Several more explosions followed the first, but they seemed fairly ordinary at this point, with all the windows of the ground floor stove in and the entire honor guard of stevedores rushing from various outposts to stem the attack that had been launched. It was very dark, being sometime just after ten o’clock, and a dense fog had descended over the river valley and was rushing across the Industrial Wastes like someone laying out a heavy winter duvet.
Elsie Mehlberg tried to subdue her very present fear as best as she could, her knees now feeling rubbed raw from the extraordinary stretch of ductwork they’d crawled so far.
“Pssst,” hissed a voice behind her; it was Ruthie. “How much farther?”
Left. Right. Left. Straight. Elsie was trying to remember the schema of the ductwork. “Not far, I think,” she said.
They’d arrived at a four-way intersection.
“We go left,” said Elsie. Her memory had served her well: It was only a few moments before they arrived at the vent covering. She peered through the mesh and saw that the vent let onto a stark white hallway.
A gust of hot air blew over them; the slightest smell of smoke was in the air. “Harry,” whispered Elsie. “You ready for this?”
“As I’ll ever be,” came the voice, holding up the rear of the foursome.
Ruthie, Oz, and Elsie pressed themselves sideways against the wall of the duct so Harry could squeeze, feet first, to the front. There, he placed his shoes against the metal vent covering and waited.
“That security system’s disarmed, right?” he asked.
Elsie, at his ear, nodded. “It should be,” she said. But she knew: Their lives were now entirely in the hands of Joffrey Unthank and his ability to keep his madness at bay. She imagined the worst-case scenario: They kick open the covering, the security system engages, they get nabbed after a feeble chase and are thrown into the safe room with Carol and Martha, the very people they’d intended to save. Or worse: They suffer the same fate that so many captured members of the Chapeaux Noirs had faced—disappeared. Drowned. Fed to the dogs. It was enough to send Elsie’s stomach spasming in fear.
Harry looked back at Elsie. “Should I just do it?”
“Wait for the explosion.”
Just after she’d said it, it came: an explosion; a soft thud sending another shock wave through the building. Harry coiled his legs back and gave the covering a tremendous kick; it went clattering into the hallway beyond. He quickly peeked out of the opening, jerking his head right and then left. “Clear,” he said.
“Go!” whispered Elsie, and Harry, grabbing the outside lip of the opening, slid himself out into the hall. The other three were quick to follow.
“Which way?” asked Ruthie once they’d all assembled in the hallway.
Elsie ran the schema in her mind. “Left,” she said.
“I’ll scout ahead,” said Oz. The boy disappeared around a corner, briefly, before scrambling back. “Stevedores!” he reported in the loudest whisper he could manage.
Sure enough, a gang of the overall-wearing giants came stomping into view. They crossed the children’s vision, running along an intersecting hallway. The duct-rats all froze in place; they’d had too little notice to do any kind of evasive action. Thankfully, whatever it was that the goons were off to do seemed more important than anything down this side hallway, and the four of them survived unnoticed. Elsie looked around at her friends with wide eyes. “Let’s be careful,” she said. “This place is jumping with those guys.”
Oz scouted again and gave the all clear, which they’d agreed would be a kind of clicking noise the boy was able to make with his tongue. It sounded like the rattle of a radiator. They rounded the corner and made their way to a second vent cover, which presented itself, as the blueprint promised it would, at ground level just a few feet past the intersection. Ruthie, charged with the task, pulled out the screwdriver and began removing the screws from the four corners of the vent. Oz and Elsie edged outward to either side, their eyes trained on the empty hallway.
The vent grille clattered to the ground and the four duct-rats, one after another, slid into the tunnel with Elsie in the lead. She paused a moment, collecting her thoughts. “Straight on,” she said. “It branches in a little ways.”
