Shadow Walker

Lights off

Seconds later, Teegan appeared beside him with an old-fashioned battery-powered torch. She smelled faintly of diesel fumes.

"Let me guess. You engineered some fancy device to get these doors to open," he said.

She knocked the battery end of the torch against her thigh. "You might be the best Shadow Walker, but I'm still the best scientist."

"I never said you weren't."

Teegan turned away and smacked the torch battery harder. The globe flickered on. "There was a backup generator powering the building. The locking mechanism on the door was also powered by electricity. I disabled the generator and switched some fuses." She shrugged. "We shouldn't have any more problems with security features requiring power." She didn't seem inclined to explain further.

Dec realised the high-pitched whine of the vacuum cleaner was the sound of a generator— required, he guessed, because the building held private, state-held documents.

It was almost too easy. But Dec was willing to accept easy for now. His brain had given up and his internal clock was still ticking down the time until sunrise.

Teegan pushed into the room, her torch light flicking aside the shadows and casting a spotlight on the fluted columns, veined with the opulent grey-blue of Carrara marble and teardrop chandeliers hanging from high-domed ceilings. As the reach of the torch beam extended further into the darkness, it picked up original pinwheel-tiled floors, freshly varnished, and large-scale oil-paintings on the walls depicting falsely wistful ideals of their country's colonial past – dry, desolate landscapes and sun-bleached fields, with a splash of bright red amongst the browns and dusty golds from desert shrub berries and dune flowers.

The room filled Dec with sticky nostalgia – the kind that made his throat clog up, and his eyes water. Something about the building, the style of decoration, or perhaps the smell, reminded him of the old town hall in Quarry Cove, where they used to hold community meetings.

They edged past the service counter on the side wall, hands sliding along the varnished timber top. They continued past a carpeted set of stairs leading to a mezzanine balcony, offices and meeting rooms, through a swinging door promising to lead to the storage rooms out the back, down a narrow hallway which led to another door, just as heavy as the first, and just as hard to open. Dec walked with increased wariness. This was not what he imagined the back rooms of a post office to look like. And it certainly wasn't the ideal setup for the postal workers if they were to have easy access to packages for their customers.

Behind the second door was a small room, as wide as it was long, with nothing in it but two square holes in the wall with perspex cover flaps. Teegan hovered the torch over the flaps – one which read 'soiled', the other 'clean'. A small slit at the base of each flap indicated that they had been locked with an old-fashioned key.

Teegan swung the torch around, the beam quivering with something that could have been mistaken for excitement. "This is a laboratory clean room," she said, a little breathlessly. "These are garment chutes."

"Why would the post office need laboratory conditions?" Dec said.

Teegan approached the final door and pushed it open, blasting them with hot straight-off-the-furnace air. She let out a sharp breath. "I believe this is your domain?"

It was a warehouse of some kind, divided into picking and sorting aisles similar to that of Overlands Trading. But while Dec recognised some of the machinery – conveyor belts, carousels, tilt tray sorters and high density storage racks – the rest was completely foreign to him and looked like it could have been conjured in one of Teegan's Frankenstein fantasies. Wires of all colours, shapes and lengths connected robots to control panels and tracks in the floor, which wound in figure of eights around the shelves. Mechanical arms stood frozen mid-reach, some with packages still clasped in pincer hands that could have rivalled the ugliness of Montague's crab arm. Packages dotted the conveyor belts, en route for the robots that would take them to their designated sections.

There were no mail trolleys or sorting tables.

Realisation dawned, slowly, due to his adrenaline zapped mind. This was a 'lights out' factory. The first Dec had ever seen, and possibly the most extensive one that existed in the whole of the Southern Isles.

"This is what Stanley meant when he said they were moving to a fully automated warehouse distribution system," he whispered, mostly to himself.

"A what?" Teegan said.

"Automated warehouse," Dec repeated. "A 'lights out' factory. A factory completely run by robots. I know they have lots of them in the North, and have started introducing them in the South but I never thought I'd see one with my own eyes." He stood back, trying to take it all in at once.

So this is why Stanley had let him go. He couldn't blame him. The place was formidable. Pinpoint accurate. Milisecond tight. No matter how good his memory was, it couldn't compete with the accuracy of a machine's.

Teegan looked upon the scene with newfound awe. "Incredible." He could practically see the scientific clogs and wheels turning in her mind. "Maybe not for humans. But for science..." She trailed off.

Dec was already scanning the area from left to right. If he looked past the robots and the space-age gadgetry, the layout wasn't so different from that of Overlands Trading. Arrivals and deliveries were divided into sections and organised by parcel numbers. His gaze stopped on a set of long-term storage vaults in the back corner, past the main bulk of machinery and backed onto what he suspected was and alley on the other side of the building to allow easy vehicle access. This was where the post office kept the deliveries that didn't need to be accessed on a daily basis.

He set towards them, passing a line of high-security vaults along the way. The desert dust would be stored as it had at Overlands – disguised as the harmless performance enhancing supplement, Luminite.