“Fuck off! I know the difference between an anchor bolt and a—”
“Shh—”
Miriam stopped. She had left the tank and now crouched behind a thick staple of black pipe. A broken jar had scraped slightly as her foot touched it. The darkness was nearly impenetrable and she cursed silently that the gray row of squares through which she had come did not shed enough light to reach the floor. The windows served only to outline vague canisters and barrels that had once held grain.
Great bulkheads of machinery and partially scavenged stills occluded her vision. While the glow of a lantern crept around one great black shape and wavered on a slick of oil, it did not reach through the jungle of wheeled bins and other objects that cluttered the area around her.
Miriam bit her lip in frustration.
“Better check it out,” said one of the voices.
The sound of some heavy metal tool dragged across the floor. A man’s shadow passed in front of the lantern light.
“If it’s a cat, I’ll give it a new shape.” Miriam saw the giant shadow of a wrench swing across the cement and disappear into crowding pools of darkness.
There was something crawling through her hair. Gingerly she reached up and plucked it from the side of her face, tossed it aside without emotion.
She focused on where the searching man had gone. His footsteps echoed slightly, bouncing off countless metal bodies and the huge empty curve of ceiling overhead.
Miriam’s pupils had dilated to their widest possible diameter, crying out for any trace of light. She could see a ladder on the side of some tall metal structure. A chute perhaps that emptied into an enormous drum. She reached out for it hesitantly, keenly aware that the level of corrosion in the building made her peril that much greater.
She couldn’t tell what surfaces might support her weight and which ones might give way, call her out amid a ragged collapse of gashing metal edges and bars clattering to the floor.
She withdrew her hand from the ladder and melted back behind the tank, moving slowly but persistently away from the last place she had made noise.
Suddenly the beam of a chemiostatic torch cut a wide cone behind her, lime-colored light running over chains and pipes and wires. Miriam froze.
There was a support strut bolted to the wall that helped stabilize the tank. Biting her lip she crouched on it, pulling her feet up so that the torch wouldn’t reveal her legs if the man looked underneath.
The green light panned across the wall and up toward the ceiling.
“Shh, you daft prick! Keep that down from the windows. You want someone to see?”
The searching man did not respond but the light dropped and flicked under the tank. Miriam could hear the man getting down on his hands and knees. The light played back and forth, inches below her feet.
“There’s nothing back here.”
Miriam used the light to her advantage, memorizing every detail of the landscape behind the tank. Then she closed her eyes to advance the process of readjusting to the dark. When she opened them the light was gone and the man had moved away, clomping over crumbling piles of discarded sheet metal and broken glass.
Miriam used his racket to mask her own sounds. She moved quickly and quietly through the dark jumble and into the diagonal shadows of a tall movable rack.
She could now see the lantern and the crouched forms of both men as the second one settled in again beside a large piece of dirty machinery. He switched off the torch.
“Nothing there,” he muttered.
“I heard you the first time,” said the other man. Both of them were covered in dust and grease. “Put that bar in here and pry up while I loosen this nut, will you?”
The second man thrust a heavy round crowbar into the engine and bent his back. They were dismantling some huge contraption that looked alien to and much newer than the apparatuses of the brewery. They had stacked various parts in neat piles around the floor.
Miriam had no idea what they were up to. She had come here only because the meeting at the surgery had prompted an investigation and additional leads indicated something was happening here at Vindai’s.
Her plan had been to nose about. She had not expected to find anyone.
She slunk closer, behind a pyramid of metal drums whose skins of salmon-orange paint fled rapidly spreading patches of corrosion.
“I don’t think we’ll have to carry it across town,” said the first man,