The street shrunk below them as Caleb and Mallory’s father pulled the ropes through the pulleys, and the platform ascended the side of the skyscraper. The two men had to pull the ropes in sync as the platform was tenuously balanced on the pulleys. The citizens had quickly set-up the pulley system given all the issues the city had faced after the loss of the Dikaió, and little attention had been paid to the safety of the platform.
Mallory looked out over the edge and wished desperately for even a simple rope to act as a guard-rail. If one of the men should pull even slightly higher than the other, the platform would tilt sideways, and they’d all slide off. The smoke billowing out of the building next door was wafting along the breeze in their direction and into Mallory’s eyes. Tears sprouted up, and her vision blurred once again. She looked at her father and could see the same tears and irritation in his reddened eyes, but he dared not let go of the ropes and overturn the platform.
Caleb was in the same predicament but seemed less capable of ignoring the irritant. He tried to wipe at his eyes with his bicep, but his grip on the rope slipped slightly. The whole platform shook, and Mallory felt her Chorus cart tip slightly backward as she gripped the edges with her hands. Caleb quickly clamped down hard on the rope and pulled his end level with her father’s.
“Careful, Caleb,” her father called. “Close your eyes if you need to; I’ll call out the strokes until we’re at the top.” Caleb nodded, and stroke-by-stroke they rose to the top of the building.
At the top, the two men wrapped the ropes around cross-sections of metal crossbeams and tied it off to secure the platform. The wind was cold and vicious at that height, and Mallory wished she had taken the time to change clothes. She was still in her formerly elegant blue formal, which was now tattered, burned, and torn up. Her arms were bare and covered in goose pimples prickled by the cold gusts of the updraft.
The platform was a step below the lip of the roof, so the two men picked up Mallory first and heaved her up over the lip. For a moment, while her back was pressed up against Caleb, Mallory warmed up slightly from his body heat—then they dumped her onto the roof and the cold blasts hit her again. Caleb lifted the Chorus cart onto the roof, and her father passed up the grocery boxes. Once the men were on the roof, they lifted her back into the cart and pushed her away from the edge over to a small square building on the rooftop with a door to the stairway.
The rooftop gardens of the Culture Co-op were a thing to behold. Mallory had been on a few tours as part of her schooling as an heir to the Triad. Crops were organized in terracotta pots on tiered shelves ascending toward the center. Green plant stems rose above the terracotta tiers, and below them, glass fish tanks held the roots, so the Culture Co-op could monitor their health. The tallest tier was about ten feet off the ground, and behind it, in the center of it all, was the orchard with fruit and nut trees; the glass bowls for their roots were roughly the size of a large swimming pool and extended below the surface of the roof. The city’s fresh-water aquariums flowed into these with fish that fed on and cleaned the roots. Across the terracotta tiers, medium-sized plants like corn and beans grew near the treetops, and smaller plants like strawberries and root vegetables spread out across the bottom terracotta tiers. Hydroponic pipes pumped aerated water and nutrients through each level.
Past the Culture tiers, there were four firefighters with two hydrant sprites at the edge of the building facing the burning skyscrapers. The four men were each holding a redesigned hose that had been haphazardly attached to the old nozzles of the hydrant sprites, just like Mallory had designed. They were pointing the new nozzles where the water needed to go, while the hydrant sprites sat there and sprayed. Mallory wished she had been able to make the attachment more secure; a lot of water was spraying out of leaky connections—but water was at least going where it needed to go now—unlike the fire at City Hall. Caleb and her father walked over to the firefighters and tapped two of the men on their shoulders.
The firefighters nearly jumped off the edge of the building, clearly surprised that more people had been able to get to the top of the building without them noticing. Mallory could see the men all gather into a circle and begin talking. Caleb was talking with his hands, tying and untying invisible knots to help the firefighters understand the plan. Her father would wave his hands in little circles when he added something, and the firefighters would listen politely and then turn back to Caleb for explanation. She smiled watching the interaction. Soon, the men all walked over and began the more difficult task of pulling the platform onto the roof, untying the ropes, and decoupling the pulleys.
Mallory’s attention strayed over to the other building that was on fire. There were four firefighters on that building, too, who were spraying water down at the fire that was threatening to consume them. She knew firefighting could be a dangerous job—one of the most dangerous jobs in the city—but these men had no idea there were plans in place to rescue them. For all they knew, they were staring down at the very flames that would eventually consume them. Yet, they showed no panic; they just continued bravely doing their duty and putting down water where it needed to go. The city needed more men like that. And maybe it was already full of men like that.
