Elsie had climbed nearly five stories (the numbers were painted in bright yellow by every door they passed) when she heard the elevator power up. It sent a jolt of adrenaline through her body. The car itself had come into view once they’d climbed a few dozen yards, lost in the hazy distance above them. A single white bulb dangled from its underside. But now: She’d heard a kind of buzzing hum echo through the shaft, and she looked down at Harry, who was some feet below her.
“Did you hear that?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said.
Hoping it was a fluke, Elsie kept climbing. It wasn’t long, however, until her worst fears were confirmed: The elevator car began to move.
Harry swore. Elsie looked up at Oz and Ruthie, who were close together, some thirty feet up. They both looked down at Elsie and Harry, a look of identically abject horror in their eyes.
“Guys!” they shouted. “It’s coming down!”
Elsie desperately began looking around her for some crevice to crawl into; none presented itself. Some ways up the shaft, she saw a small notch in the concrete, potentially big enough to house her small body. She began climbing toward it.
Just then, the elevator stopped at one of the doors, a few floors above them. Elsie barely had time to breathe a sigh of relief when it started up again, having presumably taken on passengers, and was now once more barreling toward them.
“Guys!” she shouted, disregarding the need for quiet. “Get to someplace safe!”
The elevator was picking up speed. A loud hum echoed through the long chamber. Elsie could hear the clacking of the cables as they struck against one another, dangling in the center of the shaft. She stepped away from the ladder and pressed herself into the small crevice she’d found, trying to flatten her back as well as she could. She willed her every inch of flesh to worm its way into the corners. Looking down, she saw that Harry was busily scrambling for a similar safe point, though it seemed to be some feet below him. Oz and Ruthie hadn’t had as much luck; the elevator was approaching them at a remarkably fast speed, and they were many yards away from one of these pockets in the shaft wall. Oz, dangling from the ladder, was trying to pry open one of the doors in the wall to no avail.
“Guys!” shouted Elsie.
Ruthie, unbelievably, was climbing madly toward the oncoming car, desperately attempting to reach the divot in the wall closest to her, which happened to be about ten feet above her. She arrived at it just as the speeding car passed her and she screamed as she thrust her small body into the cavity; the noise was swallowed by the groaning cry of the elevator as it plummeted downward, and Ruthie was gone from Elsie’s sight.
Oz, acting quickly, leapt from his place at the ladder and caught the looping cable that hung from the bottom of the car. He swung dramatically there, his legs kicking at the empty air below him. He joined the downward plummet of the car, rocked impotently by the swing of the cable. Elsie pressed herself farther into her crevice, preparing herself for the car’s arrival. It was now approaching her with the speed of a locomotive.
Elsewhere in the building, Joffrey Unthank watched the two stevedores as they marched out of sight down the hall. He knew he was trapped. Shutting down the elevator now would merely bring the two stevedores steaming back to him, demanding action and, more complexly, answers as to why the Machine Parts Titan was repeatedly turning on and off the service elevator. He could only watch. And wait.
He looked up at the security-camera feed of the elevator shaft; he saw the children climbing. When the stevedores called the elevator, he saw the children panic in reaction to the movement of the car.
Move, he hissed to the grainy black-and-white image of the Unadoptables.
The car was heading down.
He realized that the children would not be able to get out of the way.
His fingers dove for the keys; he began madly jamming in his pass code. His fingers were shaking.
Tra la tra lee.
It was a hopelessly long string of numbers (why did they have to make it so complicated?); the keypad below his fingers seemed to shimmy and dissolve as he punched at the keypad.
ERROR, WRONG PASS CODE, read the screen.
He swore; he cracked his knuckles and tried again.
A shout sounded below Elsie. She looked down in time to see Harry fall away from his perch on the side of the wall; he’d been spooked by Ruthie’s scream and had looked up, momentarily losing his balance. He managed to catch his arm on a rung of the ladder, and Elsie could hear a thump resound through the chamber, and Harry let out a pained yelp. The boy swung there by the crook of his elbow, fully in the path of the charging elevator car.
“HARRY!” shouted Oz, dangling from the bottom of the car. He reached out his hand, valiantly. “JUMP!”
But Harry was stuck; he couldn’t manage to get his arm unlooped from the ladder rung. Elsie closed her eyes as the elevator rushed by her; she could feel the wind it carried with it, the acrid reek of grease and synthetic adhesives. She knew the car would arrive at Harry within seconds and would either crush him with its weight or knock him from his perch to fall some twenty-odd stories to the bottom of the shaft.
ERROR, WRONG PASS CODE, the screen advertised brightly, once again. And then: TWO MORE ATTEMPTS ALLOWED.
Unthank slapped his cheek firmly, trying to banish the needling urgency that was making his fingers fail so spectacularly. He closed his eyes; he breathed deeply.
Smile.
He tried again.
ERROR, WRONG PASS CODE.
Unthank grunted, once, very loudly. Did it have to be so hard?
