“Tie that length around your waist,” Arsha said, taking the rope and looping it around a concrete pillar toward the back of the room.
“Tie that what?” I said, hesitant, dropping the pad back in its place. I eyed off the ledge nervously.
“Don’t worry,” she smirked. “I’ll be the one going out. You just have to wait in here and be my anchor should I slip.”
She drew the rope ends together and began tying them in a knot while I fumbled with the rope at my hip.
“So what’s the plan?” I said.
She thumped her fist on the ladder, making it clatter noisily in the cavernous space.
“This thing will be my platform. You stand on one end as a counterweight. You’re secured to the pillar, then I’m secured to you.” She made a final tug on the knot she was working on, the cord-like muscles in her arm flexing and writhing under her skin with the exertion. “If I fall, it’s your job to help pull me back up.”
“How about you just don’t fall in the first place?”
She grinned. “Try my best.”
Standing up, she moved over to the ledge and began to kick away the jagged pieces of glass from the edges of the window. Cautiously I went and stood beside her. The fragments drifted out into the air and shimmered for what seemed like forever as they fell toward the buildings below.
“Are you sure about this?” I said. “That’s a hell of a long way down.”
“I wouldn’t be taking a risk like this if it weren’t so important,” she said, scraping at more pieces of glass on the floor. “If you hadn’t come back I was going to have to do it myself anyway, which would have been ten times more difficult.”
I backed up to give her more room, as well as lessen the vertigo of standing so close to the edge. As I did, I noticed something snagging on the rope behind us. It was white and cylindrical, propped up the pillar. Curious, I went over to investigate.
“Hey,” I called out after a few steps. “Arsha, there’s a telescope sitting here.”
“Oh yeah, that’s mine,” she called back. “Can you shift it, please? I don’t want that broken.”
I collected it up and ran my hand along its length. It was scratched along the edges, but taking a quick look down the eyepiece it seemed in good condition. I began making my way back over to the ledge where Arsha was finishing up her preparations.
“So what did you use it for?”
She dusted off her hands and shrugged. “Lots of things. It’s a great vantage point from up here. You can see to the horizon in any direction.” She pointed to the north. “I’ve seen some darker patches in the wasteland out there that I think are clumps of vegetation. I’ve also scoped out most of the city at one time or other, saves my legs. That’s usually how I start the process of looking for a new plantation.”
I placed the telescope and its tripod on the floor nearby, out of the way. “Was that the only reason you were doing it? Or were you also on the lookout for threats?”
“I guess a little of both.”
She reached for the rope at my waist, giving it a sharp tug. She scowled, her fingers nimbly pulling at the little knot I’d made and unravelling it, then she cinched the rope tighter, enough to make me flinch, and started anew with her own knot. I raised my arms to give her free reign of my midsection.
“There,” she said, jerking one final time on the rope. “That will hold.” She went and secured it around the pillar as she had done with the first rope, and then tied the other end around her own waist. Once satisfied, she made another final check of her tool belt.
“I think we’re ready,” she said.
“Now, you’re sure about this....”
She nodded curtly. “Has to be done.” Leaning down, she began to carefully slide the ladder along the floor and out into the void. Above, an overhanging ledge jutted out a couple of metres, and when the ladder had slid out far enough to reach it, she stopped.
“Stand here,” she said, pointing to the ladder with one hand as she held it steady with the other. I did as she ordered and stepped on top of it, the aluminium frame scraping on the floor as I adjusted to a comfortable foothold. “Now just stay still and don’t panic. You’re secured to the pillar. You’re not going anywhere. All you need to do is weigh down the ladder so I can reach that ledge.”
I nodded. “I can do that.”
She flapped her fingers about to loosen them up, then exhaled heavily, the only sign of nerves I’d seen from her. Then she stepped up confidently and began to edge her way out along the ladder.
“Be careful, Arsha.”
