Thanks to the maid, by the next morning Lena and Ryff were an official couple. The status bought them each their share of winks, smiles, and comments. But it brought Lena one very unexpected thing: a person to start the revolt.
Lena was posted as out-patient supervisor. Which was a fancy way of saying she took care of the Breeders after the women in the lab did their work. Some of the girls she treated, Lena was horrified to find, couldn't have been more than fifteen, but, as she was informed by her supervisor, things worked differently at a factory three times Sherman's size.
"You're Trian, aren't you?" one of the Breeder's asked as Lena skimmed her chart. Something in her voice reminded Lena of herself and, though she wasn't supposed to talk to Breeders except in an emergency, looked up.
"Yes," Lena replied. The girl, who really could have been a girl, not looking over fifteen, had the short hair of all Worker women, but there was a ragged, rebellious look to the girl's face that even the hair couldn't erase.
"The one who hooked up with that new overseer, Ren or something," the girl continued, as if stating a fact.
"So they say," Lena replied, eyeing the girl suspiciously.
"It's amazing you can work in the labs then," the girl sneered. "Must take a lot of upper class blood in you to deny other women what you have."
Lena, as a supervisor, could well have ordered the girl killed for any number of things. But Lena, a Worker at heart, didn't. Instead, she smiled, which scared the girl much more than any punishment could have. "What's your name?"
"3519221-16," the girl replied, returning the look Lena had given her a few moments ago.
"You're name, not your ID," Lena replied, cursing herself mentally as the girl went white. "No, I don't see Workers as animals," she snapped. "You have a name, tell it to me!"
"Elle," the girl replied. "And what does a high and mighty upper class woman care about a lowly worker's name anyway?"
Lena didn't reply, she would do that later. Instead, she wheeled a protesting Elle's bed into the room reserved for "disruptive" patients. "Oh, I see," Elle snarled once the door was closed, "you have to get a certain number of "disruptive" Workers in here to prove you're doing your part to keep us subdued."
Lena chuckled. "Nice guess, but no. Actually, I brought you in here to talk to you."
Elle choked out a laugh. "To talk to me? You're risking your job to talk to me?"
"No," Lena corrected her with a smile, "I'm in here disciplining you, not talking to you. The supervisor will never know."
"Why?" Elle scoffed. "Why go through so much trouble to yell at me in here when you can just yell at me out there?"
"Look, I'm not going to yell at you," Lena insisted finally before the girl could continue. "I want to help you."
"Really?" Elle asked, her voice dripping with sarcasm. "You do? Awwe, how cute, the noble little rich girl making life better for her slaves. Sorry. Find someone else to care about."
"I'm not trying to be noble," Lena told her, "and I'm certainly no little rich girl. I'm a Worker, well, I was anyway, until my factory burned down."
Elle burst out laughing. "Sure, and I'm the owner's daughter! There were only two survivors from the Sherman factory fire and they were an upper class couple."
"You're looking at one of them," Lena told her. "And believe me, we made sure there would be no upper class survivors."
"'We'?" Elle scoffed.
"Yes we," Lena snapped. "The Workers! Of course, Ryff and I didn't tell anyone, but that was supposed to be the start of the second revolt. None of us counted on them being able to send the place up in flames though, damn upper class."
"So tell me this, even if I believed that story, how does a Worker become upper class?" Elle asked.
"Our ID's were burned off in the fire. See that burn," she pulled down the collar of her lab coat to show the red patch of skin, "that's where it was. When they found us without ID's, what else could we have been?"
"So, I'm guessing your name isn't Trian," Elle said after a moment.
"Lena, actually. ID number 2700584-9, in case you care," Lena replied. "Trian was my friend who died in the revolt."
"And Ren's name probably isn't Ren is it?" Elle sighed.
"He's Ryff," Lena replied. A huge weight dissapeared as she said their real names out loud again, she felt a little less like a traitor to her class.
"And how do I know this is not just a trick?" Elle asked, suspicious again.
Lena nodded grimly. "I would have thought that too." She reached down into the inside pocket of her lab coat and produced a paper thin knife. "If it is, you can find me and kill me with this."
Elle took the knife gingerly, wary about anything that came from an upper class hand. "Kind of risky, isn't it?" Elle asked with a grin. "Giving a knife to a Worker?"
Lena shrugged. "Not to me."
This time, the revolt took only two weeks to plan. It helped that the Workers of this factory were on the brink of revolting without Ryff and Lena's help anyway. It also helped that Lena and Ryff, as upper class, had access to weapons stores and other important places, which made planning a revolt much easier. Elle had her own little band, both men and women, who eagerly helped to organize it, giving lessons in dorms, which Ryff was the night guard of, of course, and in the recovery rooms of the labs where Lena supervised the women's activities. Both Ryff and Lena, of course, reported to their supervisors that the Workers were as happy and docile as ever.
Three weeks after Lena's first meeting with Elle, when the revolt had been ready to launch for a week, however, the Workers began to get restless. "They want to launch it now, Lena," Elle reported to her.
"Well tell them we're not ready yet!" Ryff told her angrily. "If we launch it to early, it could fail. We have to wait."
"What are we waiting for?" Elle demanded. "For a Worker, you sure act like upper class some time, Ryff."
"Elle, you want to win, right?" Lena reasoned. "We have to make sure the owner doesn't suspect anything so he'll agree to turn off the gas for a night. It takes two days for it to get back up to full potency again, so there's no danger of them using it during the revolt. But until then, it is much too dangerous!"
Elle sighed. "Maybe. But you'd better convince the owner quick. We're ready to fight back, gas or no gas."
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