ONE MORE ATTEMPT ALLOWED. IF ENTERED IN ERROR AGAIN, CLEARANCE WILL BE SUSPENDED. CHECK EMAIL TO RESET PASS CODE. THANK YOU!
Unthank waved his hands impatiently at the little screen above the keypad. “Okay, okay, I get it!” he hollered. He channeled his thoughts; he calmed his quivering digits. He thought of the kids, of the orphans. He thought of what he owed them.
He tried again.
The elevator stopped. It hadn’t just come to a smooth halt, like it would if it were to arrive at a floor, but jerked and froze. It had just cleared Elsie’s feet; she felt a tingling sensation over her entire body, as if she were a freshly torn strip of Velcro. Looking down, she could only assume the worst: that somehow Harry’s body had stopped the downward momentum of the elevator. She called out weakly, “Harry?”
Ruthie, having just extricated herself from her hiding place, called down to Elsie. “Are they okay?” she shouted desperately.
Elsie shook her head, mouthing: “I don’t know.”
A minute passed. No sound came in response. Elsie felt a sob welling in her chest.
Suddenly, from a shallow chink in the wall, she saw two dirty hands reach up and grab the top of the elevator car. Shortly, a face presented itself: It was Harry. Squeezing his thick frame between the car and the wall of the shaft, he managed to get himself onto the top of the elevator. His face was streaked with grease, and little red scratches crisscrossed his forehead. He had a wild-eyed look on his face. He turned around and thrust a hand back down the little crevice he’d climbed through and brought it back out with another hand firmly in its grip. It was Oz, who arrived at the top of the car similarly covered in soot and lacerations.
“It stopped . . . ,” mumbled Harry once Oz had been pulled from the crack between the wall and the car. “Just . . .” He held his greasy fingers up, his thumb and forefinger only inches apart.
Elsie wanted to hug him. She wanted to throw her arms around him and just fiercely hug the boy, this greasy boy. But before she could act on the very friendly and comradely instinct, they all heard the sound of whoever it was inside the elevator car they were standing on, trying to get out.
It sounded like a herd of rhinos contained in a small metal box.
Suddenly, a small door at their feet flew open, slamming back with a loud clang.
Elsie looked into the elevator, expecting to see rhinoceri. Instead, she saw two frothing-mad stevedores.
“Let’s GO!” shouted Elsie, and the four of them—Elsie, Harry, Oz, and Ruthie—leapt back onto the ladder and began climbing as if their lives depended on it, which, in point of fact, they did.
They managed to buy themselves some time; the stevedores had a hard go of it, extracting their broad frames from the small opening in the top of the elevator. When they finally managed it, two genies being sucked from the opening of a bottle, they ground their teeth angrily—so angrily that Elsie could actually hear the grating noise from her position on the ladder, twenty feet above them.
“ORPHANS!” shouted one of them, waving his overlarge pipe wrench above his head. “The attack is a DECOY!”
“UNNNTHAAANK!” shouted the other, rather dramatically.
The ladder gave a little quake as the two stevedores, one after the other, clambered onto the nearest rungs and gave chase to the duct-rats.
What the stevedores had over the children in terms of strength and arm span, the Unadoptables well made up for by sheer agility, speed, and a seemingly perpetual supply of adrenaline. They flew up the rungs of the ladder as if it were a web and they were its spider-creators, dashing for a fly caught in the center. Elsie took up the rear, keeping an eye on the progress of their pursuers; they were not far behind.
“Move, guys, move!” she shouted to the three climbers ahead of her.
“We command you to stop!” shouted one of the stevedores. He pulled his pipe wrench from a loop at his leg and swung it in Elsie’s direction. “I’m going to kneecap the lot of you!”
This gave Elsie a needed extra jolt of energy and she doubled her efforts, climbing the ladder rung over rung.
The elevator shaft wheeled below them; the distance, and thereby the potential free fall, to the stopped elevator car grew and grew. The stevedores continued to howl; the duct-rats climbed as fast as their little bodies could manage.
Elsie craned her head upward; she could see the clambering feet of Ruthie, leading the pack some thirty feet above her. “Keep an eye out, Ruthie!” she shouted. “The vent!”
Per the tower’s blueprint, Elsie knew there was a ventilation duct that let out into the service elevator shaft; it led, after some meandering, into the panic room itself.
“I think I see it!” Ruthie shouted back. She pointed upward and began climbing again. Elsie looked down at the approaching stevedores; they were gaining, fast. She slapped the shoe sole of Harry, who was just above her.
“Faster, Harry!” she shouted.
Ruthie hollered her arrival at the vent; it was just a few feet off the rungs of the ladder. The girl pulled her screwdriver from her pocket and began carefully removing the screws from the cover’s four corners. Soon, the traffic on the ladder slowed as each kid’s progress was halted by the one before them.
Elsie stopped some yards below Ruthie’s frantic activity, just below Harry, and locked her elbow around a rung of the ladder. “Don’t come any closer!” she shouted to the approaching stevedores. “I’ll kick you in the face!” She swung her leg around threateningly.
