The stairs appeared to climb for four stories rather than Beruthi’s three. For the moment, at least, they were deserted, no servants moving up or down with trays of bonbons or whatever servants used stairs for. Why didn’t they just use elevators, anyway?
Maybe they did, mostly, and that’s why the stairs were deserted.
“How the hell do we find this elevator to Thirteenth?” Danyl said. “Have you ever been in Quarters Kranz?”
“Only the ballroom,” Alania said. “But if I had to guess—”
“You do,” Danyl said.
“—then I’d guess the top floor. Quarters Kranz is the only house on Twelfth Tier that stands four stories. There’s a rooftop garden—I could see it from my room—and in the middle of it, there’s a kind of . . . gazebo, is that the word?”
“You’re asking me?” Danyl said. “Whatever a gazebo is, I’m pretty sure we don’t have them in the Middens.”
Alania laughed a little. “Fair enough. Anyway, there’s a gazebo . . . or shed . . . or pavilion . . . or whatever you want to call it exactly in the middle of the roof, and it connects to the Tier ceiling. It’s the only place in Twelfth Tier that connects to the ceiling. Even the Core is capped just below that. The elevator shaft has to be somewhere inside it, right?”
“Stands to reason,” Danyl said. Keeping out of the line of sight of that worrisome camera bubble, he peered up. “All clear. But there could be more cameras.”
“Try to look like a servant,” Alania said. She pointed at the slugthrower. “You might want to start by putting that thing away.”
Reluctantly, Danyl holstered the weapon, then pulled out the tail of his black servant’s shirt to hide it. “What if they don’t wear this type of servants’ uniform in Quarters Kranz?”
“They’re pretty much standard,” Alania said. “All the servants at all the birthday parties I had to attend growing up—and I had to attend a lot of them—were dressed like this. Servants are supposed to be invisible and interchangeable, like robots. Which is what Beruthi used in our Quarters, of course.”
“Why didn’t the others?”
“Because robots are cheap,” Alania replied. “People are expensive. The main purpose of Officer social activities is to show off to other Officers, to establish how powerful and wealthy your family is so business or political rivals think twice before messing with you. Lots and lots of costly servants send that message.”
“Like the severed heads the Rustbloods used to stick on their gateposts from time to time,” Danyl said.
Alania grimaced. “I could have done without that image, but yeah, exactly like that.”
“So you really think we’ll pass as servants?”
“I hope we’ll pass as servants,” she corrected.
“Just hope?”
“At this point, hope is pretty much all we’ve got, wouldn’t you say?”
Danyl grunted. “I guess you’re right about that.” He looked up the stairs. “Let’s climb.”
It seemed at first as if all would be well. No one challenged them as they crept past the closed door that presumably led to the kitchens, if Quarters Kranz were laid out anything like Quarters Beruthi. No one challenged them as they climbed past the second-floor doorway.
But the third-floor doorway opened as they approached it, and two Provosts entered the stairwell and headed downstairs, brushing past Danyl and Alania. Danyl tensed, and he might have reached for the barely concealed slugthrower if Alania hadn’t grabbed his arm. Her instincts proved correct—the Provosts paid no more attention to them than if they had been furniture, far more interested in their own conversation . . . a conversation that suddenly interested Danyl, too, when he heard Kranz’s name.
“. . . Kranz is antsy about something, that’s for sure,” the first one said. “Doubled security on all entrances as he left.”
“Has anyone ever broken into Quarters Kranz?” the second one asked.
“Not in fifty years,” the first one replied, his voice fading as they continued down the stairs. “That was during the previous First Officer’s tenure, of course. Burglar from Fifth. Caught the guy trying to flee up the Canyon. One of my instructors told us about him. They tortured him for a month on Tenth before they finally—”
The Provosts opened the door one floor down and exited.
Danyl glanced at Alania. “Did you hear that?” he whispered. “Kranz is out.”
