Bram Wolfe's Arc

Chapter 3 of 5

By noon the black bar was everywhere and nowhere. Bram counted twelve marks on his walk to the factory gate. Twelve marks, and the men beside him still shuffled through the ration line with their heads down. The symbol had spread. The anger had not. Paint on a wall did not feed anyone. He needed the crowds in the factory districts to see the mark and know it belonged to them, and he had no way to reach those crowds without showing his own face on every poster in the city. Joss found him behind the coal sheds at shift change. The painter still wore the same flecked coat, brushes in his belt, hands stained black to the wrist. He was the only man alive who had watched Bram draw the first line, and Bram still stood a half step back from him out of habit. "You've been counting walls," Joss said. "Walls don't shout." "Then tell me what does." Joss looked up. Above the sheds, past the wire, the broadcasting tower rose over the district. Speakers ringed its neck like a collar. Twice a day it pushed the ration numbers into every street. Bram had grown up under that voice. "They hear that tower whether they want to or not," Joss said. "Cut its throat for one minute. One minute of dead air over the districts. Men look up. They see the mark on the wall beside them. They put the two things together." "You can't climb it. Guards at every leg." "I don't climb. The junction box on the south leg feeds the horns. A wrench on the right coupling kills the feed for as long as it takes them to send a man down." "And me?" "You stand in the yard where the shift lets out. When the horns go quiet, you say one sentence. Not your name. One sentence about the bar. Then you walk." Bram thought of the boy who had pointed at him in the ration line. He thought of his own face on the posters at the tram gate. Then he took the wrench Joss held out. They went at the change of guard. Joss slipped between the tower legs like a man who had painted its base a hundred times. Bram waited in the yard among two hundred workers filing out under the horns. A small soot-dusted sparrow sat on the wire above him and did not move. The horns cut mid-number. Silence dropped on the yard like a dropped tray. Two hundred faces lifted. Bram stepped up on the loading block. He pointed at the black bar sprayed across the gate crest. "That mark is yours," he said. "They took the bread. Take the mark." He stepped down. The crowd did not disperse. A man near the front tore a strip of coal from the bin and drew a black line down the wall beside him. Then another man did. Then a woman. By the time the horns coughed back on, the yard wall was already ruined.