Chapter 6: The Chase Through the Dark
The torch beam cut a white cone through the dark volume, and Tommie ran.
His boots hit the deck plate in a rhythm that came back off the crate walls. Behind him the servers ticked as they cooled, a hundred small clicks like ice cracking. Hot dust hung in the air. He held the light low so he could see the floor.
Naomi's footprints ran ahead of him in the film of grit that had settled over eleven years. Small prints, bare heels, the left dragging slightly. Five meters on, a smear where her forearm had brushed a rack. Tommie kept the beam on the trail and moved.
"Hazel," he called back, without turning. "The port's on the north wall. I'm going."
Her answer came from far behind him, clipped and thin. "Go."
At the breaker panel, Hazel put her hand on the two-pole switch she had already thrown and felt nothing. The handle sat down and dead. Above her the red rings in the corridor mouths had gone dark, and the held tone was gone, and in its place was a silence so complete she could hear her own jaw working.
The three doors hung open on their magnetic catches. When the breaker failed, the plates had failed with it, and the locks went with the plates. Warm air spilled out of each doorway, stale and sweet, the smell of a room slept in too long.
A woman came out first, one hand gripping her own elbow. She was thin in the way hospital patients get thin, and she wore a house underlayer the color of wet cardboard. She looked at Hazel and blinked.
"The tone stopped," she said.
"It did."
"Is it finished?" The woman looked back at her door, then at the corridor she'd come from. Her cuff was grey. The house graph on it had been scraped off with something sharp.
"No," Hazel said. "You're on Sub-Level Eleven. There's a lift at the end of the service band. Go now, take the first shaft up, don't stop on any floor with a red light."
The woman walked. She didn't ask anything else, which was worse than if she had.
From the second door a man in his fifties stepped out already talking, telling the corridor he wanted it logged, he wanted the whole thing logged, he was a tenant with rights of access and review. He was barefoot and his legs were shaking. He got three steps before he saw Hazel and stopped.
"Who are you?"
"Someone who cut your power," she said. "The door's open. Use it."
From the third doorway nobody came. Hazel took one step toward it, then heard the shuffle.
It came out of the fourth corridor, which had no plate and no door, only the raw mouth of a passage cut into the volume's concrete. First one, then two more, then another two. Five in total. They wore the same grey underlayer, and each of them had a black band set into the skull above the ear, and each of them walked with the same flat, even gait.
The inventory.
The first one passed the third doorway without looking at it. The second one passed Hazel at arm's length. She caught its wrist. The skin was warm but the arm gave like a slack cable, no tension in it, and it kept walking and pulled her along a half step before she let go.
"Hey," she said. Nothing.
They were following Naomi's prints in the grit. Hazel understood it as she watched them go, the prints leading toward the north wall and the cut port, and the five of them stepping in the same track, heel to heel, one after another, the way a machine follows a program.
She went after them. She didn't run. Running would have been useless and would have told her something she didn't want to know.
Wendell's speaker crackled in the dark. "They'll walk into the shaft and fall," he said. "You should know that before you decide what to do about it."
"Which shaft?"
"The one your man is standing in."
Tommie had reached the port. It sat in the north wall at chest height, a raw rectangular opening with the deck plate flame-cut away, edges still soft with oxidization. He put the torch up and looked in.
A service shaft, narrow, vertical, ladders bolted to one side in rusted runs. At the bottom, an elbow that dropped away out of the beam. Naomi's tracks ended at the lip, single prints, no return prints. She was gone down the ladder or up it.
He put a hand on the ladder and the whole run of it moved a quarter inch. It hadn't been built for weight. He climbed anyway, one rung, two, and put his head into the shaft.
Something red moved across the wall above him.
He looked up. Three decks overhead, in the black, a lift cage was coming down. Its running lights lit the shaft in a slow red pulse, on, off, on, and they threw his shadow down the ladder behind him. Around the cage the shaft walls were clean of dust for a meter on each side, where the car had scoured them.
Coming down to Eleven. Nobody was scheduled on Eleven.
Tommie tightened his grip on the ladder and listened past the pulse of the light.
Behind him, on the other side of the port, five pairs of bare feet were stepping into the grit in the same track.