DANYL FELT FAR more at home on the infrastructure level far beneath the floor of Twelfth Tier than he had in Alania’s palatial childhood dwelling. Growing up in the Middens, where the stone-walled quarters he’d shared with Erl had been the height of luxury, hadn’t prepared him for wood paneling and posh paintings and plush carpet. There’d even been a different scent to the air: flowers, perhaps, though Danyl had never smelled anything that sickly sweet in the Middens and wasn’t even sure he liked it.
Sala’s sudden appearance had startled him, but Alania clearly trusted the servant, and it wasn’t like he had any better ideas for getting into Quarters Kranz. The key would presumably allow them access through any electronically sealed door they found, but that wouldn’t help if the door was guarded by half a dozen beamer-carrying Provosts.
Of course, it was one thing to get inside Quarters Kranz and quite another to find and access the elevator to the Thirteenth Tier without being stopped. But—how many times had he told himself this already?—one step at a time.
After donning the servants’ clothes—Danyl admired Alania’s foresight in thinking to do so—they descended one more level, emerging into a short corridor. “That’s the door into the main below-street delivery corridors,” Alania said quietly, pointing to the far end of the hallway. “There’s a freight elevator next to it. But I presume we’re not going out there.”
“No,” Sala said. She led them the other way, to the underside of the stairs they had just descended. The wall panel there looked the same as any other, but when she touched it, it slid aside. She disappeared into the dimly lit space beyond, and Alania followed. Danyl took one more quick look around the corridor they were vacating, then stepped through himself.
The door slid shut. Narrow stairs led down, lit, of course, by eternals; these were near death. The metal walls looked pitted and rusted with age. The contrast couldn’t have been greater between this stairwell and the rich Twelfth-Tier mansion above.
How did it all happen? Danyl wondered as they descended the stairs and began moving along passages as decrepit-looking as the ones down on First. The City had metal bones; the wood and other structures crammed into its Tiers were later additions. Here and there, as they had seen on First, the metal walls remained intact, and in other places they had been cut apart. But the infrastructure—the crumbling, rusting, often-failing infrastructure, which dumped raw sewage into the Middens and collected hazardous liquid waste in an ancient tank that would likewise fail someday and render the Middens uninhabitable for even the gangs—was all metal, an impossible amount of metal. How had the City been built? Why had it been built? And why just the one? All the villages of mine and farm workers out in the Heartland, ruled by the overseers appointed by their Officer owners, were built of local stone and wood. How had this one enormous metal tower come to squat here above the Canyon, excreting its waste into the chasm below like a vast incontinent beast?
The “history” he had learned offered no clues. The City was the work of “The Builders,” who had placed it there and left it in the care of the Officers. They had been in control since the Awakening, when the original citizens awoke knowing their names, who their families were, and whatever skills they had been taught, but with absolutely no memory of how they had come to be where they were.
The First Officer ruled in the Captain’s name and with the Captain’s authority. The Provosts, though drawn from all the Tiers, were absolutely loyal, their families hostage to their remaining so. There could be upward mobility on the lower Tiers—workers from the Third might aspire to someday own Quarters and a business on Fifth or Sixth—but no one ever ascended from even Ninth to Eleventh or Twelfth. The prison level of Tenth was both a warning and a barrier to any higher aspirations.
Officer positions were hereditary; the few Officer families lost over the course of the City’s history had fallen prey to disaster, or so history said. Having witnessed Beruthi’s demise, Danyl wondered how many of those vanished Officer families had in fact dared to challenge the authority of the First Officer and paid the ultimate price.
The whole edifice seemed both as solid and eternal as the City seemed from the Heartland and as rotten and rusting as it truly was here in its guts. A good, solid push might just topple it.
Clearly that was where Danyl came in. He had no idea what it would mean to become Captain, no idea what, if anything, would be left of him on the other side of that astonishing prospect. And yet he found himself as excited by it as he was terrified. There was no other possible future for him, after all. There could be no escape, as the attack on Retreat Beruthi had made clear. The Heartland was neither big enough nor wild enough to disappear into, and the Iron Ring was uninhabitable and impassable.
