Chapter Eight
THIRTY-SEVEN PEOPLE DIED WHEN the Aventine Arena collapsed. Hundreds more were injured and later, many more people succumbed to their injuries.
It took eleven hours for the rubble to be cleared, shored up, and excavated enough to begin extracting the humans trapped beneath.
It took fifteen hours for Luciana and Brice to be eased out from under the slab of roof, and they were among the lucky first because the box they had been in had been located just beneath the roof.
People in the lower stalls had to wait much longer for rescue, even though anyone who hadn’t been in the arena when it collapsed came to the Aventine to help, even if it was clearing out rubble and sweeping up dust.
In the hours it took for them to be rescued, Luciana and Brice dozed. When they were not sleeping, they talked. They spoke about everything and anything. In that dim, dusty pocket that might collapse at any time, they had no reason to hold anything of themselves in reserve.
Luciana found she could speak about her life with a rare objectivity.
“When Devar was given to Rayen and me, I was only twenty-two. My life had barely begun. Rayen already had the stellar career that couldn’t be interrupted, and she was earning enough for both of us.
She argued I should stay at home and give Devar all the care and attention he needed.
So I did. We didn’t even pick a last name for Devar.
Rayen lodged the register entry, and she used her own name.
And it isn’t until just now that I’ve realized how much I have resented that, all this time. ”
“She didn’t give Devar anything of you. He got her name,” Brice murmured.
“Yes! Only…she supported all of us, without a murmur of complaint, for twenty years, until he reached his majority. And she let me stay in the Capitol, which was home for me. So there is that.”
“Some parents don’t manage even that much,” Brice said.
“I knew that. And I was grateful,” Luciana admitted. “When Devar was…ten, I think, I got bored. He didn’t need me as much. So I started making things.”
“Things?”
Luciana smiled to herself. “My parents were both mechanical engineers. Hands-on and practical. Both raised Capitolinos, too. I learned how to jury-rig just about anything from them. A bit of solder, a circuit board, an interface, all scrounged or printed from the cheap files. I started off building shipscape dioramas. Little models of Endurance districts, with moving parts.”
“I remember those,” Brice said. “They were everywhere for a while. The Palatine hub was transparent at one end, and everything inside was miniature.”
“I sold them to a stall manager in the Capitol market,” Luciana said. “I had a few credits of my own. It was…magical.”
“Empowering, is the word you’re looking for.”
“Yes!” Luciana nodded, her chin scraping his jacket sleeve. “Then I found out that the stall manager was selling them for five times the price he had given me, and all the magic was gone, just like that.” She paused, recalling her fury and the sense of betrayal that drove it.
“You started your own stall after that?”
“I rented one half of a stall, for a month, once I had enough things to sell. I had more dioramas, some personal weather simulators—”
“That was you, too? My mother kept one on her desk. It was always freezing around her desk.”
“They sold very well,” Luciana admitted. “I just seemed to have a knack for guessing what people wanted. I made tools—”
“Made…tools? People didn’t want to just print them off?”
“They said mine worked better. Some of them didn’t exist in the print files, anyway. One of my biggest sellers was a lockbox.”
“A lockbox,” he said, with a baffled tone.
“It didn’t use electronics at all,” she said.
“Just a key. I researched mechanical keys and designed my own from pictures. Once I had the basic template, I could build them out of just about anything; sheet metal, iron-class plastics, faux wood, big, small, tiny. Someone carried a lump of real wood from a tree that had fallen in the Palatine and asked me to build a lockbox out of that.”
Brice laughed.
“I eventually got my own stall. That was when I realized that it wasn’t making things that I liked.”
“It was selling them? Making money?”
“Yes. And being good at it. I would watch other artisans and stall managers, and figure out what they were doing wrong, that stopped customers from buying, and I’d fix that thing on my stall.
That was when Parry, who owns the stall beside mine, wanted to pay me to tell him how to better manage his own stall.
I gave up my stall and rented it to Becker, who made the most amazing clothes out of bits of other clothing that people hadn’t got around to recycling.
