Chương 8: The Long Climb

The shaft ran up past where my light could reach, and it was coming apart from the bottom, the hatch we'd just climbed through. A seal let go below us with a flat, hard crack, the sound of a building starting to come apart. A column of spent coolant screamed up past my boots and was gone into the dark over our heads.

"Forty seconds of structural optimism," Errata said, conversational, which she only got when the math had turned bad.

"Give or take the lie I just told you about the forty. Climb like you mean it." So I climbed. There was no down left to want. The cull was working up the levels behind us, and up was the only way that wasn't dying on purpose. I'd come up worse pipes than this in my old life and walked away bored. Never with a body two parts heavier than the one I'd started the week in, though, and never with a kid above me setting a pace I couldn't argue with.

Sefa was six rungs up and gaining, light and fast and certain, the exact way that gets light, fast people killed. She didn't know the shaft was already showing us how it was going to fail. It was telling anyone who could read it, and reading the guts of this place was the one thing nobody ever had to teach me.

"Whoever cut this ran the relief line past the load seam to save a coupling," Errata said, contempt warming her voice where nothing kind could.

"Cheap. Which is your good news, Carole. Cheap fails in order. Bottom seal, then the deck above it, then the next, all the way up. It climbs the column like a man taking stairs. You don't outrun it. You climb on the bang, the half-second a section's just spent itself, and you keep your weight off everything it hasn't reached yet." A bracket over my head had seized in its socket, cooked solid.

"Fused. Blow it." I put the discharge into it, the core kicking down my arm with that half-second of cold I still hadn't made friends with, and the bracket sheared clean and I went up through the gap. The shaft rang like a struck pipe, and a long way up the ringing arrived somewhere and didn't come back.

"Worry about that now," she said, quieter.

"Whatever's up there to swallow a sound like that has cleaner air than anything that should be near us. Climb faster." After that Errata flew the climb for me, because that was the only way it was going to get flown.

"Wait. The seal under your left boot is loading. Let it go. Now: up, two, and not the rung that's sweating, the dry one over it." Calm as a checklist while the column came apart under us, which was what it did instead of panicking, and what kept me from it.

"Thirty seconds of optimism left.... Twenty-six. I'm rounding down now and not telling you by how much. Move." So I moved, and caught the rhythm: listen for the swell, feel the deck under the next blow go light, climb into the spent quiet behind it.

"It's going in order," Sefa called down, not winded, pleased in the flat way she got pleased.

"Bottom up. I can read a thing too, you know."

"Then read the one you're about to grab," I said. She didn't. That was the trouble with her: right often enough to trust it the once it would get her killed. She went for a conduit bracket two rungs up and wide of the honest line, faster, because she was always faster, her own read swearing the next blow was lower down. Her read had the order. It didn't have the count. It sat above a seal that hadn't yet blown.

"Not that one…" I had her name in my mouth.

"Sefa…" And the seal blew. The bracket tore off its mount in the wash of it. Sefa's hand closed on nothing. She dropped, caught the lip of a dead vent with the other, and hung over the white throat of the shaft, boots running on air, a long way of nothing under them.

"I've got it," she called up, which was a lie we both heard. Stolen novel; please report. I was already going back down before the cold part of me finished pricing it. I'd read the price the same instant my hands had: going down put my weight below the next blow, spent the seconds the climb had bought, traded a clean exit for a gamble I couldn't read. The math came out a loss. I went anyway, and for half a breath I couldn't have told you why. Then I found a reason. She knew the warrens above us and I didn't.

She was an asset I'd already spent good Heat to keep. I went back for the asset. I got a hand down to her wrist, and the hand wouldn't close. [Kinetic grip: non-responsive. Host architecture beyond tolerance. Continued operation not recommended.] The core had locked the grip half-open, the old fault, the one that never fully shut, picking the worst second on the clock to be what it had always been. My fingers dragged across her wrist and couldn't take it.

Below her the next seal was filling, a hum I felt in my back teeth: three seconds, maybe four. So I stopped trying to use the hand. I read the hum instead, that seal, that close, that ready, and put the vent into it before it could blow itself. The Veyr regulator dumped it early in a controlled white scream, away from us, and for one bought second the throat under Sefa went spent and still.

I hooked my dead half-open hand under her arm instead of around it, made the whole arm the clamp the hand refused to be, and hauled.

"She's locking up. Look at her hands," Errata said in my ear, fast.

"Don't be kind. She'll drown in kind. Make her angry enough to do it herself." So I made her angry.

"Your grip's a disgrace," I said, as hard as I could push it with my arm screaming under her weight.

"That's not a hold, it's a strong opinion about one. Don't look down. Look at the small catastrophe you call a thumb, and fix it, and climb." She climbed. White-faced and furious and alive, she dragged herself up over me and onto the rung, and somewhere only I could hear, Errata said, very quietly,"Good." And meant her. The cascade caught up to the seconds I'd spent on her.

The lower column went at once, not a seal now but the wall of them, the shaft giving up its own floor, the pressure coming up under our boots like a flat hand. We rode it up the last rungs. I got Sefa over the lip, and the lip took me, and then we were both over, sprawled on the iron of a dead maintenance landing, while the shaft behind us finished dying without us in it. [Anomaly profile: 13/100. Unsanctioned signature logged: structural event, restricted ascent.]"Thirteen.

You vented a relief seal by hand inside a resonating column. That's not a signature, it's a flare. Seven short of the flag, and we just lit the dark up to show it where we keep our spine." Sefa got onto her hands and knees beside me and dragged her breath back in hard, ugly pulls. She didn't thank me. I wouldn't have known what to do with it if she had.

"That thing with the vent," she said, when she had the air for it.

"Blowing the seal before it blew. Show me how you do that." Not a question. A requisition.

"Later," I said.

"You always say later." I didn't tell her that later was a thing I kept promising people I might not have.

"On your feet," I told her. I lay on the cold iron a moment longer and let the air saw in and out, and didn't look at Sefa, who was looking at me. I knew the look. I'd worn it myself once, back when I was young enough to think a person going back for you told you something true about them.

"Don't," I said.

"Wasn't going to say anything," she said. She was. I let her not. The landing wasn't the top of anything, just a shelf where the climb paused, iron and grime and a handrail welded by someone who'd never once trusted it. Underdecks to the bone, and I had never been so glad of filth. But the dark above it thinned wrong. A long way up, past the last of the honest rust, the Stack changed, a high, cold glow, even and tended, light from somewhere that cared how it looked.

Cleaner up there than the Underdecks had ever been allowed to be. And a place that clean was a place something kept clean, watched and wrong. Far up in that glow something shifted, or the glow shifted around it, too far to read and too brief to swear to. There, and then not. I couldn't have told you it was anything. I couldn't have told you it wasn't. Errata didn't fill the quiet, which was how I knew to be afraid of it.

"Cleaner's worse," she said, when she spoke at all.

"Cleaner means somebody's home."