Gilded Cage (Dark Gifts #1)(58)

And Luke had somehow come up with the most ambitious plan of all – a day-long walkout that would shut down Zone D.

It was distinctly more daunting than his lifetime achievements thus far: getting picked for the senior footie team, running his class project for the community festival and nailing varial kickflips on his skateboard. He couldn’t simply go asking people to join a shutdown. Security would nobble him in no time. And even if they didn’t, who would follow such a risky scheme, led by a seventeen-year-old boy? But Luke had an idea where to begin.

He knew his colleagues in Zone D by now. He’d noticed the ones who talked loudest in the canteen queue. The ones who always had a bunch of blokes around them, squeezing in some banter and camaraderie despite a schedule designed to make it impossible.

One of them was a guy named Declan, who had known Si’s Uncle Jimmy. It was a thin connecting thread, but it would help Luke find a way deeper into the network of trust and friendship that existed among his workmates. Passed from man to man, word of an insurrection would spread.

For the first time he was grateful for the din of Zone D, because otherwise Declan would surely hear the pounding of his heart, louder than any machinery. Luke tugged the man’s sleeve as they passed near the storeroom, and drew him to one side.

‘What do you think of this shutdown I keep hearing about?’ Luke said. ‘Sounds brilliant, but scary. Are you in?’

Declan looked blank, because of course there was no shutdown, not yet, and no talk – though there would be soon. So Luke outlined his plan as if it was something he’d been told, and Declan listened with interest.

‘We’ve not heard about it in the shakeout room,’ he responded. ‘Must be some hothead in components stirring it up. But it’s a sweet idea. Teach the Overbitch a lesson for denying us even a word from our families at Christmas. Not to mention those patrols crawling everywhere these days. The third Friday, you say? Lemme check with the others.’

And when Luke saw Declan next, the man reported that though none of his colleagues had heard of the shutdown either, they’d all be well up for it.

‘It’s not like they can punish us all,’ Declan said, gripping Luke’s shoulder reassuringly. ‘So hold your nerve and come in with us, lad.’

‘You know what?’ Luke said, grinning. ‘I think I will.’

The first of January came and went with no fireworks. There’d be some soon. Just not the kind the Overseer and the Equals were expecting.

Luke had a few more conversations. It wasn’t long before the responses of those he spoke to began to change. They’d heard about the shutdown too, he was told. Loads of the guys had. Everyone was up for it.

The weather was unvarying from one dreary day to the next, but by the middle of the month the atmosphere in Zone D and across Millmoor had shifted in some intangible but important way. Then the week of the club’s party arrived.

Monday morning, Williams muttered something inaudible as he and Luke operated their station’s clattering gears.

‘Sorry?’

‘Have you heard?’ Williams repeated, looking like he wanted to bite off his own tongue.

‘Heard what?’

Luke looked away, tracking the slow progress of the massive piece of metal now swinging over their heads. Maybe if Williams wasn’t being watched, he could kid himself he wasn’t actually speaking either. Trees falling in the woods and all that.

‘No show. Friday. You in?’

‘Yeah. You?’

There was a long pause. Together they unlatched the safety clasps and released the massive component into the cradle. Luke licked at the sweat that trickled along his upper lip, and tasted metal.

‘Yeah.’

The man sounded terrified, but Luke couldn’t suppress his jubilation. Now that even a timid, trouble-averse bloke like Williams knew of the walkout, word must have gone round the whole of Zone D.

And Luke had talked it into existence.

Thinking about that made his head spin. It was almost like Skill – conjuring up something out of nothing.

‘There’s no magic more powerful than the human spirit,’ Jackson had said at the third and final club meeting. Luke was beginning to dare to hope that was true.

As he and Williams moved in smooth partnership around their workstation, Luke wondered how the others were getting on with their schemes.

Mostly, it was on-the-day stuff. They’d run through it all at that last get-together. Hilda and Tilda were going to reset the electronic pricing inventory across Millmoor’s stores, so that no credit was deducted from anyone’s account for purchases made. Hopefully word would spread quickly on the day and the shops would be besieged. Renie was sabotaging Security’s vehicle pool – ‘a little knife-in-tyres jobby’, she’d called it – while Asif would have fun with the hated public broadcast system.

‘I’ll tune it to Radio Free For All,’ he announced, referring to an online channel believed to operate from a canal boat in the Netherlands. ‘Nothing like some C-pop with your agitprop.’

Luke groaned. ‘Just promise me you’ll pull the plug if they start playing “Happy Panda”.’

For an instant, his memory catapulted him back to last summer: Daisy and her pals prancing round the garden singing in atrocious Chinese. It was almost Luke’s final memory of life before Millmoor. It was only half a year ago, but it felt as distant as the Equal history he’d been cramming that day.