“Clamine! Tolly needs you in the kitchen right a…”
“Shut your mouth Bree”, Clamine punctuates her statement with slap to the girl’s mouth that leaves her tasting blood but Brienne is smart enough to muffle her pain, “do you want them to hear us?”
The remainder of the conversation plays out in the space between their eyes. From the vantage point of their ventilation duct viewing theater, Clamine indicates the horror unfolding on the hospital table below. Brienne’s face replies with contesting expressions of sadness, anger, and deep thought; wearing each, in turn like a mask. They could see enough of the doctors’ progress below to know there was not much time.
“When did they bring her down?” asks Brienne after they have shuffled their way out of the service passage and are secure in the familiar geography of the shirt factory larder. It was only nine in the evening and neither girl would begin her shift until eleven, as Both were given a paid hour at the beginning of their shift to care for their sick friend Nahlia. The Porthos of the trio, Nahlia brought song to the barrack sleeping quarters the girls of Triangle Shirtwaist factory shared. That was before the cholera.
For the last three weeks she has been wasting away. A week ago they moved her to her own room; to make her more comfortable they said. That’s what Doctor Kohlriff, the parish doctor, said. Mr. Blanck brought him in once a month to tend to the girls while the machines were shut down for service, but on this visit he explained Nahlia’s condition to Clamine and Bree in a voice dripping with acidic compassion. But he didn’t have to tell them that their friend was moved to a cold dark room because her screaming was keeping the other girls awake; they had figured that much out already.
“You see”, he began as if speaking to lab rats instead of human being, “your friend Nala has a kind of ouchie in her tummy, and the medicines we are giving here don’t seem to be helping her at all.” The girls had been patronized by the best of them but the realities of this kept them quiet at the time.
Reality often had a way of convincing the Triangle factory girls to stay quiet. Only now, Clamine thinks recalling what she just witnessed, the reality was that their friend is on that hospital table being poked with needles, electrified with great coils of wire, and cut with knives big and small. Her screams of choleric pain have died away into faint mewlings of shock and confusion. With that transformation of their vibrant friend, the last of Clamine and Brienne’s innocence died as well.
Reality; all of it, the empty stomachs every night, the whippings that come even when the ruined thread was damaged by the machines, the constant threat of savage defilement by their employer and his sons, the explosion within the H.M.S. Covington which took Brienne’s parents to the bottom of the Mozambique Channel, and the helplessness of seeing your best friend murdered slowly over days and days with nothing you can do to save her; reality is a nightmare created by rich men.
“We need to check with Tolly soon, she starts her shift at ten and by tomorrow the shift boss will know that Nahlia has been moved away and we will have to go back to our regular times as well.” Clamine hadn’t really considered changing the pace of the plan, but if the priests and doctors can change her reality at a whim then so can she. “I’ll talk with Tolly, you find Nahlia’s trunk and gather up what we need. Stow it anywhere in the hospital service chute and I’ll add what I pick up tonight. One more shift to get through and then by this time tomorrow the men of Triangle will know a new reality.”
A short time later the girls are tending the machines and deftly loading and positioning the cotton fabric amid the ferrous ballet of armatures, cams, blades, and needles. Their shortened shift will still amount to ten hours on their feet but the anxiety of the next day keep Clamine and Bree focused. Besides, an injury would put an end to the plan. The plan. Clamine loses herself in thought for just a moment, remembering how it was Nahlia who brought the plan to them in the first place. Even though her agile hands fulfill their task without error, her vacant expression earns Clamine the attention of the shift boss and his lash. In that brief moment before the whip erased yet another happy thought, Clamine held that picture of Nahlia smiling deviously and telling them how they might find a better place.
“I’m sorry sir!” her voice betrays none of the pain she suffers even as the back of her shirt dampens a red line across her shoulder blades. The boss doesn’t need to reply, and anyway his attention is drawn to the other side of the shop where the sounds of a girl screaming is rising above the din of the machines. Clamine, who long ago concluded that there could be no god, gives a moment to think that there might yet be angels. The angels were usually shown as women and sometimes they used their swords on the vicious. But it was a false hope, that an invisible beast might help them when every visible one had not. Nahlia would not have allowed such talk; she knew what was real; now more than ever.
Nahlia brought her plan to them months ago and it was a masterpiece but it took weeks to get her to admit who really thought it up. It took those same weeks to get her to admit that she was in love. Nahlia had begun waking with a smile that earned far more whippings on the shop floor but still she glowed with hope. While running an errand for the boss, she told them one night, Nahlia met one of those talking cats that were all the rage in Europe.
