He put his hands softly on my shoulders. “Not without an emergency root override.”
“Sure, if I had—”
I flinched when he dug the roughshod circuit out of his pocket. “It only opens the maintenance areas, but that includes the main elevator shafts, even under lockdown. I’m kind of surprised you never made your own, given your skills. Given all the system access you had, working for the Clan.”
“I didn’t, because they’d flay me alive if they ever found out. They’d flay you alive.”
He caught the edge in my voice. “All the more reason for us both to get the hell out of here.”
It was only then that I finally processed that he was speaking in the plural. I shook my head frantically. “No. No! Absolutely not! You can’t come with me. I can’t have you endangering yourself for me.”
“It’s not just for you, okay? I’m a muralist! A muralist who’s spent his whole miserable life in a city with no natural light and no wall bigger than two by six meters. This is not the first time I’ve thought of leaving. It’s all I’ve been able to think about for weeks now.”
I knew he was telling the truth, but it still confounded me. “You never told me that.”
“Because I knew you’d worry too much to let me come with you, no matter what I said. And yes, I admit it: I’ve been scared shitless of going to the surface. I wasn’t sure I had the guts.” He gestured to the warning lights and glitchy scenes of carnage dancing across the pane behind him. “So much for that!”
“But where will you go? How will you live? Life is hard on the surface—and if you do this, you’ll be an outlaw. The Medusas will put a price on your head. There’s no coming back from this.”
He held my shoulder. “It’s my risk to take.”
“You certainly can’t follow me to Redhill. It’s within the borders of the Confederacy. Far too risky.”
He flinched slightly and hurried to say, “Of course. I’ll just go with you to the edge of the Econ Zone. Deal?”
I closed my eyes and let the adrenaline wash through me. I synchronized my breathing to his. I ran through every mind trick I’d ever learned to dissipate a panic attack. When I looked at my hands again, they held solid. I zipped up my coveralls and grabbed my bag—and just I started to tell Naoto to stay, Dahlia Lem’s image flashed across the pane.
I’d been so naïve and so crazed with fear the night I’d first come to this city, offering myself in exchange for her protection. For five years I’d done whatever she asked: fixing and breaking things in nodespace, intelligence, counter-intelligence, small acts of sabotage and theft. I’d made myself an accessory to all her atrocities, all for the sake of putting that many more walls, armed guards, and meters of ocean depth between myself and the Keepers.
Now she was dead. The most dangerous single human being in all of Epak, if not the whole world beyond, killed in an instant by a blast of pressurized water through a single broken seal.
“You’re right,” I said. “Let’s go.”
ALEXEI
The higher the pressure, the greater the need for meditative calm. The Major had drilled this principle into me, into all of us, never knowing how literally his philosophy would be tested—that seven years after his death, his last surviving protégé would huddle in a deserted Bloom City love hotel under a ceiling weighted with thirty meters of ocean, while the walls on every side of him held back three hundred thousand people in the process converting themselves into a single panicking riot.
I controlled my breath. My task was set out before me: I had to get out of this place. There was no room in my mind for anything else.
I called Kat. “Are you with me?”
“Till the bitter end,” she answered. “Did you ever read Dante’s Inferno?”
“No.”
“How about Huckleberry Finn?”
“No.”
“Seriously? Lex, honey. As soon as you get out of this bind, I’m putting a whole reading list on your shard.”
“The point.”
“The point is, the only way out of hell is out through the bottom. I found an empty construction sub docked way down on the lower refinery level. It’s all screwed up with electronic warfare, but I think I can crack it by the time you get there.”
“The lower refinery level.” My lungs ached, thinking about it. “The pressure down there must be two atmospheres higher than what I’m breathing now, and I don’t have any Pascalex on me.”
Kat’s voice through the scrambler was taut with nervous energy. “You’re in for some pain one way or another. For what it’s worth, the sub is supposed to have a deluxe deepwater trauma kit on board, complete with drugs and automated diagnostic equipment. Assuming nobody jacked it.”
I nodded and started walking. “It’ll have to do. How do I get around the lockdown?”
“All the elevators have been recalled to their top floors. The shafts are all empty. If you can get into one of them, it should take you straight down. But the doors are pressure-sealed so you’ll need a little something.”
I was already pressing the gray putty along the seam of the door. I stuck in the detonator leads and jogged down the corridor as far as it ran. In that confined and airtight space the explosion still made my ears pop, and the whole substructure around me rang like a gong. Through the wrenched-open elevator doors an intense wind howled, underlaid by the sound of metal debris clattering to the bottom.
“Still kicking?” Kat asked through the bud in my ear.
“The night is young,”
