And they waited. Elsie couldn’t stand the strain, and she slid down the corridor, covering her face with her hands, as if willing the world away. A minute passed. One of the man’s fellow stevedores hollered out an impatient word before the toilet flushed noisily and the stall door slammed open and closed and the stevedore, freshly relieved, walked loudly out of the bathroom.
Only then did Elsie creep her head back over the lip of the vent opening.
Harry was still straddling the stall. He looked up at the shocked faces of the three Unadoptables, who were peeking down at him through the hole in the ceiling.
“That,” he said, “was disgusting.”
Before another stevedore had a chance to wander into the bathroom and disrupt their plan, Elsie and Oz had thrust their hands down through the vent opening and yanked Harry, with all their strength, into safety.
Joffrey Unthank’s goal was in sight. There, at the end of the hallway, was a door marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Beyond it was the very small and dark room that housed the operational protocols for the Tower’s two auxiliary elevators. Only one of those elevators was known to most of the staff of the Tower: the service elevator, a nondescript apparatus that was used mainly by janitorial and, if needed, in emergency situations. However, unbeknownst to everyone apart from the few who had high-level security clearance, the console inside the room could also override the security lock for a more clandestine elevator: the small caged contraption that served as an escape route from Wigman’s safe room. Joffrey rubbed his hands eagerly; he had high-level security clearance. It was a benefit of being a Titan of Industry. And now: His penultimate goal was at hand.
However, no sooner had he finished rubbing his palms when a pair of lumbering stevedores came crashing toward him, barreling down the hallway and blocking Unthank’s view of the door. He immediately recognized both of them, which was surprising considering the strange uniformity among the stevedore ranks: They all looked as if they’d been engineered by a remarkably unimaginative geneticist. But Joffrey knew them: They were Wigman’s two right-hand men, and they were steaming toward Joffrey and looking very angry.
They saw him, and genetically inseparable looks of surprise fell across their faces.
“Machine Parts?” said one, surprised.
“Jimmy!” said Unthank, smiling excitedly. “Bammer! Been a while, hasn’t it?”
“What are you doing here?” growled Bammer. He was holding a very large, red pipe wrench in his right hand.
“I thought you went crazy,” said Jimmy.
Unthank shrugged his shoulders as if to say, It happens.
“Do you know there’s an attack on the tower happening right now?” added Jimmy.
“An attack? Had no idea, tra la.” It just slipped out, the singing. He bit his lip, hard.
The two stevedores, so confused by the random meeting, seemed not to pay the little tic any mind. “Chapeaux Noirs,” said Bammer. “Gettin’ brazen. Whole lobby’s blown out.”
“Oh wow, really?” said Unthank.
“Yeah. It’s real. The Chief’s down there. We got to get him to safety.”
“What horrible people,” said Unthank. “Those saboteurs.”
“We’ll show them, though,” said Jimmy, who was also holding a very large pipe wrench. Joffrey couldn’t imagine the kind of plumbing repair that would require such a large tool. The stevedore whacked it against the palm of his opposing hand a few times.
“You sure will,” said Joffrey. “No doubt about it.”
“You shouldn’t be in here,” said Jimmy. “Ain’t safe.”
“Yes, yes,” said Joffrey. “I’m just making my way out. I know the drill.”
Just then, another explosion sounded from below. The hallway was rocked slightly by the detonation. Joffrey braced himself against the wall.
“We gotta get down there,” said Jimmy. “All hands on deck.”
“Watch yourself, Machine Parts,” said Bammer as the two stevedores shoved past him. It was an annoying entitlement the two stevedores enjoyed: being able to refer to the various Titans by their Division, something only Wigman typically did.
“Will do, guys,” said Joffrey. “And good luck down there.” He waited until they were out of sight before continuing his walk toward the door. He breathed deeply, desperately tamping down the violent urge he had to sprint for the door, screaming epithets. He still had appearances to keep up; his narrow escape from Bammer and Jimmy was testament to that.
