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

strength, and she's as likely to shoot her mouth off as she is to obey an order."
    "Can you get her replaced?"
    That got me a shrug. "Maybe. I already asked, but the day manager says that decent people are hard to come by. He wants me to give things a go with her first. We should be okay. We'll keep an eye on things—keep the temperature on the low side of the operating range so that we have an extra safety margin to work with—and then you, me and Billy will all stop by the telegraph every chance we get to check that she's passing on the messages. You'll be working the area closest to the doors though, so it will mostly fall to you to keep an eye on her."
    The thought of being in the pipe room if a pipe burst was enough to make my skin crawl. The bottom end of the generator's operating temperature was more than a hundred and fifty degrees. The pipes were supposed to be rated for three hundred and fifty degrees, which meant that a pipe that got too hot and burst from the resulting pressure was going to be unleashing scalding water on anyone in the vicinity.
    If I'd been the team leader I would have given the day manager a piece of my mind, but Beth knew a lot more about the way the system worked than I did.
    "Okay, if you're sure it's safe. I'll do my best to keep an eye on her."
    "You're a smart girl, Skye. You and I both know that there isn't anything safe about any part of this process. Brennan is the smartest man in the city—maybe the smartest man on the whole continent—but he's figuring this out as he goes. We have accidents all of the time. For every thing he anticipates there's at least two more that he doesn't see coming—mostly interactions between complex systems. Sometimes grunts like you and me see the issues developing and can head them off, sometimes we can't. There's a reason that Tyrell drops off a body or two every morning and comes back in with an equal number of new recruits. None of this is safe."
    "I thought it was mostly people who weren't paying attention who were getting killed."
    "Tyrell say that?"
    "I'm not sure—maybe."
    "There's some of that happening, but that's not the only reason that people are dying."
    "If this is all so dangerous how come you're still here?"
    Beth grinned. "Same reason you are. Here's no more dangerous than out there. At least here we don't have to worry about being murdered or raped. Besides, maybe the two of them are right and we can finally put the hurt on those ants. Bombing runs killed both of my children when they weren't any older than you are right now. I'd give a lot to be a part of something that evens the score between us and them."
    I tried to fake an enthusiastic smile, but it was harder than I'd expected. Being told it was going to be hard to keep my emotional distance from a bunch of grubbers wasn't quite the same as actually living among them and sharing life-threatening risks. Maybe I was more like Megan than I'd realized. On some level, I hadn't really thought of the grubbers as people. I'd expected them to all be like Piter and Bash, but so far a lot more of them had ended up like Beth and the three people—Sally, Jack and Donner—who'd covered for me back in the bucket brigade.
    I knew that Brennan had to be stopped—the lives of all of the people inside this city weren't any more important than the citizens, franchised or otherwise, back behind the barrier—but I was starting to realize just how much death and destruction ultimately needed to be laid at Brennan's feet. There were more reasons than I'd originally realized to make sure that I was successful with this mission.
    Billy arrived a couple of minutes after Beth and I finished our conversation, but Del and Jerome were a full twenty minutes late, which meant that two of the workers from the night shift had to stay late. I could see Beth getting hotter and hotter under the collar with every minute that passed after the official start time, and I was pretty sure that she was going to have