I taught her how to sell, and that’s how it started. ”
“Managing stalls.”
She nodded, her chin rubbing against him. “It wasn’t about the selling, either, although I am good at it.”
“It’s running your own life,” Brice said softly.
“My business is all I am, Brice. It’s all I’ve ever done. Once Devar was an adult, it was all I had. I want it to mean something, when I’m gone.”
“The largest management company on the ship,” he said. “I remember.”
Which is why I want to buy your stalls. Only, she didn’t say it. It wasn’t important. Not right then.
●
The entire Aventine had been turned into a hospital to deal with the casualties and Luciana learned in the five days she was there that it wasn’t the first time the district had become a healing center.
She suspected, though, that the first time the Aventine had been used this way, it hadn’t been right beside the scene of the disaster.
From her bed, Luciana could turn her head and see hundreds of people carefully picking through the ruins of the arena.
Industrial sized recycling maws lined up beside them.
Once a section of rubble was declared free of bodies, larger mechanical scoops would roll in and sweep up small hillocks of mortar, metal and other building materials, and drop them in the maws.
Luciana’s hip was broken. Brice’s femur was also broken. They both had multiple cuts, bruises, gouges and other minor injuries that were dealt with while their bones knitted.
On the fifth day, Luciana was told to go home, rest, and report to her physician in three days’ time.
Brice was released the day after Luciana, when his leg could support him. He walked across the Aventine and knocked on her door. When she opened it, he bent and kissed her.
Her first thought, that everyone nearby would see, swiftly evaporated. Somehow, between them, they moved inside, shut the door and reached the couch in front of her desk, their mouths still together.
●
The entire ship fell into unproclaimed mourning. While days proceeded normally, few people smiled. Someone on the Forum suggested that the entire ship’s population was in shock and should be treated as patients, too.
Slowly, though, the outrage built. People wanted to know who to blame. They wanted to know what had gone wrong. It frightened them that a simple thing like a tankball ball could turn rogue and deliver so much damage that a building which had stood for hundreds of years would collapse.
Captain Tokyo Travers announced on the Forum that a formal investigation would begin immediately, and that everyone was to be patient; it would take time to learn the truth.
One of the first things to emerge from the investigation was that the ball itself had not brought down the building.
“It was the tankball walls falling against the arena structures that brought it down,” Luciana explained to Brice, while she sipped coffee in the corner of his sofa, the one with its back to the glass walls.
“The weight of them. Whatever the chemical engineers do to produce walls that won’t shatter makes them extremely heavy.
Plus, the arena itself, especially the framework that holds up the stall seating, is old.
They think it might even be original to the building.
Which makes it centuries old. They tested every few years for the usual stress indicators.
They think that the alloy the original builders used reached the limit of its life. ”
“I don’t remember reading that in the report on the Forum,” Brice said, putting aside the pad he had been reading.
“It’s in the structural investigation report the Bridge just released,” Luciana said, lifting her pad. “It’s the same idea as annealing metal to make it soft. There are other processes—manipulation makes it hard. Only, if you manipulate it too hard, it can shatter like glass.”
“Which is what the stress tests are for, yes?”
“Yes. The last one was four years ago. The alloy might have reached its limits in that time, and a halfway decent tap, like those girders landing on the stands, and down it all went.”
“You really are the child of engineers, aren’t you?
” Brice’s smile was small, but it was there, which was a change from the sober and tired expression he had been wearing since he had returned to work.
“Perhaps you should be in the meeting tomorrow, when the Association will be formally presented with the report.”
“Oh, I only know basic things,” Luciana said quickly. “You need Devar’s Caelen for that. She’s the real genius when it comes to engineering.”
“She’s with the institute?”
“Third year and apparently quite brilliant,” Luciana said proudly. “She got a place there all by herself. No sponsorships…she’s an orphan, you know.”
“I didn’t. You mean her parents both died when she was young?”
“When she was three. She was raised by…well, lots of people in the Capitol. She told me that her bedroom when she was younger was the pack on her back. She moved around from letterbox to letterbox. If people ran out of money to feed her, someone else would always step up.”