They scuttled down the short passage, listening to the reverberant sounds of explosions somewhere far below them. Elsie thought they sounded like they were getting closer. She’d been disturbed by an exchange between Jacques and Nico, just before they were leaving for the action: Jacques had suddenly, emboldened by promised success, been very adamant that they achieve the thing they’d long angled for: the complete destruction of Titan Tower. He’d said that they weren’t likely to get this close again. That the time to strike was now, to deal the final blow. Nico’d warned against it, saying it was too rash. Their objective, as they’d promised the Unadoptables, was to simply free the Chief Titan’s hostages, full stop. And that’s how they’d left it, but once the explosions started happening—louder and closer than Elsie imagined they would be—she couldn’t help wondering if that wasn’t the sound of Jacques getting his way.
But there was no time to fret: They arrived at a T-intersect; following the blueprint of Elsie’s recollections, the four duct-rats crawled leftward and soon arrived at a vertical duct. One after another, they began their upward climb, spidering themselves against the walls of the duct and inching, ever so carefully, toward a glimmering light some five floors above them.
The elevator climbed; Unthank watched the numbers change in the readout above the door. The chaotic noises of the ground floor: the breaking glass, the howling voices, the sound of a multitude of footsteps running desperately to the scene of the explosion—they all ebbed away until Unthank was alone with his thoughts in the silent space of the elevator car.
“Tra la, tra lee,” he sang to himself. He felt at the small black package in the left-hand pocket of his coat. The thing was still there. He sang again: “Tra loo, tra lee.” The elevator dinged its arrival at the twenty-second floor. He waited cautiously as the doors slid open, revealing an empty hallway.
He stepped out uncertainly, unnerved by the quiet on the floor. He looked at his watch and confirmed that despite the inconsistencies in the plan, he was still on schedule. A tentative beep could be heard somewhere in the distance, and he began walking toward it, humming all the while.
The duct-rats had arrived at another vent cover; the dusty light from the hallway cast a hatch-marked etching on the floor of the duct. They waited for another explosion; it came, and Harry kicked the cover out into the hall, sending a spray of chalky drywall dust onto the floor. The way was clear; they extricated themselves from the low conduit and stretched in the open air of the hallway. Despite their small size, each of them was feeling the pinch of having to crouch so low for so long; what’s more, the five-story free climb through the vertical duct had taken all the energy they could muster. They were breathing deeply, gulping in air.
“To the bathroom,” instructed Elsie, and they all filed toward the door, which, as she’d known, was only a few feet to their right.
The bathroom was sparklingly clean; truly, the work of an organization that prided itself on spotless, bacteria-free cleanliness. To the children, having spent the last several years of their lives either in an overcrowded orphanage, in a woodland cottage with no working plumbing, or in an abandoned warehouse with even fewer amenities, the sight of the immaculately clean restroom facility was enough to bring tears to their eyes. Or at least Harry’s.
“I’ve never seen anything so beautiful,” he mused aloud.
“C’mon,” hissed Elsie, who, of the children, had had the most recent exposure to the everyday cleanliness of twenty-first-century life. She was committed to her task, which involved the careful cataloging of the byways of a ductwork that spanned hundreds of yards and stories. One kid’s potty break could be enough to throw that off. “The vent’s in the ceiling. Over here.”
“Can I just go to the bathroom once?” pleaded Harry, in thrall to the beautiful, snow-white porcelain that presented itself throughout the restroom.
“No,” whispered Elsie. “Let’s go!”
“What if it’s just a number one?”
Elsie grabbed Harry by the arm and dragged him toward the end of the room, where a black grate interrupted the cool white of the tiled ceiling. It hung directly above one of the bathroom’s toilet stalls, and Elsie had seen enough movies to know that one must look both under the door and above it to see if anyone is hiding within. The stall was clear; Elsie and Ruthie scaled the opposing stall walls and sat there, balanced on the metal dividers. Oz stood on the back of the toilet and braced Ruthie’s slippered feet while she undid the screws holding the cover in place.
The screws dropped, one after another, into the toilet. Ruthie slid the grate aside, into the interior of the duct, and they all climbed into the hole in the ceiling. All of them but Harry.
