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

having been lubricated in years. After all, he'd asked a seventeen-year-old girl who looked like she'd spent significant chunks of her life not getting enough to eat.
    I'd been wrong. The locking wheel was poorly machined and I could feel metal grinding against metal as I tried to turn it. One of my companions, the burly twenty-year-old guy, laughed and said something dismissive.
    Under other circumstances I probably would have backed off and asked for help, but this was still a grubber domain. No matter how progressive Brennan might seem, there was still one truth that reigned supreme. You couldn't appear weak.
    I clenched my jaw and slowly increased the force I was using until the wheel finally broke loose, spinning enough to release the locks on the door.
    Tyrell patted me on the shoulder as he walked past, leading us into the foundry. "You're surprisingly strong, Skye. I think I chose well bringing you down here. You'll need to be strong to survive underground."
     
     

Chapter 8
     
    Saying that I was going to work in the foundry wasn't quite true. I was actually working above the foundry—a fact that kept me up more nights than I wanted to think about.
    The city was powered by a mix of generation sources. Wood, wind, solar, gravity-fed turbines from water captured on the roofs of buildings more than a hundred stories tall, it was all in the mix, but none of it was very plentiful.
    I knew from my pre-mission briefings that the solar and wind generators were all the better part of a hundred and fifty years old, and with every passing year the city's generation abilities dropped. Old age claimed many of the panels and windmills, but the biggest cause of the loss was bombing runs like the one that had been used to cover my arrival.
    The Society was in a tough position. We wanted the grubbers to become self-sufficient enough to realize that the teachings of the precepts were a better way to live, but we also couldn't allow them to become a threat to our way of life.
    If they directed their efforts towards redeveloping solar technology then we wouldn't be forced to continually bomb them. Instead they continued to focus on building better ways to kill us.
    Good old-fashioned wood-burning power generation was very much within the capabilities of all of the grubber cities, but that posed a different set of problems. It was obvious to even the least informed individual back home that the grubbers couldn't be allowed to roam freely over the face of the earth.
    The Desolation had taken place precisely because the various countries had been allowed to attack each other with a host of weapons capable of raining down destruction from half a world away. The precepts were clear that no group could be allowed to threaten the survival of our world in that manner again.
    Even if that hadn't been the case, their cities were toxic dumps—letting them range more than a day or two beyond the edges of the urbanized areas would just allow the contamination to spread.
    That meant that our drones and snipers picked them off whenever one of them stayed outside of the city after dark, which in turn meant that there wasn't a lot of wood coming into the city for fuel purposes.
    What fuel did make it into the city was fought over for use as building materials and to provide warmth in the winter, and only if there was any surplus did it then make it into the rudimentary generators that powered critical machinery like the fire suppression systems.
    It was no wonder that the warlords on the edge of the city were the most powerful. They were the ones who controlled most of the food production and all of the lumber trade. It was ironic. From what I'd been told, just two hundred years ago agriculture had taken a definite back seat with regards to the creation of wealth, a trend that had been progressing for centuries before that.
    Now everything had reversed. All of the warlords were fabulously wealthy compared to the average grubber, but the value of the