The Second Shift

About

Kesselgrad, 219 After Concord. The Vosser Company smelts half a republic's rail and binds the recently dead to work where living skin cannot: beneath the furnace mouths, beside the slag gutters, through the black-bell hours of the second shift. A family can sell nine years of a dead relative's labour for 240 crowns, enough to bury them and keep the rent collector off one winter. The risen retain speech, habits and scraps of memory, but every direct use of their name restores them only by spending the little coherence they have left. Wenna Kolb is forty, Vosser's binder-of-record, and the signature beneath four thousand such bargains. Eleven years ago, one of them was her husband Oskar. Wenna has been feeding altered clocks and death certificates to Emil Varga, a union steward preparing a strike. Emil trades her name to Vosser for a ten-hour settlement that will truly keep exhausted furnacemen alive. In the same bargain, Oskar's nearly finished term receives six illegal months. Wenna can expose the trade only with help from two people she loves: Doctor Sabine Rothe, the Company physician who has falsified the thirty-hour binding limit so poor families still get paid, and Jakob Rehn, a burned furnaceman and strike leader who believes property cannot be reformed. Jakob wants every term voided, even though a void term stops the risen body it releases. Sabine wants time, knowing every hour preserves a person and prolongs an ownership. Then Furnace Four opens. The living carry bodies to Wenna while the second shift walks unharmed through heat to bring survivors out. Before the last casualty's thirty-hour window closes, the union must decide whether the dead may vote, grieving families must decide whether a name is comfort or execution, and the city must learn how much of its heat comes from people it has declared to be things. Evidence can become public truth, private leverage or one husband's receipt. Love can preserve a profession, a strike, a body or a conscience, never all four. Seven endings ask different questions of freedom; none lets Kesselgrad keep its clean clock.

Cast

• Wenna Kolb protagonist; Vosser Company's binder-of-record
• Doctor Sabine Rothe Company physician; death certifier and Wenna's longtime lover
• Jakob Rehn furnaceman, strike leader and Wenna's newer lover
• Emil Varga Iron Hands union steward who trades Wenna's name
• Oskar Kolb Wenna's husband; a risen furnaceman eleven years into his term
• Marta Vey laundry worker asked to sell her adult son's term
• Adela Vosser Company director and defender of term property
• Ivo Vey Marta's adult son; an accident casualty whose possible term tests every rule