“Leger” she said dreamily. She always smiled when she said his name. “He says it’s kind of a joke since the donor specimen used to make him was a breed called Maine Coon. He says it’s a kind of magician or trickster, someone whose hands are quicker than they eye. Leger de Maine … Coon…”, the giggles that interrupted her story were so alien in that orphanage work house, just like every evidence that the drudges within were children. Nahlia had shown the prim cat a kindness while waiting for a banker to take some of the factory paperwork from her. The feline’s digestive system was not well acquainted with American food so Nahlia offered him some soda bread she had brought from the larder. It was only after he had eaten it all, that Leger realized it was the girl’s food for the whole day. After hearing the girl’s story, the cat, with ears pinned back with indirectable emotion, told her how to make this right.
“Leger is a bombardier in the French Colonial Force” Nahlia explained, “but his brother is the first mate of an airship that comes to New York quite often”. At first, the plan was simply for the three girls to sneak out in the early morning and take a subway to whatever building the Bellwether Corrienne was moored at. They would wait for a signal from the cat for far too long. The distraction of Leger’s absence drove Nahlia to make several minor errors on the shop floor, which meant Nahlia was under constant scrutiny by the bosses. Still they waited. It was while waiting for word from her romantic little friend that Nahlia became ill. By the time Leger arrived she was far too gone to notice.
“They’re going to take her to the morgue” he hissed the words soaked with grief and anger, “the plan has changed. In three days the Corrienne will moor to the masthead of the Pulitzer building next door. You two each gather up some kind of tool or knife and a rucksack loaded with bottles of mineral spirits. When the signal comes you will need to evacuate the other girls out of the service entrance to the hospital. Then help Schrödinger set this awful place right and I will make my way to the morgue. I have a plan to cover our tracks, and I need to… to put Nahlia to rest…”
Finally the hour arrived. Brienne was carrying the water that night so she made sure everyone knew to run, but nobody really knew what was going to happen. Then, as the shift boss was preparing to whip one of the girls for eating too much he suddenly doubled over clutching his face. Brienne was closest and when the boss lurched upright she could see a smoky gray cat still gripping his chest. When the towering man fell backwards to the floor there was no life in him at all. The cat, who must be Schrödinger, had raced up the man like a tree. As he climbed, sliced tendons and arteries on every limb with a two inch curved linoleum knife that fit his paw like a reaper’s scythe. When the cat reached the brute’s face the damage he did there was purely recreational; in an instant he shredded both of the man’s eyes with his claws while digging his hind-legs into the throat until there was nothing left of it.
The man who was surely Carmine followed and began directing the children out of the shop. Leger came last and went straight towards the passage to the hospital basement; he passed Clamine on her way back from retrieving the supplies. The next 12 minutes takes forever or it happened in an instant depending on who describes it afterwards. Clamine and Bree move to the lower shop exits and chain them closed.
“What do you think you’re up to pretty princess” the owner’s son Geoff drawls. The disgusting lecher arrives in time to catch Brienne chaining one of the second level doors.
Bree silently moves close to him in a pantomime of submission. But it’s a mockery of what the lewd man is expecting; far from docile this American Girl shows Geoff his place with a ball peen hammer to the temple. Whether he ever wakes up is no longer her concern so she makes her way back to the floor level, breaking bottles of solvent onto pallets of fabric along the way.
“Boss Blanck made it out before I could get to him” Schrödinger calls out, he’s drenched in blood and gore that is certainly not his own. “He’s locked himself into the upper floors but there’s nowhere to go but up.” Leger arrives a moment later looking pale, something that Clamine had not thought a cat could do.
“Carmine has our tracks covered but it’s going to take some time, we’ll pick him up when we dock at Bolger Field. If everything goes … right … he’ll have Nahlia with him.” Too busy running to fully grasp that last statement, the crew makes its way to the top of the Pulitzer building. Even if the Maine coon had had all the time in the world he could not have truly explained what he meant, there just aren’t words to explain it.
“No wait, don’t go” her tiny voice had called out to him though barely moving lips when Leger had begun to roll her drawer back into the mortuary storage. He still had one hundred bodies to get loaded onto carts for Carmine but he had to see her first. He had to see why all of this evil he was about to do was necessary. But then she called to him. And in her chest was a heartbeat he could feel through his feet when he hopped up onto her. And she was so cold.
