Muttering foul curses down on the heads of Kane, Tasya, and whichever genius had reconnoitred the route yet failed to mention it involved gymnastics, Katya shifted her bag so the weight fell on the small of her back and squared up to step across to the maintenance ladder running up the left of the shaft.
She stepped back from the edge and looked at her torch; it was too big to hold between her teeth, so she would either have to make the step with only one hand free or in pitch darkness. She ruminated for a moment, then picked up a piece of broken ceramic from the floor. It looked like it had once been part of an electrical insulator, probably something very important in the running of the lift. She doubted the thing would ever run again even if it was powered up.
She tossed the ceramic chip into the shaft and waited, counting off the seconds. The splash when it came seemed very distant. She did a couple of quick calculations in her head and made a guess that there were five levels to fall before hitting water. Even better, the fatalistic part of her mind told her, if she managed to climb the ladder and then slipped, she’d have eight levels to fall, and wouldn’t that be fun?
Finally, she clipped the torch into one of the side-pockets of her shoulder bag so that it shone onto the wall to her right. It wasn’t perfect, but at least the reflected light was better than nothing. Rallying her courage, she shuffled to the very edge of the shaft, took a deep breath in and out, and stepped out into nothingness.
The shadows played hell with her depth perception, but she had made a point of gauging the distance when the ladder had been under the full beam of her torch, and she trusted to that knowledge rather than the shifting shapes cast before her now. It worked; her leading foot came down heavily on a rung a split second before her hands found the verticals and held on firmly. It was just as well she did, because the firm blow her foot had delivered to its rung seemed to disengage something in the ladder’s structure that was not supposed to disengage. Some catch or ratchet or bolt or screw had been quietly corroding away there for years, and all it took was one good thump to make it fail.
There was a metallic plink!, sharp and final. She hesitated, confused by the sound echoing from the concrete sides of the shaft, and then felt her lower body moving away from the wall. The ladder was constructed from two-metre lengths and while the length her hands were gripping was secure, the one her feet had landed on was anything but. The uppermost stanchion connecting the section to the wall had broken cleanly and now the length of ladder from her knees down was levering out into the shaft, pivoting at its lowest bracket.
Katya gasped and gripped the uprights even more fiercely as she felt the ladder beneath her push her legs away from the wall. She tried momentarily to keep her feet on the rung, but the free end of the ladder section was pushing painfully against her kneecaps and, a moment later, she felt her feet slide off the metal.
With surprisingly little noise, the ladder section fell away quickly enough to snap its connections to the next section down, and dropped down the shaft with the quietest sound of sheering air that ended with a small splash as it landed vertically five levels below, slicing cleanly through the dark, waiting water.
“Oh, shit,” said Katya in a small voice. Her hands were starting to slide down the ladder verticals.
Making an instant decision that certainly saved her life, she released her right hand’s grip and slapped it onto the first rung she could find. Her left hand followed suit, but this time she reached up to grab the next rung up. Using the panic-borne adrenalin to power her screaming muscles, her feet scrambling at the wall to find whatever footholds they could, she progressed up the ladder in a series of short, staccato pull-and-grabs until a foot found a rung and she was able to pause, relatively safe.
Now reaction set in, and she felt cold sweat prickle across her even as her muscles seemed to weaken. She had to make the most of the dwindling strength the near fall had given her, and used it to drive herself up the ladder, not thinking of anything but the next rung, and then the next rung, and then the next rung. Only when she had climbed three levels, found another door held up with a jack, and stepped smartly across did she have a chance to be afraid, only then did she allow herself to think about what the broken ladder meant for her future.
Her planned escape route was now impassable.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Dangerous Corridors
So much for the carefully worked-out plan. Kane had been frank in explaining that her chances of getting away were no better than 50/50. Now they had just lengthened considerably.
She had a paranoid thought that perhaps the ladder had been sabotaged for exactly this reason, but that made no sense. She could just as easily have died in the lift shaft, mission incomplete, and that would have profited no one but the FMA, who would never have known about it. No, it was just one of those things. One of those silly, random things that, in this case, pretty much guaranteed a death sentence.
Katya’s sense of fatalism deepened. Her future now contained only two potential outcomes — she either successfully completed the mission, or she didn’t. That something bad would subsequently happen to her was a foregone conclusion, so she disregarded that. Success or failure was all she need concern herself with, and she much preferred to be a successful martyr to global peace than another of the war’s faceless dead.
She made her way along the dark, damply smelling hallways, second right, first left, first right and found herself in a cul-de-sac where the old abutted the new. Here there was a locked door, using an old-style keystick lock of a type that had been deemed obsolete even before her parents had been born. Katya searched around until she found amongst the debris in the corner what looked like an abandoned toolkit box. Inside she found a keystick and a change of clothes. Kane had said she’d get filthy in the old corridors and that wasn’t even taking into account the scuffs and tears her coveralls had taken during the incident in the lift shaft.
Changing clothes in an abandoned corridor was possibly not the strangest thing she’d ever done in her life, but it felt odd all the same. Once, this had been a busy place, and a ghost of that liveliness still hung around it. It seemed strange to be in her underwear there, leaning against the wall with one hand while trying to kick off her dirty coveralls, which had taken on a sudden emotional attachment to her right ankle.
After another five minutes of undignified hopping around while she tried to keep as much grime as she could off the new clothes while dressing in them, she was ready. She made sure her identity card and the keystick were in her left breast pocket, ran the route she had been given through her mind one last time, and doused the torch.
In darkness, she stood close by the door and listened. It was vitally important that she was not seen emerging from the door — even the dullest observer might wonder why somebody had been in the disused sections — and so she waited for a full minute simply to get used to the sound levels beyond.
Kane had told her that it was little more than an access corridor, well off the main byways, and few people should be walking them. She heard one pair of feet walk by and then a muffled greeting that brought the footsteps to a halt. A conversation ensued, rendered irritating by its length and boring by being muffled into meaninglessness by the door. Finally, after almost ten minutes, the conversationalists remembered they had jobs to be getting on with and they parted. Katya waited until all the footfalls had faded away before sliding the keystick into the slot in the lock. There was a very solid clunk, terrifying in the quiet, and the door opened easily under her hand.