Chương 157: Book 3 - Chapter 4 - Foreclosed

The heat within the district was oppressive. Most of the people stripped off their outer layers as soon as they crossed the bridge. I didn't find it that bad. Helen just scowled as she stripped her ratty old coat off, exposing the fact that she'd run grease or something through her golden-blond hair earlier to blend in better.

"How can you not be hot?" she hissed.

"If I had to guess, it would have to do with the fact that I had all my organs replaced recently," I replied flippantly. Helen paused and looked at me in confusion.

"Why would you do that?"

"Had to, the old ones were kinda… paste at the time," I said, casually inspecting the area.

"I'm actually a little glad we didn't come to direct blows. You say some scary shit sometimes," Helen muttered. We were just inside the entrance to the industrial district, and I could already see how serious the corps took this place. Each of the separate smelters was fenced off and separated from the main road, and just inside each of the compounds was a mixture of cameras and guards. There were checkpoints at the exits to most places, performing patdown searches of the workers, even at the smelters.

"I can see why they'd want to rebel," I muttered.

"None of that talk! They're super sensitive to that sort of thing right now," Helen warned as she tied her jacket around her waist.

"Now then, shall we try and find my contact?"

"Sure, assuming they haven't been arrested and beaten half to death for not having their shoes tied correctly," I replied. Helen snorted.

"Despite how things look, the corps aren't that bad on their employees. Work hard, don't do anything stupid, and you get paid," she said as she started moving further down the road.

"You're right," I grumbled, "it's a true corporate paradise." I had to slip around a particularly large group of people hauling tools across the next intersection before catching up to Helen again.

"Where exactly are we going?"

"Floor ten, the former Global Rare-Earth manufacturing district," Helen explained. I finally noticed that we were headed toward a massive bank of industrial lifts. Each one could probably hold a hundred people, and each one was packed over capacity both up and down. I struggled against the horde of sweating bodies in order to hold onto my place against the railing for several long moments before the lift filled, the barriers closed, and the entire thing shook, struggling to climb to the higher floors.

I honestly thought we weren't going to make it when the lift dropped a couple feet midway up, but everyone else acted like this was a perfectly normal occurrence. Sure enough, a few minutes later the lift shuddered heavily as it slid to a stop at floor ten. I could not get off fast enough.

"I see the corps haven't bothered to maintain those deathtraps they call lifts anymore than in any of the other sectors," I huffed as I slid away from the area.

"Yet the ones here only suffer a single failure a year, which is a marked improvement," Helen explained. I hadn't seen her step next to me, which I didn't find that surprising anymore. I originally thought the upper streets in the industrial sector were in better shape than elsewhere in the undercity, but I was wrong. The concrete and asphalt had still fallen away in many places, only to be haphazardly patched by large metal grate systems.

There were still holes that you could easily step in, falling to your death, but they were, for the most part, passable. As we made our way down the street, the hot air pushing the pollution up through the grates as we passed, I noticed the streets were slowly emptying of people. There were plenty of factories in the direction we were traveling, it just seemed like no one else was traveling there. I gave Helen a concerned look.

"Global Rare-earth's properties have been shut down temporarily until they can be sold to cover the bankruptcy proceedings," Helen explained.

"How is wandering into an abandoned factory and talking to your contact NOT attracting attention to ourselves?" I asked.

"The other corps must have security watching the place for looters." If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

"But we're allowed to be here!" Helen exclaimed.

"I'm the facility inspector, and you're my assistant!" She whipped out a little badge and flashed it in front of me.

"Looks fake to me," I muttered.

"Well, it doesn't matter. I'm actually a registered facility inspector, thanks to Zetta, so even though the security might stop us, they'll eventually have to let us go." As she said this, we passed the final working factory and into an entire shutdown section. Compared to all the well-lit, noisy, and completely packed factories before now, this place was a ghost town. None of the factories in this section had lights on, but many of them had security, which eyed us suspiciously as we passed.

"We're looking for the Global Wiring complex," Helen said, stopping to check the sign next to one of the factories.

"Don't you know which one that is?"

"Of course I do, but it's best we look like tourists when the security comes by," Helen replied calmly as a hover car approached our position. It didn't land, but floated out of reach, and someone yelled at us out of the loudspeaker.

"Identify yourselves! This area is off limits until further notice!" Helen just waved like a ditz and stumbled towards the patrol car.

"Hi, Hello! I'm Tracy Holmes, the facility inspector for Trans Pacific Power, and this is my assistant. We're here for a scheduled inspection of the Global Rare-earth wiring complex, but we're having trouble finding it."

"Stand-by," came the cold reply. I just stared at Helen as she stood there, tapping a foot and pouting. It was like I was looking at a completely different woman.

"Your identity has been confirmed. Your destination is three complexes up on the left."

"Thaaaanks!" Helen yelled as she bounced around, waving at the car. As soon as it was gone, she stretched and dropped back into her regular mannerisms.

"What the fuck was that?" I asked incredulously. Helen smiled.

"There are limits to what my perception filtering can do. It'll hide my face from cameras and scramble my voice, but when I'm the focus of attention, I like to change my mannerisms. That way they have absolutely nothing to go on if they want to track me down later."

"Well, aren't you full of surprises?" I grumbled.

"Too bad you decided the best way to protect the undercity was genocide."

"Not everyone has access to enough points to build an army of killbots," Helen suddenly hissed, dropping her happy facade for the first time since we met up.

"I did what I thought was necessary to protect my people." I narrowed my eyes at the woman.

"There's the Helen I remember. I was honestly beginning to think they'd brainwashed you instead of putting you into therapy."

"Shut up, you gremlin. My plans were the best chance for the undercity to survive, until you showed up," Helen grumbled before turning to jump across a gap in the pavement.

"But I DID show up," I reminded her, as I effortlessly hurdled the gap myself.

"Yes, you did," she replied quietly before going silent. I followed her for a few hundred more meters until we came to an absolutely titanic complex. There were several dozen loading docks in the center of a couple separate wings of the building, and from what I could tell, there appeared to be some sort of lift system to bring in raw materials from below. Helen simply hopped the security barrier at the front and headed towards the nearest entrance.

"We're looking for the former foreman, a friend of mine named Andrew Moore. He's looking after the facility while it's in liquidation," Helen said as she tested the door.

"He has a lot of contacts in the industrial area and was investigating after a couple of them got hurt in the last riot. If anyone knows what's happening around here, it's him." She fiddled with the door for a few more seconds, until I heard a click, then she stepped inside. The factory was cavernous, with multiple floors of manufacturing equipment and conveyor belts, all converging in our general area.

There was a small, multilevel office building a few feet away, and Helen immediately made a beeline for the building.

"Alex, are you here?" she called quietly. The entire complex was quiet, even though our footsteps echoed loudly about the space, I couldn't hear any movement from the small building. I was getting a bad feeling about this. When Helen got to the entrance to the building, she paused and just stood there for a minute. I had to peek around her to see inside. Her friend was dead, and not only that but it looked like he'd been tortured.

He'd been tied to a chair and beaten ferociously before having his throat slit, then a message pinned to his chest with a knife. I carefully pulled the note loose while Helen checked over her friend. The note looked like it had been printed from the office printer, and it just contained a single line.

'Enemies of the revolution will die!' I immediately crumpled the note.

"We'll see about that."