He’d been so taken by the bathroom that he lingered a moment longer, apparently ogling the facilities, before the hissed whispers from his fellow duct-rats shook him back to attention. Sitting on the edge of the top of the stall, he kicked one foot down and flushed the toilet, apparently just to see it work. The sound masked the noise of the bathroom door suddenly swinging open, though Harry saw the stevedore, moments after, as he came around the corner and made his way toward the stalls.
Elsie, her head sticking out of the hole in the ceiling, saw the intruder too; it all seemed to be happening in slow motion.
A voice shouted to the stevedore from the hallway beyond. “Come on, Tony! We got to get down to the lobby. This ain’t a drill.”
“Hold up,” said the stevedore as he walked along the corridor of closed bathroom stalls. “Nature calls.”
Elsie jerked her head backward into the duct; peeking over the edge, she stared wide-eyed at Harry, who was poised, spread-eagled, across the top of the toilet stall. The toilet stall that the stevedore had hurriedly selected.
Elsie held her breath. She could hear Oz and Ruthie suck in theirs as well. She only imagined Harry was doing the same.
The stall door swung open. The stevedore gave a cursory look at the empty toilet bowl before dropping his overalls and turning around, sitting heavily on the white toilet seat. He cupped his forehead in his hands and stared at the space between his knees as Harry, pale and terrified, stood only a handful of feet above his head, his legs painfully tenting the distance between the metal walls of the stall.
And they waited. Elsie couldn’t stand the strain, and she slid down the corridor, covering her face with her hands, as if willing the world away. A minute passed. One of the man’s fellow stevedores hollered out an impatient word before the toilet flushed noisily and the stall door slammed open and closed and the stevedore, freshly relieved, walked loudly out of the bathroom.
Only then did Elsie creep her head back over the lip of the vent opening.
Harry was still straddling the stall. He looked up at the shocked faces of the three Unadoptables, who were peeking down at him through the hole in the ceiling.
“That,” he said, “was disgusting.”
Before another stevedore had a chance to wander into the bathroom and disrupt their plan, Elsie and Oz had thrust their hands down through the vent opening and yanked Harry, with all their strength, into safety.
Joffrey Unthank’s goal was in sight. There, at the end of the hallway, was a door marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Beyond it was the very small and dark room that housed the operational protocols for the Tower’s two auxiliary elevators. Only one of those elevators was known to most of the staff of the Tower: the service elevator, a nondescript apparatus that was used mainly by janitorial and, if needed, in emergency situations. However, unbeknownst to everyone apart from the few who had high-level security clearance, the console inside the room could also override the security lock for a more clandestine elevator: the small caged contraption that served as an escape route from Wigman’s safe room. Joffrey rubbed his hands eagerly; he had high-level security clearance. It was a benefit of being a Titan of Industry. And now: His penultimate goal was at hand.
However, no sooner had he finished rubbing his palms when a pair of lumbering stevedores came crashing toward him, barreling down the hallway and blocking Unthank’s view of the door. He immediately recognized both of them, which was surprising considering the strange uniformity among the stevedore ranks: They all looked as if they’d been engineered by a remarkably unimaginative geneticist. But Joffrey knew them: They were Wigman’s two right-hand men, and they were steaming toward Joffrey and looking very angry.
They saw him, and genetically inseparable looks of surprise fell across their faces.
“Machine Parts?” said one, surprised.
“Jimmy!” said Unthank, smiling excitedly. “Bammer! Been a while, hasn’t it?”
“What are you doing here?” growled Bammer. He was holding a very large, red pipe wrench in his right hand.
“I thought you went crazy,” said Jimmy.
Unthank shrugged his shoulders as if to say, It happens.
“Do you know there’s an attack on the tower happening right now?” added Jimmy.
“An attack? Had no idea, tra la.” It just slipped out, the singing. He bit his lip, hard.
The two stevedores, so confused by the random meeting, seemed not to pay the little tic any mind. “Chapeaux Noirs,” said Bammer. “Gettin’ brazen. Whole lobby’s blown out.”
“Oh wow, really?” said Unthank.
“Yeah. It’s real. The Chief’s down there. We got to get him to safety.”
