Chapter 20: Child Labour

I stretched my arms and legs, testing their newfound strength. It was a definite improvement. Though the sleeves of the oversized shirt still hung past my wrists, my legs were free to move. I had no intention of wearing trousers again any time soon, especially not ones that had belonged to someone else. The thought was still… unsettlingly intimate.

After my trip to the privy, I felt remarkably clear-headed, but a strange thought occurred to me. I had eaten far more than I had drunk last night, wolfing down a mountain of expired, foul-tasting food, yet I felt no stomach ache, no urgent need to relieve myself further. In fact, despite having emptied most of Jared's hard-won stash, a strange, hollow emptiness remained inside me, a void that all that food had failed to fill. I was still hungry.

“That food from yesterday… there isn’t much left, is there?” I asked Jared, the reality of our situation settling in. “What will we do?”

“Nothing for it,” he said with a resigned sigh, his voice the pragmatic murmur of a survivor. “I’ll have to go thieving again today. It’s too early now, all the shops are alert. I’ll wait till dusk, hit the bakeries. They’re always careless with the loaves that didn’t sell at day's end.”

“You should wear your own trousers, then,” I said, pointing to the overalls he now held. “You’ll move easier. The shirt shouldn’t get in your way if you roll up the sleeves.”

 “Oh, and could you ask around?” I added, the memory of the foul water still fresh in my mind. “See if there’s a well nearby?” This was a critical problem. Even someone as tough and accustomed to hardship as Jared wouldn’t last long drinking that poison.

“Alright, I’ll ask,” he said, heading over to a group of young, weary-looking workers who were sharing a bit of bread before their shift began. Child labourers. Another piece of this grim world's puzzle slotted into place. There were no laws against child labour here. I didn’t know if this was a global standard or unique to this city, but it was undoubtedly a sign of a backward, brutal society. A single healthy adult could do the work of four or five children, and do it better. Employing children, working them to the bone, meant exploiting their bodies, stealing their futures, and ultimately wasting the city's potential workforce. The factory owners, in their short-sighted greed, were clearly fools, devouring the city's future for today's profit. But the real mystery was the silence from on high. Where was the government in all this? What kind of city let its own children be fed to the machines? And the children themselves… looking at their gaunt, soot-stained faces, I guessed they were like Jared and me: orphans, with no one to care for them, no other way to survive in this unforgiving world. But that raised another, darker question: where did all these orphans come from? Did parents here simply cast their children aside like so much refuse? The more I saw of this world, the more questions I had, and the more a deep, pervasive sense of wrongness settled in my soul.

Jared had already asked several of the children, but none of them knew of a well nearby, shaking their heads with listless indifference. I figured I should try as well. Now that I could speak, I couldn't let him do all the work, bear all the burdens. I dredged up the words from Parula’s fragmented memory, approached a young girl with a soot-stained face, and asked my question in the most polite, gentle tone I could manage. She gave me a long, hostile stare, her eyes raking over my too-clean shirt and my strangely formal words, before she simply turned her back on me and walked away. Was it my attitude? Confused, I tried a few more people. The most I got was a curt shake of the head and a mumbled "dunno." My politeness, my way of speaking, it marked me as an outsider, someone not to be trusted in a world where trust was a dangerous luxury.

Just then, I noticed a crowd of workers gathering nearby, their murmurs a low hum beneath the roar of the factories. Curious, I shuffled closer to see what the commotion was about. Squeezing my way through the throng of grimy, weary bodies, I saw him. In the center of the crowd, in a small, clear space that the surrounding filth seemed afraid to touch, stood a gentleman, impeccably, almost absurdly, dressed. He wore a pristine black top hat and a perfectly tailored tailcoat, carried a polished, silver-topped cane, sported a meticulously waxed mustache, and—to top it all off—had a gleaming monocle screwed into one eye, through which he surveyed the crowd with an air of detached amusement. My mind flooded with a thousand sarcastic remarks. It was perfect. Too perfect. He was the quintessential, top-hatted industrialist, a caricature of wealth and power ripped straight from the pages of a political pamphlet.