“Nahlia! Oh gods, what have they done to you?”
“It’s alright. It doesn’t hurt anymore. They were trying to build a better body. For others, for soldiers they said, not for me, they just needed me to get them started.” There was a detachment in the child’s voice, something he had heard in the stories told by prisoners of war. She was dead inside.
“They needed to open me up and run threads of some reactive metal through my veins while I was still alive. But when they got to my heart they found it had broken and died years ago.” Nahlia was sitting now and indicated to the far wall with a slight nod. Leger’s gasp caught Carmine’s attention who gasped himself at seeing the wreckage left of two doctors and a priest. From the looks of it Nahlia had eviscerated the priest with a rib bone pulled from the gut of one of the doctors. The second doctor looked to have been kicked or punched in the face hard enough to eject skull fragments out the back of his head.
“Can you walk? Can Carmine carry you?” It was the best the cat could come up with. It was as if someone or some thing had gotten his tongue. But speaking was also unnecessary.
“You need to go, and Carmine has work to do. Go now, and I will meet you on the roof. GO!” the last word issued forth from her tiny frame like a cannon shot and Leger had no choice but to obey. As he darted through the door he looked over his shoulders and saw his sweet innocent little friend putting on a pair of brass blast goggles. And he saw her smile.
The girls and the Corrienne’s crew reached the mooring lines just as Emaliene leaned out the mix on her two diesel engines. Behind them lay a wasteland inferno caused by the firebombing they had done to the shirt factory and some sort of demolition brought upon the hospital by Nahlia. Staccato bursts came from the building next door that shook the floor as they ran to the top of the Pulitzer building. Each tremor were the ascending floors of the hospital, one after another, exploding. Say what you like about that little doll, thought Schrödinger, but she can keep up a good pace. Twenty floors they climbed and the hospital had nearly as many.
If there had been any survivors they would have reported a sweet child emitting a faint green glow walking swiftly but effortlessly by. After she walked through a hospital floor and ascended the stairway to the next level, that person would have noticed an acrid scent and a burning sensation across his body. It probably would not have occurred to a witness of this ethereal youth that the humid air was degrading into hydroxy gas at an alarming rate nor the presence of something else, some foreign energy that was imbuing everything in that sweet angel’s path with an electric charge. There were no survivors though; the metal door shutting behind the girl would be the last sound anyone would hear.
“There! Move forward!” Leger commanded the captain and for once she did not smack him for it.
“Nahlia!” Bree and Clamine announce at once as the hospital’s roof access door flies open and the girl they love, they all love, stands before them just across the alleyway. She’s surrounded by an aura of uranium yellow light and the flames and smoke and terror behind her create a silhouette that is unforgettable. Wrapped around that silhouette is a writhing snake of electrical force. As it moves along the sweep of her figure the trauma of countless explosions is revealed as craters of missing flesh. But she’s smiling as brightly as the glow in her eyes behind the screen of her brass goggles; and where the veins and tendons once trailed through her body the living tungsten wires the monsters had defiled her with were still there and sparkling with life.
As the Bellweather Corrienne approaches the hospital rooftop Nahlia, aware of the electrical risk she poses to the airship, throws down her brass goggles. Acting as a focus , the goggles had allowed Nahlia to move energies and elements like a wizard and without them her own life’s energy quickly leaves her. But no one should have to rely on their own energy all the time and a peace finally falls upon the child as her friends, her old friends and new ones she's never even met load her onto the airship.
“She’ll be okay I think.” Leger says through a tight throat and teary eyes, “We’ll go somewhere far away.”
“Maybe Katmandu.” Schrödinger ventures innocently enough as the engine revolutions reach a high pitched whine. Surprisingly, no one even tries to throw him out the window.
The next day, the newspapers played their parts well. The wreckage was caused by the greedy factory owner who had chained his workers inside the building dooming over 140 girls and 15 men to a fiery death. The spreading horror completely destroyed what turned out to be a research hospital run by the British government. There was enough news in just those two statements for months’ worth of reporting. No one needed to know that the bodies found piled up against the factory exit doors were cadavers from the neighboring hospital, or that two thirteen year old girls chained the doors shut to keep the owners inside and not the other way around. Sometimes details don’t matter. The owner, Mr. Blanck and his partner Isaac Harris lost about $100,000 in damages from the fire but were paid $160,000 by their insurance companies to recover it. They were eventually prosecuted and acquitted. Reality seems to suit the rich.
But Clamine, Brienne, and Nahlia, with their new friends, broke that reality if just for a day.
