His new home was a six-bed dormitory in a looming prefab block. A row of overalls hung on pegs like shrivelled skins, as if Millmoor had sucked the substance out of the bodies that wore them. In one of the beds a figure tossed and turned, a blanket pulled over his head to block out the light. He was presumably a night-shift worker, because Luke doubted they took kindly to sickies in Millmoor. The air smelled stale and sharp. Too much sweat, not enough soap, as Mum would say.
He dumped his duffel on the bed with a bare mattress, and tore open the envelope on the locker beside it. It was his assignment. The components shed in the Machine Park’s Zone D. Shifts: Monday to Saturday, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Start date: 3 September. Tomorrow. He stared at the paper in disbelief.
This afternoon was all the freedom he had left until Sunday came round, another six days away. Where was the Machine Park? How did he get there? Where could he get something to eat? He thought longingly of the sandwiches Mum had made, carefully preparing everyone’s favourites. The girls would be scoffing theirs right now, halfway to Kyneston. He devoutly hoped that whatever was waiting for them at the end of their journey was better than what he’d found here.
A caretaker sat in a dark cubbyhole by the dorm block entrance – an old guy who must have come in at fifty-five as a last ditcher, delaying his days to the final moment. He obligingly sketched a rudimentary map. Armed with that, and a few vague memories from films they’d been shown in Citizenship classes, Luke headed out. He could feel each alveolus in his lungs contract in protest as he stepped into the smog-choked street.
Millmoor was the country’s oldest slavetown, as old as industry itself. No sooner had some genius developed manufacturing machinery than the Equals had put people to backbreaking work slaving on them. Up until then, the slavedays had resembled feudalism, everyone doing days under their local lord as farm labourers, craftspeople or house-slaves. Illustrations in school textbooks contrived to make it appear almost cosy – grateful peasants in candlelit cottages, clustered outside the Skill-glowing wall of a great estate. But for three hundred years, the reality had been Millmoor and the slavetowns that sprang up in its likeness, shadowing each of Britain’s cities.
Luke checked the map. The old geezer had drawn something resembling a darts board, circular and quartered. The heart of Millmoor was its administration hub; ringing that were the residential blocks. Beyond them, the industrial zones: the Machine Park, the Comms Zone (hangar after hangar of call centres, which they’d walked past on the way in), the meatpacking district, and the old quarter – those earliest mills and loom sheds. The caretaker had crosshatched that, explaining that it was derelict.
Luke’s dorm block was in West, while the Park (Luke doubted it had a duck pond and ‘Keep off the grass’ signs) was over East, so he set off in what he hoped was the right direction. But the streets became a warren, branching again, and he was soon hopelessly lost.
He’d turned into a dead-end maze of courtyards round the back of several run-down accommodation blocks. A rusty plaque on the wall said East 1-11-11, which was precisely less than no help at all. Then he spotted two guys stood talking at the far end of the courtyard, by an arched array of heating ducts and ventilation shafts. Maintenance men. They’d tell him the way out.
But something stopped him calling to them. They weren’t chatting to each other. They were speaking to a third person, hidden behind the wall of their backs, who must be caught between them, the ducts, and the mouldering building. Luke crept closer.
‘. . . know you’ve got some,’ the larger of the two men was saying. ‘I’ve seen you bringing it round. The old cow quits her moaning for a while after you stop by, which is great, but a few vials of morphine for our personal use would be even better. So hand it over.’
Had he stumbled on some kind of black market deal? Luke was about to creep away when the other guy shifted, and he glimpsed the person they were talking to. It was a girl – and from the birdlike look of her, she was barely older than Daisy.
His feet glued themselves to the ground. He wouldn’t be going anywhere until he’d got the kid away from these creeps twice her size.
‘I’ve not got nothing I’m giving you,’ the girl said fiercely. ‘Other than this.’
And as Luke’s brain was still working through a plan, she darted at one of the men and he cried out.
‘Bitch has got a knife,’ he yelled, as the other guy swung a massive fist at the girl – and connected with empty air.
Luke saw her. She’d dropped to the ground and was squirming on her stomach into the tiny space beneath a duct, intending to slip out the other side. The man she’d injured crouched down and thrust fingers into the gap, hunting for a piece of her to grab. The other had worked out that the only way he’d reach her was by doubling back and round, so he turned and charged – right towards Luke.
Obeying instinct, Luke crouched then snatched blindly as the bloke ran past. The handful of rough fabric was pulled instantly from his grasp as the guy went down, and Luke toppled backwards.
Small fingers dug into his armpits, hauling him up.
‘C’mon.’
The girl took off, frizzy hair flying, as the guy she’d cut looked up and snarled, blood dripping from his hand. Luke didn’t stop to think.
He’d never been more grateful for all those weekend footie training sessions he’d spent shivering in his shorts in the rain, because the kid was fast. She fled down alleys and ginnels, slipping between buildings, leaping over broken bricks or gutted rubbish sacks that bled sloppy detritus across the pavement.