He reached the door in a few short steps. Access required handprint identification, which he provided, along with another retinal scan. “Good evening, Joffrey Unthank,” said a robotic voice from the panel by the door once the procedure had been completed. A click sounded by the handle; Unthank pushed the door in and entered the room.
The break room had exhibited all the signs of a speedy departure; benches were upturned and magazines thrown carelessly to the ground. Several of the stevedores’ metal locker doors were wide open, and denim overalls poured out like blue tongues. A few maroon beanies littered the floor. Cold cups of coffee. Half-eaten bagels. The duct-rats had managed their scurry through the room without incident, and they were now running down the hall toward the service elevator that would, if all things were going according to plan, be powered down.
Harry led the pack this time; arriving at the shut doors (a sign above them read SERVICE ELEVATOR! AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY!) he sized up his challenge with a steely eye. He was ten years old—he’d have been twelve if it weren’t for his two years in the time-stasis of the Periphery—and it was as if someone had held their thumb on his head as he’d grown. All of his development seemed to have occurred in his thighs and biceps, while his height stayed remarkably stunted. Even Elsie, who was shorter than most of the nine-year-olds in their crowd, met him eye to eye when they spoke. He squared up his stumpy legs and fished his thick fingers into the gap between the elevator doors and pulled.
Nothing.
Again: He pulled. He grunted as he did so, and little veins popped up in his neck.
Elsie gave a look behind them. “Hurry!” she whispered.
“I’m trying,” said Harry, annoyed, before he gritted his teeth and tried again; the doors gave a little this time, and a thin red glow appeared between them: the light from the interior of the elevator shaft.
“You’re almost there!” said Ruthie. She and Oz thrust their fingers into the fissure to try and help.
Harry grunted again, and soon the doors had been pried some eighteen inches apart and the boy was able to slide between them and brace them open with his feet. “Okay!” he whispered breathlessly. “Get in!”
Oz went first, climbing through the lattice of Harry’s splayed shins and elbows, and gasped loudly. “Long way down, guys,” he said. He then inched his way out of sight and presumably began climbing. Elsie and Ruthie followed suit.
Just beyond the doors was a red-lit shaft that seemed impossibly tall; the floors below were distinguished by metal doors that appeared periodically along the wall of the cement corridor. The car was nowhere in sight. They could only hope that Mr. Unthank had managed to shut the thing down; it was understood that if the car were operational and it were to run over them as they climbed, well, the less said about it the better. Above them, the shaft stretched into the unseen distance, a constellation of little red lights extending into a pinkish blur. The metal rungs of a ladder were set into a shallow channel in the shaft wall, and the four children began climbing them, mindful not to look down.
“Come on,” said Elsie. “We got a long ways to go.”
Adopting the bearing of a service technician finishing his rounds, Unthank backed out of the room and gently closed the door behind him, ensuring that the door was locked as he did so. He couldn’t help, at this moment, but feel a little impressed with himself. Not only had he steeled himself against the constant barrage fed by his enfeebled mind, bursts of manic suggestions and reality-tilting images, but he’d managed it all r
ather flexibly, adapting his actions to all the curveballs that fate had thrown at him. What’s more, he’d done an incredibly good turn for the children. Now they would be well on their way to freeing their friends from the grip of the Chief Titan and thereby scuttling any chance of Bradley Wigman achieving what would have rightfully been Unthank’s, what he had worked at for so long. . . .
He stopped. That was the old himself.
He was working to free the children. To allow them their justice.
Smile.
He was, he had to admit, fairly good at this sort of thing. Perhaps there was a place for him among the ranks of the Chapeaux Noirs. He had to admit: Being a saboteur was rather satisfying.
But no: He had one last task. One last goal. One last wish to complete. He patted the thing in his pocket, took a deep breath, and began walking toward the end of the hall.
That was when Bammer and Jimmy showed up again.
