The Society (A Broken World Book 1) by Dean Murray

human lives controlled in the inner territories was completely eclipsed by the wealth generated by the farms and lumber operations on the edge of the cities.
    Brennan's compound was different. There was an array of priceless solar panels stationed on the top of his headquarters building, but they had primarily been used to bootstrap him up to the compound's current method of power generation, a large, two-stage geothermal facility.
    The first stage drew heat up from several miles below the surface of the earth and converted it into electricity, which was then used to power a small foundry buried several hundred feet underground. The second stage involved harvesting the waste heat off of the foundry and using it to generate additional electricity. That was where I was stationed, along with two of the other workers who'd joined up on the same day as me.
    Back home a facility like this would have been fully automated so as to ensure that no human life would be lost in the event of a disaster, but I hadn't seen a working computer since I'd landed inside the city. Instead, Brennan and his foremen were using barely trained men and women to keep the geothermal plant running.
    Each stage of the process was fraught with danger. Brennan had managed to drill down far enough that the temperatures in each of the main shafts was more than hot enough to boil water. The individuals in the first stage were responsible for regulating the flow of cold water to keep the generator operating at peak temperatures. That regulation was done by way of old-fashioned valves mounted on more than a dozen different pipes, and a round-the-clock watch had to be maintained to make sure that the temperatures didn't rise to dangerous levels.
    The foundry was dangerous simply because they were working with metal that had been heated to a temperature measured in the thousands of degrees. Unlike normal foundries, this one was underground, which meant that there wasn't any easy escape for all of that heat.
    Instead, the heat emitted by the molten metal was absorbed into the rock walls around the foundry and then shunted away with cold water piped in from above. The hot water rising back to the top of the loop then ended up in the second stage of the geothermal power generation facility.
    Those of us in the second stage weren't in quite as much danger as the people in the foundry, but we had just as much or more responsibility. If we didn't correctly regulate the flow of water into the coolant headed down into the foundry, then everyone down there would die. If we dumped too much cold water down the pipes, then the secondary power generator stopped working and power that the rest of the compound was depending on disappeared.
    That would have been plenty bad enough all by itself, but the added complexity driven by the hot water coming up from the stage one power generating facility meant that we were often juggling multiple variables with nothing more sophisticated than a few old-fashioned mercury thermometers and an ancient telegraph.
    The crew I was working with was a mixed bag. Our team lead was a serious, silver-haired woman named Beth who'd been running the night shift inside of phase two for more than three months. Her right-hand man was a guy named Billy.
    Billy rarely said more than two words at a time, but the two of them had a near-perfect ability to anticipate what the other needed at any given moment in order to keep the various pipes from getting too hot.
    Those two were the good part of my new team. The two who'd joined up with me were decidedly less competent. Jerome was roughly the size of a house—an amazing feat for someone who'd grown up in the food-poor interior of the city. I suspected that he'd served as an enforcer for one or more of the other warlords before moving into Brennan's territory. He was only marginally smarter than a rock, which made me question the wisdom of putting him in such a critical location, but there was no denying the fact