Chapter 105: Vance Lot
The disposal yards smelled like wet steel and old protein.
Caleb had worked these yards for six years before Iris pulled him into the Seventh Division. He knew every gate, every crane track, every stretch of cracked concrete where the rain collected and never drained. He knew the night shift was thinner than the day shift. He knew Vance ran the night shift himself on Wednesdays.
It was Wednesday.
He came in through the workers’ gate without a credential. The night guard recognized him and waved him through without asking. The guard had been a friend of Caleb’s father, though the guard didn’t know that and Caleb hadn’t known it until two days ago.
Vance was in the supervisor’s shed.
The shed was a concrete box with a corrugated tin roof and a single bare bulb hanging from a wire. Vance was at his desk with a thermos of something hot and a logbook open in front of him. He lifted his head when Caleb stepped in.
His expression did not change.
"Took you longer than I expected," he said. "Sit down."
Caleb sat down on the stool across from the desk.
The stool was the one he had sat on for six years.
"You knew I was coming."
"Your father told me eleven days ago. I have been waiting."
"What for?"
"To give you something. To tell you the rest of what your father didn’t tell you on Sunday night. And to apologize, though the apology is the smallest part and I will get it out of the way first because I don’t want it taking up space in your head while we work."
He pushed the thermos across the desk. "Drink. It’s coffee. I made it strong."
Caleb drank, and Vance leaned back in his chair.
"I hired you in twenty-twenty-one because your father asked me to. He had been gone twelve years at that point. He came to me through a relay I won’t name and asked me to keep you in the yards until you were ready to leave them. He didn’t tell me why. I didn’t ask. I positioned you on the slow crews so you wouldn’t get noticed. I clocked you out of three Defense Force recruitment sweeps before they got to your name. The fourth sweep I let through because Iris was running it, and Iris was the relay your father wanted you handed off to. That’s the apology. I controlled six years of your work life and I let you think you were just a scrubber. You weren’t. You were never going to be. Your father told me what you were going to carry the first night I met him. I held you in place until the carrier needed to start walking."
Caleb didn’t answer.
Vance waited.
Then Vance reached under the desk and pulled out a metal toolbox.
He set it on the desk between them.
"Open it."
Caleb opened the toolbox.
Inside was a cylindrical device about the size of a coffee cup, machined from dull gray alloy, with a single recessed button on top. It resembled a defective grenade.
It was not a grenade.
"What is it?"
"Your father called it the dampener. It is the device your grandfather designed in nineteen seventy-seven and never finished. Your father finished it nineteen years ago. I have held it in this toolbox in the floor of this shed for nineteen years. He told me you would come for it before Day Sixteen. He did not tell me which day. He said you would know it was the day when you walked in."
"What does it do?"
"It puts the Twelfth back to sleep for one minute after it is reassembled. One minute. Your father needs the minute to seal it. Without the dampener, the minute is a second. Without the second, your father is dead and the Twelfth is awake. With the minute, your father has a chance."
Caleb studied it. It might as well have been a paperweight.
He closed the toolbox. "The other thing."
Vance picked up his pen. He tapped it against the logbook twice.
"Your father trusts your mother more than he has let you understand. The folder you took from her coat yesterday is one of three folders she has been holding without knowing it. The second is in a cookbook she has not opened in fifteen years on the third shelf in her kitchen. The third is in a photograph frame on the wall of her bedroom. Behind the photograph, between the photograph and the backing board. He did not put them all there at once. He put them in over twelve years. Each one was sewn or sealed by hand so she would not notice the weight. He told me about the cookbook two days ago through the relay. He has not yet told me about the photograph. He will, before Day Sixteen. If he does not, the photograph stays with her. He has been very particular about which parts of the plan she gets to keep without knowing she is keeping them."
"You’re telling me to go back."
"Not yet. Day Twelve. He has Day Twelve in his folder for it. Don’t get ahead of him."
"Vance."
"Yes."
"Why did you take this job?"
"Because your father saved my sister’s life in nineteen ninety-six and I owe him a debt I will never finish paying. The shed is the smallest thing I have given him in return for it. The toolbox is part of the same debt. The six years I kept you here were the same debt. I did not love every minute of it. I loved most of them. You were a good worker and you didn’t ask for things I couldn’t give. I will miss the shifts where you came in and didn’t say anything for the first twenty minutes."
Caleb faced the older man across the desk.
He had stood with this man at hundreds of dawns over hundreds of carcasses and not once known any of this.
"Thank you."
"Don’t thank me until Day Seventeen. If you make it to Day Seventeen, come back here and drink another thermos with me. If you don’t, I’ll know."
He left through the workers’ gate with the toolbox under his coat.
Elara’s car was on the access road two hundred meters from the gate.
He got in.
Elara was driving.
He set the toolbox on the floor between his boots.
[Hacker, on the comm, after a long silence]: He was honest.
"Yes."
[Hacker]: Then I have eleven years of work that holds.
"Yes."
[Hacker]: I’ll see you on Day Sixteen.
The channel went quiet.
Elara took the long way back to the safe house. She did not say anything for the first twenty minutes. Caleb did not say anything either. The toolbox between his boots was a weight he could feel through the floorboard. The thermos of coffee was sitting empty in Vance’s shed behind them.
At the third stoplight, Elara reached across the gearshift and put her hand on his.
She kept it there until the light changed.
Then she put both hands back on the wheel and drove.
