasn't a whole lot of blood at least."

It wasn't quite a lie. Brennan had been breathing—just not without help. I could see more questions coming, see them on the tip of the foreman's tongue, but I was already uncomfortable with what I'd said so far.

My duty to the Society was getting cloudier by the moment. I was supposed to stop Brennan and make sure that his generator couldn't ever be used to pierce the barrier. Now was the perfect time to strike if I wanted to destabilize Brennan's operations, but I hadn't gone into the mission thinking in those terms, which meant I wasn't prepared to instigate some kind of coup. Even worse, if I tried something like that and failed, I would be found out and never have another chance at the generator.

Besides, my orders had been to find the generator and then radio in. The only way forward I could see was to continue to play the role of dutiful bodyguard, but it made me wonder if the Citizen-President had realized just how convoluted things were going to get on this mission. Probably not—the Society didn't have a history of using human assets to infiltrate the cities.

My questing gaze finally found something that would serve to distract everyone—me included—from the question of what was going to happen next. I pointed at the piles of bricks just inside the entrance to the foundry.

"What's the situation with the rebuild? Are we to the point where we can start putting the new layer of bricks in?"

"I…I think so. It seemed like Tyrell was nearly to the point of having us tear out the old bricks when he got called away."

"You don't know?"

"Look, lady, I can melt metal, but that doesn't mean that I know how to build the machines that make it all possible."

I took a deep breath and then nodded. "That's fair—I don't actually know how my gun works, but that doesn't stop me from pulling the trigger. Well, we'd better get started."

"Right now? What's the hurry? We don't even know if Brennan is going to make it."

That woke an unexpected flash of anger inside of me. "The hurry is that we've got metal that needs to be poured and shipped off to the surrounding territories so that we can trade for all of the stuff that we can't make or grow ourselves. With the textiles factory down, that puts even more pressure on us to get the foundry back up and running."

The foreman was backing away now—almost like he was afraid I was going to physically assault him. I didn't help the situation by stepping forward into his personal space, but I was too furious to care.

"Brennan is going to be fine, but even if he doesn't pull through, that doesn't mean that everything he's built—that all of you have helped build—needs to disappear. He's done something amazing, and even if the rest of us aren't good enough to push it forward like he would have, we're still good enough to continue doing the stuff that he's already taught us how to do.

"This couldn't have happened without Brennan, but it's bigger than just him now. We have a chance to live lives that matter, to experience an existence that is more than just barely getting by. So either help me rip out the old bricks or get out of my way, because when Brennan is finally back on his feet I don't want to have to look at him and admit that I jeopardized everything he's worked towards because I wasn't smart enough to know that piles of new bricks all around the furnace mean that we need to tear the old bricks out to make room for them."

It was like I ran a current through the entire crew. They all jumped into action, and within seconds we were all beating on the refractory material inside of the furnace. It turned out that the bricks inside of the furnace had been coated with something that was the same consistency as the bricks, but which formed a relatively smooth face which was presumably what kept the molten metal from running out through the cracks in the bricks.

The coating meant that we couldn't just lift the bricks out, we had to take hammers and chisels to the lining and break it up into pieces that were small enough to be lifted out of the furnace. It was much more work than I'd realized it was going to be going into the project, but I quickly lost myself in the task, and after several hours—long past when my shift was supposed to be done with—we finally pulled the last of the bricks out and decided to call it a night.

Somewhere along the way, I realized that I'd meant every word I'd said to the foundry crew. The presence of the generator complicated things, but once the possibility of weaponizing it was removed, the things that Brennan had accomplished were nothing but admirable.

The precepts spoke again and again about the need to shepherd those on the outside of the barrier to a life of self-sufficiency and progress, but Brennan was the first of the warlords with any interest in doing that. I just needed to make sure that the Citizen-President understood that.

The Society couldn't stand idly by while Brennan finished up the first phase in a weapon designed to bring down the barrier, but there wasn't anything to say that Brennan's compound needed to be leveled. We just needed to find a way to make sure that Brennan wouldn't weaponize the generator. Once that happened, we could leave the rest of what he'd built in place to serve as a guiding light to the rest of the city's inhabitants.

Maybe we could kidnap Brennan and show him all of the good inherent in the Society. Surely once he and the Citizen-President sat down and talked about their concerns it would be possible to come to some kind of understanding.

It might even be as simple as showing Brennan the archives showing the different nations attacking each other in spite of the Founder's best efforts to stop the war. Even as I thought it, I knew just how unlikely that scenario was, but I ignored the tiny voice in the back of my head that was screaming that Brennan would die before he would agree to work with a culture he found so repugnant. I had to try, had to at least attempt to find a way to satisfy all parties before it turned into a war that Brennan couldn't possibly win.

