Read Online The Factory Trilogy 01 - Gleam by Tom Fletcher - Free Book Online

call you Angry Alan, not Wild Alan.’
    ‘Where did you hear they call me that?’
    ‘Mum. And school. I said it before.’
    Alan laughed again. ‘Well,’ he said. He put an arm round Billy. The whisky was making him feel loose-limbed. ‘Modest Mills was a hot little town – all the Discard is hot, there isn’t the breeze you lot have up here – made out of white stone and brick and wood, and there were bright little birds flitting around everywhere. The market never closed, rows and rows of stalls with canopies all the colours you can imagine, all the traders shouting all day and the singers singing all night. I wanted to be a Modest Mills singer. Even then I knew that girls liked singers. I don’t know why that mattered to me back then – I was only your age – but it did. I wanted the attention, the costumes, the power – I didn’t know what the power was but I could
feel
it. Some singers could juststop everybody dead. It was a kind of magic. It was a magic that was real, that I could learn.’
    ‘You’re a singer now.’
    ‘Yeah, but not a very good one.’
    ‘What happened to it? To the town? Did Discarders come and kill everyone? Did they burn it down? Weren’t you scared of the Discarders, anyway? And weren’t there any swamp monsters? Teacher Grumblepip says that most Discarders die before they’re forty because of swamp monsters, but here in the Pyramid we all live to be a hundred. Was it the monsters that got the town?’
    ‘No, Billy. If it was Discarders, or swamp monsters, then likely they’d have made it a big part of your lessons. It was Pyramidders who destroyed Modest Mills. And they didn’t just destroy the buildings. They destroyed the people. A load of Arbitrators swept out of some low gate, all armoured up like nothing I’d ever seen, all shining darkly like bronze statues, and they tore through the streets with knives and with fire and with chaos and they killed every last citizen.’ He lit another roll-up. ‘Well. Almost. All but one.’
    Billy didn’t say anything.
    ‘Maybe you don’t believe me. I know what they tell you in this place. I know what they tell you about the Discard. I know how wise and magnificent they appear. I know that what I’m telling you sounds impossible. But it’s true. I watched Pyramidders slaughter my friends and family, Billy. I saw them kill little children. I saw …’ Hestopped. ‘I won’t tell you everything I saw, but it made me very sad, and very angry too, and even though one of the Arbitrators scooped me up and carried me back inside, and even though the Pyramidders fed me and watered me and taught me and bathed me and sheltered me, I stayed angry, and I have been angry ever since, Billy. Even though I met your mother and fell in love I stayed angry. And we had you, and you were such a joy, such a tonic, but I was still angry. And it was being angry that got me exiled. I shouted at people and asked questions and I mistrusted the Teachers, and the work that the Administrators and Alchemists and Astronomers made us all do drove me mad. I told others how Modest Mills had been razed to the ground. I wrote it down. I sang songs about it in the plazas, and when the Arbitrators came and locked me up for singing, I wrote songs about that. And then I sang those songs. The next time they didn’t just lock me up, they broke my nose.’
    ‘The Arbitrators don’t hurt people, though.’ Billy’s voice was quiet. ‘They’re there to help citizens and resolve disputes.’
    ‘When I sang songs about them beating me up, the Arbitrators visited our home. I wasn’t in. They scared your mother, they scared you.’
    ‘They’re not scary.’
    ‘They can be. They scared your mother enough for her not to let me back in.’
    ‘She said you chose to leave.’
    ‘She was right, in a way. I couldn’t see it then but I can now. I should have stopped before it got to that point. Before they threatened her. Before they threatened you. But I kept on