“And they’re focused on the regular entrances,” Alania whispered back. “We’ve got a chance . . .”
They hurried on up to the fourth and final landing. The door opened easily. The corridor beyond, floored in marble with silvery walls and ceiling and sparkling crystal light fixtures, made Quarters Beruthi look Spartan. There were only a few doors: a pair of them facing each other at Danyl and Alania’s end of the hall and another pair far, far down, near the other end. In between stood an ostentatiously grand pair of double doors, framed with marble pillars.
“First Officer’s office?” Danyl guessed.
“Has to be,” Alania agreed.
Danyl nodded. “Then let’s go.”
He stepped into the hallway . . . and all hell broke loose.
First came the alarm: screeching, screaming, deafening, a physical assault in its own right, hammering Danyl and Alania into momentary motionlessness. Then came the amplified voice of the City computer: “Unauthorized personnel, fourth floor! Unauthorized firearm, fourth floor! Unauthorized personnel, fourth floor! Unauthorized firearm, fourth floor!”
“Shit!” Danyl jerked the slugthrower from under his shirt just as the doors closest to them burst open. A Provost charged out from each side of the hall. Danyl fired instantly, reacting with reflexes honed by countless hours in Erl’s simulator.
The Provosts wore bulletproof vests, but so had the enemies in the simulations. Danyl fired not at their bodies, not at the iffy targets of their heads, but at their legs. Both went down screaming. Shouts echoed from the stairwell, and doors slammed open on each floor. Danyl stomped on the hand of one of the crippled Provosts, who was trying to raise his beamer, then kicked the dropped weapon farther down the hall. “Get that!” he shouted to Alania. She hurried to grab it. “Shoot anything that moves!” He turned back to the servants’ stair, slamming the door shut.
As he spun around again, a door at the far end of the hall swung open, and the beam from Alania’s weapon seared a burning line across the paneling. The door slammed shut as smoke billowed to the ceiling. The high-pitched squeal of a triggered smoke alarm added to the din.
Danyl ran past the fallen Provosts and dashed with Alania the rest of the way to what they hoped was Kranz’s office. He pulled the key from his pocket and inserted it into the lockplate in the middle of the right-hand door. If it didn’t work . . .
But the door opened without fuss. Danyl snatched back the key, and they bolted into the room. Danyl turned and slammed the door shut again, hoping it locked automatically. Only then did he pause to survey the office.
He’d feared the elevator would be hard to find, concealed somehow, but far from being hidden, it was highlighted, its floodlit doors glowing like molten gold . . . the same color as the key he carried. Probably to rub the noses of visitors in the fact Kranz has access to the Captain and they don’t.
He rushed to the elevator doors. There was no button, no lockplate. He tried touching the doors with the key.
They didn’t open.
Danyl heard running footsteps in the hall. The office doors might have locked, but the Provosts had to have some way of getting through them. He and Alania only had a moment. Alania turned toward the doors with her beamer, but that would only buy them a few seconds.
He searched the desktop, but it was smooth black glass, and the only decoration, if you could call it that, was a strange dagger, heavier than it looked. He ignored it and turned to the walls.
One of the paintings, a romanticized view of the City at dusk, was slightly out of place, one edge tilted away from the wall. He ran to it and tugged at it.
It swung open like a door, revealing a monitor similar to the status screen of the docbot that had patched up his wounds—and apparently programmed his nanobots—as a kid. Most of the readouts were yellow or red. Beneath that screen was a simple square of gold metal with a hole in the middle of it, just the size of the key.
“Show-off,” he muttered, and he shoved the cylinder into the hole.
The elevator opened. He tugged at the key. It wouldn’t come out.
Something heavy struck the office doors, which bowed inward. Another blow like that . . . Danyl turned and fired twice at the doors. The bullets didn’t penetrate, just gouged holes in the wood as they flattened against armor plating beneath, but maybe the noise and implied threat would deter anyone on the other side for a few seconds. Then he and Alania crammed into the glistening white-and-gold interior of the tiny elevator, clearly only intended to accommodate one person.