“Shut your mouth Bree”, Clamine punctuates her statement with slap to the girl’s mouth that leaves her tasting blood but Brienne is smart enough to muffle her pain, “do you want them to hear us?”
The remainder of the conversation plays out in the space between their eyes. From the vantage point of their ventilation duct viewing theater, Clamine indicates the horror unfolding on the hospital table below. Brienne’s face replies with contesting expressions of sadness, anger, and deep thought; wearing each, in turn like a mask. They could see enough of the doctors’ progress below to know there was not much time.
“When did they bring her down?” asks Brienne after they have shuffled their way out of the service passage and are secure in the familiar geography of the shirt factory larder. It was only nine in the evening and neither girl would begin her shift until eleven, as Both were given a paid hour at the beginning of their shift to care for their sick friend Nahlia. The Porthos of the trio, Nahlia brought song to the barrack sleeping quarters the girls of Triangle Shirtwaist factory shared. That was before the cholera.
For the last three weeks she has been wasting away. A week ago they moved her to her own room; to make her more comfortable they said. That’s what Doctor Kohlriff, the parish doctor, said. Mr. Blanck brought him in once a month to tend to the girls while the machines were shut down for service, but on this visit he explained Nahlia’s condition to Clamine and Bree in a voice dripping with acidic compassion. But he didn’t have to tell them that their friend was moved to a cold dark room because her screaming was keeping the other girls awake; they had figured that much out already.
“You see”, he began as if speaking to lab rats instead of human being, “your friend Nala has a kind of ouchie in her tummy, and the medicines we are giving here don’t seem to be helping her at all.” The girls had been patronized by the best of them but the realities of this kept them quiet at the time.
Reality often had a way of convincing the Triangle factory girls to stay quiet. Only now, Clamine thinks recalling what she just witnessed, the reality was that their friend is on that hospital table being poked with needles, electrified with great coils of wire, and cut with knives big and small. Her screams of choleric pain have died away into faint mewlings of shock and confusion. With that transformation of their vibrant friend, the last of Clamine and Brienne’s innocence died as well.
Reality; all of it, the empty stomachs every night, the whippings that come even when the ruined thread was damaged by the machines, the constant threat of savage defilement by their employer and his sons, the explosion within the H.M.S. Covington which took Brienne’s parents to the bottom of the Mozambique Channel, and the helplessness of seeing your best friend murdered slowly over days and days with nothing you can do to save her; reality is a nightmare created by rich men.
“We need to check with Tolly soon, she starts her shift at ten and by tomorrow the shift boss will know that Nahlia has been moved away and we will have to go back to our regular times as well.” Clamine hadn’t really considered changing the pace of the plan, but if the priests and doctors can change her reality at a whim then so can she. “I’ll talk with Tolly, you find Nahlia’s trunk and gather up what we need. Stow it anywhere in the hospital service chute and I’ll add what I pick up tonight. One more shift to get through and then by this time tomorrow the men of Triangle will know a new reality.”
A short time later the girls are tending the machines and deftly loading and positioning the cotton fabric amid the ferrous ballet of armatures, cams, blades, and needles. Their shortened shift will still amount to ten hours on their feet but the anxiety of the next day keep Clamine and Bree focused. Besides, an injury would put an end to the plan. The plan. Clamine loses herself in thought for just a moment, remembering how it was Nahlia who brought the plan to them in the first place. Even though her agile hands fulfill their task without error, her vacant expression earns Clamine the attention of the shift boss and his lash. In that brief moment before the whip erased yet another happy thought, Clamine held that picture of Nahlia smiling deviously and telling them how they might find a better place.
“I’m sorry sir!” her voice betrays none of the pain she suffers even as the back of her shirt dampens a red line across her shoulder blades. The boss doesn’t need to reply, and anyway his attention is drawn to the other side of the shop where the sounds of a girl screaming is rising above the din of the machines. Clamine, who long ago concluded that there could be no god, gives a moment to think that there might yet be angels. The angels were usually shown as women and sometimes they used their swords on the vicious. But it was a false hope, that an invisible beast might help them when every visible one had not. Nahlia would not have allowed such talk; she knew what was real; now more than ever.
Nahlia brought her plan to them months ago and it was a masterpiece but it took weeks to get her to admit who really thought it up. It took those same weeks to get her to admit that she was in love. Nahlia had begun waking with a smile that earned far more whippings on the shop floor but still she glowed with hope. While running an errand for the boss, she told them one night, Nahlia met one of those talking cats that were all the rage in Europe.
