“Come on,” Enne said. Their hands still clasped, she pulled Lola through the crowd and toward the generator. Stepping on a lever, Enne climbed onto the huge mechanical cylinder and hoisted herself up.
“You’re shatz,” Lola breathed once she realized Enne’s plan. She stared at the kids near the ceiling with wide eyes.
But then she reached up and grasped Enne’s hand, and Enne pulled her up. After a few moments of hesitation, Lola jumped to the column. She landed awkwardly on one foot but managed to steady herself.
Enne leaped and landed behind her. Lola scrambled up with her arms wrapped around the pole so tightly that her shirt bunched around her neck, exposing part of her stomach.
“You need to climb faster,” Enne urged. “Before they notice us.”
The whiteboots had reached the crowd. One of them grabbed a girl by her hair and pulled her down to her knees. Others pointed their clubs at the wide-eyed customers, who raised their arms in surrender. In the front, a group of men pounded against the closed door and screamed.
Enne swung herself around the angled pole, her back facing down, and climbed the opposite column with her legs wrapped around the beam. Now she wouldn’t need to wait for Lola to move faster. The bolts on the side of the column were large enough to grasp.
Enne made it to one of the metal rafters near the ceiling. It wasn’t until she’d seized it and swung her legs over that she looked down. The climb hadn’t appeared quite so high from the ground. Lola, on the other hand, seemed all too aware of this. She climbed to the steady rhythm of, “Muck, muck, muck.”
At least a dozen children huddled on the rafters, some as young as seven. They watched Enne in fascination and nervousness as she stood—she probably looked rather intimidating in her black mask. Below, a few people pointed at her,sawher. Enne was reminded once again that she was no longer invisible. She was powerful—but she was also vulnerable.
Lola appeared several feet away, dripping sweat. She hauled herself up with all the gracefulness of a walrus. “Shatz. You’re shatz.”
Enne ignored her and calculated the route to the window that she’d seen the boy escape from earlier. Then she realized why the other children hadn’t moved: there was a twelve-foot gap between their beam and the one near the window. A huge black cord spanned across the distance, pulled taut. Several kids on either side worked to knot it to the closest beams.
A tightrope.
Lola blanched. “There’s nomuckingway.”
“How did they already get over there?” Enne asked the kids.
“They came in from there. From the roof,” answered a girl with waist-length black hair. She looked to be about eleven. “We took the stairs.” She nodded to the opposite end of the factory, where a stairwell climbed most of the way up a corner wall to reach an office level. Enne hadn’t seen it, being so far away, with all the whiteboots between here and there. She and Lola had taken a more strenuous route. No wonder the kids had looked at them with such amazement.
“We should just wait,” Lola said, her voice shaking. “The whiteboots will leave eventually.”
“Or come up eventually,” the girl muttered.
Enne looked down again. Several of the whiteboots already stood still, watching them, waiting them out.
“The whiteboots will be gentle with you,” Enne told the girl. “You’re all young, what could they—”
The girl shook her head and showed Enne her hands. They were covered in scars. Enne realized all of them bore matching marks. They werechildren.
“We just swore,” the girl explained. “Eight Fingers never let us, but Scavenger did.”
Which meant all of them—not just Lola—were in danger.
Enne inched over to the cord. No net to catch her here.
“You could just wrap your legs around the cord and hang upside down,” Enne said as Lola crawled on her stomach closer to her, her chin pressed against the cool metal of the rafter. She looked absurd, all trembling and pale. Then Enne realized that maybe it wasshewho looked absurd, confident enough to stand and give direction.
“There are holes in the wire,” Lola said, indicating several bare patches with no covering. At the cord’s other end, it was plugged into a machine on the ceiling. “That might be on. Touch it, and you’re fried.”
“Rubber soles,” Enne reminded her. She flicked the cord in a safe spot. It wasn’t perfectly taut, but the give wasn’t severe.
“Fall and you die,” Lola countered.
“Then use your clothes.”
The black-haired girl slid off her jacket. She carefully walked around Enne, then slipped her coat over the cord and wrapped both sleeves around her wrists and clenched hands.
“You’re actually doing that?” hissed the boy beside her. He had swollen cheeks, like he’d recently had a tooth pulled.
