Steel Sky (52 page)

“Is that why you’ve helped me? Because you wanted an old myth to be real?”

“The people needed the Winnower, Edward. You needed to be special in a way that medical practice alone couldn’t satisfy. I only brought the two needs together.”

STAGING AREA

Orel reaches up for the next girder, and his hand hits something he hasn’t felt before: a metal shelf of some sort, slick with condensation, jutting out half a meter from the edge of the shaft. He squeezes up as close to the shelf as he can, and feels around. The shelf runs as far as he can feel to either side. It is made of some sort of high-grade alloy, unlike the rusting girders, still smooth and sharp-edged after all these years. It is about ten centimeters thick, with a groove running along the inside. Leaning out and stretching his arm, Orel can feel around to the top of the shelf. If it wasn’t such a long drop, he’d try to swing out and climb over the edge, but he doesn’t dare chance it.

Inching sideways, and rounding a corner, he finds a break in the shelf, a gap where the chain must have run. He clambers up, using the crenellations of the old pulley mechanism as footrests. There is a guardrail running parallel to the edge of the shelf. Orel climbs over it and collapses to the ground. Every noise he makes echoes repeatedly though a wide, metal chamber.

He lays supine on the shelf, catching his breath, until the ache seeping into his limbs from the cold metal forces him to stand again. “You can’t sleep,” Bernie says. “Not here.” But the voice is very faint and not easily distinguishable from Orel’s own thoughts.

Orel rubs the warmth back into his arms. The higher he has climbed, the colder and thinner the air has grown. It bites his lungs with every breath. But at least it seems cleaner than the air below.

New energy flows through him, helping him forget the ache in his limbs, the sting of the cuts on his hands and legs. He walks along the shelf, with one hand against the rail and the other against the wall, until he feels the concrete give way to a long, outward-leaning pane of glass. At the other end of the window he finds a set of steps. Beyond them is what sounds like a short corridor, and, to the side, a rough metal door. It takes some time for him to figure out that this door swings, rather than slides, and then more time to force the rusted hinges to turn.

The air inside is thick and musty, but Orel barely notices over the rank smell of his own sweat. He does not waste time stumbling around the room, instead feeling immediately to the left side of the door. In the Hypogeum, this is the standard place to put emergency materials. His heart leaps when he feels the handle of the cabinet. Inside, clipped to the edge of the cabinet, are several thin plastic tubes that can only be glowsticks. He pulls one loose, and twists the end, rupturing the separation membrane. As the two chemicals mix, the stick begins to glow with a pale green light that is almost blinding to Orel, who has spent the better part of two days in total darkness.

Once his eyes have adjusted, Orel looks around. In front of him is the wide window he felt, and beneath it is a control panel of bewildering complexity. The knobs and levers are labeled in English, but most of the words mean nothing to Orel. The light from the glowstick is too pale to allow him to see through the window, so he makes a quick circuit of the room. There are several hard plastic chairs, and piles of rotted scraps of organic debris: what might have once been clothes, perhaps. The walls are covered with complex diagrams. Given time, Orel might be able to glean their purpose, but time is a luxury he does not have.

In the back of the room is a locker that swings open with a horrifying screech. Orel eagerly pulls a jacket of synthetic fleece from its hanger, and puts it on. He cannot close the front of the jacket around his stomach, and at any rate the zipper is rusted in place, but the warmth it imparts to his arms and torso is almost deliriously pleasurable. Orel rummages through a backpack, also of synthetic material, hanging from a hook on the side of the locker. He finds a broken flashlight, a bottle of pills, two square plastic cases with glistening disks inside, a sheaf of papers that crumbles at his touch, a toothbrush from which the bristles have all eroded, and a solidified tube of toothpaste.