“Leger” she said dreamily. She always smiled when she said his name. “He says it’s kind of a joke since the donor specimen used to make him was a breed called Maine Coon. He says it’s a kind of magician or trickster, someone whose hands are quicker than they eye. Leger de Maine … Coon…”, the giggles that interrupted her story were so alien in that orphanage work house, just like every evidence that the drudges within were children. Nahlia had shown the prim cat a kindness while waiting for a banker to take some of the factory paperwork from her. The feline’s digestive system was not well acquainted with American food so Nahlia offered him some soda bread she had brought from the larder. It was only after he had eaten it all, that Leger realized it was the girl’s food for the whole day. After hearing the girl’s story, the cat, with ears pinned back with indirectable emotion, told her how to make this right.
“Leger is a bombardier in the French Colonial Force” Nahlia explained, “but his brother is the first mate of an airship that comes to New York quite often”. At first, the plan was simply for the three girls to sneak out in the early morning and take a subway to whatever building the Bellwether Corrienne was moored at. They would wait for a signal from the cat for far too long. The distraction of Leger’s absence drove Nahlia to make several minor errors on the shop floor, which meant Nahlia was under constant scrutiny by the bosses. Still they waited. It was while waiting for word from her romantic little friend that Nahlia became ill. By the time Leger arrived she was far too gone to notice.
“They’re going to take her to the morgue” he hissed the words soaked with grief and anger, “the plan has changed. In three days the Corrienne will moor to the masthead of the Pulitzer building next door. You two each gather up some kind of tool or knife and a rucksack loaded with bottles of mineral spirits. When the signal comes you will need to evacuate the other girls out of the service entrance to the hospital. Then help Schrödinger set this awful place right and I will make my way to the morgue. I have a plan to cover our tracks, and I need to… to put Nahlia to rest…”
Finally the hour arrived. Brienne was carrying the water that night so she made sure everyone knew to run, but nobody really knew what was going to happen. Then, as the shift boss was preparing to whip one of the girls for eating too much he suddenly doubled over clutching his face. Brienne was closest and when the boss lurched upright she could see a smoky gray cat still gripping his chest. When the towering man fell backwards to the floor there was no life in him at all. The cat, who must be Schrödinger, had raced up the man like a tree. As he climbed, sliced tendons and arteries on every limb with a two inch curved linoleum knife that fit his paw like a reaper’s scythe. When the cat reached the brute’s face the damage he did there was purely recreational; in an instant he shredded both of the man’s eyes with his claws while digging his hind-legs into the throat until there was nothing left of it.
The man who was surely Carmine followed and began directing the children out of the shop. Leger came last and went straight towards the passage to the hospital basement; he passed Clamine on her way back from retrieving the supplies. The next 12 minutes takes forever or it happened in an instant depending on who describes it afterwards. Clamine and Bree move to the lower shop exits and chain them closed.
“What do you think you’re up to pretty princess” the owner’s son Geoff drawls. The disgusting lecher arrives in time to catch Brienne chaining one of the second level doors.
Bree silently moves close to him in a pantomime of submission. But it’s a mockery of what the lewd man is expecting; far from docile this American Girl shows Geoff his place with a ball peen hammer to the temple. Whether he ever wakes up is no longer her concern so she makes her way back to the floor level, breaking bottles of solvent onto pallets of fabric along the way.
“Boss Blanck made it out before I could get to him” Schrödinger calls out, he’s drenched in blood and gore that is certainly not his own. “He’s locked himself into the upper floors but there’s nowhere to go but up.” Leger arrives a moment later looking pale, something that Clamine had not thought a cat could do.
“Carmine has our tracks covered but it’s going to take some time, we’ll pick him up when we dock at Bolger Field. If everything goes … right … he’ll have Nahlia with him.” Too busy running to fully grasp that last statement, the crew makes its way to the top of the Pulitzer building. Even if the Maine coon had had all the time in the world he could not have truly explained what he meant, there just aren’t words to explain it.
“No wait, don’t go” her tiny voice had called out to him though barely moving lips when Leger had begun to roll her drawer back into the mortuary storage. He still had one hundred bodies to get loaded onto carts for Carmine but he had to see her first. He had to see why all of this evil he was about to do was necessary. But then she called to him. And in her chest was a heartbeat he could feel through his feet when he hopped up onto her. And she was so cold.
“Nahlia! Oh gods, what have they done to you?”
