Page 2 of A Slipper in the Smoke
“Elena fixed it, Mama!” cried Elena’s younger stepsister, Mariah. “Isn’t she amazing?”
The Baroness lay her chin against her long, pale fingers, her cool blue eyes glinting in the dim light of the apartment. “An amazingopportunity.”
The family fortunes long dried up, the Baroness had no income. Elena became the family breadwinner. The Baroness rented a garage in the outer ring, as cheap as they came, sourcing the simplest of tools, and set Elena up as a mechanic. It was a poor use of her talents. Elena couldmakethings. Tiny mechanical bees like the ones used to pollinate the fields, great beasts to pull equipment and harvest the crops, self-moving carts. But the Baroness spared no money for these endeavours, and no time, either. From dawn till dusk, Elena worked in the garage, fixing things for the middle ring, praying the filters worked and that she wouldn’t succumb to the black death that had stolen her father.
Her one way out was the metal canister she kept under her workbench, where she was slowly saving up for her escape. Although most of her clients paid the Baroness directly, occasionally, rarely, someone would offer her cash for a job her stepmother didn’t know about, or she’d devise something out of a few bits of scrap metal that she could sell for a handful of coins.
It would take years, but she would get there.
Elena turned the corner and caught sight of the coal plant a few streets away, a dark, towering monstrosity vomiting black fumes into the air. Armoured guards patrolled the newly-fortified wall. It had been erected a few months ago when a handful of rebels tried to break into it. There was a rumour going around that the coal was made using the bones of the dead, and darker rumours that it wasn’t the dead at all—that the Crown took those dying from the coal sickness or purposefully infected people in the first place, making fodder of their citizens.
Elena hoped it wasn’t true, because that would mean her father’s ashes weren’t his, and his body…
She looked at the black smoke, and shuddered under the weight of it.
Who are you, if not what? What faces did you wear, once?
The Crown, of course, denied all such rumours. “The rebels will say anything to sew the seeds of discourse,” was the official response. “Do not let it infect you, loyal citizens.”
It had been a long time since there had been any cases of coal sickness, though. Almost like something had made it back off.
Elena hoped it wasn’t true. That did not mean she thought it wasn’t.
Someone bumped into her shoulder, running at speed towards the factory. Cries tangled with the smoke, and she realised a crowd had gathered at the gates, crowds with placards. “WE NEED ANSWERS!” “Show us our dead!” “Man cannot live on smoke alone.”
Elena’s stomach twinged like it always did when she saw displays like this, some intermingling of guilt and fear. She always wondered if she should be joining them.Shewanted answers too, but she wanted to go home more. She couldn’t risk doing anything to jeopardise that.
“Interesting times we live in, aren’t they?” said a raspy voice from the side of the street.
Elena turned. An old woman sat in the shadows of an old warehouse, perched on an upturned crate. She was as wrinkled as a prune in a pint glass, and just as miniature. Elena knew her, at least, a little. She was an old storyteller known by the locals only as Grandma.
Sometimes, when she finished work early, Elena would go to the old market square at dusk to listen to her speak. She liked her tales; they reminded her of home. The old woman told stories that came, in part, from the Holy Book of Navarra. Navarra was unique among the Mechanical Kingdoms in that it still retained a religion. In all of the others, while it was not outlawed in principle, public worship was not permitted. In theory, this began as a rule to dissuade uprisings in the name of religion, phrased under the much more palatable, “Faith belongs in people’s hearts, and no person or place shall hold the reins to it” but it just seemed to Elena like another way to control people.
And as for uprising? People would always find a way.
“You all right, dear?” Grandma prompted. “You look far away.”
Elena blinked, surprised to be spoken to. “I am always far away.”
Grandma smiled. “Back in Navarra again?”
I never left.But she only nodded, surprised Grandma remembered this about her. Maybe it was her accent. She hadn’t shaken it, not in half a decade. Sometimes she said words and realised they were twinged with the bluntness of the Petragradian twang, the softness of Navarra sloughing away. At night, she’d repeat the words to herself in her true voice, colouring the molecules of it.
I shall not lose this. I shall not.
A roar went up from the crowd. “You should hurry home,” said Grandma sagely. “It looks to be getting rowdy.”
Elena nodded, readjusting her mask, and hurried down the street. The crowd was getting larger, louder, rising like a furnace. A group of folk had crowded around one of the vans trying to gain access to the plant, gathering around a singular side. The van heaved on its axis, slowly tipping.
It landed against the cobbles with a terrific crash.
A shot rang through the air. “Enough!” said a soldier, emerging from the van. “The next one goes through one of you!”
A still, shifting silence passed over the crowd, but it did not last long. A smoke bomb exploded on the side of the street. The soldier fired again, but another citizen charged at his waist, knocking him to the ground as a second shot let off.
People ran, streaming down the streets. Elena, desperate not to be caught up in it, started to run too, sprinting away until her lungs burned and the sounds of the scuffle were muted and rough. She stopped for a minute on a street corner beside a cart selling hot buns, her mouth watering, the aroma of the sweet, baked dough erasing the momentary panic of earlier. She didn’t have a coin on her for the bread, and she wouldn’t have wasted it anyway; the Baroness’ apartment was not far away.
She took a moment to slow her breathing, and carried on her way, arriving at the entrance to the middle ring not long after.