You’re not supposed to do that, Unthank fought the urge to say aloud when he saw them. He chided himself. Remember. Flexibility. Smile. Don’t sing.
“Hi, gents,” he said amiably. “Back so soon?”
“Elevator’s down. Service elevator isn’t taking our credentials.”
“Oh,” said Unthank. “That’s strange.”
Bammer cocked his eyebrow. “I thought you were making your way out.”
“You were goin’ the wrong way to get out,” added Jimmy.
“Was I?” said Unthank. “I was, wasn’t I? Oh well, I guess you both should lead the way.”
The two stevedores paused and shared a look. “I said: Service elevator ain’t takin’ credentials. Think it’s been shut off. We need it on.”
“You got security clearance for that, don’t you?” asked Jimmy.
“I do, in fact,” said Unthank. Flexibility. He thought of the children. They would be climbing by now.
“Well?” prompted Bammer.
“I suppose we ought to, well, turn it on,” said Unthank.
“Yeah,” said Jimmy. “Like, now.”
“Right,” said Unthank. “Now.”
The three of them stood there in the hallway for a minute; another explosion rocked the building.
“NOW!” shouted Bammer.
The two stevedores grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around to face the door he’d so recently closed and locked. He focused his power into his legs to stop them from buckling, before realizing that he needed an equal amount of brainpower to consider all the implications of turning the service elevator back on. He and the stevedores were on the twenty-second floor; he knew that the duct-rats would be climbing into the shaft at the fifteenth. Surely, unless the children had already climbed above the elevator car, they would be meat loaf in the workings once the apparatus had passed them by. A shiver went up his spine.
“C’mon,” said Bammer. Unthank then realized they’d already arrived at the door, and he defeatedly presented the required body parts to the palm and retinal scanners.
“Welcome back, Mr. Unthank,” said the robotic chirp.
Jimmy cast a sidelong glance at Joffrey.
“Did you—” he began.
Unthank interrupted him. “C’mon, gents,” he said with a forced urgency. “The Chief Titan might be hurt.”
This, apparently, was enough to distract them from their sudden suspicions. They entered the room, gently shoving Unthank forward. A myriad of television screens presented themselves, flickering in the dark of the room. The monitors displayed the footage from the tower’s manifold security cameras and they played in stark, cinema verité black and white the violent scene that was playing out all around the tower’s ground floor. Several of the screens only showed static; three of them showed the dust-and-debris-covered lobby. Another explosion sounded; its source was shown in grim depiction by one of the television screens: a tremendous white cloud overcame a section of the south wall; a phalanx of stevedores came rushing into the frame.
“Quick!” shouted Bammer. Or was it Jimmy? Unthank couldn’t tell; his eyes were fixed on the monitors.
One of the screens showed the interior of the service elevator shaft. Four small children were there, gingerly scaling a narrow ladder, bathed in a dim light. One reached a hand out to the other, helping their compatriot over a difficult spot. Unthank looked down and, typing in the pass code he’d been given when he’d been named a Titan of Industry, restarted the power to the elevator.
CHAPTER 19
Martyrs for the Cause
Elsie had climbed nearly five stories (the numbers were painted in bright yellow by every door they passed) when she heard the elevator power up. It sent a jolt of adrenaline through her body. The car itself had come into view once they’d climbed a few dozen yards, lost in the hazy distance above them. A single white bulb dangled from its underside. But now: She’d heard a kind of buzzing hum echo through the shaft, and she looked down at Harry, who was some feet below her.
“Did you hear that?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said.
Hoping it was a fluke, Elsie kept climbing. It wasn’t long, however, until her worst fears were confirmed: The elevator car began to move.
Harry swore. Elsie looked up at Oz and Ruthie, who were close together, some thirty feet up. They both looked down at Elsie and Harry, a look of identically abject horror in their eyes.
“Guys!” they shouted. “It’s coming down!”
Elsie desperately began looking around her for some crevice to crawl into; none presented itself. Some ways up the shaft, she saw a small notch in the concrete, potentially big enough to house her small body. She began climbing toward it.
