The Casting of the Bolts

The brass plate struck the unpolished wood of the table with a dry crack. Nico slowly drew his hand back, leaving a blackened crescent of coal dust on the chipped rim of the metal.

"The lard's gone sour," the boy said, staring at the grayish paste without touching the tin fork. "It tastes like boiled rust."

"Then don't eat."

"I'm hungry."

"Chew slowly and don't think about what fat they used."

Nico didn't answer. He plunged two fingers into the cold mush, brought them to his mouth and sucked them with a brief, mechanical smack, his eyes fixed on the dark hollow of the cupboard with its bottom gone. Mateo felt the usual tightness at the base of his neck, that cold pull running down from his left collarbone to his floating ribs. He rubbed his wrist against his jacket to soothe the itch of the ammonia plaster. He tried to remember the exact pitch of his sister's laugh when they crossed the canal toward the coal docks, but the effort only brought a dry heave and a stab behind his eyes: where that memory should have been there was nothing, only a dull emptiness that left his mouth pasty.

The pull at his collarbone came back, harder, and Mateo stopped trying.

He put on his stiff canvas gloves. The leather of the satchel straps creaked as it bent. He tightened the strap with his teeth, pulling hard until the hole caught on the notched buckle, and didn't look at the boy again.

"If the valve collector comes, don't open," Mateo said.

"Nobody's coming," Nico replied without lifting his eyes from the plate. "There's nothing left here worth appraising."

"Good."

The trail of Bruna's three trucks was easy to read in the mud. The thick mix of half-set tar and linseed oil burned in the brass heaters dripped through the joints of the crankcases and drew two parallel lines that wound between the rotten sleepers of the coal spur. Mateo walked close to the shadow of the concrete blocks, where the water in the ditches held violet glints under a dense film of settled ore.

Four blocks to the east, the steam hammers struck with a monotonous boom that came up through the heels before it reached the ears: a blind tremor that shook the roots of the teeth with every blow, steady and heavy. Along the dead tracks lay the leavings of the crews that had abandoned the sector in the great autumn strike: two wrenches with their jaws eaten by acid, a broken boot tied with esparto rope, a rotten pine crate of which only the bent nails survived, and a flattened can of bearing grease.

Mateo moved on in silence. The wind off the lowlands smelled of rotting fish and wet caliche. He reached the drainage pit of the old rolling mills, where the concrete slabs had split into huge wedges sinking toward the trench. There were fresh tracks of heavy tires in the clay: the iron brake shoes had bitten into the ground and left ruts where a greenish foam was still bubbling. Mateo crouched, touched the edge of the rut with the tip of a gloved finger and brought it to his face. It wasn't just dirty kerosene. It smelled of a slaughterhouse and rancid tallow.

Rolling shed number four stood out against the sky like the ribcage of a whale stranded in the ash.

The bolts holding the sheets of the overhang were loose; with every gust they rattled in holes widened by rust. Mateo pressed his back against the precast slate wall. The cold of the cement went through his threadbare smock and bit his shoulder blades, but he didn't move. He waited. He counted seventy slow breaths, feeling the cartilage of his left shoulder creak each time he filled his lungs with that sulfurous vapor that burned the throat.

He was about to take the whetstone out of the satchel to run it along the edge of the chisel when—

An electric hum cut through the fog.

Behind the tarred canvas covering the unloading gallery shone the orange, livid, flickering glow of an arc torch. Someone was welding bars in the lower bay.

He went down the slag ramp, stepping on the drifts of coal dust to muffle the crunch of his boots. The zinc sheet of the side gate had a rivet missing at waist height; through that slit, Mateo put a single eye to the gloom of the bay.

The air inside didn't move. It was a warm, viscous mass, heavy with a bitter stench that closed his throat: blood spilled on the hot pavement, mixed with the steam of animal breath and the metallic reek of the portable stoves where dressings soaked in brine were boiling. There were no extermination cages. There were no mass graves with quicklime, no heaps of crushed shells to feed the smelting furnaces, as the night watch's posters pasted on the bridges claimed.

In the middle of the workshop, under the dim light of three carbide lamps hanging from the trusses, stood twelve butchering benches made of rolled-steel sections. Upon them lay no beasts.

They were boys. Small orphans from the dock barracks, sallow-skinned children not yet twelve winters old, strapped to the boards with artillery harness. Mateo recognized them by their pockmarks and shaved heads: the lost litter of the steam galleries that the quartermaster's office had struck from the rolls the month before without sending a single patrol to look for them.

Bruna Varga walked among the tables with the sleeves of her flannel shirt rolled to the elbows. Her forearms were covered in dry scabs and yellow iodine stains that wouldn't come off even scrubbed with sand. In her right hand she held a three-edged sacking needle threaded with tarred hemp, and with her left she lifted the flap of a striated, bluish, membranous mass of muscle—a bundle of tendons taken still warm from the back of a chimera that lay bled out on a tipping barrow.

Two stable hands were holding a child face down on the oiled sheet. The child wasn't screaming. His mouth was open around a cork gag and his eyes were fixed on a crack in the floor with the stupid calm of sheep before the knife. Bruna drove the needle into the flesh over his shoulder blade with a muffled snap, like an old shoe sole pierced by a blunt awl. She pulled the hemp. The grafted muscle contracted with an electric shudder that made the little one's bones crack like dry kindling, and the boy's back swelled into the broad, heavy curve of a draft animal.

"Tighten the dorsal bolt before the tissue cools," Bruna said, wiping the sweat from her forehead with the back of her bloodied arm. Her voice was flat, without fury, with the bored cadence of a foreman logging bushels of barley in an account book. "If the fiber seizes before it's threaded, we'll have to strip him and start on another. Hurry."

The boy didn't cry. When the hands undid the leather straps, he stood up on the grease-stained flagstones. His left arm hung two spans below his knee, thickened by a mass of gray tendons pulsing under the child's skin like a living rope. With that misshapen hand, without anyone telling him to, the boy bent down and lifted a fifty-pound ingot of cast iron as if it were a piece of stale bread.

Mateo pressed his forehead against the sharp edge of the zinc sheet and the metal opened a warm line on his temple, but he didn't even blink.