She stepped carefully and deliberately, making slow progress. A gust of wind ruffled her shirt and tossed her hair in all directions, strands of it floating in the air like gossamer threads of spider silk. She kept her hands out to her sides for balance and never once looked like losing her equilibrium. With every step her weight was brought to bear on my end of the ladder, the sensation causing me to feel more and more buoyant, like I was being hoisted up into the air. I kept my focus on the rope, which was holding firm and secure.
“One hell of a view,” she called over her shoulder, looking through the rungs of the ladder at what must have been a dizzying spectacle down the sheer face of the building. “Wish I’d brought my camera,” she joked.
“Watch it, will you?” I said tensely. “This is a ladder tied to a rope, not an observation deck.”
She ignored me, instead turning her attention to the edge of the roof above her. She stood perfectly still on the end of the ladder, sizing up her approach, looking very much like an Olympic diver poised on the edge of a diving board.
“I can make it,” she called out, intently focused now on her goal. “Hang on.”
I gripped the rope, the lifeline that linked us together, as if it were me out there hanging over that tremendous gulf. She waited for what seemed an age before moving into a crouch. Her legs tensed. She leapt.
The ladder rocked beneath my feet and I almost cried out, fearing the worst. I needn’t have feared. Arsha bridged the distance to the ledge and clung to it easily, like a trapeze artist who had performed the trick a thousand times before and who found it no more of a challenge than climbing out of bed in the morning. She even had the audacity to hang there by one hand as she casually checked the implements on her tool belt one by one to ensure they were still snugly in place.
“For fuck’s sake, Arsha,” I moaned. “Two hands.”
She grinned back at me, oozing confidence. “Be back in a minute, okay?”
She hauled herself upward, and in a few seconds her legs had disappeared from view. I heard her scratching about as little clumps of dust sprinkled over the edge, dislodged by her passage.
Her voice floated down as she shouted over the wind to be heard. It sounded distant, but I could make out parts here and there.
“...going... look around.”
The rope began to shimmy along the ledge to the left as she moved, like a fishing line jumping at the whim of an unseen catch.
“Just be careful,” I said again. I watched the rope slide along, snagging in places before she flicked at it to free it up again, then looked down at the loops of rope at my feet. There was still plenty of slack should she require it.
She stopped once or twice and seemed to double back, then kept moving. I heard a dull thud and had a horrible vision of her slipping, tumbling over the edge and into the abyss, screaming in terror, but she remained surefooted on the roof. A few more thuds followed, and I realised she was clubbing at something with her tools. There was more scratching, and then I heard her call something out. The wind twisted and tore at the sounds and made them indecipherable.
“What?” I called back. Realising I no longer needed to remain standing on the ladder, I moved across closer to where the rope disappeared above the ledge. “Can you repeat that?”
Her words drifted down to me in little morsels, coming through like a bad radio transmission. “... think I found... conduit... few minutes..
..”
“Okay,” I called back. Then I mumbled to myself, “I think.”
I moved over to the telescope and pivoted it upward so that it pointed out across the city. Edging down, I peered through the eyepiece, and after a minute or so of searching I zeroed in on the Grid spire. It was like a needle that stretched up forever, the base in total darkness but the upper extremities bathed in glinting crimson sunlight, as if it had punctured the skin of the earth from within and pushed skyward, its tip still bloody. I did not see it pulse again.
Panning to either side along the horizon, I could detect nothing but the great expanse of the wasteland. Arsha had said she’d seen vegetation out there, but with the gloom of evening already spreading across, there was no evidence to be seen. I made a mental note to return here in better light so that I could survey the terrain in more favourable conditions.
“Still okay?” I yelled out across the ledge.
“...good....” came the reply.
I swivelled the telescope closer to home and began picking out landmarks. A bare patch of brown that was once a golf course lay over in the east. Not far from that, the football stadium. There wasn’t much else out there I could recognise. It had all changed so much. Not for the first time, I had that feeling that it was like a different city down there.