Just then, the elevator stopped at one of the doors, a few floors above them. Elsie barely had time to breathe a sigh of relief when it started up again, having presumably taken on passengers, and was now once more barreling toward them.
“Guys!” she shouted, disregarding the need for quiet. “Get to someplace safe!”
The elevator was picking up speed. A loud hum echoed through the long chamber. Elsie could hear the clacking of the cables as they struck against one another, dangling in the center of the shaft. She stepped away from the ladder and pressed herself into the small crevice she’d found, trying to flatten her back as well as she could. She willed her every inch of flesh to worm its way into the corners. Looking down, she saw that Harry was busily scrambling for a similar safe point, though it seemed to be some feet below him. Oz and Ruthie hadn’t had as much luck; the elevator was approaching them at a remarkably fast speed, and they were many yards away from one of these pockets in the shaft wall. Oz, dangling from the ladder, was trying to pry open one of the doors in the wall to no avail.
“Guys!” shouted Elsie.
Ruthie, unbelievably, was climbing madly toward the oncoming car, desperately attempting to reach the divot in the wall closest to her, which happened to be about ten feet above her. She arrived at it just as the speeding car passed her and she screamed as she thrust her small body into the cavity; the noise was swallowed by the groaning cry of the elevator as it plummeted downward, and Ruthie was gone from Elsie’s sight.
Oz, acting quickly, leapt from his place at the ladder and caught the looping cable that hung from the bottom of the car. He swung dramatically there, his legs kicking at the empty air below him. He joined the downward plummet of the car, rocked impotently by the swing of the cable. Elsie pressed herself farther into her crevice, preparing herself for the car’s arrival. It was now approaching her with the speed of a locomotive.
Elsewhere in the building, Joffrey Unthank watched the two stevedores as they marched out of sight down the hall. He knew he was trapped. Shutting down the elevator now would merely bring the two stevedores steaming back to him, demanding action and, more complexly, answers as to why the Machine Parts Titan was repeatedly turning on and off the service elevator. He could only watch. And wait.
He looked up at the security-camera feed of the elevator shaft; he saw the children cli
mbing. When the stevedores called the elevator, he saw the children panic in reaction to the movement of the car.
Move, he hissed to the grainy black-and-white image of the Unadoptables.
The car was heading down.
He realized that the children would not be able to get out of the way.
His fingers dove for the keys; he began madly jamming in his pass code. His fingers were shaking.
Tra la tra lee.
It was a hopelessly long string of numbers (why did they have to make it so complicated?); the keypad below his fingers seemed to shimmy and dissolve as he punched at the keypad.
ERROR, WRONG PASS CODE, read the screen.
He swore; he cracked his knuckles and tried again.
A shout sounded below Elsie. She looked down in time to see Harry fall away from his perch on the side of the wall; he’d been spooked by Ruthie’s scream and had looked up, momentarily losing his balance. He managed to catch his arm on a rung of the ladder, and Elsie could hear a thump resound through the chamber, and Harry let out a pained yelp. The boy swung there by the crook of his elbow, fully in the path of the charging elevator car.
“HARRY!” shouted Oz, dangling from the bottom of the car. He reached out his hand, valiantly. “JUMP!”
But Harry was stuck; he couldn’t manage to get his arm unlooped from the ladder rung. Elsie closed her eyes as the elevator rushed by her; she could feel the wind it carried with it, the acrid reek of grease and synthetic adhesives. She knew the car would arrive at Harry within seconds and would either crush him with its weight or knock him from his perch to fall some twenty-odd stories to the bottom of the shaft.
ERROR, WRONG PASS CODE, the screen advertised brightly, once again. And then: TWO MORE ATTEMPTS ALLOWED.
Unthank slapped his cheek firmly, trying to banish the needling urgency that was making his fingers fail so spectacularly. He closed his eyes; he breathed deeply.
Smile.