Mallory looked past the firefighters to the buildings toward the hospital in the north. She could make out the forms of people on the roofs, and the shiny silver steel of un-birthed sprite husks being set up against the sides of the roofs, ready to deploy against the fire sprites. She wished that she could see the fire sprites below her in the street to see what they were doing. In order for their plan to work, they would need to get the fire sprites to move to the building they were occupying, so they could drop the sprite husks on them, but they seemed intent on destroying these three buildings before continuing down the row.
In her head, she imagined that taking the firefighters away from the burning building would also mean that their hydrant sprites would stop extinguishing the fire, which would speed up the fire sprite’s progress. Now that she was on top of the building next to the fire sprites, she wondered what would happen if they moved to her building instead of further down Main Street toward the hospital. They needed to get some of those sprite husks over to the building already on fire and stop the sprites there.
Mallory called to the men busily working to carry out her plan, but the wind on top of the building carried her voice away from them. Frustration rose up in her chest, and she beat at the sides of the Chorus cart. No one paid her any attention. She could see no way around it: She was going to have to disobey her mother’s wishes, get out of the cart, and walk over to the men to relay her idea. However, when she tried to push herself up out of the cart, she found that the sides were too steep to just vault over. She was going to have to pull her feet into the cart, putting pressure on them, and try to climb out over the side.
Mallory had just started the process when the stairway door swung open, and her mother walked onto the roof carrying a ream of paper and a handful of pencils. Mallory yelled out to her, “Mom!”
Her mother turned and said, “Mallory, what are you doing? Get off your feet; you’re going split those wounds wide open again!”
Mallory sunk back into the Chorus cart. “Mother, they can’t hear me. We need to adjust the plan.”
Her mother nodded. “Okay, I’ll get them. You stay here.”
“Where would I go?” Mallory yelled and threw up her hands.
Soon, the men were gathered around her cart. Mallory felt strange encircled by all the adults looking down at her. She craned her neck to look into their eyes as she spoke, “The fire sprites are going to keep working on the buildings that they’re at until they burn down, so we need to hit the first fire sprite from that building.” She pointed at the building currently on fire, “which means, we’ll have to use the carriage to get over there, and then make another carriage to send over for the sprite husks. And we’ll have to do the same thing for those two buildings across the street.”
“Do we really have time for that?” Caleb asked.
“I think we have to. Besides, what happens if the fire sprite comes this way instead of going that way?”
All of their eyes grew larger, and they nodded, understanding that only having one carriage meant only having one exit that could be cut off by a fire sprite’s attack.
Her father asked, “How do we help those guys across the street?”
“Let’s get the horizontal elevator set up here, and then you can split up. Two head across the street, and two head across to tell the firefighters nearest to us how to build their own horizontal elevators to get the sprite husks across. Mother, I’ll start drawing the directions, and you fold the paper birds. We’ll make enough to send across the street.”
Everyone went back to work. Mallory drew rudimentary pictures of men tying knots in rope, and she hoped it would be clear enough for the firefighters across the way. The men worked much faster than Mallory had expected them to; she found the firefighters were quite adept at tying knots and threading pulleys. Soon they had secured the two support lines on this building and tied them into the pillars of the terracotta tiers. They were ready to send over the other ends of the ropes in the grocery carts. Caleb came over and wheeled Mallory closer to the edge, so she could see what was happening in case any adjustments needed to be made.
Mallory called to her mother, “Do you have some paper birds ready?” Her mother had about four birds folded, and she walked over to the edge of the building and threw one over. The paper bird fell initially, and then it was caught in the updraft between the tall buildings and spiraled up, and then fell back onto their own roof. Her mother tried another bird, and it followed an identical trajectory.
Mallory shook her head. “Mother, stop. That’s not going to work. Let’s see if one of the grocery boxes with the rope will get across.”
Caleb smiled. He had apparently been waiting for this. He grabbed one of the boxes with the rope tied to the top slot, backed up to the Culture tiers, and took a running start before throwing it over the edge of the building as hard as he could. The box soared out into the open air. After it had gone about a foot, it got caught in the updraft just like the paper birds. The box drifted upwards. Mallory held her breath, waiting for it to upturn or fly back onto their roof, but the propellers engaged, and the box maintained its forward motion, slowly floating across the space of the two buildings, landing perfectly on the other roof.
