The New Weird - Ann VanderMeer [66]
What got me wasn't so much what he did with the money as where he stole it from. It was a government office. Where they store taxes.
Everyone knows what the security on those places is like. And I knew that there was no way he'd have done something like that without it being a screw you. He was making a point, and my good bloody gods but I admired that.
It was then, in that pub, when I realised what he'd done, how he must have made that night-raid work, how he must have climbed and crept and fought his way in, with his new body, how he must have been able to vanish, weighed down with specie, that I realised he was something. That was when I knew that Jack Half-a-Prayer was no ordinary Remade, and no ordinary renegade.
Not many people see the Remade like I do, or like Jack did.
You know it's true. To most of you they're to be ignored or used. If you really notice them you wish you hadn't. It wasn't like that for Jack, and not just because he was Remade. I bet ― I know ― that Jack used to notice them, see them clear, before anything was done to him. And that's the same for me.
People walk along and see nothing but trash, Remade trash with bodies all wrong, shat out by the punishment factories. Well, I don't want to be too sentimental about it but I've no doubts at all that Jack'd have seen this woman ― whose hands yes were gone and been replaced with little birds' wings ― and he'd have seen an old man, not the sexless thing he'd been made into, and a young lad with eyes gone and in their place an array of dark glass and pipework and lights and the boy stumbling trying to see in ways he weren't born to but still a boy. Jack'd see people changed with engines in steam, and oily gears, and the parts of animals, and their innards or their skin altered with hexes, and all those things, but he'd have seen them under the punishment.
People get broken when they get Remade. I've seen it so many times. Suddenly, take a wrong turn by the law and it ain't just the physical punishment, it ain't just the new limbs or metal or the change in the body, it's that they wake up and they're Remade, the same as they spat on or ignored for years. They know they're nothing.
Jack, when it was done to him, never thought he was nothing. He'd never thought any of them were.
There was this one time. A foundry in Smog Bend, and there was a man there, some middling supervisor ― this was years after Jack got free, and I only heard all this ― who was causing trouble. Informing on guilders trying to recruit. There was gangs following organisers home, and scaring them so they'd not come back, or maybe retiring them permanently.
I'm not clear on the details. But the point is what Jack done.
One day the workers troop in and they take their places by the gears, but there's no klaxon. And they're waiting, but nothing happens. Now they're getting wary, they're getting very antsy. They know it's that overseer who's due in that day, so they're nervous, they ain't talking much, but they go looking. And there at the foot of the steps up to the office, there's an arrow put together out of tools. On the floor, pointing up.
So they creep up. And on the landing there's another. And there's a whole gang of men now, and they're following these arrows, soldered to the banisters, up on the walkway, trooping round the factory, until pretty much the whole workforce is up there, and they come to the end of the gangway, and there dangling is that supervisor.
He's unconscious. His mouth's all scabbed. It's sewn up, with wire.
People know right then and there what's happened, but when the man wakes up and gets unstitched he starts raving, describing the man who done this to him, and then it's certain.
That man was lucky he didn't get killed, is my thinking. There was no more trouble there for a while, I hear. That