I swung out towards the setting sun and immediately lifted my eye away from the telescope. There was a thick plume of smoke out there, churning skyward. The sun was an even deeper shade of red-orange than normal as it hid behind the haze, like the smouldering eye of a demon. I could see the familiar shape of the West Street Bridge in the shadow of the smoke, and leaned back in to the eyepiece for a closer look.
The fire was very bright, and large enough to fill up the lens through the telescope. I thought I could make out the form of some of the factories we had passed yesterday, ablaze, wreathed brilliantly in yellow and red. All of this had grown from something small and insignificant, something that had only been a faint scent at first, just an inkling in the air as we’d passed the bridge. It had blossomed into something far more fearsome than I’d anticipated.
“Looks like those factories out past the bridge are going up in smoke,” I called out.
“...what...?”
“The smoke. Do you see it?”
She yelled back something garbled that I couldn’t decipher.
I looked again through the eyepiece. I tried counting the buildings that had been consumed. There were more than a few. I was up to six when I noticed something else through the haze: further out to the west, beyond the smog of the first fire was another plume of smoke. It was directly in line with the first, disguised, making it harder to detect, and it was also much smaller. But it was definitely there. A secondary fire.
Tendrils of ice suddenly closed around my insides and I looked away from the eyepiece.
“Brant,” I muttered to myself, “get a grip.”
With the naked eye there was no second plume visible at all.
You’re imagining it.
Bending to the eyepiece one more time, I looked again. No. It’s there. Fumbling, my fingers trembling, I turned the telescope as I followed the curve of the street from the bridge as it headed west, picking out landmarks as I went. I’d only seen them the day before, so there was at least some familiarity there. I kept tracing the road as it curved back around. Further. As I came to a stop I found the eyepiece was filled with that new plume of smoke.
Time seemed to stop. This wasn’t real.
That secondary fire intersected precisely with the location of the Displacer laboratory.
“Arshaaaa!”
There was a clatter above of something being dropped.
“...shit, Brant... what...?”
“Arsha! You need to get down here! Right now!”
A pause. “...the hell... almost done.”
“Arsha, it’s the lab. The Displacer lab is on fire!”
37
Arsha dropped to the ladder, swaying uncertainly for a moment and flirting with the emptiness below her. I stood still and straight, trying my best to keep it from rocking as she steadied and began to creep toward me, scowling.
“Just what do you think you’re doing? Don’t you know I...?” The look of wrath that constricted her features melted away when she saw the terror, the desperation in my eyes.
“Hurry, Arsha, just hurry.” I willed her forward with every fibre of my being. Her passage seemed to take an age as she edged along. She was moving in slow motion. “Come on!”
“Okay, okay,” she said, her anger gone. A mixture of doubt and apprehension had crept in and taken its place. “Just be cool.”
After what seemed like minutes she was back inside, rolling nimbly away from the ladder and to safety. I was already moving and untying the rope from my waist.
“What the hell, Brant,” she said shakily. The words were framed as a complaint, but there was a note of concern there as well. One knee bent to the floor, she began working at her own rope. “What’s all this about?”
“I told you, the lab is on fire out there,” I said, making no attempt to hide my anguish. “On fire.”
“Impossible,” she muttered. She began to say something else but I was already free of my bonds and heading to the door. ‘Brant!”
I lurched into the stairwell and leapt, one hand skimming across the railing and the other flailing as I attempted to maintain balance. I cleared the whole flight of a dozen or so steps and thudded onto the landing below, somehow keeping my footing, dust exploding from the impact. My knees creaked and my body quivered from the vibrations that ran up my legs. It hurt. But I didn’t slow down. I did the same on the next flight and the one after that, hurling myself down the stairwell with a kind of reckless abandon. My own welfare seemed a distant concern. I just needed to get down. I needed to get out.
