Kelley Eskridge (12 page)
Authors: Solitaire
She wanted to find a beautiful present for
Snow, something that would surprise and delight with its perfect
meaning, but everything she saw seemed tasteless and wrong, so instead
she drank too much Dutch beer at a café on the fourteenth level.
Her chair faced a shop window with staggeringly expensive clothes worn
by live models, who changed position incrementally so that over the
course of an hour one woman reached her hand across the space of two
feet to touch another woman's. Jackal had plenty of time to watch: all
her conversations seemed slightly askew, until she finally decided it
was better to shut up.
More beer, and sometime later, movement,
the web drawing in around her. Bat knelt next to her chair,
particularly little and pointed from this angle, all elbows and
collarbones and sharp chin. Her eyes were bright with some kind of
excess. “Jackal, hey Jackal…”
“Hey, Bat.”
“Hey. Let's go up, you want to?”
“Where?” But she knew.
“Up. Up the Needle.”
The Needle. The top of Mirabile, one
hundred and seventy-eight stories, over two thousand feet, where
hundreds of people at a time could crowd up to a view across the sea to
Ko in the south, or north into the maw of mainland China. Two thousand
feet up, when anything over seventy made her sick. She looked across
the plaza toward the Core support shaft, as big as a steel redwood
punching through one hundred seventy eight floors. In between the
horizontal crossbracing and angled beams, three enormous glass-walled
elevators ran up and down like faceted beads. Mirabile staff in aqua
jumpsuits handled crowd control at top and bottom. The elevators ran
constantly. She had heard that the Needle was never empty.
“Hey, powerful,” said Stone. “We can see
the holiday lights all over the city.”
“There's going to be fireworks,” Bat said.
“We may as well have a look.” That was
Mist, casual, pretending to be bored.
They all looked at Jackal. She took a
swallow of beer, wiped her mouth on her sleeve. “No, thanks,” she said.
“You go ahead, meet me back here.” She shrugged, smiled at Mist:
somehow it seemed important not to hurt her feelings again. Then she
turned and found Tiger at her shoulder.
“I want you to come,” he said in a low
voice.
She snorted, finished her beer.
“You have foam on your mouth. Come on, you
don't have to be scared.”
“I'm not scared.”
He said, still speaking softly, “I think
you owe me this one, don't you? Consider this your public apology. Then
we're even. No more hard feelings.” His mouth tightened briefly. “I'll
leave you alone if that's what you want. But today I want you to come
with me up the Needle.”
“Tiger, why?”
He said finally, “Don't you know?” Why did
he look sad? She had drunk too much. There was a brief moment, his face
changing…and then it was just Tiger again. He made a great show of
pulling out her chair. She let him. He was collecting his debt, and she
did not know what else to do except walk beside him, following the rest
of the web across the plaza. Then an aqua person was pointing her into
an elevator and the doors slid closed.
One hundred fifteen people in a glass
bubble going up and up and up. Deceptively simple, as long as she
thought about the destination and not the journey, the long trip
helpless in the low-bid product of some disgruntled worker's labor; as
long as she did not let herself see the distance through the airy glass
that looked as though a breath could break it. Tiger stood close behind
her, his hand on her shoulder. She made herself see only the LCD
counting off the floors; twenty, thirty, forty. She stared unblinking
at the display and waited, waited, waited, for the metal beast to haul
itself up with little squeaks, changes in air pressure that hurt her
ears, small clicks of cables and junctions, a slight shimmy in the
climb at around level eighty-five that took fifteen floors to work
itself out while she stared and did not blink and never breathed. One
hundred ten. No one spoke. Was there a crack in the glass panel there,
at the edge of her peripheral vision? The air began to taste of other
people's breath, of ketones and heat-activated perfumes. One hundred
thirty. Tiger's voice in her ear told her
it's
okay, we're almost there, you're doing fine
. She looked up
and saw the bulky body of Mirabile narrowing as it stretched. She could
see the enormous arches and trusses and beams, the polystyrene concrete
skin; and then the walls seemed to fall in around her and the elevator
shouldered through its narrow passage up into the night sky, riding now
on the outside of the Needle's frame. She looked out; gods and angels,
so far up, so far from everything safe. One hundred fifty; one hundred
sixty. Kowloon poured itself out in lights below her. One hundred
seventy. The cage began to slow. Then they were inside a metal shaft.
