53

The door to the stairwell was locked, despite the fact that the door was labeled EXIT, in glowing green letters.

I knew this hospital. I had stood with my father while we contemplated the blueprints of the new wing, the new laundry facility, the new emergency room, my father’s fingers slipping across the vacant rectangles that indicated the chambers of refuge and healing.

I found another door, to another stairwell, and this one opened.

My steps echoed in the shaft. I bounded up the stairs, from time to time gripping the handrail as I leaped three or four steps at once. Below, far below, was the slam and echo of pursuers.

The lower stairs were well worn, the rail’s paint flaking to bare steel. As I climbed higher, however, the steps were newer in appearance. Each doorway was surmounted by a green exit sign, and I kept climbing, beginning to breathe hard, all the way to the top.

The stairs ended. I struck the barrier with my fist and the resulting sound was loud. This was a trap, a cul-de-sac. I had run so far to end up nowhere. The top door was padlocked and chained, and the links rattled as I tugged at the latchbar of the door.

I plunged downstairs, and a door I had raced past was labeled, clearly and in bright red letters: OPENING THIS DOOR WILL SOUND FIRE ALARM.

Footsteps slapped the stairs below me. The sound of the steps had a continuous, reverberating quality, like the splash of water in a cave.

As I tugged at the door I heard a faraway trill, a very faint shrill of fire alarm, which I knew was connected to my activities here in the musty air of the stairwell. A further notice on the door read: DOOR TO REMAIN UNLOCKED AT ALL TIMES.

The pursuers were closer. There were voices, gasps. Far-off doors were flung open, a metallic thunder.

I pushed. The barrier gave way, barely. It was unlocked, but it stuck. I slammed into it with all my weight. It burst open with a steel chuckle, scraping the crushed rock that had somehow worked its way under the door.

My feet crunched gravel.

Everything was quiet, open. There was freedom—air, sky. I was on the roof.

So you understand at last.

Her steps did not stir the crushed rock of the roof. She hovered there, as though a wrinkle of skin, a shrink-wrap sheath over the earth, kept her from touching the fragments of stone.

She was indistinct, then, and just as quickly distinct, a source of pain now as well as light, as though the early symptoms of petit mal seizure had blossomed into hallucination.

I was panting hard, unafraid. “It’s all a matter of cost, isn’t it? It’s all a matter of what a person is worth.”

Her voice was the sizzle of surf on sand, the flutter of wing. “Nothing more. But, Stratton—you still don’t understand what I am.”

“What you are? What difference does it make what you are? I know what you can do.”

I took no pleasure, anticipating what I had to do. And yet I was sure of myself. I had that clarity of vision that comes from having no choice. I ran.

Did I hear that voice in me, that source of light, calling me, telling me to go no farther?

This was the sort of roof that should have been a garden, a landscape away from the tumult in the building below it. Instead, it was another waste. The roof in the dark was a disorienting desert. Vents brayed and vibrated, big metal hoods and domes. The smell in the air was like the clean, starchy smell vented from a laundromat.

I stumbled, and recovered my stride. There was a walkway across the gravel, flat slabs of cinderblock set as steppingstones across the rough gray mesa. I followed this path, running easily.

It was all a business, all a carnival, a noisy flea market, a brawling auction. I had guessed the secret. I climbed the dull, rough-surfaced edge of the roof, a low wall.

For her. To bring her back. I was paying a life for a life, and in the blathering stock exchange of souls I had guessed right.