He could reach the ceiling. He unscrewed the darkened bulb, got down and got the conjoined wire and his bucket handle and climbed up again, with the wire wrapped around his arm to hang onto it.
This was the anxious part. He felt the inside of the socket, identified the contact as best he could guess, then used the bucket handle to try to pull the whole socket apart and get at the wires that connected to the socket.
That proved harder than he thought. He peeled a corner of the socket, peeled more of it, but there were screws involved, and he could not get at the wires themselves. Instead, he folded metal over, punched it onto the contact, cutting his sore fingers, and rammed it down hard. Then he stripped the covering off his insulated wire, got down to paper lining, and stripped and spat, balanced precariously there the while, and hoping no one came.
Somewhere far off he could hear doors opening. He could hear the sound of a vehicle, a bus or a truck, somewhere outside. People were coming and going and that was not good, if somebody was leaving and might mean to take him with them, or maybe if they had gotten a doctor—that would not be good at all.
He spat paper, took the stripped part of the wire and just wrapped it into the wreckage he had made of the socket, finding no other way to secure it, and, worst of all, having no way at all to test his construction to see if it even worked. He got down, shivering from long effort, and from the cold, and carefully, gingerly, took his dangling wire past the chair back and over to the door.
Big metal door latch there, a lot of metal. He stripped more wire, starting it with his teeth, and stripped it way up and wrapped bare wire around the door latch.
So the light switch was on the outside of the door. If somebody flipped it on and then put his hand on the latch— Then he thought of something else he knew about electricity. He found his water pitcher by the bed and he brought it to the door and made a puddle just right where someone had to step.
That was the first part of his plan. But he did not, as Bren would say, put all his eggs in that basket. Or try to eat dinner before he caught it, in mani-ma’s proverb. He got back onto his bruised knees, started to move the bedframe to cover his escape hole, and, on inspiration, and seeing how it rattled without the weight of the mattress on it, decided to see if the bedframe and the wire underpinnings came apart.
The frame readily unsocketed, no question. He took the thin, linked-wire frame that constituted the mattress springs over to the door and laid that metal framework down right over his puddle in front of the door.
But he had derived something better from the disassembly of the bed frame. He had the metal side rail, a pole longer than he was, with a flat end where it had hooked onto the other end. And when he applied that to the hole he had made in the wall he had started, he was able to lever out pieces of wood and chunks of plaster one after another.
Now if somebody tried to walk in on him and turned on that light, they would be busy with that watered metal gridwork.
There was a lot of racket outside. A lot of coming and going. He heard doors slam. He kept digging, hammering the interior of his hole in the plaster until the rail went all the way through the wall.
Free for an instant. Then it hit something on the other side.
Thump.
Dammit!
14
Big bump. The bus bounced, swung, skidded. And clawed its way onto an uphill climb.
They’d made the time they could on the lower road. They were headed up again. Everyone in the bus had waked including Banichi and Jago, and now heads sank again, experienced security getting rest where they could.
Bren lowered his head back to Jago’s shoulder. She hugged him a little closer, maybe seeking relief from his weight, maybe just for the warmth. As resting places went, he couldn’t complain of it.
And he tried his best not to think. Thinking did absolutely nothing for sleep. He just listened to the tires on the snow, tried to make himself believe they were just going up to Malguri, peaceful vacationc breakfast in the morningc Damned lie. But he kept telling it to himself. Reason wasn’t working outstandingly well. He was so tired he was glitching in and out despite everything else.
Eyes shut. Another dark space, and a turn. Another dark space, and another turn, consistently upward, and at an uncomfortable grade, the winter tires grabbing for purchase.
God, don’t let us get stuck in a snowbank.
Lurch. Then the bus accelerated, on the level.
The lakeshore, he thought, which jarred him right back to the immediate moment, a desperate race, the bus now fueled for a long haul, for the north rim and the north shore.
Possibilites started crowding in. Contingencies. Resources.
Calamities.
He gnawed his lip and started calculating. Again. And knew nobody up front was going to ask him anyway.
Through the wall. But blocked by something.
Cajeiri braced his toe against an irregularity of the slate floor behind him, shoved the long pole through the hole with all his strength and felt whatever-it-was scoot a little.
Furniture, maybe.
Then he thought if there was somebody next door it was certainly going to be suspicious-looking when plaster started cracking and the wall started going. He got down flat and curled around to get his eye up to the hole.
There was no glimmer, which only meant it was pitch-black if there was a crack in the other side at all, and there was no way to tell whether he was getting anywhere.
The hell with it. If he heard them coming, they would run into the boobytrap first.
So he swiveled about again and started thumping away at the plaster. He bent double, lying sideways, braced his feet and got hold of the thin boards that backed the plaster, where the wires had been.
It definitely gave. Cracked, with another heave.
He had a wide enough escape hole on his side of the wall. He lay as he was and simply kicked. Hard.
Two and three more kicks, and his toe went partway through the other side, trapping it in thin boards. It took work to haul it out. He got the bed rail in, took aim, and rammed it.
Crack.
That was encouraging. He swiveled about again and looked. Then he turned about again and went on kicking it until his whole foot could get all the way through.
Then he started kicking just above it, and broke the plaster and boards in on his side, and out, on the other side. By now his foot hurt and his knee hurt and his arms were tired from holding himself still, but he was finally getting somewhere. He kept after it, kicking it and ramming it with the bed rail, and eventually he could get his whole leg through if it wanted to. It just needed a lot more kicking in.
He rolled over and changed feet, and battered away above, and when that leg got tired, he sat down by his hole and pulled at the boards behind the plaster, and took out rubble fill, and shoved that aside. He pulled and pushed again for all he was worth, until he was sure his hands were bleeding, and he had splinters in every one of his fingers.
But it was bigger. It was nearly big enough. There were ways to get through really narrow grates and conduits—he had learned that on the ship. You got one shoulder up, and made your ribs small, and you just lifted this side of your ribs and then the other side the same, and you could do that every time you breathed, just a finger’s width, maybe, but he might make it through. His shoulders were the widest part of him. If he practiced the ribs-lifting, he thought he could get there, if he just took off his coat and his shirt.
He took off his jacket, and took off his shirt and put that through, to be sure it didn’t snag on the edges. Then he started after it, right shoulder, whole arm, folding inward, ribs, and all, in time with little, helpful breaths. It was like smothering. It scraped his ribs—bloody, he was sure. And it was dangerous to stop, because one lost the rhythm if one stopped, and if one lost the rhythm, muscles could freeze up and then one would be stuck for sure and maybe not able to breathe if one’s associates failed to pull him out by the feet—which had happened to him once, in the conduits on the ship.