One hundred seventy-eight. Had they really stopped moving? The doors
did not open. They were stuck, she was certain, and her breath hitched
under her collarbones. She let herself lean on Tiger, feel how solid he
was, how he took her weight and did not let her fall. Then the doors
slid apart tiredly.
“Step out, please.” Jackal blinked at the
aqua-suited traffic controller standing before her. “This way, please.”
“We're here,” Tiger said gently.
“Right,” Jackal answered, and unlocked her
knees so that her legs would move. They shook, a little, but they took
her off the elevator. She imagined the floating platform, the six
cables hanging down underneath it, thousands of feet of steel rope,
each waving gently like a manta's tail. She sat down on the first bench
she found.
Bear shouldered Tiger out of the way and
squatted down next to her. “You okay?”
She shrugged. Tiger bit his lip and then
turned away. “I'm okay,” she told Bear. He squinted at her, his mouth
crooked. “All right, I hate this and I feel like throwing up. If there
was an open window I'd probably push Tiger out of it. Is that better?”
He patted her hand approvingly and
squeezed next to her on the bench. “That's my Jackal.”
“I hate being scared of things.”
He nodded.
They sat silent and watched the web push
themselves up against the observation windows, seeming to stand on the
edge of the black sky; then green and blue light splashed against the
glass and lit up their faces, and their collective
ohhhh
came just a second before the echo of the fireworks explosion. When she
was a baby, her parents had taken her to Al Iskandariyah for a
presentation of the new Hopes. She had a holo of it on her bedroom
wall: her father's face so proud, her mother lifting her up so the
whole world could see her, and voices had roared out of the night just
like the web at the window. There had been fireworks there, too, and it
looked in the holo as if the babies were reaching for the light.
Beside her, Bear strained to see across
the gallery. “Go on, go watch,” Jackal told him. “Really. I'm okay.
Really.”
Finally, space to breathe. She wished she
hadn't drunk so much. She concentrated on shutting out the sounds
around her: the mush of noise from the windows; closer voices that
might be the Mirabile attendants; the faint drone of machinery behind
the walls. But she could not shake the sensation of being too high,
slip-sliding over an open space. Okay, let's not do this, she told
herself, but it was too late: suddenly oxygen seemed harder to come by,
and the room was too warm. Sharks, she was going to be sick. She
swallowed air and felt her stomach roll and her mouth fill with saliva.
Down the hallway, past the windows on one side and the elevator shaft
on the other, she could see the lit sign for the public bathrooms: she
walked fast.
The queasiness subsided as she ran cold
water over her wrists and scooped some onto the back of her neck. She
still felt shaky: the trip home seemed unimaginable, the Hong Kong
system and the tunnel train and the bus ride back to her own bed.
Around the corner from the sinks, out of sight of the door, she found a
padded bench. It was a mercy to lie down and be still. That damned
beer. She closed her eyes.
She blinked awake to the last half of a
sentence: “…one in here?” Another phrase, this time in Chinese; a man's
voice, sharp and perfunctory. The door was already closing before
Jackal collected her wits enough to realize that she should answer. Had
she been asleep? What time was it? She swung herself up to a sitting
position and stayed there for a few minutes, leaning back against the
wall while her breath steadied.
She still felt drunk, slightly
out-of-sync, but she would try to face the ride down the Needle. Get it
over with and go home. She splashed water on her face, and frowned at
her reflection. She looked strained and tired; she would have to do
something about that. Have some fun for a change. Would it be so bad if
one or two newspapers on the planet didn't get a personal interview, or
if her next global politics class assignment was less than thorough?
She frowned again, told her reflection, “Go home, get some sleep, wake
up tomorrow and figure out how to get some of your life back. And no
more beer!” Well, maybe just not so much beer: she winked at
Jackal-in-the-mirror, feeling better, and left the bathroom.
The observation lobby was empty.
She stood at the end of the hallway,
confusion bubbling into anger. They'd left her here at the top of this
damned high place. She hated them all. Then she rubbed her face, told
herself to relax, think it through. Of course they hadn't left her here
deliberately. Maybe they didn't yet realize she wasn't with them; or
perhaps Bear was even now on the way back up for her. She was lowering
herself onto the bench to wait when everything went to hell.
