IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE FOR Oscar to concentrate on anything while he waited for his secret visit with Saige, which resulted in the following mishaps:
On Monday, he burned dinner so badly they had to throw the entire thing out and go back to East Market for something else to eat.
On Tuesday, he cut a canvas for a Wib umbrella when he was supposed to be cutting a canvas for a Spillen.
On Wednesday, he spilled an entire mug of hot coffee on the kitchen table.
On Thursday, he put his shoes on the wrong feet and didn’t notice until halfway through the day.105
And on Friday, he was so jittery that he kept dropping Bilius’s tools, over and over, until finally Bilius dismissed him altogether, and sent him over to the factories to pick up a new roll of canvas.
“You’re like a bull in a china shop,” Bilius complained loudly after narrowly escaping impalement from a pair of scissors Oscar threw across the room.
“Sorry,” Oscar said, and he really was sorry, of course, because he hadn’t meant to launch the scissors at his father.
“It’s fine, it’s fine. I’ve been meaning to send you to the factories, anyway. It will be good for you to run an errand and get the lay of the land.”106
Oscar had ridden past the factories on the bus plenty of times, but he’d never actually gotten off at the stop before. Bilius found a scrap piece of paper and drew Oscar a quick map, outlining the six factories and which one Oscar was meant to visit. He labeled each building with a letter, A through F. Bilius had drawn one of them, C, significantly larger than the others. Oscar stared at it. That must be Brawn Industries. All the other factories were leased and used by multiple companies. Brawn Industries was the only one that owned an entire building, just to themselves.
“There will be a loading dock here,” Bilius said, pointing to building D with the tip of his pencil. Oscar tried hard to pay attention. “You’ll ask for Frederika. Introduce yourself and she’ll get you what you need. Got it?”
“Got it,” Oscar mumbled.
“See you in a couple hours,” Bilius said. “And for goodness’ sake, Oscar, try not to throw any sharp objects at the bus driver, okay?”
Oscar cracked a smile at that. “I’ll try,” he said. “No promises.”
By good fortune, Oscar arrived at the bus stop just as the bus was pulling up, and he waved a hello to the driver as he took a seat near the middle of the vehicle. He studied Bilius’s map, then put it in his pocket. Now that he thought about it, he was actually happy for the distraction this errand provided. As it was, he could hardly sit still—he kept bouncing up and down in the bus seat—but at least he was out in the world and not trapped in the umbrella shop, where time sometimes seemed to slow down so much as to stop entirely. This was much better. There was a little breeze coming through the cracked-open windows and it wasn’t even raining that hard.
The bus meandered107 its way around the Toe, stopping at Bleak Beach, where a few people shuffled off and on, then swinging back around to the west side and heading north to the factories. When they reached the factory stop, Oscar filed off with a half dozen other people.
Within a minute, his throat had become scratchy, and his skin had become clammy and warm. In front of him, the factories spat their foul smoke into the air, darkening the sky above, and all around him, workers hustled and bustled, coming to and from lunch breaks and clocking in and out of shifts. There was so much energy and movement that Oscar felt a little overwhelmed, and once he’d passed buildings A and B, he took a moment to stop and get his bearings.
Building C was right in front of him. The enormous doors were thrown open, and a sign above them confirmed what Oscar had guessed, because there, in massive letters, were the words BRAWN INDUSTRIES. The building was wider and taller than any other factory, and the smoke that gushed from its smokestacks seemed to be even blacker, even thicker, even fouler. Oscar couldn’t tear his eyes away from it. How was this sort of rampant pollution even legal?
He started walking again, keeping to the right of building C, just like Bilius had instructed. Beyond building C were buildings D and E and, past those, building F. Oscar made his way around the left side of building D and found the loading dock, which was buzzing with activity. There were a few trucks being loaded with large, heavy-looking boxes, assembly lines spitting out more boxes from the belly of the building, and people everywhere who moved like bees in a hive, in a perfectly coordinated dance that seemed to make sense to them but just felt a bit like chaos to Oscar.
Footnotes
105 When he had already developed some pretty impressive blisters.
106 But Oscar didn’t really want to get the lay of the land when it came to the factories, because they had always creeped him out. Just being near them made his throat itchy (from all the smoke) and his skin sweaty (the air always seemed to be five degrees warmer over there).
107 The bus driver never seemed to be in that big of a hurry, driving slowly and sometimes taking quite random wrong turns, doubling back, and eventually continuing on again.