The door slid shut.
They ascended.
Danyl’s eyes met Alania’s, which were wide and white, but she didn’t look frightened. If anything, she looked exhilarated. He felt another surge of protectiveness and pride toward her. My sister. We’re cut from the same cloth.
From the same cloth as the Captain, he thought then. And worse, Kranz.
The elevator continued its inexorable rise. Danyl couldn’t imagine what they would see when that door opened, couldn’t imagine what he was supposed to do.
But soon enough, he wouldn’t have to imagine.
Without speaking, they rose to the pinnacle of the City.
THIRTY-TWO
ONCE AGAIN, First Officer Kranz glared down at the man in the hospital bed, furious and frustrated by the fact that it was impossible to torture someone in a coma.
I could always torture the Provost who shot him, he thought viciously, but then he shoved that thought aside. That would be unnecessarily vindictive. It had been a firefight, after all, and the bullet that had laid Erlkin Orillia low had apparently been a ricochet; if it had been a direct hit, it would have killed him instantly.
Medical Officer Saunders had had nothing new to report: there was serious swelling of the brain, he said, and whether Orillia ever spoke again—or even woke again—was out of his control.
Kranz had come down to the hospital determined to have the doctor rouse Orillia by any means necessary, but neither drugs nor electrical stimulation had produced more than a twitch. Orillia’s body might be alive, but it wasn’t his body Kranz needed—it was his mind, and whatever information he must have about Beruthi’s ultimate intentions for Danyl.
And where were the two Cityborn brats, anyway? They’d come into the City, and he knew they were alive, but no one had seen them since—
He felt a buzz against his wrist and looked to see the code of his Head of Household Security blinking an urgent red. With a mixture of alarm and annoyance, he slapped at the communicator with his right hand. “What is it, Lieutenant Commander Trishel?”
“Young man and young woman got into the house, sir,” Trishel’s voice snapped, urgent and tense. “Disguised as servants. They made it to the fourth floor.”
“Where you presumably arrested them,” Kranz said icily.
Even over the commlink, he heard Trishel swallow hard. “No, sir. They . . . I’m sorry, sir, but . . . somehow . . . they gained access to your office. We had to break down the door. By the time we got inside, they . . . they were gone, sir.”
“Gone?” Kranz’s gut clenched as the enormity of what he was hearing hit home. “Gone where?”
“The elevator, sir,” Trishel said. “They took the elevator.”
Impossible! Kranz wanted to shout, but clearly it wasn’t. There was no way out of his office besides the main door and the elevator. All they’ve done is trap themselves, he tried to reassure himself. They can’t do anything on Thirteenth.
Can they?
“On my way,” he snapped. He didn’t bother adding, I’ll deal with you later. There was no point in threatening punishment when punishment was already certain.
He was fifteen minutes from Quarters Kranz. Danyl and Alania would be on Thirteenth for more than twenty minutes before he could reach them.
They can’t know anything about what they’ll find there, he reminded himself as he strode quickly toward the exit; he would have preferred to run, but the First Officer couldn’t afford to show panic, even if he felt it. I’m the only one who knows the procedure to replace the Captain. They’ll still be standing there, befuddled, when I arrive. And then I can take control of the situation.
This can still be salvaged.
In fact, they might have just saved him time and effort. After all, Thirteenth was exactly where he wanted Alania. If all goes well, we’ll have a new Captain by nightfall.
If all goes well.
The trouble was, nothing had gone well since Alania had plunged into the Middens.
Still, Kranz thought as he reached the street and hurried toward his quarters, his bodyguards falling in beside him as he burst out of the hospital. At this point, hope is pretty much all the City and I have got, isn’t it?
