Engn

XII-2

The woman smiled and held up her own right hand. The curved end of her middle finger was gone too, although it was healed over.

“You'll get the hang of it,” she said. “Once the bleeding has stopped, try the other clip. The trick is to pull your finger out of the way at just the right moment.”

Finn wrapped a rag around his bleeding finger, the oil on it making his wound sting. He squeezed hard to stanch the flow of blood.

He looked around the room. No one paid him any attention. It seemed no one had even heard him cry out over the background thrum. Master Owyn had left. Directly opposite him sat Bellow and Croft, each of them lost in concentration, struggling to get their own clips into place. Finn watched them, waiting to see what would happen, whether they too would catch the ends of their fingers. He could probably warn them by shouting across the room. He decided not to. With comic timing, both managed to work their clips into place at precisely the same moment, dropping their valves and yelping in unison. Finn couldn't stop himself smiling at the sight of them.

“The man who sat here,” said Finn to the woman. “What was his name?”

“No talking,” she said, her attention back on her next valve.

Above the woman's head, on the wall, was a great brass counting frame made up of rows and rows of black metal beads sliding along horizontal runners. He studied it, trying to make sense of it. Each row was numbered. Finn watched as one of the trolleymen picked up a long wooden rod and flicked some of the beads to the right, consulting a piece of paper as he did so. The man glanced across at Finn, then clacked all the beads on another of the rows back to the left.

A tally of how many valves you produced. He could just make out a green, oval plaque next to his row that said 56. His number. He returned his attention to his valve. The bleeding had stopped now. He lifted another clip and prepared to work it into place.

They worked for six hours, then after a short break another six. Then another six. Half the day, all told. By the end, Finn's head throbbed and he could barely keep his eyes open. Three of his fingertips were bandaged. He followed Graves, Croft, Bellow, and the others out of the room and back into the refectory for more food. This time, at least, he was hungry and very, very thirsty. He ate the lumpy stew without talking to any of the other boys. At least the others also looked exhausted. With any luck they would be too tired to bother him that night.

In the end they came for Boyle in the next bed. Finn lay with his head under his covers, listening as the other boy cried out in pain. Graves, Bellow, Croft and a couple of others took turns punching Boyle through his bedclothes. The contents of his cupboard were thrown out of the window. They threatened to hurl Boyle out, too. The rest of the boys said nothing and did nothing. Finn, relieved they weren't attacking him, did nothing either. What could he do?

Plans for escape, for the destruction of Engn, buzzed around in his exhausted mind. He wondered if Connor had ever slept in this room. He shut out the sounds of Boyle's bed being lifted and turned upside with the boy trapped underneath it. Within moments, he fell into exhausted asleep.

The small brass case Master Owyn had given him on the first evening woke him at three quarters to the sixth bell. Finn slept with it under his pillow, now, terrified he wouldn't hear its gentle buzzing. It was a clock of sorts but with no dial or hands, no features at all except for a small square hole on one side. And, embossed in tiny figures on its base, the number 520. You could hear a gentle ticking and whirring from inside it if you put it to your ear. The little device woke Finn every morning, so that he could ring the sixth bell to wake up all the others.

He rose and dressed as quietly as he could. A thin light slanted in through the window. The other boys were stationary shapes underneath their blankets, breathing peacefully as he crept past. Boyle, next to him, hadn't managed to right his iron bed. He lay asleep on just his mattress, knotted up in a tangle of sheets and blankets.

Finn stepped out of the dormitory, closing the door as gently as he could so that he didn't wake anyone early. He crossed to the door on the far side of the balcony. He ran across as quickly as he could, conscious of the great gulf of space beneath him. The balcony, like the winding steps, had little in the way of support to hold it up. Through the other door was the cramped spiral of wooden steps Master Owyn had shown him. They led up higher and higher before opening into a small dusty room filled with wooden crates, cobwebs, and broken beds. A square skylight above his head gave him a view of the clock tower overhead and, elongated by the oblique angle, the face of the clock he had to time himself by.

The big hand of the clock leapt a whole minute at a time. Finn had been told to wait for the moment it jerked onto one minute before six, then race off immediately. He then had exactly that minute to run down the spiral stairs and start pulling on the bell-rope. If he ran, he would get there just in time.

Engn was a place of bells. A bell was always ringing somewhere, clanging nearby or tolling in the distance. Very often two or three would argue away at the same time, trying to shout over each other. The bells, Master Owyn had said, told everyone what to do, where to go. There was a language to them. A code. Each had its own particular tone or timbre. Some were leaden, booming roars. Others rang out reluctant notes, repeated at long intervals. Some were barely audible. But each was different. The boys would be in the refectory, or milling around in the Octagon, when Master Owyn would stop speaking and c**k his head, listening. The Quarter Bell, he would say, or The Change Bell. Hurry now.