He frowned, wondering suddenly if the reason aircars could not cross the Iron Ring was because they had been designed that way by the Officers, who had a vested interest in ensuring the entire population remained trapped inside the Heartland. Was the landscape beyond the Iron Ring in all directions really the hellish place they’d been told it was?
Well, he thought, maybe I’ll find out once I’m Captain.
They had turned several corners and traversed a couple of hundred meters of corridor by the time Sala called a halt. They had also passed several doors, all sealed, all with red lights glowing above them. The one she stopped in front of looked exactly like all the others: plain green-painted metal. “You’re sure this is the one for Quarters Kranz?” Danyl said, staring at it.
Sala gave him a withering look, but it was Alania who replied. “The path we followed corresponded to the streets between Quarters Beruthi and Kranz—it’s the same path I was following when the Provosts escorting me were attacked and I jumped into the trash elevator. This is definitely Quarters Kranz.”
Danyl nodded and drew out the golden key. Sala’s eyes widened when she saw it. “You really do have a key. I’ve never seen anyone but an Officer with one of those.”
“You’ve never seen anyone with one like this,” Danyl corrected. He stepped toward the door, but Alania grabbed his wrist.
“Wait,” she said. She turned to Sala. “You should go. We don’t know what will happen when we open this door. You shouldn’t be here.”
“I agree,” Sala said. She gave Alania another hug. “Be safe,” Danyl heard her whisper into Alania’s ear, then she turned and hurried away.
Alania watched her until she rounded a corner and vanished from sight, then sighed and turned to Danyl. “All right,” she said. “Let’s try it.”
Danyl drew the slugthrower with his right hand, then inserted the key into the lockplate with his left.
For a moment nothing happened, and he felt a surge of anxiety. But then the door groaned open with a horrible metal-on-metal cacophony that would surely have brought Provosts running if any had been within earshot. There was only darkness beyond—not even the green glow of an eternal this time.
Alania cautiously looked inside. “Can’t see a thing.”
Danyl retrieved the key, stepped past her into the shadows, and peered around. “It’s just like at Quarters Beruthi,” he said. “Stairs at the end leading up to a door.”
“I guess that’s where we go next.” Alania came through the door. The moment she did so, it slid shut, grinding closed and sealing with a rather alarmingly final-sounding thud and the clunk of steel bolts driving home. It cut off the next-to-nothing glow of the eternals outside, leaving them in pitch darkness.
“You’d think,” Alania said from the blackness, “that we would have thought to pick up a flashlight somewhere along the way.”
“I’ll put it on my list for next time.” Danyl put the key back in his pocket, gripped the slugthrower with his right hand, and reached out blindly with his left, feeling for the wall.
He promptly banged his knuckles; apparently he’d been taking bigger steps than he’d thought. But there was the door. He felt around its edges, found the port, and inserted the key.
The door slid open just as noisily as the last. The honest white light beyond was dim but still enough to make him blink. He retrieved the key, and then he and Alania stepped cautiously through, the door once again closing behind them.
As expected, they appeared to be at the bottom of the servants’ stairs. A well-lit corridor to their left ran to what had to be the entrance to the main service tunnels and a freight elevator, as in Quarters Beruthi. Danyl caught a glimpse of a camera dome above the door and hurriedly pulled Alania out of its line of sight, though it was probably focused on the door to the outside and not on the locked door leading to the infrastructure level. That didn’t mean there weren’t others, though, and he shot a look up.
The stairs appeared to climb for four stories rather than Beruthi’s three. For the moment, at least, they were deserted, no servants moving up or down with trays of bonbons or whatever servants used stairs for. Why didn’t they just use elevators, anyway?
Maybe they did, mostly, and that’s why the stairs were deserted.
“How the hell do we find this elevator to Thirteenth?” Danyl said. “Have you ever been in Quarters Kranz?”
“Only the ballroom,” Alania said. “But if I had to guess—”
“You do,” Danyl said.
