“I think they must be locked from the other side,” he said, between heavy, panting breaths.
“Then we’re really up shit creek without a paddle, aren’t we?”
Floyd looked at her, somewhat stunned by her choice of words despite the desperateness of their situation. “Did you really just say that?”
“I’m a little tense,” she said defensively.
“Well,” Floyd said, “now that you mention it, a paddle would actually be quite useful. Or better still a crowbar.”
“What?”
“I think I can see a gap between these doors. If we could wedge something into it, we might be able to prise them open enough to squeeze through.”
“Into another underground room?”
“No—I think I can see daylight. Look around. There’s got to be something we can use.”
There was another violent crash. With a drawn-out groan, the plinth and lathe finally slid through the hole in the ceiling, dragging several tons of masonry and metal with them. The mass of twisted metal hung above them, suspended by a few pipes and wires that had become wrapped around it.
It was directly over the sphere.
“That thing’s not going to stay up there much longer,” Auger said.
“So let’s get out of here before it falls. You check the left side, I’ll check the right. Any piece of metal will do.”
Auger started searching her side of the room, rummaging through the mess they had already created.
“And be quick!” Floyd shouted.
Auger’s hands fell on a piece of perforated metal framing. It was broken at one end, tapered to just the right shape to fit between the doors. “Wendell! I’ve got something.” She held the makeshift tool up for inspection.
“Attagirl. That’ll do nicely.”
She jogged back to Floyd as fast as her heels would allow and passed the piece of metal to him. He hefted it, like a hunter evaluating a new spear.
“Hurry,” Auger said.
He slipped the sharp end into the fine crack between the two doors and started levering, applying his full weight to the task. The huge doors creaked and groaned. Simultaneously, the room shook and the hanging lathe slipped down a good half-metre before jerking to a halt again, suspended even more improbably.
“It’s working,” Floyd said. “I think it’s going—”
Something gave a metallic crack and the doors sprang apart by a thumb’s width. A fan of dreary daylight sliced the room in two.
“That’s a good start,” Auger said. “Now the rest.”
“I’m working on it.” Floyd renewed his struggle, adjusting the position of his feet to optimise his bracing position. “But I’m not sure how long this thing is going to last. See if you can’t rustle up another one, in case this one buckles.”
She stood rooted to the spot, desperate to slip through the crack.
“Verity! Get searching!”
Stumbling on her heels, she began to search the other side of the room. She felt her trousers rip against sharp metal and something cut into her knee. Tripping, she fell forward, her hand reaching out for support. Miraculously it closed around an iron bar.
Picking herself up, barely registering the pain in her leg, she hefted the new prize. “Got something!”
“Bring it here. I think this boy’s about to—”
The fan of light widened. The gap in the door was now big enough to push a face through.
Auger started making her way back to the double doors just as the room shook again, more violently than ever before. She halted in her tracks and looked up with a horrid sense of inevitability. The plinth and lathe eased through their flimsy restraints with a final squeal of freedom. Untethered, the equipment dropped through the air and landed on the upper surface of the sphere’s support harness, before sliding off and falling to one side with a deafening chime of metal on metal.
The sphere rocked, but for a moment nothing more happened. Auger forced herself to move again, gripping the iron bar.
Then she stopped and looked at the sphere again. There was a whisking, whipping sound as the guy line’s many constituent threads began to break, one by one. She only had an instant to register this before the entire line snapped, whiplashing against the harness with appalling force.
The sphere dropped.
It hit the floor and cracked wide open along its casting flaw like a piece of ripe fruit. Distorted now, not even approximately spherical, it still managed to roll, picking up momentum with each rotation.
Auger followed its trajectory with horror: it was rolling towards the double doors, and Floyd. She opened her mouth to scream something—some useless warning, as if Floyd could possibly not have seen what was happening—but by then it was far, far too late. The mangled sphere trundled into the double doors, forcing them open and wedging itself in the gap. The metal emitted a horrible noise as it buckled. It almost sounded like a human scream, cut off with sickening swiftness.
“No…” Auger breathed.
Everything was suddenly very quiet. Even the demolition machines had stopped. She let go of the bar and heard it clatter to the ground in some distant corner of the universe. Auger slowed as she neared the doors, trying not to think about what she was going to find.
Floyd was flat on the ground, lying perfectly still. His face was turned away from her, bright blood matting his scalp. His hat had rolled away into a corner.
“No,” Auger said. “Don’t be dead. Please don’t be dead. You had no business being here. You didn’t have to get involved.”
His body had fallen inside the doors, to one side of the sphere’s path, and it didn’t look as if it had rolled over any part of him. She took his head in her hands, very gently, and turned it so that she could see his eyes. They were closed, as if he had fallen asleep. His mouth was slightly open and his chest was rising and falling, but with a worrying irregularity, as if each breath was a struggle.
“Stay with me,” Auger said. “Don’t go dying on me, not now that we’ve come this far. Now that we’ve actually started to get somewhere. Now that I’ve actually started to like you.” She squeezed his head, her hands wet with his blood. “Are you listening to me, Wendell? Wake up, you sad excuse for a detective. Wake the fuck up and talk to me!”
Laying his head gently on the floor, she stood, appraising the gap that the sphere had made in the doors. She could squeeze through it without difficulty, but there was no way she was going to leave Floyd to be buried alive. Sitting back on her haunches, she put an arm around his shoulders and slid another beneath his back and, groaning with the effort, she managed to arrange Floyd into a sitting position, balanced against the right-hand sliding door. His head lolled on to his chest, his eyes still closed.
Leaving Floyd where he was, with his back to the door, she scrambled over the sphere and through the gap it had made as it wedged itself between the doors, catching an elbow on the edge of the door as she went through. Beyond, just as Floyd had predicted, was a sloping ramp leading up to ground level. The air swirled with the dust of collapsed buildings.
She turned back to Floyd, reaching through the gap and grabbing him under the armpits. “Come on,” she said.
Gritting her teeth with the effort, she managed to drag Floyd off the floor, so that he was halfway between a standing and a sitting position, but she could not lift him high enough to pull him through the gap. Exhausted, her arms feeling as if they were about to pop from their sockets, she fell back down on to the concrete of the ramp. Every instinct told her to get away now, before the machines caused the entire structure to cave in.