All of that ran through my head during the long hours it took to tear out the furnace's lining, and by the time I watched the rest of the crew head back towards the surface, I'd decided that it was time to report back to the Citizen-President.

I told the foreman that I wanted to swing by the pipe room before going back home, and turned left when he turned right, working my way towards the location where I'd stashed my radio transmitter. I breathed a sigh of relief when I arrived and it was still where I'd stashed it. I'd affixed it to one of the pipes that came out of the pipe room and then jogged back horizontally for several dozen feet—all the way to a neighboring tunnel—before making a right angle upwards again.

The fact that it was still there meant that I could still call back to my superiors—could still exert some small influence on events—and it also meant that there was a good chance nobody had stumbled across the transmitter yet.

I turned on the radio, took a deep breath and then pressed the transmit button as I spoke into the hush mic, hoping that my transmitter really was strong enough to penetrate the jamming that Brennan and Tyrell were using to stop the Society from spying on their operations.

"This is Skinwalker calling Home Base. Come in, Home Base."

The response was almost instantaneous, which meant that they had someone monitoring the frequency around the clock.

"This is Home Base; you're a go, Skinwalker. Have you found the present?"

"Yes, I've located the present—it still needs some assembly before it will be ready for gifting."

"Is there an instruction manual, Skinwalker?"

"Yes, but it's not a threat—it's in another language, one that nobody else can speak."

There was a pause while whoever was on the other end of the conversation digested the fact that Brennan had encrypted his notes. I was still working my courage up to the point of suggesting a kidnapping when the voice resumed.

"Understood, Skinwalker. How long before the present will be ready for gifting?"

"I'm not sure, several weeks probably. Recent events mean that assembly will take a lot longer than the toymaker originally planned. We have time to analyze the situation."

"Your brief is being changed, Skinwalker. For now, you need to protect the toy and the toymaker at all costs. The Architect wants the present; you're to begin gathering intel to allow us to get our hands on it."

The abrupt change confused me. I was relieved that the Citizen-President wasn't going to order me to kill Brennan, but it didn't make sense for the mission to shift objectives so quickly.

"Skinwalker copies the order. It's going to take some doing to find a way to get both the toymaker and the toy out without causing massive collateral damage."

"Neither of those issues are your concern, Skinwalker. You find a way to get the present, Home Base will worry about everything else. Home Base out."

My world seemed to be spinning around me as I reached out and turned off the transmitter. They hadn't explicitly said that they were going to burn the compound down and kill Brennan in the course of grabbing the generator, but I couldn't get away from the feeling that they were planning on doing exactly that.

Chapter 16

I woke less than six hours later to the sound of someone pounding on my bedroom door. Lexis understandably hadn't had time to deliver any of the rest of the outfits Brennan had commissioned, so I was sleeping in my underwear.

I grabbed my blanket as I rolled out of my hammock and wrapped it around myself as I stumbled towards the door. It turned out that it was Tyrell knocking. He took in my blanket and messy hair with a frown.

I rubbed my eyes as I looked for the simple, wind-up clock on one of my shelves. "What time is it?"

"Nine a.m. You had the entire afternoon off and you couldn't be bothered to do laundry or go to bed at a decent hour?"

"I went down to the foundry and helped them rip the lining to the furnace out. I only made it back here a little before three this morning."

His manner softened slightly. "Get dressed—Brennan is asking for you. He's back in his room."

Tyrell turned and walked away before I could process the information enough to respond, and after standing there in my doorway for several seconds I swung my door shut and ran over to my last clean set of clothes.

I didn't stop to take a shower or do my hair, I just threw on my clothes and sprinted from my bedroom to Brennan's. Once I arrived, I was torn between knocking or just opening the door, but before I could make a decision one way or the other, Jax opened the door.

He waved me inside, where I found Brennan resting on the same table he'd been on in Tyrell's room. Brennan's eyes were open and he managed a faint smile when he saw me, but other than that he looked like he was half a step from death's door.

Tyrell had put a metal frame around Brennan's torso, which was obviously designed to both immobilize him and provide traction to his ribs where necessary. Brennan was shirtless, which meant I could see both extensive bruising up and down the right side of his chest wherever the bandages weren't covering and the metal rods that ran between the framework and Brennan's bandages.

I'd seen my share of battlefield injuries, but this one made me queasier than I'd expected. Maybe it was the way the rods disappeared into the bloody bandages, or maybe it was just the fact that it was Brennan rather than someone I didn't know or care about, but it was all I could do to stop from being sick. I resolved to stay focused on his face so as not to embarrass myself or let on to him how badly he'd been injured.

"You have a terrible poker face, Skye."

"I'm not sure if that's a compliment or an insult."

That earned me another smile. "Definitely a compliment. The last thing someone in my position needs is more people he can't trust."