Arsha’s voice echoed down in my wake, a ghostly patchwork of noise that was incomprehensible amid the slapping of my feet on concrete. The echoes of one impact reverberated even as the next one arrived, such was the rapidity of my descent. The stairwell became a cacophony of scuffs and thuds and grunts of exertion. I slipped and fell more than once, but the pain didn’t seem to register. I just kept going, tripping down steps, getting up, my shoulder cannoning into walls, ribs scraping on metal railings. I swept it all aside like a man brushing away cobwebs as he staggered toward the light at the end of a tunnel.
I didn’t count floor numbers on the descent, never once raising my eyes from the objective in front of me: the next set of stairs. There was no attempt to track my progress, no milestones. Just one landing, then the next, and the one after that. I felt like I was entering an infinite loop, caught in a stairwell that had no beginning or end, and no matter how many floors I descended, there would always be another one below to greet me. A paradoxical quest that only got longer the further I went. Another version of Hell.
Then, suddenly, I was there at the steel door, wrenching it aside and limping out into the alleyway. Outside, twilight was shedding its last light across the city. I kept running, down to the dumpster, through one side and busting out the other, bits of wood and debris bursting around me. I pulled myself off the pavement and got my legs pumping, careening down the street, headed west.
In minutes I was at the West Street Bridge, weaving through car wrecks and hurdling anything that got in my way, the fire on the other side of the river lighting my way. The dragon-like curves of the bridge swept above me, and at the far end that arc of flaming buildings was like its fiery breath. I could feel the heat of it already, like standing in the midday sun at the peak of summer. At another time I would have sat back to marvel at the spectacle of it, but right now, my only thought was to find a way through it.
As I neared the end of the bridge, the heat became overwhelming, stinging the skin with its intensity. The storm hadn’t reached this side of the river and the fire had gone unchecked. The smoke pouring out of the inferno was thick, clogging the street to such
an extent that I couldn’t be sure there was safe passage through. Even if there was, I doubted I could withstand the temperature at such close proximity. I had no choice but to turn south along the river and head down a block, away from the fire, and turn back. It was an aggravating detour, but one that was necessary.
The streets one block down were brightly lit by the fire and visibility was good, allowing me to keep up a steady pace. I came across one major obstacle - a tangled wreck of cars that consumed precious seconds as I negotiated my way across. Once free of them I was able to turn back north and resume my heading along West Street, out to the Displacer lab.
Thoughts were trampling through my head like a herd of deer. I tried grabbing at them, holding them so I could place them in some kind of order and establish a plan, but I couldn’t secure any of them for more than a few seconds. As soon as I touched one it was swiftly replaced by the next, bumping and thrusting its way forward and knocking any previous notion aside. With every stride it seemed a new question came to mind.
How did the lab catch on fire when the first outbreak was several clicks away? What was I going to do when I got there? Was there a way to douse the flames? Could I relocate the gear that was inside? How long before the whole building came down? What would happen if I didn’t make it in time?
They kept coming, question after question. But I had no answers.
Skipping over a pile of debris, my foot caught and I was sent sliding and scraping along the asphalt. I bumped heavily on the unyielding surface, but didn’t waste time licking my wounds. I didn’t feel the pain. My palms slapped on the ground and I pushed myself up, hobbling forward again. The second fire was close. Minutes before it had been just a dull glow in the sky. Now I could see the flames over the rooftops, hear it crackle, see the plume of smoke drifting up into the night sky. I gave one last surge to close the distance between us.
Finally I rounded the last bend and it came into view. The fire had already swept between a number of buildings, not as intense as the fire at the river, but enough to engulf one whole side of the street. The lab sat between the larger shapes of the buildings around it, the roof ablaze. The noise seemed deafening, the insistent roar and crackle of flames punctuated by the sounds of things inside the buildings popping and fizzing - long dormant chemicals and appliances meeting a fiery end.
After the Winter (The Silent Earth, Book 1) Page 24