Chapter 18: The Factory District

Yesterday, though I had crossed worlds, my own perception had been a feverish, blurry haze, a reality confined to the suffocating darkness of a sewer. When Jared finally carried me out into the city proper, the sun had already set, only for me to discover I was cursed with a profound night blindness that rendered the world a smudge of threatening shadows. And so, today marked my first true attempt to observe this new world. As I walked along the edge of the canal, leaving our wretched alcove behind, I saw that most of the other "residents" had already departed for the day. They were off to the factories to toil, their bodies cogs in some great machine, or to engage in even more wretched work in the city's labyrinthine streets. Scavenging, begging, stealing, cheating—they did whatever they had to do. Even at the absolute bottom of society, one still had to earn their daily bread, however stale or mouldy it might be.

Climbing the steep, slick stone steps leading up from the canal, I felt a weakness in my legs, a trembling that had nothing to do with the cold. Jared asked if I needed help, but I refused his offered arm. This was my first step, my own first step. If I needed help even with this, how could I ever hope to stand on my own two feet in this monstrous, uncaring world?

When I reached the top, the first thing that greeted me was not the sky, but a forest of colossal, soot-stained smokestacks. They stood like the pillars of some grim, industrial temple, belching thick, white smoke into the already hazy air, a constant, choking sacrifice to some unseen god of progress. I hadn't seen them from our hovel below; I had only felt their thunder. From their base came a deafening cacophony of sound—the piercing shriek of steam whistles, the thunderous roar of furnaces, and the constant, grinding symphony of iron on iron. A massive factory building, a true industrial leviathan, squatted beneath the smokestacks. This was the source of the noise I'd heard last night, or at least, one of the sources. From all around me, I could hear the same mechanical thunder, the city's relentless, grinding heartbeat.

As I tried to pinpoint the source of the grinding and clashing, my eyes fell upon a sight so strange, so utterly impossible, that it made me stop dead in my tracks. The exterior walls of the factory were alive with movement. Massive, interlocking gears, some as tall as a house, turned slowly and ponderously, their brass teeth meshing with terrifying precision. Great pistons, like the limbs of some metal giant, pumped up and down in a steady, powerful rhythm that seemed to shake the very ground beneath my feet. It was like the clockwork I had seen on the building near MacDuff's slum, but on a far grander, more complex, more nightmarish scale. I could see the intricate web of it now—the way the great cogs meshed, the gleaming shafts and whirring balance wheels that connected them, all working in a beautiful and terrible harmony. It was like staring into the exposed heart of a giant, ticking, terrifyingly intricate pocket watch. And it wasn't just this one factory. All around us, several other industrial behemoths stood, each with its own unique configuration of external machinery, but all sharing the same grim, alien aesthetic: giant, exposed gears, complex mechanical skeletons, and great-throated smokestacks vomiting plumes of white smoke into the sky.

In fact, as I looked further, across the rooftops and into the distance, I saw that the entire city was a forest of smokestacks. As far as the eye could see, white smoke rose in lazy, curling pillars, merging into a single, greasy shroud that hung over everything. It was as if the entire city was one vast, sprawling, breathing machine. Was this not a city at all, but a single, living organism of brass and iron? The sheer scale of the emissions was staggering. I couldn't even begin to imagine the level of pollution, the toxicity of the air and water. No wonder a thick, impenetrable, chemical-smelling fog descended upon the city every night. Even now, in the daylight, the sky was a hazy, indistinct grey, as if viewed through a dirty pane of glass.

Thankfully, though the night revealed three moons, the day revealed only one sun. I was genuinely afraid I might look up and see a chaotic trio of stars, a system destined for a fiery, screaming destruction. The sun's weak, watery light filtered through the thin layer of smog, casting a pale, sickly warmth on the ground below, slowly chasing away the lingering, damp chill of the night. All around us, the city was stirring, its people emerging from their hovels to begin their daily toil. Dragging my eyes away from the grand, terrible vista, I focused on my immediate surroundings. A chaotic, labyrinthine sprawl of tin shanties stretched out before me, a sea of rust and decay. There were no straight roads here, just a tangled mess of uneven, makeshift dwellings that seemed to have grown organically from the filth. This was the workers' slum. These were the homes of the men and women who toiled in the factories. They were a step above the dregs we had left behind in the sewer, with a slightly more stable income, a slightly less precarious hold on existence. The two slums were different in character—one a haven for the idle and the criminal, nestled in the dark, forgotten corners of the city; the other a teeming, noisy warren for the laboring poor, clinging to the flanks of the very factories that consumed their lives. But the people themselves, I suspected, were much the same, separated only by a sliver of luck, a single bad day away from swapping one miserable existence for another.