An electronic siren leaped into an
ear-splitting
whoop whoop whoop
,
and red lights began to flash over each set of elevator doors. She
covered her ears, and when that didn't help she retreated back up the
hall past the bathrooms.
What is going on
?
The combination of the noise and the alcohol made her feel as if the
Needle were tipping sideways, swaying in some huge storm. She wondered
if anyone was still up here; then she rounded the curve of the tower,
and saw an open door.
She stopped just outside the doorway: an
operations room of some kind, with a central console of flat-screen
monitors and keyboards, wall-mounted speakers, two utilitarian chairs.
One chair lay on its side. Two aqua-suited backs bent over the console.
Under the cacophony of the siren, she could hear a mélange of
voices coming from the speakers, as though hundreds of people were
trying to talk on a single comm line.
“Hello?” she said, and wasn't surprised
that they didn't hear: the noise was incredible.
“Excuse me!” she yelled, and one of the
people turned: a Chinese man, tall and thin. His startled expression at
seeing her didn't sit well on the general worried set of his face. He
touched the person beside him, who also turned: a shorter man, equally
worried, a thin wire headset tucked around his left ear. The second man
spoke rapidly to Jackal.
“I'm sorry, I don't speak Cantonese well,”
she said haltingly in that language. “Do you speak English?
O habla usted español?
”
“You're not allowed in here,” he snapped.
“Return to the lobby immediately.”
She opened her mouth to explain, and at
that moment her brain finally began to make sense of the muddy voices
in the background.
“
Get us out, get us out
!”
“
Shut up! Everybody just calm
—”
“
Maman, qu'est qui se passe
?”
“
I don't like this, I'm scared
—”
Mist? That was Mist. Jackal was at the
console in three long steps, scanning the monitors: the interior of the
Needle elevators, with a digital display at the side of each screen
indicating floor location. One elevator was empty except for a
middle-aged Chinese woman in a business suit, standing between two
large men in loose clothing. The display read 83. The other two were
stuffed with people, much more so than she remembered from the ride up.
In one, she could see Mist, face clenched like a cramp. And Bear, and
Stone: their cage was at floor 117. In the other elevator, Bat and Kea,
Turtle: the 120th floor. Back to the other elevator: people shifted and
behind them she saw Tiger, looking distant and very still.
“What's happening here?” she asked.
“You can't come in here. Authorized
personnel only.” He said something in a low voice to the taller man,
who stepped to Jackal's side.
“What's going on?”
“You must leave now.” The tall man put a
hand on Jackal's arm and pointed to the door. Jackal shook him off.
“That's my web! Tell me what's happening.”
“You are interfering with an emergency
situation,” he said. “You must leave or I will notify security.”
Jackal extended her wrist with her ID meld
showing, and he furrowed his forehead so his eyebrows ran together.
“There's no need for security. Go ahead
and scan me. I'm Ren Segura, I'm the Hope from Ko Island.” She tried to
look sober and immovable.
He huffed, then spoke rapid-fire to the
shorter man. She caught the word for “Hope,” and the two men exchanged
a look of resigned frustration. The shorter man began talking into his
headset. There was a touchscreen in front of him with instructions in
Chinese characters. He ignored it and continued his conversation.
The other man said, “Ms. Segura, you would
be more comfortable in the lobby.”
“I would not,” she said. “Now please
explain immediately what is happening.” Pointing to the monitors:
“Those are my people.”
“The elevators have unfortunately become
stalled in transit,” he said carefully.
“They're stuck?”
“As you say.”
“What are you doing about it?” Her stomach
wanted to roll over again. On the screen, Mist was crying openly now.
“We are attempting to contact our service
contract provider for assistance.”
“That's it? You're making a phone call?
You have to get them out of there.”
“Please, Ms. Segura,” he said nervously,
“there is no concern. Our elevators are equipped with emergency brakes
and secondary rack and pinion lift systems—”
She interrupted him: “I'd like to talk to
them, please.”
“Excuse me?”
She pointed to the monitors. “I want to
talk to them.”
He looked as if he might object, so she
gave him the Hope look, the blank expectant stare of a VIP accustomed
to getting what she wanted. He fetched her a chair and a headset, with
a number of anxious glances toward the man still working at the
console. Before he sat her down, he pointed up to the corner of the
ceiling. “All activities are recorded for security purposes,” he said.
“Please confirm for the record that you understand these tapes may be
given as evidence of your actions in a restricted area.”