To Finn, there was never any discernible difference to the clamour. It seemed incredible everyone heard their bells and went to where they were supposed to be. What happened if bells were missed, or late, or early? Did everything just stop working?

It was his job to sound the Sixth Bell to wake up all the other apprentices in the morning. He'd been told very clearly to make sure he rang it each day at just the right moment. If he didn't, everything would go wrong.

“Why don't I just wait downstairs by the longcase clock and time the bell by that?” he'd asked the master after he'd been given his instructions. Master Owyn had scowled at him. Trapped with him there in the tiny room, Finn had been suddenly afraid.

“Know best, do you, boy? You have to do it this way, by the tower clock. That's the way it's always been done.”

“Yes, master.”

Today he had a couple of moments to spare. The hand on the clock above him had just swept onto the notch three minutes away from six. There was time to try out his plan. He scraped one of the wooden boxes across the floor and set it underneath the skylight. Standing on top he reached up and tried to push the small window open. It was very heavy, its frame thick lead, but he managed to budge it a little. He looked around for something he could use as a wedge. Using a tube of black iron from a broken bedstead, he managed to lever the skylight upwards so that it stood vertically upwards.

Finn poked his head through the gap.

A wind, cold in the early morning, chilled his face. He gazed out across a vast new world; a landscape of slate slopes with gutter-rivers running through it, the peaks of the roofline its mountains. Clumps of moss for bushes and woods clung to everything but the vertical cliffs of the grey stone buildings. He could see for miles, across acres and acres of roof. It was a wonderful sight. He felt the urge to climb outside and run across those slopes, just as he had once raced over the hills and valleys at home. Perhaps there was even a way to get back to the outer walls of Engn, to escape by leaping across them.

One of the great wheels turned just off to his left, its relentless churning motion filling him with alarm for a moment, making him think something was flying towards him. Along the ridge of the rooftop, a line of large crows watched him with a suspicious eye. He marvelled that they chose to say in Engn when they could fly away. Beyond them, visible between the ridge and the rampart of the clock tower, he could see a dome. Some green metal covered its curved surfaces and it had windows set all around its base, forty or fifty of them. The dome had to be huge. Finn tried to work out where it was in relation to the rooms and halls he knew. It was then he noticed the silhouette of someone in one of the dome's windows, watching him.

The head and shoulders of a figure, black against the lighted interior. Finn ducked down, knowing it was futile. Who was watching him? Master Owyn, perhaps, checking up on him? Or someone else? Perhaps it was Connor. Finn peeped back over the lip of the skylight. The figure still stood there. Now it moved. It opened the window, catching the rising sun in a blinding flash. Against the light inside Finn still couldn't make out who it was, but now he could see the figure waving. No, not waving, beckoning. Telling Finn to come.

He looked around. What did it mean? And how could he possibly reach the dome? The skylight was big enough to poke his head through, but his shoulders certainly wouldn't fit. He looked down at the frame of the window from the outside, to see if there was some weakness, some way of making the opening larger, but there was nothing. When he looked back up, the figure was gone, the window in the dome closed once more.

A bell began to chime, a deep metallic boom in the cold air. Finn looked up at the clock. It was already the sixth hour. He had missed his cue. With a gasp he hauled the skylight shut, jumped from the wooden box and hurled himself down the stairs.

He reached the rope in record time. The longcase clock still hadn't ticked over to one minute past. Finn began to tug on the thick rope snaking up into the campanile over the dormitory, working the swinging bell up to speed until, finally, it began to clang and clang to wake the other boys. He pulled on the rope for a minute and then strode off for breakfast before any of them came down.

His stomach fizzed with anxiety that someone would have noticed the late bell. He couldn't face eating the bread and butter laid out for them on the long wooden tables. Master Owyn, strolling around the edges of the room with his hands behind his back, glanced at Finn but said nothing. The other boys arrived in a clamour of shouts and laughter.

Finn began to relax. Chewing a mouthful of bread, he thought about what he'd seen. It couldn't have been Master Owyn in the dome because the master was there. Who, then? One of the other boys playing a trick on him? But that wasn't possible either. The others were as trapped as he was. Someone else he hadn't even thought of? Perhaps the stories about the wreckers were true after all, and one of them was trying to reach him?

He sat and thought about all this, and about Connor, and about the tests the gatekeeper had mentioned, until a bell rang to tell them it was time to return to work in the Valve Hall.