“Whatever,” she said as she stood up.
“Not got so much to say now, huh? Who is it? Sam? Croft? One of the others?”
“I don’t need to say anything to justify myself to you.” She wasn’t looking at Zack anymore, instead her eyes were focussed on the bar, and a smirk settled on her otherwise sour looking face. “At least I was right about you.”
Zack looked up just in time to see Ronson approach. He sidled up close and passed a dirty edged and frayed cushion into his lap. “There you go, Shiner. And a little something for your troubles.” Ronson placed a small once-white tablet on the dimpled metal table top that would have once shone and glistened under the sunlight in a bistro or cafe. It rolled like the mangled slug from a gun, settling in one of the divots made through damage, fights, time, or a mixture of all three.
“Like I said,” the girl said as she leant back across the table. “You take the things he needs, and the things you don’t.” She motioned her eyes in turn from the cushion to the tablet, all the while her head shaking. The tablet was lumpy and poorly formed. A homemade concoction that offered an hour of dreaming. An hour of escape from Delta Tower.
“Don’t you dare judge me,” Zack said as he too stood up, knocking the table. He was surprised at her height. He was over six foot tall and she matched him inch for inch, her aqua green eyes level with his. For a moment he thought he heard the sound of the ocean, like when as a child he would convince himself that he could hear the waves in an upturned conch shell. He could almost smell the salt as the summer heat burned it from the surface of a calm sea.
“Come on now, Shiner,” Ronson said, breaking Zack’s trance as he placed a cautionary hand against his chest. He was still wearing the deerstalker and it was true that even up close the scar was almost fully covered. “Take it easy.”
“All I was doing was trying to be nice, Ronny,” Zack said, ignoring the girl. “I just wanted to talk to somebody.”
“Come sit at the bar. Talk to me. Take your pill,” Ronson said as he picked up the puckered tablet. Zack watched as the smirk grew across her face. “Don’t let this get to you. It’s nothing.” The pressure underneath Ronson’s palm was growing until eventually with the girl still watching him, even as the distance between them grew, Zack started walking back to the bar. He sat down on the oil barrel stool from where he had got up only moments before. He picked up the tablet and the shot of Moonshine that Ronson had poured him without asking, and knocked them both straight back. His head was starting to swim, and he could feel his eyes drooping heavier than lead shutters. He slammed his beaker back down onto the flimsy bar top, shaking the structure from its base to its surface before standing to walk away. Just before he walked through the door of NAVIMEG he turned and said to Ronson, “After the double bell, got it?” Ronson nodded, and as Zack’s eyes scanned the room for the final time he saw that the girl who had ruined his evening had already left. Still pissed at her ignorance, and as drunk on that as he was the Moonshine, he took the stairs two at a time. Several times he stubbed his toe and only just managed to correct his balance before he fell. He stopped on each level and scanned the crowds for her face and her golden hair which cascaded over her shoulder like a waterfall. He ignored the crowds making trades, most as high as he was. He paid no attention to the girls who offered themselves, pushing their flimsily covered bodies away. But by the time he got to the surface, the ground level where life was supposed to flourish and where he used to believe it was possible for dreams to come true, he still hadn’t found her.
Chapter Four
“Take my hand!” The arms stretched forwards from within the darkness, and as her father lifted her up, Emily felt the man snatch at her wrists. The man pulled her up and pushed her backwards. Emily rolled away from him towards the edge of the lift. She sat up, pushing herself upright with both palms and she saw the man lunging himself back into the hatch from where she herself had been dragged. There was an electronic whirring coming from above her as some sort of generator kicked in, and the emergency lighting flickered on and off in time with the sound of the electronics. She could feel the lift rocking underneath her, and the steel girders which held the whole thing in place groaned as they flexed. The whole thing was being shaken from the outside, crumpled and moulded against its will.
“Dad!” Emily cried, trying to poke her head back towards the hatch. “Get my Dad out!”
“Get away from the opening, Emily,” shouted the man whose head was hanging into the hatch. He knew her name but she couldn’t place his face. Maybe it was the lighting. His skin was lit up green like a cartoon character, shadows cast by intermittent light, and his eyes sunk in endless dark sockets. “It’s not safe. We have to be quick.” He pulled up another woman who blocked Emily’s view. She was crying and seemed hysterical. She told Emily to calm down, that everything would be alright. It might as well have been her mother speaking.
The third person to be brought up through the hatch was Helena Grayson. As she got to her knees on the top side of the lift Emily thought how quiet her mother seemed. She wasn’t crying, or causing a commotion. Nothing like what Emily expected and nothing like the first woman. She looked at Emily and said only one word.
“Focus.”
She said it with a cold conviction that Emily was not used to, and it came out as an instruction which she wouldn’t dare ignore. Emily stuffed the iPod back into her pocket and clutched at her mother’s wrist. By the time the big man was finishing hauling up bodies through the hatch there was only one left. Emily’s father. He came out sweating, his face red, his cheeks puffed out and hair lopsided as if he had woken from a nightmare. There was another child in their group. A small girl who reached up for Emily’s free hand. The hand was warm and slick, much like she imagined her own would feel to her mother.
“Mum, what’s happening,” said Emily, as she watched the big man who had pulled them from the lift ascend a ladder on the inside of the shaft. The girders were still groaning their disapproval as he climbed step after step. Emily was sure that he was too heavy. His feet chinked against the metal bars, dust spraying out underneath him, flickering like plankton as it passed the wall-mounted lights. He reached the doors of the next floor and stepped off the ladder onto the shelf. He grunted, pulling at the lift doors, shards of light filtering through from the other side of the door, there one minute, gone the next as he failed to hold them open.
The man called back down. “Sir, I can’t get them open,” and without answering, Emily’s father was skimming up the ladder, swifter and more athletically than the first, portly man. Together they prised the doors apart with their finger tips and light poured through to reveal the inner working of the lift shaft, the only time Emily could remember the light making something more terrifying than the dark.
In turn they all climbed the ladder, their footsteps the sound of raindrops striking against a tin roof. Emily was pushed forwards, her mother behind her. “Move, Emily,” she said. “Focus.” On three separate occasions Emily stopped, her fear of heights gripping her as tightly as she herself gripped the rungs of the ladder. Each time her mother pushed her, screamed at her to focus as she coughed up the dust dislodged by Emily’s feet. Tears flowed across their faces making tracks in the dirt covering their cheeks. As Emily stepped from the ladder she was dragged into the doorway by the big man. Her father grabbed her, his hands gripping her face as he shouted, “Run down this corridor, Emily. Wait by the door at the other end.”