“What horrible people,” said Unthank. “Those saboteurs.”
“We’ll show them, though,” said Jimmy, who was also holding a very large pipe wrench. Joffrey couldn’t imagine the kind of plumbing repair that would require such a large tool. The stevedore whacked it against the palm of his opposing hand a few times.
“You sure will,” said Joffrey. “No doubt about it.”
“You shouldn’t be in here,” said Jimmy. “Ain’t safe.”
“Yes, yes,” said Joffrey. “I’m just making my way out. I know the drill.”
Just then, another explosion sounded from below. The hallway was rocked slightly by the detonation. Joffrey braced himself against the wall.
“We gotta get down there,” said Jimmy. “All hands on deck.”
“Watch yourself, Machine Parts,” said Bammer as the two stevedores shoved past him. It was an annoying entitlement the two stevedores enjoyed: being able to refer to the various Titans by their Division, something only Wigman typically did.
“Will do, guys,” said Joffrey. “And good luck down there.” He waited until they were out of sight before continuing his walk toward the door. He breathed deeply, desperately tamping down the violent urge he had to sprint for the door, screaming epithets. He still had appearances to keep up; his narrow escape from Bammer and Jimmy was testament to that.
He reached the door in a few short steps. Access required handprint identification, which he provided, along with another retinal scan. “Good evening, Joffrey Unthank,” said a robotic voice from the panel by the door once the procedure had been completed. A click sounded by the handle; Unthank pushed the door in and entered the room.
The break room had exhibited all the signs of a speedy departure; benches were upturned and magazines thrown carelessly to the ground. Several of the stevedores’ metal locker doors were wide open, and denim overalls poured out like blue tongues. A few maroon beanies littered the floor. Cold cups of coffee. Half-eaten bagels. The duct-rats had managed their scurry through the room without incident, and they were now running down the hall toward the service elevator that would, if all things were going according to plan, be powered down.
Harry led the pack this time; arriving at the shut doors (a sign above them read SERVICE ELEVATOR! AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY!) he sized up his challenge with a steely eye. He was ten years old—he’d have been twelve if it weren’t for his two years in the time-stasis of the Periphery—and it was as if someone had held their thumb on his head as he’d grown. All of his development seemed to have occurred in his thighs and biceps, while his height stayed remarkably stunted. Even Elsie, who was shorter than most of the nine-year-olds in their crowd, met him eye to eye when they spoke. He squared up his stumpy legs and fished his thick fingers into the gap between the elevator doors and pulled.
Nothing.
Again: He pulled. He grunted as he did so, and little veins popped up in his neck.
Elsie gave a look behind them. “Hurry!” she whispered.
“I’m trying,” said Harry, annoyed, before he gritted his teeth and tried again; the doors gave a little this time, and a thin red glow appeared between them: the light from the interior of the elevator shaft.
“You’re almost there!” said Ruthie. She and Oz thrust their fingers into the fissure to try and help.
Harry grunted again, and soon the doors had been pried some eighteen inches apart and the boy was able to slide between them and brace them open with his feet. “Okay!” he whispered breathlessly. “Get in!”
Oz went first, climbing through the lattice of Harry’s splayed shins and elbows, and gasped loudly. “Long way down, guys,” he said. He then inched his way out of sight and presumably began climbing. Elsie and Ruthie followed suit.
Just beyond the doors was a red-lit shaft that seemed impossibly tall; the floors below were distinguished by metal doors that appeared periodically along the wall of the cement corridor. The car was nowhere in sight. They could only hope that Mr. Unthank had managed to shut the thing down; it was understood that if the car were operational and it were to run over them as they climbed, well, the less said about it the better. Above them, the shaft stretched into the unseen distance, a constellation of little red lights extending into a pinkish blur. The metal rungs of a ladder were set into a shallow channel in the shaft wall, and the four children began climbing them, mindful not to look down.
“Come on,” said Elsie. “We got a long ways to go.”
