My grandfather worked at the factory in town.

He was the eldest of his siblings, so it was always understood that he would work there, as his father had before him. When his firstborn child was born, my uncle, the same was assumed for him.

The factory had operated in our town as long as anyone could remember. The lights always remained on and the smoke always poured out of the stacks. Not a person in our town could remember a day of clear sky: we had always lived beneath tendrils of grey smoke, reaching like ethereal tendrils towards the sky. On days where staff was limited and the smoke could not reach as high, it would seem to curve back down, searching for fuel. Work always returned to full production before they reached the town. Always.

The layout of the factory had likewise remained consistent. The top floor was where the stacks were maintained. Keeping them clean and clear was a full-time job for multiple people.

The next floor filtered debris from the stacks. Those that cleaned out the stacks threw the waste to waiting workers, who sifted what there was of value from it. Most ended up in the incinerator, but enough gems and precious minerals filtered up to make the job worth it.

The next floor fed things down a separate array of chutes. Things that other towns paid us to take away. Things wrapped in bags and carpets and sealed in rusting barrels that needed to never return. We did not question the contents. We did not question the regularity. The outside world would entrust us with their secrets, and in return they never questioned what we did with them. Silence was the reassuring truce between our town and world outside.

The bottom floor, the only subterranean floor of the building, was the school. It was assumed that any firstborn women in town would be assigned to work there. My grandfather always pitied them for it.  

My uncle started attending when he was five, as did all the firstborn children in the town. Every night, he was collected from home by the school attendants, and he was returned shortly after dawn, when the factory workers had already filed in. My grandfather only saw my uncle in passing in those years. As he finished his shift and left for home in the evening, he saw his son screaming as the school attendants carried him inside. When he returned for work in the morning, he would see his son being carried home to his mother, now silent, still and grey.

One day he did not pass his son. None of the workers entering that morning saw any of their children being taken home. There was one path to the factory, and no one had passed a single person leaving.

My grandfather was the first to venture downstairs to the school. The doors, which were locked from the outside by a rotation of attendants, remained bolted. He demanded the catatonic woman who curled beside her chair unlock them. She shook and repeated that the knocking had been wrong. It was wrong. Not their signal. Not their hands. Not the hands of the children. It was wrong.

He took the keys from her. He still has the scars on his forearms: marks showing where fingernails met bone.

He unlocked the doors and went in search of his firstborn son.

He does not tell the rest of this story. It is a story told in absence. There were no ambulances called. There was no cleaning or investigation. There were no survivors retrieved. Those who dug graves refilled them with empty coffin and decorated them with blank markers.

The bottom floor of the factory was filled in with concrete the next day. Deals were made with neighbouring towns for the supplies. They left even more assured of our town’s confidentiality, as no one in the town would speak of their reasons.

Over the following weeks, the factory was alight with activity at all hours. A new storey was added and the stacks were raised. The new school was the ground floor, atop a base never to be reopened. The factory is now completely above ground: four stories tall.

I am the firstborn of my father. I spent my nights in that school, listening to the pulsing and breathing noises the factory emits at all hours. They were loudest where the stacks and chutes hid behind the walls.

Once I was old enough, I was assigned my role. I keep those stacks clean. We are each assigned one, so that we will know it as well as our own limbs. We will know what is perfectly normal and what is deviant and must be removed.

Each morning at dawn I enter the factory, and climb to the fourth floor, then I enter my stack. It is warm, and after months I have learned the shape of it: what is normal, routine and unremarkable. To not be noted or spoken about. Some of my fellow workers do not take a torch, preferring to work by touch in the darkness, but I do not allow myself that luxury.

I climb further down each day, incentivising my faster return with the fear of exiting so late that I am alone in the factory at the end of the day. With no one to walk with down the steep path of the hill the factory sits atop.

Today I managed to travel ten floors down. Past the concrete of my uncle’s school. Past floors built of brick, mortar, carved stone, petrified roots. All quiet. All sealed.

I reach the end of where I feel confident in my ability to return. I look down into the tunnel below, but my torch still sees no bottom to the factory. I never have. I do not allow myself to wonder how many times it has demanded growth by sacrificing the lowest floor. The weakest workers.

A warm breath rises from below me and I choose to believe that whatever engine lies below me now wishes me to rise. I grip my ladder in my hand – the bones and sinews and veins that line the round walls of the stack. I remove masses as I climb: small lumps of fat and cancer and cysts. The factory must remain healthy. It must remain in operation.