Ninth City Burning by J. Patrick Black

answering cracks of gunfire, and a bugle calling. Distantly, my thoughts tell me this can only mean Half-Moon’s Niagaras have mounted an attack, and indeed that is the signal sounding: battle already joined.
    There is a new sound, too, over the cries and blasts. It is distant at first, but builds in speed and degree until it has become a steady booming, the sort a giant would make running at full tilt. I wait for some monstrous creature to come breaking through the trees, but what I see instead is an even stranger vision: blue lights, thin and sharp as needles, stabbing over the horizon into the sky, each flashing only a moment but so powerfully as to pierce the very clouds.
    I know I must rise now, rise and fight, if I am to survive. I make a fist and find the pistol, Rae’s present to me, already in my hand.

SIX

TORRO
    T he last five minutes of your shift are always the worst. I won’t say longest because they’re each sixty seconds apiece, just like every minute since the beginning of time. They seem longer, sure, but that’s not what’s so bad about them. What’s so bad is that you’ve been watching the fish rolling around on the conveyor belts for like sixteen hours, getting gutted and beheaded by little blades, then stuffed into cans and drowned in oil and sealed up and cooked to superhigh temperatures and labeled and boxed, and you’re just waiting for it all to stop; only when it finally does, you don’t feel like it’s really over. You
feel
like it’s
you
down there on the belts, and the reason everything seems still is because now
you’re
the one moving along with all those little fish, waiting for the rotating saw to come and slice your head off. So when the bell rings at the end of the shift, I don’t just run off like everybody else. I stay at my station a minute and let my brain work out which way is up and everything. If people ask, I say I’m dizzy, and that’s not like a complete lie. But it’s also a good excuse to not leave right away.
    From my station, I watch everyone filing out, dumping their gloves and goggles and hairnets and aprons in separate containers to be cleaned and sterilized and so forth, all in a rush, like they’ve got someplace important to be or something, even though the first railbus back to town doesn’t leave for fifteen minutes. Most of them are kids about my age, that is, seventeen. Pretty much everybody does a rotation or two at the factories once they get out of school, even if you’re like me and you actually made it all the way through. Not like school necessarily gets you anywhere. Or experience, either. There are plenty of people who work the factories their whole lives and never even make foreman, and I bet half of them did as much schoolas me. I can see a few of them, the lifers, there among the younger kids. Not so many, though. It’s just that the older you get, the more likely you’ll end up at the Front instead of in good old Settlement 225.
    When pretty much everyone is off the factory floor, I head for the door, making sure to go the way that takes me by the cookers, so all the cans I pass are basically ready to go except maybe for the labels. At the last corner, I stumble and knock a whole bunch of cans off the conveyor. I make a big show of being like embarrassed over screwing up the line of production and whatnot, and I’m real careful about picking up every single can and dusting it off and checking it for dents. I put the good cans back on the belt and toss the dented ones into a bin labeled “nonconforming.” There are a lot of nonconforming ones.
    I’ve been doing this a couple of times each week since I started over in canning, just denting a few cans here and there so they can’t be boxed. I’ve got a whole bunch of ways to do it. Like I might leave something on the conveyor belt so it gets backed up, and the cans start falling off, or maybe