1st 5 Pages June Workshop - Bartlett

Name: Claire Bartlett
Genre: Young Adult Fantasy
Title: Night Witches

Valentina heard the hum of warcraft too late. The organized cacophany of industry filled the factory to the brim, leaving her oblivious to the oncoming storm from the south until her supervisor rushed in, flushed and gasping.

Her stomach twisted sickly. God, she thought, even though good Union girls weren’t supposed to think about God anymore. I’m fired. They’d only taken her on out of a sense of charity, and she’d been waiting three years for Mrs. Rodoya to realize her mistake.

Slim, multi-jointed metal legs drifted past on the conveyor belt, twitching and trembling with traces of magic. Valka picked one up and checked the joints, tested the gears, working her fingers along its oily bones. She tried to calm the leg as she worked, but her hands shook with fear as she waited for Mrs. Rodoya’s judgment call.

“We need to evacuate,” Mrs. Rodoya said. The leg fell back on the conveyor belt with a sharp clang. Her tidy hair had fallen from its bun and lay half unfurled on her square shoulders. “Get your things.”

Valka gripped the sides of the conveyor as fear flashed through her. “What’s happening?” she said. But Mrs. Rodoya was already spinning away, running around the conveyor belt to the girls on the opposite side.

Evacuate. Her hands reached automatically for the next leg on the line. Her job was to check all the finished legs and ensure that nothing faulty left the factory. Someone else would attach the legs to metal horses, palanquins, carriers, war beetles, and all other manner of equipment on the front. The army relied on the high quality production of the factories in Tammin Reaching, which meant the army relied on Valka. It was the closest thing she had to a sense of purpose.

She should keep working. Keep the Union running, do her part as well as she could - which, she thought with a pang, was restrictive enough. Everyone in Tammin Reaching made allowances for the girl with metal legs. Everyone knew that a girl with no legs couldn’t run for the Union, couldn’t hunt for the Union, couldn’t carry beams to build sturdy Union houses or chase down Union cows for their sweet milk. Even Union girls whose flesh legs had been replaced with living metal calves, whose feet had become living metal claws. Her legs trembled even now, feeding off the fear that pumped through her. She tried to focus. She shouldn’t evacuate. Maybe she could convince Mrs. Rodoya to let her keep on with her job. But even as she thought it, the conveyor belt slowed.

The hissing, ratcheting, clanging of the factory faded until every machine on the floor had stilled. Silence descended like a blanket of snow. Whispers swept around the room in soft, hissing syllables as the machines wound down for the first time in years. Valka had never heard the factories fall silent. Even when she’d finished her shift, another girl came to oversee the machines as they ground through the night, churning out parts for the army. The silence felt like a promise broken.

For a moment it seemed as though that silence had taken over the whole world. Valka thought she’d drown in it. Then she heard it - a low hum, like some enraged cloud of insects. Elda aircraft. Elda witchcraft. The fear returned doubly strong.

“Girls!” Mrs Rodoya’s trembling voice rang out over the factory hall. Valka turned her wheelchair away from the conveyor belt and pushed towards the sound of Mrs. Rodoya’s voice, oily hands slipping on the wheels.

Mrs. Rodoya stood in the middle of the hall, ramrod straight, her hands clasped just over her belly. “We’ve practiced this before, girls. Let’s make an orderly exit, please.”

Mrs. Rodoya loved order. Sometimes Valka thought she’d rather let a bomb fall on the whole factory than allow her girls to disturb the precious order. She pushed her chair towards the door, fighting the oil on her hands and the metal filings and barbs that littered the factory floor. One good thing about being in a chair was that she didn’t have to pick thin slivers out of her heel from where her rubber soles had been ground to nothing. On the other hand, she had twice as many to pick out of her palms.

The girls lined up - in an orderly fashion, of course. Their shelter was a ten-minute walk away, and right now Valka wanted nothing more than to stay put where it was warm and safe. They want to bomb the factories, she thought, trying to convince herself to go out where she could see the Elda dragons and their bombs as they came to kill her. The other girls formed a line of pairs, hands clasped. At least they had a friend to hold on to. Valka got to go to the end of the line, and Mrs. Rodoya was her partner. Everyone assumed she’d be too slow to keep up with the others.

Mrs. Rodoya opened the factory door and counted each girl with a bob of her head as they went through. Then she grabbed the back of Valka’s chair and began to push without asking. A lot of people did that. Even when Valka had asked to push herself during practice raids, and even when she’d asked to just walk like everyone else. “Now, now, we want speed over pride, don’t we?” Mrs. Rodoya said.

Valka wanted to leap out of her chair and run for the shelter. Never mind being calm, never mind letting Mrs. Rodoya literally push her around. But even if she could disentangle her feet without catching them in the chair, even if she could escape Mrs. Rodoya and the factory girls, she’d cause chaos, and chaos was the enemy of the Union.

The factory girls took measured steps, moving in a dance that declared order against panic. They moved away from the high concrete building, down a street lined with the standard issue factory blocks that churned out legs, carapaces, rifles, helmets and other army equipment. Twilight deepened the cloudless sky above. The moon hung like a fruit, a fat crescent surrounded by stars. On an ordinary night Valka might watch it thread its way to the horizon. But there were other things in the sky tonight, things that hummed and growled. A shudder ran through Valka, and she wasn’t the only one. The line of girls undulated as the dance began to unravel. “Calm, girls,” Mrs. Rodoya said. Did she even know the meaning of the world? Calm was easy during a practice raid. Holding your head high and following the War Ministry’s approved path to the shelter was easy during a pratice raid. When the hum of aircraft resonated against the buildings to either side of them, holding your head high was a whole lot harder to do. Valka folded her hands in front of her, clenching them until she couldn’t feel them shake anymore. Don’t be such a coward, she told herself. But she hadn’t been brave in a long time. Sometimes she felt like when they cut off her legs, they amputated her bravery as well.