He empties the contents of the backpack onto the floor and fills it with the remaining glowsticks. He leaves the control room and heads back the way he came. As he descends the steps, his legs tremble, as if anxious to resume climbing. He comes to the shelf overlooking the pit, and leans against the guardrail. In the green light of the glowstick, he can see now a wide staging area on the other side of the shaft, with forklifts and other machinery. Above the shaft is a gigantic hatch, wider than the pit itself, the doors of which are shut with interlocking teeth. Materials for construction of the Hypogeum must have once been delivered through this hatch, at which point the forklifts would arrange the materials on a platform to be lowered down the shaft.

He walks along the guardrail, around the shaft, to the staging area. Considering how well the equipment here seems to have been built, it is conceivable that the great hatch still works, but Orel has decided there is a better way out. Wherever there is important machinery, there is a backup, a manual override. There must be an emergency exit somewhere.

AGON

The access tube runs inside one of the curving beams that support the Sky. The transport bucket carries Edward two-thirds of the way up before the motor burns out under the weight of his armor. Edward climbs out, grabbing the rungs that run between the tracks, and pulls himself forward. The going is difficult, since he is neither climbing nor crawling. He keeps banging his knees on the rungs, and he cannot get a good grip with his left hand.

He reaches a place where a window has been cut into the side of the tube. Leaning forward, he can see tiny people hard at work, carting away fallen rock in the plaza beneath the statue of Koba. Surveyors are taking measurements and assessing the stability of the new space cleared by the collapse of the Rat tunnels. Despite the deaths of two dozen Rakehells, the cave-in was a benefit to the Hypogeum: it ended the danger of Rat infiltration, and it opened the way for an expansion of the city. Second Son has already proposed a plan to build living quarters in the new space. There will be apartments for over eight hundred new residents, nestled almost in the arms of Koba. The feared mandatory sterilization program will be delayed another year. Second Son is a hero.

And the people of the Hypogeum are crying for the execution of the woman who caused the explosion.

Edward crawls forward, his heart pounding with exhaustion, his body drenched in sweat. Finally he reaches the end of the tunnel. He cycles through the airlock into the Sun. As the door slides open the light blasts through, blinding him. Even here, in the darkened portion of the Sun, the light is so bright that it strikes him almost like a physical force. His head throbs with pain, bursting like fireworks somewhere in the back of his brain. He removes the helmet, squinting his eyes so that only the barest sliver of sight is available to him, and rests for a moment, breathing deeply.

With his helmet tucked under his arm, he climbs down the ladder to the catwalk. It is even hotter here than in the tube. Wind from the ventilators moves the air around, tousling his hair, but still the temperature is almost unbearable. With his free arm across his eyes, he surveys his surroundings.

The Sun is deserted. The engineers who would normally be working here are at the site of the cave-in, which is the city’s top priority.

A framework of struts stretches out before him, its far end lost in the distance. Below the framework hangs the translucent shell of the Sun. The plastic is discolored a muddy yellow and pitted with slow deterioration under constant ultraviolet bombardment. It curves up to form a wall behind him, and stretches around him to either side as far as the eye can see.

Above him, among the wires and cables, are the huge fluorescent tubes. Each one is almost a meter in diameter and over a hundred meters in length. Rows upon rows of them line the ceiling in all directions. This section of the Sun was damaged by the explosion, so most of the tubes are dark, but a few still flicker fitfully. In the distance, Edward can see the other tubes burning brightly. His vision dances with phosphene after-images as he looks away.

He walks out onto one of the struts, balancing himself carefully. The beam is wide and its traction is good, but his armor is very heavy and Edward does not know if the shell beneath will hold his weight if he falls.

He has not gone very far before he hears a voice, full of surprise and confusion, call his name: “Doctor Penn!”

He looks up. Ten meters in front of him, at an intersection of struts, Amarantha Kirton is standing, dressed in a wrinkled electrician’s uniform, looking at him through dark goggles. A safety harness around her waist connects her, via a long canvas rope, to a pulley hanging from the girders above. Her green hair has been chopped short. She looks as if she has not slept in days. In her hands she holds a small revolver, its barrel pointed squarely at Edward’s chest.