Erl waited for two minutes after Kranz left, then brought himself out of the semiconscious state into which he had ordered his nanobots to submerge him—the nanobots with which Prime had provided him all those years ago, which had long since mended his wounds and had just now counteracted the drugs and electrical shocks used to “revive” him. The doctor knew what was going on, of course; Medical Officer Saunders had helped Prime arrange Danyl’s abduction two decades ago. He’d personally taken over Erl’s treatment the moment he was delivered to the hospital; who else would Kranz have trusted?
Saunders had done everything in his power to convince Kranz that Erl could not be questioned, and he had done so most effectively. He had also, of course, not told Kranz about the nanobots in Erl’s bloodstream. Like Danyl’s, Erl’s had always been half quiescent, keeping him healthy and helping him heal more quickly than normal, but they’d never been fully activated for fear Cark or someone else would notice his unusual abilities and wonder if information about them might be worth something to the Provosts.
Erl had been so badly wounded when he’d arrived at the hospital, though, that Saunders had had no choice but to dial the nanobots up to full power. They had quickly healed Erl’s head injury and other assorted wounds from the firefight and brought him back to full consciousness. Best of all, they were now under his conscious control, so he could use them to do things like put himself into a semiconscious state that looked like sleep to anyone on the outside but allowed him to listen in on things like the conversation Kranz had just had with his Head of Household Security. Thus he had learned that Danyl and Alania, against all hope, were even now ascending to the Captain.
The trouble was, of course, that Kranz was hard on their heels. Which meant it was time for Erl to quit malingering.
He swung his feet over the side of the bed, pulled off the various cords and tubes attached to him purely for the sake of appearances, and reached for his clothes. As he’d expected, Saunders arrived two minutes later. “What are you doing?” the Medical Officer demanded. “We can’t be certain the nanobots are stable. There could still be complications . . .”
“There’s already been a complication,” Erl said. “I’m self-discharging, Doctor Saunders. Don’t worry, I’ll say it was against doctor’s orders.”
“Oh, good,” Saunders said dryly. “I wouldn’t want to risk my career or anything like that.” His brief smile faded. “I didn’t see you leave. And the cameras didn’t see you either.”
Erl nodded. “Thank you for your help.”
Saunders nodded once more, then turned and went out without looking
back.
Two minutes later, Erl was running along the streets of Twelfth Tier, his destination the same as the First Officer’s: Quarters Kranz.
With one side stop along the way . . .
The elevator halted, the door opened, and without any fuss at all, Alania and Danyl entered Thirteenth Tier, abode of the Captain.
In her mind, Alania had conjured an image of Thirteenth Tier based largely on the Earthmyth tale of Heaven, where the souls of the righteous played harps on solid clouds and the decorating consisted of gold and precious and semiprecious stones. The initial reality proved to be a bland, wood-paneled room with a red suede couch against one wall, sitting beneath a strange image of a blue-and-white sphere hung in a starry black sky, a smaller white sphere behind it and off to one side.
Against the other wall were two big armchairs upholstered in the same red leather. Between them in a glass cabinet hung something Alania took to be an abstract sculpture, since it made no sense otherwise. It was a kind of long cylinder with bulbous ends and an apparently random assortment of other shapes attached to its length here and there: cubes, tetrahedrons, smaller spheres. Lights sparkled. An engraved plaque caught her eye, and she moved close enough to read UES Discovery. She knew the word “Discovery,” of course, but what did UES stand for?
Maybe they’re the artist’s initials.
Danyl hadn’t even glanced at the sculpture—his attention was on the door opposite the elevator. “I don’t have the key anymore,” he said grimly. “The lock in Kranz’s office wouldn’t release it. If this door doesn’t open . . .”
Alania hefted the beamer she’d taken from the fallen Provost in Kranz’s fourth-floor hallway. “We’ll get through it somehow,” she said. She took a step toward the door, prepared to burn through it if she had to—if she could—but the door simply slid open at her approach. She exchanged a startled glance with Danyl, and then, still holding the beamer at the ready, took a step toward the opening.
The Cityborn Page 36