Mallory immediately shouted, “Put the directions in the next box and weigh them down with one of those broken pieces of terracotta.”
With the directions secured, Caleb sent the next box sailing across the expanse. Mallory was not sure how the distant firefighter across the way saw the second box floating onto their rooftop, but he set down his hose, walked around the terracotta tiers on his rooftop, and met the box while it was still in the air. He watched the box land gently on the rooftop and retrieved Mallory’s directions out of the box. He studied them for a moment and looked across the expanse at them.
Mallory and the rest of the group began to point at the rope tied to the tiers on their side. The distant firefighter gave a thumbs-up sign, and soon Caleb, her father, and the two firemen were slowly crossing between the buildings on her horizontal elevator. When they reached the other side, Mallory and her mother both cheered.
The two firefighters from the first building walked away with the others, but her father and Caleb started pulling their way back over to the building on which Mallory and her mother were waiting. When they got back to their roof, Caleb jumped off and said, “I don’t think there’s enough room for all of us and the Chorus cart, but we’re going to need you both over there. Mal, are you okay sitting on the ground?”
Her mother jumped between them. “What do you need her for now? What’s wrong?”
Her father moved his hands in small circles then stiffly through his hair. “The platform on that building is on fire down below. We’re going to have to send this platform over on the other side for the sprites. You may not have any way off this roof if the fire sprites move to this building. I’m not okay leaving either of you here without a way out. At least over there, we can still get you to safety depending on which way they turn, either north toward the hospital or south toward the Governor’s District.”
The Matriarch shook her head. “We can just go down the stairs now and get out of harm’s way.”
Her husband pointed at Mallory’s feet. “What about her injuries?”
The Matriarch processed this information then nodded.
Caleb lifted Mallory out of the Chorus cart and lowered her carefully down to the platform. She could not help but land on her feet a little, but she tried to keep her weight off the worst foot. The last thing she wanted to do was lose her balance at this height, so she readjusted her weight onto both feet, even though the pain was excruciating. She squared her jaw with determination and managed to lower herself down to a sitting position off her feet.
Mallory’s father helped the Matriarch down, and then the men climbed aboard as well. The support lines were connected to four corners on the platform as it dangled between the buildings, which made this horizontal elevator more stable than the vertical version with only two connections at the top. As the men pulled away from the edge across the expanse, the platform bucked wildly in the updraft. Mallory grabbed the ropes leading to the supports and laid down as low as she could. Her eyes drifted over the edge of the platform: The updraft hit her face, carrying heat and smoke formed by what looked like a river of fire and smoke below them. The fire sprite itself was barely visible despite its massive size. They were going to need remarkable aim to hit it from this height.
The fire itself was climbing quickly up the building without the hydrant sprites working to hold it back. Mallory could tell that they were working against the clock to get what they needed done, and there was a good chance this building would not be saved. The platform touched the side of the building. The firemen stabilized the cart, helping the passengers up. Mallory crawled on hands and knees, and two of them lifted her up over the ledge and carried her out of the way. The men quickly pulled the platform over the side and started untying it from the ropes and pulleys, so they could get the platform to the other side of the building and send it over for the sprite husks.
Mallory was sitting near the grocery boxes, and she had a sudden inspiration. “Did you bring a pencil with you, Mother?” she asked. Her mother tapped her vest pockets and pulled out three pencils. “Perfect, thanks.” She took one of the sheets with the knot-tying directions and flipped it over. She bit the corner of her lip and began to draw a new set of directions for the people on the other building. When she finished, she looked up and found the men were gone, likely on the other side of the roof, getting the platform ready to send across to the other building. Her mother was still sitting quietly beside her, staring up at the smoke-filled sky, lost in thought. “Here, give this to Caleb,” Mallory said, breaking her mother’s trance.
The Matriarch looked down at the drawing, and her eyes widened. “Will this work?”
Mallory said, “I think so.” She tapped the boxes. “They carry a lot of weight in groceries.”
Her mother nodded thoughtfully and walked off to find Caleb.
All alone now, Mallory looked up in the direction her mother had been gazing. Dark rivulets of smoke filled the sky. The sun was getting lower, and Mallory could not tell how much of the red sky was from the smoke or from the nearness of sunset. For the first time, she wondered if she would die up here, roasted alive on a rooftop. Oddly, she wondered if the crops would smell good while they cooked, and she realized that she had not eaten since breakfast. All of a sudden, the smell of the smoke reminded her of summer barbecues and her stomach rolled in protest and neglect. She rolled her eyes at her body’s poor sense of timing.