“—then I’d guess the top floor. Quarters Kranz is the only house on Twelfth Tier that stands four stories. There’s a rooftop garden—I could see it from my room—and in the middle of it, there’s a kind of . . . gazebo, is that the word?”
“You’re asking me?” Danyl said. “Whatever a gazebo is, I’m pretty sure we don’t have them in the Middens.”
Alania laughed a little. “Fair enough. Anyway, there’s a gazebo . . . or shed . . . or pavilion . . . or whatever you want to call it exactly in the middle of the roof, and it connects to the Tier ceiling. It’s the only place in Twelfth Tier that connects to the ceiling. Even the Core is capped just below that. The elevator shaft has to be somewhere inside it, right?”
“Stands to reason,” Danyl said. Keeping out of the line of sight of that worrisome camera bubble, he peered up. “All clear. But there could be more cameras.”
“Try to look like a servant,” Alania said. She pointed at the slugthrower. “You might want to start by putting that thing away.”
Reluctantly, Danyl holstered the weapon, then pulled out the tail of his black servant’s shirt to hide it. “What if they don’t wear this type of servants’ uniform in Quarters Kranz?”
“They’re pretty much standard,” Alania said. “All the servants at all the birthday parties I had to attend growing up—and I had to attend a lot of them—were dressed like this. Servants are supposed to be invisible and interchangeable, like robots. Which is what Beruthi used in our Quarters, of course.”
“Why didn’t the others?”
“Because robots are cheap,” Alania replied. “People are expensive. The main purpose of Officer social activities is to show off to other Officers, to establish how powerful and wealthy your family is so business or political rivals think twice before messing with you. Lots and lots of costly servants send that message.”
“Like the severed heads the Rustbloods used to stick on their gateposts from time to time,” Danyl said.
Alania grimaced. “I could have done without that image, but yeah, exactly like that.”
“So you really think we’ll pass as servants?”
“I hope we’ll pass as servants,” she corrected.
“Just hope?”
“At this point, hope is pretty much all we’ve got, wouldn’t you say?”
Danyl grunted. “I guess you’re right about that.” He looked up the stairs. “Let’s climb.”
It seemed at first as if all would be well. No one challenged them as they crept past the closed door that presumably led to the kitchens, if Quarters Kranz were laid out anything like Quarters Beruthi. No one challenged them as they climbed past the second-floor doorway.
But the third-floor doorway opened as they approached it, and two Provosts entered the stairwell and headed downstairs, brushing past Danyl and Alania. Danyl tensed, and he might have reached for the barely concealed slugthrower if Alania hadn’t grabbed his arm. Her instincts proved correct—the Provosts paid no more attention to them than if they had been furniture, far more interested in their own conversation . . . a conversation that suddenly interested Danyl, too, when he heard Kranz’s name.
“. . . Kranz is antsy about something, that’s for sure,” the first one said. “Doubled security on all entrances as he left.”
“Has anyone ever broken into Quarters Kranz?” the second one asked.
“Not in fifty years,” the first one replied, his voice fading as they continued down the stairs. “That was during the previous First Officer’s tenure, of course. Burglar from Fifth. Caught the guy trying to flee up the Canyon. One of my instructors told us about him. They tortured him for a month on Tenth before they finally—”
The Provosts opened the door one floor down and exited.
Danyl glanced at Alania. “Did you hear that?” he whispered. “Kranz is out.”
“And they’re focused on the regular entrances,” Alania whispered back. “We’ve got a chance . . .”
They hurried on up to the fourth and final landing. The door opened easily. The corridor beyond, floored in marble with silvery walls and ceiling and sparkling crystal light fixtures, made Quarters Beruthi look Spartan. There were only a few doors: a pair of them facing each other at Danyl and Alania’s end of the hall and another pair far, far down, near the other end. In between stood an ostentatiously grand pair of double doors, framed with marble pillars.
“First Officer’s office?” Danyl guessed.
“Has to be,” Alania agreed.
