After a tense wait, Noi lowered the glasses. "It doesn’t seem to be following you. Is it feasible at all to get into the park without going into its line of sight?"
"Yes. Easily." Nash paused, then added: "It is more a question of what we will encounter in the park, given that there is already one creature on guard."
"I’m for risking that," Noi said. "Anyone against?"
No-one spoke.
"Right. We’d better do this without any chatter. We unload, and push the boats out. Even with the path lights, it’s probably a bad idea to go stumbling through the trees, so walk along the inner path all the way down the east edge to the car park entrance. If the hotel looks like a no-go, we break into the nearest apartments and get keys, cars. If we’re split up, we’re split up, and will either meet in Plan B City or…we won’t. Nash, lead the way."
The nearest edge of the park was an inlet sheltered in all directions except north across the harbour, with more than enough room for both dinghies. They bumped against stepped blocks of stone, and Madeleine was not the only one to wet her feet in the process of getting out. A lamppost stood above them, marking the path’s location, and they took their time dumping their life jackets, pushing the boats out, and then climbing, a hands and knees progress, constantly reaching to confirm each other’s location, passing the food bags up, angling to avoid the light.
Moving at a pace just short of a trot along the path through the trees, they hesitated at the inlet at the southern edge of North Barangaroo, then darted from shadow to shadow in the more open Central section. The hotel loomed above, a monolith of glimmering blue glass, and they approached it at a tangent, following the road down to the gates of the underground car park.
Firmly sealed.
Chapter Seventeen
"Who takes the time to lock up in the middle of an alien invasion?" Pan deposited his food bag on the traffic island dividing the in and out lanes. "Want me to go try the front?"
"Not yet." Noi tugged experimentally at the service door to the right of the main gates. "Even if this isn’t wired with an alarm, punching it open will leave an obvious sign someone’s broken in."
"Shall I look down here?" Nash unslung his bags and headed down a branch of the entry drive, Pan at his heels.
Madeleine added her food bag to the growing pile, and peered through the mesh of the gate. This hurdle had not been unanticipated, but even though the garage entry was lower than street level, she felt painfully exposed beneath the cold fluorescent lighting. Not long till dawn. Just over six hours before the world would come hunting.
"We could try to finger punch just the lock," Emily suggested, peering over Noi’s shoulder.
"Because only breaking it a little would be less likely to set off any alarms?" Min asked. The sharper than usual edge in his voice brought a warning glance from Noi, and he made a gesture of apology, then sat down on the traffic island, examining reddened palms.
"In a hotel this size there will be a dozen entry points," Fisher said. "After the panic of the arrival day, the chances of every single one being firmly sealed is low." But he glanced toward the eastern sky.
"Guys, check this out."
Pan, beckoning from the junction of the drive. They followed him past a "Staff Only" sign, to another set of metal gates. Nash was peering through the one on the right, and pointed as they came up: "A solution."
Standing two metres inside the gate was a machine sporting a big green button, a gate release meant to be hit by departing drivers.
"All it needs is a finger punch, at just the right strength to push the button, but not so strong we smash the machine." Pan looked around. "Who thinks they have the best control?"
Knowing her limits, Madeleine opted to fetch the food bags, and returned just as the gate whirred upward. The elevator obliged them by not requiring any keys to access the ground floor, and then they were standing at a spacious junction directly before a door marked Reception.
"Kitchen," Pan said, and went right. By the time they followed him into an enormous rectangular room of shining stainless steel, he was pulling open a heavy-duty door. A wave of chill flowed over them. "Freezer. And this would be – damn, I’ve seen houses smaller than this refrigerator. We should all fit in here."
"No." Fisher walked into the rack-lined space and paced out an estimate of its boundaries, stepping around pallets of boxes set on the floor. "Four, no, three people at most. It’s not the oxygen; it’s the carbon dioxide build-up which is going to be the problem. Depending on the length of the challenge, we may need to risk even opening the doors at least once. Unless…" He glanced around the kitchen. "With big enough containers we could try to rig some kind of crude carbon sink. That may help a little."
"Then where do the rest of us go?" Emily asked, stepping closer to Noi.
"There’s four restaurants in this hotel – we’ll need to spread between them if we want to survive twenty-four hours." He pulled the freezer door open again and considered its size. "Plenty of space here, which is good since one of us will probably need to use it. We can adjust the temperature to the highest setting."
Madeleine shivered at the mere idea, and looked around at worn, shadow-eyed faces. Some of them had tried to sleep during the gap between the challenge announcement and leaving, but the attempts hadn’t been very successful, and after a pre-dawn row and a park excursion with wet feet, the idea of even the refrigerator made her feel ill.
"Right." Noi dumped her food bag on the nearest work surface. "Iced Blues it is. But first snacks, hot showers, a warm meal, and then we’ll see what we can do about making a freezer habitable.
An elbow to her ribs. Madeleine started awake, and came close to falling off the edge of the triple-stack of mattresses set in the centre of the refrigerator. Emily, beside her, shifted and groaned until Noi, on her far side, turned to rub the girl’s arm.
"She’s trying so hard," Noi murmured. "She’s not even thirteen-going-on-fourteen, has only just stopped being twelve. I don’t know how to convince her that she’s allowed to be overwhelmed and frightened sometimes. Just like the rest of us."
Madeleine blinked in the orange glow of the emergency exit button. "I spend half of each day being overwhelmed. What’s the time?"
"Ten minutes till midnight. How’s your breathing? Feeling headachy? Stifled?"
"I feel like I’m in a refrigerator," Madeleine said, tucking the quilt back under her side, then contemplating the metal ceiling. "I guess it worked, then."
"Yeah, looks like Science Boy was right. I had my doubts, I admit it."
"I think he did too," Madeleine said, remembering Fisher’s expression as he asked for her promise.
"Twenty minutes before we get to check what’s going on. Distract me by describing exactly what you’re going to do to Science Boy first opportunity you get."
"I think I’ll leave that to your imagination." Madeleine’s own imagination caught her up, and she paused to enjoy it before adding: "The rooms in this place are–"