A lot of time had passed and Mallory started to wonder if they had all forgotten her. She could not see past the terracotta tiers of the rooftop crops to what the group was doing, or if her new plan was working. Waiting was absolutely maddening, so she pulled herself up onto her hands and knees again. She kept her feet elevated off the rooftop, focusing all her weight on her kneecaps. It was not easy crawling in that position, but she made it to the edge of the terracotta tiers and peeked around them to see what the group was up to.
Two firefighters were pulling a grocery box over the edge, and inside it was the silver husk of an un-birthed sprite. The plan had worked. There was no need to send a platform across; they could use the grocery boxes to accomplish the same task. She could see that they had tied the support lines anyway: They now had a means of escape from the building on both sides.
Caleb turned around and started running toward the terracotta tiers. He stopped short and laughed when he saw her peeking around them. “Mal! I should have known you couldn’t stay put. Did you see? It worked!”
Mallory nodded and smiled as another sprite husk arrived via grocery cart from the neighboring building to the north. “Can you see across the street? Are they watching what we’re doing? They can do the same thing!”
Caleb ran to the western edge of the roof and held his hand up to his eyes to look over to the other buildings. He nodded approvingly and came back to Mallory. “It looks like they saw. They’ve got an elevator climbing one of the buildings, and it’s full of grocery boxes.”
Mallory sat back on her haunches. “Great! Let’s throw one and see if we can kill one of those things!”
Caleb clapped his hands, “Now, you’re talking!”
He ran over to the group of adults and started talking to them animatedly. The sprite husks were fairly heavy, and it took two firefighters to carry one over to the edge. Mallory watched as they positioned it. Caleb directed them to the left and to the right then he held up his fist, waiting in anticipation. His hand lowered quickly, and his shout was lost in the wind gusts atop the skyscrapers, but the firemen were close enough to hear, and they pushed the sprite husk over the edge of the building. Caleb and the three men leaned out over the lip of the rooftop, tracking the descent of the husk.
Their countenances all fell at the same moment, and Mallory knew that they had missed their target. Caleb walked over to her and said, “The fire sprite is standing too far back from the building. We need to be about this much farther out.” He held up his thumb and forefinger just slightly apart to demonstrate the slight adjustment that needed to be made. “But the sprites are too heavy; we’ll never be able to throw them out farther over the edge.”
Mallory bit her lip and thought about the problem. She looked around the rooftop gardens: There were various gardening tools, including shears, spades, and hoses—even a couple of long-handled fruit baskets for picking fruit off the tall trees. “What if we balanced a sprite on two grocery boxes, like so?” She made a V with two fingers and placed the forefinger of her other hand across the top. “We’ll tie ropes to the boxes and push them off the roof, so the propellors engage. We can use those fruit pickers to position them over the fire sprite, and then spread the grocery boxes away from each other to drop the sprite.”
“That could work!” Caleb said. “What were the ropes for, though?”
“If we miss, we’ll need to reel-in the baskets to try again.”
“Righ—“
An explosion shook the building under their feet and cut Caleb’s agreement short. He lost his footing and fell over backwards. Mallory looked toward the adults, and those who had not been near something to hold onto had fallen to the rooftop as well. Caleb pulled himself up and ran to the edge of the building to see what had happened. He did a double-take and then jumped up and down cheering. The other adults collected themselves and ran over to see too. Soon they were all cheering. Mallory quickly assumed the uncomfortable hands-and-knees crawling position and slowly made her way to the edge of the building. She pulled herself up and peered over.
Across the street, she could see that the half-completed sprite was on the ground in a pile of flames. On the rooftop corner, she saw firefighters, a magistrate, and a blond-haired man, who were all jumping up and down and cheering. It was the Chief Magistrate and the Governor, and they had managed to drop their sprite husk directly on top of the half-completed fire sprite, putting it out of commission.
Mallory felt her heart leap inside her chest. “Yes!” She screamed, starting to pull herself to her feet to join their cheers. Her mother caught her arm, and even though she was laughing quite giddily, she shook her head and pointed down. Mallory laughed and sank back to the ground, clapping her hands instead of leaping up and down on her injured feet.