The stevedore in the lead gave a leering smile. “Won’t do you no good, kid,” he said. “You ain’t gonna last on this ladder. Gonna pick you like a ripe apple and give you a toss. Gonna make applesauce with ya.” He kept climbing, rung over rung.
Trying to ignore the stomach-turning image the stevedore’s threat had evoked, Elsie looked up, watching Ruthie’s progress, willing her fingers to work faster. The girl handled the screwdriver carefully, unthreading the screws and letting them fall into the open shaft below. “Two more to go!” she shouted.
Elsie felt something at her ankle; it was the meaty hand of one of the stevedores, grabbing her shoe. She screamed and kicked; the man swore loudly as her toe connected with the bridge of his nose.
“Move, Harry! UP!” she shouted.
The boy bolted a few feet up the ladder until he was practically on top of Oz. Elsie scrambled the short distance the boy had bought her, but still their pursuers came on.
“You’ll pay for that, missy,” said the freshly kicked stevedore, a palm held to his face. He lifted his hand away and looked at the results: His sausagelike fingers were stained with blood. “Oh, you’ll pay. You’re gonna fly.” He swatted his hand upward again, just brushing the bottom of Elsie’s feet.
“Only one more to go!” shouted Ruthie; a little screw went whizzing by Elsie’s face.
“Get going!” Elsie yelled at Harry.
“I can’t! Oz’s right here!” It was true; the boys were practically embracing on the ladder.
CLANG. The vent cover came loose and cartwheeled down the elevator shaft, banging its way down to the car far below. Ruthie swung away from the ladder and climbed into the shaft, followed close behind by Oz, having unbraided himself from Harry’s embrace.
Suddenly, Elsie felt a rough pain at her ankle; she looked down to see that the stevedore had her foot in his grip.
“Got you,” he said, calmly, quietly.
Elsie screamed and jerked her body around, trying to lose the man’s grip, but it held tight. Harry had already started to scramble into the duct when he heard Elsie’s shout. Reversing his steps, he climbed out and, firmly catching a ladder rung in the crook of one elbow, reached his hand down to her.
“Grab hold!” he yelled.
Elsie shot her hand up and laced it tightly with Harry’s. Suddenly, she was being torn in two directions, her spine stretching like a piece of taffy as the two opposing forces fought against each other.
Something had to give.
Finally, something did.
It was Elsie’s shoe. It glided off the heel of her foot like the burned outer skin of a marshmallow too long over the campfire, and remained in the grasp of the suddenly bewildered stevedore. Elsie shot upward, buoyed by the pull of Harry’s strong arm. They clambered, arm over arm, the remaining distance on the ladder, and within moments the two of them were crawling into the safety of the ventilation duct.
They could hear the wild and enraged cries of the stevedores, just at the entrance to the vent. They even heard a few pained grunts as the stevedores evidently tried to fit their massive frames into the small profile of the duct opening—to no avail. The duct-rats turned a corner in the tiny corridor, and the stevedores’ cries soon echoed into nonsense and were assimilated into the ambient noises of the building itself.
Unthank stared at the television monitor breathlessly, watching the scene play out in vivid black and white. He had his hands to his lips, his mouth slightly open. When he saw the children escape through the duct, he couldn’t help letting out a little victorious yelp.
“Yes!” he shouted, shaking his fist at the screen. “YES!” He then broke out into a song, a song he’d been storing up for a while now, and he belted it loudly in the privacy of the small room. His feet cut a kind of shuffling tap dance on the laminate floor.
And then it dawned on him what must come next. His hand dropped to his side and he backed out of the room, letting the flickering monitors televising the very real revolution that was happening within its many-eyed purview fall away. He closed the door. He locked it. He patted the little box in his pocket and turned around, heading for the stairway and from there to climb the remaining floors to the top of the tower. To Wigman’s office. While he climbed, he remembered.
“You do the honors?” Jacques had said to him, there in the half-light of the saboteurs’ hideout, safe away from the onlookers. The room was alive, so many people, so many children, planning this elaborate caper.
“Yes,” he’d said. “I do the honors.”
“One charge, top floor. Wait till the kids are out.”
“One charge, top floor.” He’d stopped there. “What if the kids aren’t out, tra la tra lee?”
Jacques had shaken his head, hadn’t he? “No singing,” that’s what he’d said. Another reminder. Had he answered the question, though? Unthank had asked him again:
“What if they aren’t out?”
“The kids will be out,” Jack—Jacques—had said.
“And if they’re not?” Unthank had pressed. He’d remembered.
Jacques stared at his old compatriot, hard. He perhaps hadn’t expected blowback from a reportedly crazy person. “Then we’ve got a few more martyrs for the cause.” That’s what he’d said. “All in the service of bringing down the greatest industrial power this country has known. We’re dealing the killing blow here, Joffrey. No time for cowards and quitters.”
“No time,” repeated Unthank. “Yes. No time.”
And so here he was, panting wildly as he walked the eight stories to the thirtieth floor, the thing in his pocket weighing more and more with every flight he climbed.