Danyl nodded. “Then let’s go.”
He stepped into the hallway . . . and all hell broke loose.
First came the alarm: screeching, screaming, deafening, a physical assault in its own right, hammering Danyl and Alania into momentary motionlessness. Then came the amplified voice of the City computer: “Unauthorized personnel, fourth floor! Unauthorized firearm, fourth floor! Unauthorized personnel, fourth floor! Unauthorized firearm, fourth floor!”
“Shit!” Danyl jerked the slugthrower from under his shirt just as the doors closest to them burst open. A Provost charged out from each side of the hall. Danyl fired instantly, reacting with reflexes honed by countless hours in Erl’s simulator.
The Provosts wore bulletproof vests, but so had the enemies in the simulations. Danyl fired not at their bodies, not at the iffy targets of their heads, but at their legs. Both went down screaming. Shouts echoed from the stairwell, and doors slammed open on each floor. Danyl stomped on the hand of one of the crippled Provosts, who was trying to raise his beamer, then kicked the dropped weapon farther down the hall. “Get that!” he shouted to Alania. She hurried to grab it. “Shoot anything that moves!” He turned back to the servants’ stair, slamming the door shut.
As he spun around again, a door at the far end of the hall swung open, and the beam from Alania’s weapon seared a burning line across the paneling. The door slammed shut as smoke billowed to the ceiling. The high-pitched squeal of a triggered smoke alarm added to the din.
Danyl ran past the fallen Provosts and dashed with Alania the rest of the way to what they hoped was Kranz’s office. He pulled the key from his pocket and inserted it into the lockplate in the middle of the right-hand door. If it didn’t work . . .
But the door opened without fuss. Danyl snatched back the key, and they bolted into the room. Danyl turned and slammed the door shut again, hoping it locked automatically. Only then did he pause to survey the office.
He’d feared the elevator would be hard to find, concealed somehow, but far from being hidden, it was highlighted, its floodlit doors glowing like molten gold . . . the same color as the key he carried. Probably to rub the noses of visitors in the fact Kranz has access to the Captain and they don’t.
He rushed to the elevator doors. There was no button, no lockplate. He tried touching the doors with the key.
They didn’t open.
Danyl heard running footsteps in the hall. The office doors might have locked, but the Provosts had to have some way of getting through them. He and Alania only had a moment. Alania turned toward the doors with her beamer, but that would only buy them a few seconds.
He searched the desktop, but it was smooth black glass, and the only decoration, if you could call it that, was a strange dagger, heavier than it looked. He ignored it and turned to the walls.
One of the paintings, a romanticized view of the City at dusk, was slightly out of place, one edge tilted away from the wall. He ran to it and tugged at it.
It swung open like a door, revealing a monitor similar to the status screen of the docbot that had patched up his wounds—and apparently programmed his nanobots—as a kid. Most of the readouts were yellow or red. Beneath that screen was a simple square of gold metal with a hole in the middle of it, just the size of the key.
“Show-off,” he muttered, and he shoved the cylinder into the hole.
The elevator opened. He tugged at the key. It wouldn’t come out.
Something heavy struck the office doors, which bowed inward. Another blow like that . . . Danyl turned and fired twice at the doors. The bullets didn’t penetrate, just gouged holes in the wood as they flattened against armor plating beneath, but maybe the noise and implied threat would deter anyone on the other side for a few seconds. Then he and Alania crammed into the glistening white-and-gold interior of the tiny elevator, clearly only intended to accommodate one person.
The door slid shut.
They ascended.
Danyl’s eyes met Alania’s, which were wide and white, but she didn’t look frightened. If anything, she looked exhilarated. He felt another surge of protectiveness and pride toward her. My sister. We’re cut from the same cloth.
From the same cloth as the Captain, he thought then. And worse, Kranz.
The elevator continued its inexorable rise. Danyl couldn’t imagine what they would see when that door opened, couldn’t imagine what he was supposed to do.
But soon enough, he wouldn’t have to imagine.
Without speaking, they rose to the pinnacle of the City.