Suddenly a groan sounded out above the cheering, and the building lurched about six inches to the south. One of the firefighters stumbled forward and fell over the edge—if it had not been for the quick hands of his compatriots, he would have surely fallen to his doom. Mallory pulled herself up onto her knees again, just high enough to look over the lip. She thought for sure he would have screamed when he went over the edge, but instead he was just dangling upside down, anchored to the building only by the hands of two firefighters holding his feet, looking bewildered. They slowly pulled him back on top of the roof. Mallory looked down into the street after the firefighter was safe. The last fire sprite was still busy spraying fire. The south-side corner of the building looked warped, and the metal beams were bending outward through the flames. Everyone was so elated that they almost forgot about the sprite burning the building they were standing on—and they did not have much time.
“Get those boxes and prepare a sprite!” Caleb barked. “Let’s end this, so we can get off this building.”
Two firefighters ran off to grab a sprite husk, two others grabbed ropes and poles, and Caleb and Mallory’s father grabbed the grocery boxes. Caleb and her father dropped the grocery boxes on the roof, and just before they touched the rooftop, the propellors engaged and the boxes began to slowly lower toward the ground. Just before they could land, the firefighters slid the poles into slats on the sides of the carts and pulled them gently back up. Mallory was satisfied to see that the propellors stayed engaged. The firefighters with the sprite husk set it on top the two boxes, half on one and half on the other. The boxes dipped toward the center a bit as the sprite steadied on top of them, but they stayed afloat when the firefighters applied some leverage with the poles. Caleb and Mallory’s father ran the rope through the slots and around the poles, and the firefighters with available hands tied quick knots, securing the ropes to the floating boxes.
“It’s perfect!” Mallory shouted.
The firefighters with the poles began walking toward the western lip of the building, pushing the hovering boxes with the sprite before them. Everyone else ran to the edge, and Mallory pulled herself up on her knees again to see over the lip. Caleb shouted, “Good, another foot or so should do it.”
Mallory yelled, “No, it’s further. Look at where the first sprite landed. The fire sprite is now about ten feet behind that spot. Those poles are only about twelve feet long, so they need to be all the way to the edge before they drop it.”
Caleb looked down, and then back at the firefighters. “You heard her. All the way to the edge.” He pointed to the other firefighters. “You men go and help them. The poles are dipping a bit up front. They need more leverage on the back end.”
Soon, all four firefighters were at the edge of the building, holding onto the poles. Mallory yelled, “It looks right. Pull the poles apart.” The firefighters pulled as instructed, and slowly the boxes holding the sprite husk began to move away from each other. The sprite husk teetered backwards and fell off the backside of the boxes. Mallory had hoped the sprite husk would fall directly between them. She desperately watched the silver football fall, hoping it would hit its mark on the fire sprite’s head. End-over-end it tumbled: down, down, down. The closer it got to the fire sprite, the more Mallory worried that the trajectory was off. She was just about to yell to the firefighters to load another one when the sprite husk made contact with the fire sprite—or at least part of it. The sprite husk was a little behind Mallory’s target, so instead of hitting the fire sprite’s head, the husk smashed through one of the accelerant tanks on its back. There was a split second where the fire sprite was tipping backwards, paraffin mushrooming upward like the splash of a stone breaking the surface of a stream, and then the accelerant touched the flames coming out of the fire sprite’s nozzle. The explosion was brilliant.
Mallory’s vision blurred as the concussion hit the building: The entire structure tilted nearly a foot to the south. Mallory lost her balance and fell to the rooftop. Everyone else fell over on top of her, and then they were all rolling toward what was now the lower edge of the building. Mallory hit the lip first, and the others hit her. They lay there in a jumble for a moment, and then they began to cautiously stand.
“We need to get off this building,” one of the firefighters yelled. “Now!”
The horizontal elevator was on the north side of the building, opposite where the lilt had tossed them. Everyone began to climb the angled hill that the rooftop had become; the adults walking, and Mallory crawling on hands and knees. It was not a steep incline—only about a fifteen-degree angle—but any incline at that height is worrisome.
Water from the terracotta tiers flushed over the tops of the fishbowls and splashed across the tarred surface of the rooftop—it was so slippery, it might as well have been oil. Their feet slipped this way and that, and what was left of Mallory’s blue dress was quickly soaked as she fell into the flow more than once. They were not far in their climb when they heard a terrifying noise coming from just over the western edge of the building: the sound of metal scraping against metal.
