Free Keeper by Mal Peet Page A

‘junction.’ This was a plate of steel as long as my arm and as wide as my hand, studded with metal connectors and sprouting rubber hoses. I could not imagine what this thing was, but I didn’t like the look of it.
    As Hellman had done, Estevan felt my arm. He gave me a little glimpse of his gold tooth and told me to hold the ends of the steel plate. He then began unlocking the hose connections with a big adjustable wrench. The plate bucked as he worked at the nuts, but I put my elbows on the bench and held the thing steady. We took the whole thing to pieces. It took a long time.
    ‘What are we doing?’ I asked.
    ‘It’s cracked,’ he said.
    ‘What is?’
    Estevan sighed dramatically, a man talking to a complete imbecile. He held the stripped-down plate in front of my face. There were ten holes in it where the hoses had been. Estevan ran his finger under three of the holes. I could just see a line, like a hair, running between them.
    ‘Is it serious?’ I asked.
    He didn’t answer. He just looked at me sorrowfully, the way you might look at a dog with three legs. Then he put the faulty plate under his arm and set off down the line of workbenches. I supposed I was meant to follow him, so I did.
    The smith’s bench was bigger than the others. Sheets and bars of different metals were stacked behind it.
    The smith was a big man whose face was all beard and glasses. Estevan gave him the plate. He and the smith had a conversation that to me seemed like a violent argument, with lots of arm waving, but it ended in smiles, with the bearded man’s arm around Estevan’s shoulders.
    Estevan gestured to me in a secretive way, and I followed him around to the back of the metal sheds, where the gravel ended and the mud and ruin of the forest began. He faced this wasteland and took a long pee into it. When he had finished, he sighed with pleasure, pulled a flat bottle from his back pocket, and took a swig. Then he squatted in the shade of the sheds and became as still as a waxwork statue. I didn’t know what else to do, so I did the same.
    We sat there for an hour, I guess. I stared out at the vast expanse of water-filled craters and smoldering fires that had once been a forest. The only living things that still existed were the flies that were interested in my mouth and eyes. I wondered where everything else had gone. I suddenly realized that this was the hour of the day when I should have reported to the Keeper, and I felt a sickness, a guilt, a twist of misery in my guts. I imagined him standing in the clearing, looking around with his shadowed eyes, waiting for me. I put my forehead on my knees and tried to give up hope.
    Estevan stood up; an alarm clock that nobody else could hear had gone off in his dark head. He stretched and looked around, and seemed slightly surprised to see me there.
    ‘Come,’ he said. ‘Let’s see if that hairy-faced so-called smith has cut our plate.’
    The new steel plate — blank, with no holes, and no cracks — was waiting for us. We took it back to our bench along with the old one and spent the rest of the day drilling and building the new junction. Estevan worked with extreme care, and incredibly slowly. He said maybe ten words to me the whole time. I thought I would go crazy. I was deeply, deeply bored and completely mystified. But for my father’s sake, I struggled to stay focused. Toward the end of the day, Estevan made me use the big electric drill that was bolted to the roof of our bench. I did okay. Driving through the steel plate, the drill produced curls of metal. One touched my left hand and immediately drew blood. When this happened, Estevan smiled and nodded as if he had revealed to me one of the secrets of the universe.
    When the light began to drain from the sky, Hellman came out of his office and went to the big, gray generator at the far end of the work sheds. There was a change in the rhythm that came from the generator, and arc lights came on all around the camp. The