“You agreed to show us.”
“Not good to go there, cursed place, why you cross?”
“We have to get across. Where’s the bridge?”
“Don’t show. I tell. You listen, go if you must.”
Adelaide lifted her eyes to this weird specimen, trying to see its face. She sensed her gaze reciprocated.
Nils went over.
The two men and the stranger conversed in low voices. Pekko muttered something under his breath. Nils responded sharply. Pekko nodded. They both glanced at Adelaide.
“What?” she said.
“We’re going up,” Nils said curtly.
The would-have-been guide disappeared as abruptly as he had come.
The five of them climbed to the seventieth floor and reached a door that careened on one hinge. Pekko flashed about a torch. The room was empty, completely empty, even without litter. There was a two metre gash where part of the window-wall had been ripped away. Icy sleet blew inside. It was freezing.
“Stars,” muttered Nils. He was wheezing.
“Great bridge,” Adelaide ventured. She had to get Nils on side.
“Oh, you’ll like the bridge,” said Pekko, a nasty grin curling his lips. He reached overhead and tugged on a length of rope which was attached to a metal ring in the wall.
“What’s that?”
“That’s the bridge,” Pekko said.
Adelaide stared, uncomprehending. She looked at the metal ring, the thick tarred knots, the rope which ran close to the ceiling and out.
“You’ve got to be joking.”
The others looked equally unhappy. Drake and Nils exchanged glances. Rikard pulled on the rope, testing its strength.
“Pekko, you’d better go first,” said Nils at last. “We don’t want her running off on the other side.”
Pekko nodded. From his rucksack he took a tangle of rope and began fashioning it into some kind of harness. Adelaide watched his hands at work under the torchlight with a sick fascination. She glanced through the gaping wall. Now the leaning tower was invisible. Thunder rumbled again.
“I’m not going over a rope,” she said. “We’re seventy floors above sea level, are you all crazy? Did you hear what that-that man said downstairs, he said this place is cursed. I’m not going there and I’m definitely not going on that bit of string. It looks ready to snap.”
“Leave it,” muttered Nils.
“None of you want to use it either, this is fucking insane!”
She stared at Drake but Drake looked away.
“Would you gag her, please,” said Pekko, continuing to work with the ropes. “She’s doing my head in.”
“With pleasure,” Nils retorted. “Don’t struggle,” he said, as the material pulled once again at the corners of her mouth. “Or I’ll use tape instead, and that’s more unpleasant to get off.”
Her nose sucked in air frantically. Pekko had slipped on his harness; a rudimentary construction which tightened under his arms and around his chest. He reached up and hooked it onto the rope. His face betrayed no fear; only the single-minded, merciless determination that was as much a part of him as his shaven skull. Nils checked all of the knots. He reached up and gave the rope a tug.
“You’re good.”
Pekko stepped up to the gap. He stood on the ledge, sleet lashing his face. Adelaide felt her heart treble. Pekko leapt and vanished.
She gave a moan of horror. Pekko had drowned, and Nils was about to send her after him.
Nils peered across the chasm. He gave a shout, and flashed a torch twice. An answering light blinked. Pekko had made it across. A minute later the harness came spinning back across the rope. Nils reeled it in.
“You’re next.”
She tried to make a bolt for it but they anticipated the move. She didn’t even make it to the door. Nils pulled the harness over her head. She fought him, struggling with every weapon she had left. Her forehead contacted with his collar bone. She heard him grunt. Then Drake put a knee into the small of her back and she went down. She felt the harness tightening around her chest.
“Come on,” said Nils. “Just get it over with.”
She didn’t move so he wrenched her to her feet. The harness fastened to the slimy rope. She tried to speak but even if the gag hadn’t been there, only gibberish would have come out. Her body was dysfunctional with fear. Nils dragged her towards the window-wall. Her shoes scraped on the buckling floor. Thunder and lightning split the sky and illuminated the leaning tower. She was a foot away from the edge-her toes were at the brink-over it- blackness above and below Nils untied her hands.
“I’d hold on if I were you,” said Drake from behind.
She gripped the rope. It was the only thing between her and death.
I don’t want to drown. Oh stars, I don’t want to drown. Give me any end other than that…
Hail fell in a gulf of oblivion.
Another rumble, another sheet of lightning flared. Nils’s shove sent her spinning out. She closed her eyes against the onslaught of sleet and wind. Thunder growled and her scream was muffled by the gag and the elements. She saw the lightning that followed on the backs of her eyelids. She thought she’d been hit.
Arms were around her. She collapsed into the ungiving mass. She could not understand that her feet were on a solid structure; she couldn’t support herself.
“Get up,” said Pekko.
She opened her eyes. She was on the other side. Pekko, taking no risks, was retying her wrists before he untied the harness. He flashed the torch back across the brink. She saw tiny dots, Nils responding. Pekko sent the harness back.
Adelaide cringed away from the gap and from Pekko. The wall here had disintegrated even more than in the other tower.
“I wouldn’t run anywhere,” Pekko said. “The whole tower is structurally unsound. Listen. You can hear it eroding.”
His voice echoed in the empty room. There were no lights. The floor was uneven underfoot, littered with unnameable, crunching debris. When she listened, she heard a deep, unearthly moaning. There’s something eating the foundations.
Nils landed walking. He must have done this before, she thought numbly. Nils stripped off the harness and passed it to Pekko, who sent it back for the others.
Nils switched on a torch. It lit the planes of his face weirdly.
“Welcome to the unremembered quarters.”
40 VIKRAM
The snow came down from the sky in dizzy swirls and collected in the well of the boat. It stuck to the hood and the shoulders of Vikram’s coat. He hunched over, shivering. At the prow a red lantern produced a dim glow. Every few minutes Vikram leaned forward and brushed the flakes away from its casing. The lantern was his signal.
The westerners, Surface Level or whoever they were, were late. He could not think of them as enemies, but neither could he think of them as friends. He had no idea who he was about to meet.
He should have a plan. He should have a decision, at least. But he had nothing. The invisible circle on the back of his neck seemed to pulse gently. He knew it was only his own circulation. He was the only person who could feel that mark. No-one else could translate its soft message: traitor, traitor, traitor, traitor.
If that was the decision.
Something bumped against his boat. He glanced down and made out a broken square from a raft rack,
