“For goodness sake,” Mayna said, looking through the bars. “Be quiet! You want to have every cop in the world up here?”
“You again.”
“Shh!”
“But how—”
“Cats can go anywhere, Hero Tohm. Even up the sides of sheer buildings, accomplishing the impossible. If there's a convenient rainspout, that is.”
“Youll get caught,” he said, looking over his shoulder to the cell door.
“We will if you insist upon being so damnably loud,” she hissed, hooking a metal prong onto each bar where it met the sill at the bottom, covering each hook with thick, green putty.
“What are you doing?”
“Getting you out. Lay down on the floor. This isn't noisy, but there's one helluva lot of heat.”
He got down on his stomach next to the door and did not argue. Mayna backed away from the window, clinging to the wall by whatever impossible manner she had scaled it. There was a sudden pfft, then no noise at all. He could feel the heat on his back through the thin material of his shirt. Once he glanced up to see exactly what was happening. There didn't seem to be any light, unless… He looked closer. Yes, the flame was very dark blue, almost black. The room was stifling by then.
“Okay,” she whispered.
He stood up, reached out.
“No! Don't touch. It's hot yet.”
She took a small can of white crystals from the rucksack on her back, sprinkled them over the sill. There was steam, a crackle-snap noise, and ice began forming across the bars and on the cement.
“Okay,” she said again, putting the can away. “Now. Grasp the bars and bend them back, away from the sill. Only the bottoms are burned through.”
“Uh,” he grunted, straining at them.
“You can do it, Hero Tohm, if anyone can.”
He never knew, later, whether he could have done it without that goad. At the time, it smacked him in the pit of the stomach, churned up adrenalin. He twisted the bars back and up until he could squeeze through onto the wide sill. He sat on the window ledge, clinging desperately to the bars. A small ledge, only an inch wide, a decorative trim actually, broke the smooth façade of the building. It was that that Mayna perched upon, standing lightly on her toes, perfectly balanced.
“Do you have a flybelt?” he asked.
“They aren't as easy to come by for everyone as they are for you.”
“But I can't walk on that goddamn ledge!”
“Shh! We made allowances for that. We knew you were a poor, incompetent normal.”
He didn't say anything.
She took a strong nylon cord-rope from her rucksack, tied one end through the bars, almost knocking him from his perilous perch. “Use your feet against the wall to keep from sliding down and burning your hands. And please do be quiet — if that isn't beyond your meager talents.”
He grabbed the rope, swung away from the building, wriggling around to face it on the first outward arc, planting his feet against the wall when he swung back. As easily as possible, he moved down.
Swinging…
Jumping…
Swinging, jumping, swinging…
A human spider…
Mayna waited, watching him go.
Her eyes glinted green in the starlight…
“Very good,” a voice said below.
For a moment, he froze, imaging gestapos below. But then his mind cleared itself and he recognized the voice as Babe's. He dropped the last few feet, letting the rope slap against the wall. He looked up. Mayna still waited on the ledge, looking somewhat like a great vampire woman nestled there in the shadows. But now she was turning very adeptly and moving along the narrow ledge toward the rainspout.
“Here,” Babe said, tugging urgently at his shirt. “The shrubs.”
They ran, Tohm crouching to match Babe's height, and made the shelter of the bushes without incident. They turned and watched Mayna creep easily down the building, using the rainspout very little. She swung gracefully, down, down, down… Hitting the earth, she bounced on the balls of her feet, rocking back and forth for a short moment. Then, bent almost in two, hugging the ground and nearly blending with it, she ran across the courtyard to where they waited.
“C'mon,” she said, moving behind the hedge that paralleled the street, taking the lead.
Tohm followed her swinging hips, losing the dark form of her in the still darker night, recapturing sight of the vision when the lights of the street broke through gaps in the hedge and glimmered in her hair, trapped like fireflies in her silken cage. Babe brought up the rear, an unlighted cigar clamped between his teeth. They weaved along, skirting the rear of the House of Nubile Maidens, stopping suddenly at the edge of the main avenue.
“What's the matter?” Tohm asked her as she peered into the street from their hiding place behind a number of garbage bins in the alleyway.
“Listen.”
Then he heard it too. The faint slip-slap of boot heels on pavement, snapping out a rhythm. They hunched themselves down in the shadows, peeping through the crevice between wall and garbage bin. In moments, a cadre of Royal Romaghin Guards moved past, their colorful, plumed uniforms somehow out of place in the dark night streets. There were twenty of them, moving to positions along the city wall and at the city gate to change duties with guards already there. The officer would march these men from position to position, losing some and gaining the tired sentries coming off duty, eventually to return to the garrison at a slightly slower pace and a slightly more slipshod rhythm. It seemed to Tohm that the Romaghins were paranoid in the fear of the Muties. And ironic in that they were trying to keep Muties out of the capital by guarding the gate while said Muties were actually living in it — rather, under it.
“We'll wait a few minutes before crossing the street,” Mayna said.
He put his mouth close to the delicate shell of her ear. “Listen, I want to thank you for saving my life. This was a lot of trouble and danger to go through.”
She turned, smiling a smile that did not exactly indicate pleasure. The corners of her mouth were strained in their upturned mimicry of joy, her sharp teeth glittering brightly. “Hero Tohm, I would just as soon have left you rot there. But they would have tortured you before the hanging, trying to get information about us.”
“Torture?”
“And they are good at it. We couldn't risk your spilling everything to them. We had to come and get you.”
He eased away from her glumly, and sat silently waiting.
“Okay,” she said at length. “One at a time across the street and into the alley over there. Run on tiptoes and don't make a lot of noise.”
She moved first, like a piece of airy fluff hardly touching the ground at all, totally silent. She gained the darkness at the mouth of the opposite alley, waved an arm for the next.
The street was a broad, open plain with lights that seemed almost, at this moment of exposure, to be brighter than the sun at noon. But he ran anyway, trying not to bring his feet down too heavily, meeting with less success than he had hoped. He made the shadows in relative quiet, although not so easily as she had. Babe followed. He waddled rather than walked.
“Ho! Stop there!” a voice called from up the street.
Babe doubled his efforts.
Two Romaghin guards had turned the corner and were pursuing him.
“Stop or be killed!”
Mayna leaped into the open, crouching, a hand laser aimed down the avenue. Before the guards could even finish drawing their own, they were seething masses of bubbling flesh on the street. She, indeed, was a champion marksman.
“Thanks,” Babe wheezed, pounding into the alley, his belly shaking, his double chin bathed in sweat.