“Fine.” She waved him off, sat and began
to click the headset control through channel frequencies until she
found the right set of voices. “Bear, can you hear me?”
“Jackal? What?” He looked around as if he
expected to find her standing next to him, and then back up at the
place where the speaker must be, just under the camera. “Where are you?
Are you on another elevator? Everybody shut up, it's Jackal.”
“I'm still up the Needle, I got sick and
found a place to lie down. You guys left me.”
Mist snuffled and dragged her silk sleeve
across her nose. “So you're missing all the fun,” she said in a shaky
voice. Jackal had never thought of Mist as brave, and she was touched.
“Hey, Mist, what's up?” she said gently.
“I thought you're the one who's always saying not to hang around when
the party's over.”
Mist smiled: only a small smile, but it
made Jackal feel forgiven.
“What happened?” Bear said.
“I don't know, they're working on it.”
Bear sighed. “Great. You hate heights, I
hate crowds. So here we are.”
“Where did all these people come from?”
“They shoved us all onto two elevators to
make room for some special party coming up. I didn't even get to see
the fireworks.” He sounded wistful.
Tiger did something with his elbow and
slipped between two strangers to stand beside Bear. “Jackal, how long
is this going to take?”
“I don't know…I don't think they know
what's wrong. They're calling the service provider.”
Tiger snorted. “What kind of system is it?”
She looked around the console. “Umm…aha.
Ko HardBrain, Series E.”
“Tetraplex processor…should be able to run
every elevator in Hong Kong at once, never mind these three. So they
should look at either the controller or the software. Connective
hardware. Maybe a bad interface to the EACS. Are they working on it at
Mirabile Central?”
“I don't know.”
“Can I talk to someone there?”
“Hang on.” She tapped the shoulder of the
man next to her, with the headset, and made the request. He shook his
head.
“He can help,” Jackal said impatiently.
She pointed at the HardBrain logo. “He practically lives inside these
things.”
He put up a hand and turned away.
“He wants to know if you've checked the
interface to the EACS?” Jackal challenged. She had no idea what it
meant, but it worked: he looked at her and then at Tiger on the
monitor, and clicked his headset to the proper channel and began to
speak. The first thing Tiger did was to open a panel in the elevator
and find a headset: he plugged in and was able to talk privately to the
man at the console while the swell of general noise continued to roll
through the wall speakers over Jackal's head. Jackal followed them to
the private channel and listened: she couldn't understand a word of it,
but it became clear that Tiger was making suggestions that the
attendant was cautiously following, touching the sensory screen in
front of him as Tiger talked him through the steps. It was odd to watch
Tiger speaking Cantonese: the sharp edges of the language molded his
face into a different shape.
Eventually, the shorter man stopped
entering commands on the touchscreen. There was a longer exchange with
Tiger; then the attendant left the room with an intent expression,
still worried but more focused now. He didn't seem to notice Jackal,
and when she turned, the taller man was also gone. It made her
uncomfortable that they'd left her here alone; then she glanced up,
remembering the security camera.
“Jackal, are you still there?” Tiger said
softly. He was slumped directly under the camera's lens, looking drawn
and tense, the headset curving along the line of his cheek. The crowd
had made some space for him to work: there was a mass of bodies a few
feet behind him, a bouquet of frightened faces.
“Right here,” she answered. “How's it
going?”
“Don't know yet. He's supposed to be
checking the EACS connections at the network routers.”
She chuckled. “If you say so.” And then
she realized it was the nicest they'd been to each other in months, and
she had to swallow hard.
He must have felt it too, because abruptly
he said, “Chao told me that if you needed to break my arm along with my
nose next time that they'd let you, that I would just have to take it,
that I better back off…god, Jackal, I know you probably don't have any
idea how that feels, having no choice…what?”
“Nothing,” she whispered.
“I'm sorry I made you come up here. I know
you hate it. I just wanted you to do something because I said so.
Because I asked. I thought that if you were scared you would let me…I
don't know, let me in again.” Even though he was keeping his voice low,
she could hear it shake a little. “You know, I had this fantasy that we
would go back down and you'd be scared and I would hold you, and this
time you couldn't pretend that it didn't happen because it would be in
front of everybody.”
“Tiger…”
“I'm sorry. But you—you cut me off after
we…it was like I was invisible. I just wanted you to see me.”