She moves slowly toward him, green eyes narrow with anger. The canvas rope draws taught and the pulley jumps forward, squealing in its track.

“I don’t believe it,” she mutters. “I don’t believe it.”

Edward stands his ground, with one arm still shading his eyes and the other cradling his helmet. He stays very still, making certain he gives her no reason to panic. He is unfamiliar with the weapon she’s holding, and he isn’t sure the armor will protect him against it.

“So you’ve come for
me
now,” she says.

“Believe me, Amarantha, I don’t want to be here any more than you do.”

She tosses her head, indicating the direction he has come from. “So go back.”

“If it wasn’t me, it would be somebody else. You’re the most hated woman in the Hypogeum. You must know that they’ll never let you return alive.”

“I didn’t do it,” she says, continuing to inch forward.

“I know,” Edward replies, keeping his voice low and neutral. “It doesn’t matter. They need someone to hate. The truth is messy . . . unsettling. This way it’s easy. Everybody’s happy. Except you and me.”

Amarantha takes another step forward. She is gripping the handle of the revolver so hard that her knuckles are white. Edward watches her carefully. If she decides to shoot, he will see it in her eyes before her finger pulls the trigger. “Did
he
send you?” she asks.

Before Edward can reply, Amarantha laughs bitterly. “Of course he did,” she snorts. “You’re his
puppet
, like everybody else.”

Edward looks at her carefully. Though almost blinded by the brilliance of the Sun, he can still see clearly enough to judge a line of attack. She is close enough to him now that he could knock the gun out of her hands before she has a chance to fire. “If you’re going to try to shoot me,” he says, “you’d better do it now.”

Amarantha’s finger tightens on the trigger, tendons straining against the ancient mechanism, and pauses halfway, at the point where the trigger begins to push back. She is reluctant to pull that one extra millimeter.

Edward waits, legs tense, preparing to duck under the path of fire, to knock the gun from her hands, but the hammer is only half raised, the cylinder not yet turned. He realizes that the moment has dragged out too long. She will not fire unless he forces her to. Despite the pain she has endured, remorse has not yet been completely scoured from her spirit.

Slowly, keeping his eyes firmly locked with hers, Edward raises the helmet to his head, and slips it back on. As it snaps into place, he realizes that the usual pleasure, the sense of becoming possessed by the righteous fury of the Winnower, is absent. The moment is flat, mechanical. It is much too hot here inside the Sun. He can feel puddles of sweat collecting inside his armor. A throbbing in his head signals the return of his headache.

“Put the gun down,” he says.

“No!” She grips the revolver so tightly her hands shake. Her finger has eased on the trigger, but the muzzle is still pointed at Edward’s chest.

“I can move faster than you can fire,” he says. “But even if I couldn’t, even if I made a mistake and you were able to kill me, what would you do? You’d still be trapped here, all alone, with nowhere left to run, waiting for a stranger to come and kill you.”

“No!” Amarantha’s voice rises. Her hands and forehead glisten with sweat. A shudder runs the whole length of her body. S
he’s deliberately whipping herself into a frenzy
, Edward thinks.
She’s trying to work up the nerve to fire
. “You killed Cadell!” she shouts.

Edward shakes his head. The ache there is growing rapidly, and he is running out of patience. “What happened to him has nothing to do with me,” he says.

“You certified him as incurable! If you hadn’t, he’d still be alive!”

“He
was
incurable. Anyone could see that. You can’t blame me for everything that’s wrong in the Hypogeum.”

“You could have helped him,” Amarantha says, raising the gun so it is pointed between Edward’s eyes. “You could have done more.”

Everything is silent, painfully still. Edward wants to scream, to drown out her words, but the denial dies in his throat. Amarantha’s face grows larger, preternaturally sharp. Everything else blurs out, smearing at the edges. The world is rushing towards him at dizzying speed. He sees his future in front of him, wavering formlessly only a few centimeters beyond his eyes. The throbbing in his head builds to a crescendo.