Adopting the bearing of a service technician finishing his rounds, Unthank backed out of the room and gently closed the door behind him, ensuring that the door was locked as he did so. He couldn’t help, at this moment, but feel a little impressed with himself. Not only had he steeled himself against the constant barrage fed by his enfeebled mind, bursts of manic suggestions and reality-tilting images, but he’d managed it all rather flexibly, adapting his actions to all the curveballs that fate had thrown at him. What’s more, he’d done an incredibly good turn for the children. Now they would be well on their way to freeing their friends from the grip of the Chief Titan and thereby scuttling any chance of Bradley Wigman achieving what would have rightfully been Unthank’s, what he had worked at for so long. . . .
He stopped. That was the old himself.
He was working to free the children. To allow them their justice.
Smile.
He was, he had to admit, fairly good at this sort of thing. Perhaps there was a place for him among the ranks of the Chapeaux Noirs. He had to admit: Being a saboteur was rather satisfying.
But no: He had one last task. One last goal. One last wish to complete. He patted the thing in his pocket, took a deep breath, and began walking toward the end of the hall.
That was when Bammer and Jimmy showed up again.
You’re not supposed to do that, Unthank fought the urge to say aloud when he saw them. He chided himself. Remember. Flexibility. Smile. Don’t sing.
“Hi, gents,” he said amiably. “Back so soon?”
“Elevator’s down. Service elevator isn’t taking our credentials.”
“Oh,” said Unthank. “That’s strange.”
Bammer cocked his eyebrow. “I thought you were making your way out.”
“You were goin’ the wrong way to get out,” added Jimmy.
“Was I?” said Unthank. “I was, wasn’t I? Oh well, I guess you both should lead the way.”
The two stevedores paused and shared a look. “I said: Service elevator ain’t takin’ credentials. Think it’s been shut off. We need it on.”
“You got security clearance for that, don’t you?” asked Jimmy.
“I do, in fact,” said Unthank. Flexibility. He thought of the children. They would be climbing by now.
“Well?” prompted Bammer.
“I suppose we ought to, well, turn it on,” said Unthank.
“Yeah,” said Jimmy. “Like, now.”
“Right,” said Unthank. “Now.”
The three of them stood there in the hallway for a minute; another explosion rocked the building.
“NOW!” shouted Bammer.
The two stevedores grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around to face the door he’d so recently closed and locked. He focused his power into his legs to stop them from buckling, before realizing that he needed an equal amount of brainpower to consider all the implications of turning the service elevator back on. He and the stevedores were on the twenty-second floor; he knew that the duct-rats would be climbing into the shaft at the fifteenth. Surely, unless the children had already climbed above the elevator car, they would be meat loaf in the workings once the apparatus had passed them by. A shiver went up his spine.
“C’mon,” said Bammer. Unthank then realized they’d already arrived at the door, and he defeatedly presented the required body parts to the palm and retinal scanners.
“Welcome back, Mr. Unthank,” said the robotic chirp.
Jimmy cast a sidelong glance at Joffrey.
“Did you—” he began.
Unthank interrupted him. “C’mon, gents,” he said with a forced urgency. “The Chief Titan might be hurt.”
This, apparently, was enough to distract them from their sudden suspicions. They entered the room, gently shoving Unthank forward. A myriad of television screens presented themselves, flickering in the dark of the room. The monitors displayed the footage from the tower’s manifold security cameras and they played in stark, cinema verité black and white the violent scene that was playing out all around the tower’s ground floor. Several of the screens only showed static; three of them showed the dust-and-debris-covered lobby. Another explosion sounded; its source was shown in grim depiction by one of the television screens: a tremendous white cloud overcame a section of the south wall; a phalanx of stevedores came rushing into the frame.
“Quick!” shouted Bammer. Or was it Jimmy? Unthank couldn’t tell; his eyes were fixed on the monitors.
One of the screens showed the interior of the service elevator shaft. Four small children were there, gingerly scaling a narrow ladder, bathed in a dim light. One reached a hand out to the other, helping their compatriot over a difficult spot. Unthank looked down and, typing in the pass code he’d been given when he’d been named a Titan of Industry, restarted the power to the elevator.