The unintended nap had done little to make her feel better. She could still feel the moment of slippage and freefall, something that even after years of working over a net, practicing with her father and his aerialists, never completely lost its terror.
Wouldn't be much of a circus unless there is a chance someone might die.
Strangely, the thought gave her a little comfort. Nothing was assured in that life or this: even a safety net was no guarantee. Jansci, the Hungarian wire-walker, a good friend of her father's, had fallen to the net during practice, caught his foot as he was bouncing up, and had somehow gone over the edge. A mere fifteen-foot fall, but it had paralyzed him.
No guarantee, even with a net.
She drank a little more water, then tried Catur Ramsey's line again, but whatever magic had once connected her through the telematic jack to the real world outside this artificial black mountain was gone. The coach was a pumpkin once more, the footmen had become mice. She would have to do it on her own.
She packed her meager belongings and headed for the service elevator.
Almost a full day of living like a rat in the walls of Felix Jongleur's house had made her cautious. When the elevator hissed open on the mezzanine floor she peered around the edge before stepping out, then shrank back into the interior until the young man at the end of the corridor had rounded the corner and disappeared. He was wearing a collarless shirt and work pants, but seemed more like a business employee in casual clothes than a custodial worker—perhaps a young manager on the way up, anxious to impress the bosses with unpaid overtime.
Even the minions of Hell don't have to dress up on weekends, she decided. I don't remember Mr. Dante mentioning that.
As she held the door open and waited a few extra moments for safety, she could not help thinking about the dozens of oh-so-ordinary employees she had seen around the building, all doing oh-so-ordinary things. In fact, she had seen no evidence that her own reasons for being here were anything but delusional. J Corporation headquarters, once she was past its forbidding black facade, held nothing she could not have found in any downtown skyscraper. Even the hardened office for the squad of security guards was not excessive if you considered that the building was also the residence of one of the world's richest men.
Any reasonable person would have to admit that the fantasies of lost children and worldwide conspiracies seemed more and more farfetched—and Olga herself was a reasonable person.
Can you be reasonable and still be insane? she wondered. That would seem to be stretching the rules a bit.
When she felt certain the hallway was empty, she made her way down the stairs from the mezzanine onto the ground floor of the vast, pyramid-roofed lobby. Although she had seen several people crossing from one elevator bank to another, at the moment it was empty—almost shockingly so, in the way only a closed public building can seem. She hurried across the black marble floor toward the main reception desk, the echo of her footsteps sounding as loud as gunfire. When she reached the desk she made a show for the hidden cameras of accidentally tipping a square vase of flowers across the countertop, so that the water and the fading irises from Friday morning splashed out onto the floor in front of the desk. Pretending she had not noticed what she'd done, she hurried back up to the comparative safety of the mezzanine.
From a secure place in a copse of potted ornamental trees she waited and watched as an agonizingly slow trickle of J Corporation workers checked in through the inset security door for some weekend catch-up, or wandered across the lobby from one part of the building to the other. Several of them seemed to notice the pool of water and spilled flowers in front of the desk, but if any of them decided to notify someone about it they used their telematic jack to do so. Olga had no way of knowing for sure.
An hour went by. Somewhere between twenty and thirty employees had trekked across the lobby but the spilled vase still lay untended. The huge clock on the wall, a rectangle of gold the size of a panel truck inset with Egyptian figures and characters, showed a few minutes past eight o'clock. Saturday night, her time almost half gone, and nothing accomplished. Olga had always been a patient woman, but now she felt herself stretched like a thin cord, vibrating in every breeze, poised to snap. She had all but decided that she would have to take the risk of exposing herself on a search of the lower floors when a gangly figure shuffled out of the service elevator and across the lobby floor pushing a plastic bin on wheels, a mop resting on one shoulder like a sentry's rifle.
Relieved, Olga let out a long-held sigh of breath. She watched for a moment as the custodian gathered up the fallen irises with slow, careful movements, then lowered the mop. When she was sure she was right—who knew how many custodians actually worked here on weekends?—she hurried to the elevator and got in. A minute later it was summoned to the lobby level. She did her best to look surprised when he got in.
"Well, hello, Jerome," she said as he bumped his bin over the tiny gap between car and door. She gave him her best smile. "What are you doing up here?"
"I don't know anything about that, Olga." He spoke mildly, but was clearly troubled. "All those floors are closed. I only been up there when the security fellows ask me to come help move something." He sat thinking with his mouth open and his milky eyes almost shut, half a sandwich in his hand, arrested on its upward journey.
Olga forced herself to take a bite of the liverwurst sandwich he had insisted she share. Since she had vetoed eating in the custodians' lunchroom, convincing him instead to join her in the storage room—she had spent so much time there it was beginning to feel like home—she had not felt it polite to turn down the sandwich, despite her extremely mixed feelings about liverwurst, "So . . . so you've been to those floors?"
"Oh, sure. Lots of times. But only up to the security office." He frowned again. "Once to the room above that where they have all these machines, because one of the bosses was angry there was mouse poop there and he wanted to show me. But I told him I didn't even clean that room, so how was I supposed to know there were mice up there?" He laughed, then embarrassedly cleaned a morsel of liverwurst from his chin. "Lena said the mice were going up in the elevator! That was really funny."
Olga tried to suppress her almost panicky interest in this second machine room. What good would it do her, in any case? She had no idea how to attach Sellars' device, or what to attach it to, and no Sellars to benefit from its use anyway. But it was in the part of the tower she wanted to visit. "So could you take me up there?"
He shook his head. "We're not supposed to. We'll get in trouble."
"But I told you, if I don't, I'll get in trouble."
"I still don't understand," he said, chewing vigorously again.
"I told you, my friend from the other shift took me up there Friday, just to show it to me. But I dropped my wallet up there, you see? By accident. And if someone finds it I will get in trouble. And I also won't have my cards for shopping and things."
"You'd get in trouble, huh?"
"Yes. They will fire me for sure. And I won't be able to help my daughter and her little girl." Olga was torn between self-loathing and increasing desperation. Nobody but a man with some serious thinking problems would buy an ill-concocted story like this. She was taking advantage of Jerome because he was credulous and eager to please—probably brain-damaged—and she felt like the lowest scum imaginable. Only by thinking of the dream-children as though the memories were a mantra, of the way they had flocked to her like frightened birds seeking shelter, their imploring, hopeless voices, could she ease the pain of what she was doing.