That'll teach them to trust machines, he thought bitterly, wincing as the saw started up again, accompanied by what sounded like a jackhammer, shaking the walls of the 'cot until it seemed the whole thing might fall down. A plume of dust floated up out of the hole. A dragon's skull vibrated off a shelf and shattered, a piece of the jaw coming to rest beside Ramsey's feet.
In the midst of it all, the red dot rose serenely upward.
Despite the smoothness of the silent elevator, Olga felt as though a giant had grabbed her in its fist and was lifting her up, up toward a monstrous face she didn't want to see. She suddenly knew exactly why she'd dreamed of the circus, all its performers now dead and gone—a part of her life that was equally dead. It had been just like this, the climb up the ladder to the high platform, no matter how many times she did it: part of it had been almost mechanical, hand over hand in practiced motion, and even the surface of her mind had been full of rote memorizations, all the things her father had taught her to set her mind and prepare herself for whatever might come.
"Always you must be inside your thoughts and outside your body, my dear one." She suddenly could almost see him in the elevator with her, as close as Jerome was standing, Papa with his neat, graying beard, the scar across the bridge of his nose where his own brother's heel had broken it when they were young performers. It was only one or many scars—his large hands were ribboned with them, scored by nets and tent cables and guy wires. He often claimed that on his days off, he played catch with Le Cirque Royale's knife thrower. The first time he had said it, when she was three or four, she had been terrified until he assured her it was a joke.
He smelled of pine resin, always, which he used to keep his hands dry in the ring. That and her mama's cigarettes, those foul Russian things, even after all these years the two smells always brought back her childhood in an instant. Watching her father with his big hands on Mama's shoulders, or wrapped around her waist from behind while they watched rehearsal. Mama always, always with a cigarette in the corner of her mouth, her chin lifted to keep the smoke out of her eyes. She had been ramrod straight, slender, her dancer's body hard and muscular well into her seventies, before she got sick.
"My Polish princess," Papa had called Mama. "Look at her," he had always said, half-mocking, half-proud. "She may not be royalty, but she's built like it. No rear end on her at all, hips like a boy." And then he would give Mama a playful swat on the backside, and she would hiss at him like a cat being annoyed by a child. Papa would laugh, winking at Olga and the world. Look at my good-looking wife, it meant. And look at the temper she has on her!
They were both long gone now, Mama dead from cancer, her father following not long after, as everyone knew he would. He had said it himself: "I don't want to outlive her. You and your brother, Olga, God grant you long lives. Don't take offense if I don't stick around to see the grandchildren."
But there weren't any grandchildren, of course. Olga's brother Benjamin had died not long after her parents, a freakish piece of bad luck when his appendix had ruptured while he was on a mountaineering holiday with friends from university. And long before that she had lost her own baby and her husband in the same week—her entire chance at happiness, it had seemed then and still somehow did.
So I'm the last, she thought. That line from Mama's and Papa's parents and grandparents ends with me—maybe ends today, right here in this building. For the first time in days she felt truly overwhelmed. So sad, so . . . final. All the plans those people made, the baby blankets they knitted, the money they tucked away, and it all comes down to an aging woman probably throwing her life away over a delusion.
The elevator seemed to be creeping upward as slowly as a rising tide, the little squares on the black glass panel lighting one after the other. So sad.
"Do you have a family around here?" she asked Jerome, just to hear some human noise.
"My mom." He was squinting at the blinking lights on the panel as though hypnotized. She wondered how well he could see. They climbed from 35 to 36 to 37. For a modern elevator, Olga thought it seemed cruelly slow. "She lives in Garyville," Jerome went on. "My brother lives in Houston, Texas."
"Olga? Can you hear me?" The sudden voice in her head made her jump and gasp.
"What's wrong, Olga?" Jerome asked.
"Just a headache." She put a hand to her temple. "Who is that?" she subvocalized. "Mr. Ramsey, is that you?"
"Jesus, I never thought I'd get through again. You need to get off the elevator."
She looked at the panel. 40. 41. "What are you talking about? How did you know. . . ?"
"Olga, you look really sick."
She waved her hand to show she didn't want to talk.
"Just get off the elevator!" Ramsey's obvious panic cut through her confusion. "Now! If that door opens above the forty-fifth floor, you're going to set off alarms all over the building. Security will be on you before you can blink."
The feigned headache was becoming real. "Stop the car," she told Jerome. "What floor are we on?" The blinking panel suggested it was 43. "I need to use the restroom, Jerome. Is that okay?"
"Sure." But even as he pressed the button, the car had already moved up another floor. Olga found herself holding her breath. The car slid to a stop and the door hissed open, revealing a carpeted hallway and a bizarrely festive lighting scheme. It took her a moment to see that the walls were hung with shimmering pieces of neon art. Jerome stood in the open doorway. It took Olga a moment to realize he expected her to know where the restrooms were. After all, she was an employee, wasn't she?
"I haven't been on this floor," she explained. When he had told her where to go, she asked him to wait in the elevator lobby, afraid that someone might notice an elevator stopped on one floor too long.
The restroom was empty. She sat down in the farthest stall and pulled up her feet. "Tell me what's going on," she said to Ramsey. "Where did you people go? I've been trying to call you all day."
His explanation did not make her feel any better about anything—in fact, it was hard to think of something more carefully designed to destroy what little confidence she had left. "Oh, God help us, Sellars is . . . gone? So who is this Beezle who is helping you out? Is he one of that army fellow's specialists or something?"
"It's a long story." Ramsey didn't sound very eager to tell it. "Right now, we have to figure out what we're going to do. Are you in a secure place?"
She had to laugh at that. "I am in enemy territory, Mr. Ramsey! I am about as secure as a cockroach standing in the bathtub when the light comes on. If someone doesn't smash me with a shoe, yes, I suppose I am just fine."
"I'm doing my best, Olga, honestly. You don't know how hard I've been trying to get back in touch with you since Sellars . . . since whatever happened to him." He took a deep breath. "I'm going to put Beezle on with you. He's . . . he's a little eccentric. Don't worry about it—he's very good at what he does."
"Eccentric I can live with, Mr. Ramsey."
The voice, when it came, was like that of some ancient comedian from the Television Era. "You're Olga, right? Pleased to meetcha."