There were two or three crashes as windows shattered, and then a flaming sprite head appeared over the top of the lip. The fire sprite was climbing to the rooftop, and it was covered in burning paraffin. One of its tanks was crushed, but the other one looked okay. Mallory shouted, “It needs to reload. It’s going for the paraffin!”
The tanks of paraffin that the Culture Co-op used to ward off insects were on the other side of the building from where the sprite was climbing up. They had to stop it from getting more fuel, but Mallory was not sure how. She had run out of ideas.
Suddenly, one of the grocery boxes that were attached to the poles smashed into the fire sprite’s head. Mallory followed the pole to see who was wielding it and was surprised to see her mother on the other end. The Matriarch let lose a primal scream that rivaled the fire sprite’s screeching metal flints, and she ran forward, pushing the fire sprite hard like a knight with a lance. The fire sprite did not look like it was moving at first, but then its flaming head disappeared from view.
The group ran to the lip of the building. Mallory forgot her injured feet in the rush of adrenaline coursing through her body, and she jumped to her feet and followed them. She got there just in time to see the fire sprite land face-down at the bottom of the building.
The fire sprite lay there for a time, and they all waited for it to explode or show some sign of being destroyed—but then, unfathomably, it started to push itself up off the ground. It was clearly damaged and fell back down several times, but it continued to push up again.
The Matriarch screamed again, and Mallory turned to see her push one of the hydrant sprites off the edge of the building. They all watched the hydrant sprite fall, cartwheeling water trails all the way down. This time the dropped sprite found its target, and the fire sprite crumpled. An instant later, it exploded. They instinctively grabbed the lip of the building, just before the concussion hit.
The skyscraper groaned as if it were a living animal, then it squirmed in agony. The rooftop buckled and shifted below their feet, and the angle to the other side of the building increased to twenty-five percent. “Let’s go!” screamed Mallory’s father, waving his arms in clockwise circles toward their only exit.
They all began to run up the rooftop hill. Plants in the gardens let loose, and Mallory watched an apple tree fly past them over the edge of the building, swept along on a river of water from its basin. Fish flopped around, gasping for breath across the rooftop surface. Then a pear tree broke loose, and a walnut tree, followed by an orange tree. If the group had not moved closer to the street-side edge to see what happened to the fire sprite, they would have been directly in the flying orchard’s path. They trudged upward past the terracotta tiers until they could see the ropes for the elevator. The ropes were taut as guitar strings and hummed an eerie high C note as they resonated in the updraft.
One of the firefighters said, “The Matriarch, her husband, and the heirs will go first.”
Mallory shook her head. “No, there’s no time. The ropes are about to break. We all need to go, now!”
The firefighter shook his head, “There’s not room for eight people. We’ll stay; you go.”
Mallory blinked and bit her lip. Her mother cupped her face in both hands. “Mallory, there’s not time to argue.” She turned to her husband and Caleb. “Get her on the platform, now!”
The two men picked Mallory up, and she did not struggle. Her mother was right; there was not time for a plan B, nor time to argue. When the four of them were on the platform, Caleb and her father began to pull them toward the other building, which Mallory noted was oddly quite a few feet below them. She looked back at the skyscraper they were leaving and could see why: The edge they had just climbed off was several feet higher and seemed to be going higher as she watched it. This side of the building was angling up as the other descended. She looked at the support ropes they were crossing. Frayed bits of rope were starting to stand up along the length of it as the pulleys worked their way down.
“Faster!” she yelled. “The rope is going to break.”
Caleb and her father started pulling as fast as they could, and they reached the other building, climbing off quickly. They picked up Mallory and set her down on the rooftop while the waiting firefighters helped the Matriarch off.
The humming of the ropes was climbing the musical scale as the ropes pulled more and more taut. Caleb started climbing back onto the platform. The Matriarch grabbed his arm, “What are you doing?”
“I’m going back for those men!” Caleb shouted at her.
“No!” The Matriarch shot back. “One of the firefighters here will go. You have other duties.” Caleb stepped down reluctantly, and a firefighter stepped forward to take his place.
Before he could swing his foot over the lip down onto the platform, there was a rumbling explosion, then another, and another. The building next to them began to sink downward, and they watched with horror as the windows on each floor started bursting outward and the floors collapsed on themselves in dusty eruptions. The support ropes on the horizontal elevator went limp, then taut again, and then the platform slid off their frayed ends and tumbled into the fiery chasm below.