“It’s alright. It doesn’t hurt anymore. They were trying to build a better body. For others, for soldiers they said, not for me, they just needed me to get them started.” There was a detachment in the child’s voice, something he had heard in the stories told by prisoners of war. She was dead inside.
“They needed to open me up and run threads of some reactive metal through my veins while I was still alive. But when they got to my heart they found it had broken and died years ago.” Nahlia was sitting now and indicated to the far wall with a slight nod. Leger’s gasp caught Carmine’s attention who gasped himself at seeing the wreckage left of two doctors and a priest. From the looks of it Nahlia had eviscerated the priest with a rib bone pulled from the gut of one of the doctors. The second doctor looked to have been kicked or punched in the face hard enough to eject skull fragments out the back of his head.
“Can you walk? Can Carmine carry you?” It was the best the cat could come up with. It was as if someone or some thing had gotten his tongue. But speaking was also unnecessary.
“You need to go, and Carmine has work to do. Go now, and I will meet you on the roof. GO!” the last word issued forth from her tiny frame like a cannon shot and Leger had no choice but to obey. As he darted through the door he looked over his shoulders and saw his sweet innocent little friend putting on a pair of brass blast goggles. And he saw her smile.
The girls and the Corrienne’s crew reached the mooring lines just as Emaliene leaned out the mix on her two diesel engines. Behind them lay a wasteland inferno caused by the firebombing they had done to the shirt factory and some sort of demolition brought upon the hospital by Nahlia. Staccato bursts came from the building next door that shook the floor as they ran to the top of the Pulitzer building. Each tremor were the ascending floors of the hospital, one after another, exploding. Say what you like about that little doll, thought Schrödinger, but she can keep up a good pace. Twenty floors they climbed and the hospital had nearly as many.
If there had been any survivors they would have reported a sweet child emitting a faint green glow walking swiftly but effortlessly by. After she walked through a hospital floor and ascended the stairway to the next level, that person would have noticed an acrid scent and a burning sensation across his body. It probably would not have occurred to a witness of this ethereal youth that the humid air was degrading into hydroxy gas at an alarming rate nor the presence of something else, some foreign energy that was imbuing everything in that sweet angel’s path with an electric charge. There were no survivors though; the metal door shutting behind the girl would be the last sound anyone would hear.
“There! Move forward!” Leger commanded the captain and for once she did not smack him for it.
“Nahlia!” Bree and Clamine announce at once as the hospital’s roof access door flies open and the girl they love, they all love, stands before them just across the alleyway. She’s surrounded by an aura of uranium yellow light and the flames and smoke and terror behind her create a silhouette that is unforgettable. Wrapped around that silhouette is a writhing snake of electrical force. As it moves along the sweep of her figure the trauma of countless explosions is revealed as craters of missing flesh. But she’s smiling as brightly as the glow in her eyes behind the screen of her brass goggles; and where the veins and tendons once trailed through her body the living tungsten wires the monsters had defiled her with were still there and sparkling with life.
As the Bellweather Corrienne approaches the hospital rooftop Nahlia, aware of the electrical risk she poses to the airship, throws down her brass goggles. Acting as a focus , the goggles had allowed Nahlia to move energies and elements like a wizard and without them her own life’s energy quickly leaves her. But no one should have to rely on their own energy all the time and a peace finally falls upon the child as her friends, her old friends and new ones she's never even met load her onto the airship.
“She’ll be okay I think.” Leger says through a tight throat and teary eyes, “We’ll go somewhere far away.”
“Maybe Katmandu.” Schrödinger ventures innocently enough as the engine revolutions reach a high pitched whine. Surprisingly, no one even tries to throw him out the window.
The next day, the newspapers played their parts well. The wreckage was caused by the greedy factory owner who had chained his workers inside the building dooming over 140 girls and 15 men to a fiery death. The spreading horror completely destroyed what turned out to be a research hospital run by the British government. There was enough news in just those two statements for months’ worth of reporting. No one needed to know that the bodies found piled up against the factory exit doors were cadavers from the neighboring hospital, or that two thirteen year old girls chained the doors shut to keep the owners inside and not the other way around. Sometimes details don’t matter. The owner, Mr. Blanck and his partner Isaac Harris lost about $100,000 in damages from the fire but were paid $160,000 by their insurance companies to recover it. They were eventually prosecuted and acquitted. Reality seems to suit the rich.
But Clamine, Brienne, and Nahlia, with their new friends, broke that reality if just for a day.
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