It was so raw and so obviously true that
she wanted to reach through the glass and touch him.
“You didn't do anything wrong,” she told
him. “It wasn't your fault. It was me. I found out—I found out
something I couldn't handle and I took it out on you and it wasn't
fair, Tiger, I'm sorry. And then everything got so complicated. I
shouldn't have—”
“It's okay,” he said. He nodded at her
through the camera. “I tell you what, let's get down from here and
we'll sort it all out, okay?”
“Okay.”
And then his image on the monitor
shuddered, and people in his elevator screamed and fell about. The
digital display flickered and then reset itself to 113. Tiger's headset
was pulled off his ear; she rekeyed her comm to the main elevator
speakers. “Are you all right? Tiger?”
He had grabbed the side rail, and there
were new lines of stress on his face. “We just dropped, I'm not sure
how much.”
“Four floors. Why's this happening?”
A woman spoke from the group behind Tiger.
“We're over capacity,” she said bleakly. “We're too heavy. Everyone
needs to stay still and try not to weigh so much.”
“Has that guy come back yet?” Tiger said.
Jackal could hear the strain in his voice.
She shook her head, and then remembered he
couldn't see her. “No.” She looked up again at the security camera's
steady red light, as if she might find help there. Her heart pounded a
series of tense paradiddles. It made her feel breathless and jittery,
as if she would go mad unless she did something, anything, right now.
“Damn.” Tiger chewed his lower lip. “Okay,
what do we know about elevators?”
“He said something about emergency brakes
and secondary lift systems.”
“We stopped normally the first time. So
that jerk just now must have been the brakes grabbing when we fell.”
Jackal suddenly had a clear picture of the elevator cage in the shaft
of the Needle, held onto its cable by a few bits of compressed metal.
It wasn't a reassuring image.
“I'm scared,” Mist said in a small voice.
She was tucked under Bear's arm.
Me too, Jackal thought, but said, “Don't
worry. We'll get you out.”
“Where is that guy?” Tiger said.
“I'll go look.” She stumbled along the
hall in both directions: the siren was still screaming in the
observation lobby, but she found no other people. There was an open
door leading to a stairwell.
“Oh, great,” Tiger said when she got back.
“The grid must be on another floor.”
“What do we do?”
“Did he say what kind of secondary lift
system they use?”
She wished the damn emergency whoops would
stop so she could think. “Rack and pinion? Does that sound right?”
He stared speculatively up into the
camera, so that it seemed he looked right into her eyes. “Can you read
Chinese Traditional characters?”
“Some.” Not very well, but she didn't tell
him that. If she was the web's best hope of action right now, she
wouldn't undermine their confidence in her.
“Maybe some is all we need. Okay, tell me
what you see on the screen right now.”
She began to recite the commands, pausing
to describe the characters she didn't recognize so that he could
translate.
“Right. Go back to the place that says
‘Engage backup system.’ Touch that.”
“Hang on.” She peered at the screen: the
resolution was grainy and it was hard to keep track of all the
characters.
If we get out of this okay, I'll
never drink again, I promise
, she heard a voice say
somewhere in the back of her head, like a prayer. She searched,
searched: there, that one. She put a finger on it. Tiger was saying,
“You should get some kind of prompt—” and then there was a horrendous
triple screech and thud. The sound cut off. Jackal saw in the monitors
all the people jerk and stumble over each other. Tiger's head came up.
Mist wrapped her arms around herself. Bear closed his eyes.
There was a moment of perfect stillness;
and then, one by one, the displays began to flicker through their
numbers as the elevators dropped like glass beads running off a wire.
Oh, and it was so quiet, this falling
death,
god no no no
, she sees that
they are screaming but she hears only silence so how can the screams be
real, because this is not the way it ends, not possible, not in a
million years, not for the web,
what did I do
,
see how they fly and there is Mist beating against the glass as if
breaking through it could save her, and Jackal cannot reach them,
I didn't mean to
, and she slaps her hands
against the screen and screams for them
no no
no
, but they do not hear her, not even Tiger who is pressed
face against the glass flying for these last few moments and she
wonders how it feels and she is holding her breath and she will never
move again, she is afraid to blink because there is no time.
Then Tiger throws his head back. His eyes
meet hers. She sees him. And then she sees black; and she does not need
the distant explosive sounds to know that they are gone.
