Frank Schätzing - Limit

Xin threw his head back. Yoyo had disappeared.

Then he saw her climbing. She clung to the stanchions like a monkey, pulled herself higher up, and he understood that there probably was a possible escape route. A conveyor belt abutted the inlet. It ran down from the top of the furnace to the ground, steep, but walkable.

The bitch.

Did he actually need her alive? She had reached her hand out to the computer, there was no doubt which one it was. It was still in the control room… except he didn’t know who she’d talked to about the matter.

Cursing, he began his ascent.

A loud hissing sound came towards him. With one hand clamped to the scaffolding and the other gripping his gun, he turned his head.

The airbike was coming straight at him.

Jericho had stalled the first bike he tried. It was a new model, very different from the ones he was used to. The controls gleamed from a flat user interface, there was nothing mechanical on this one. He slipped from the saddle, jumped onto the second airbike, whose engine was running, and ran his hand over the touchscreen. He was luckier this time. The machine reacted like a goaded bull, bucked and reared and tried to throw him off. His hands gripped the handles. Before, they’d been vertical, now they curved upwards and could be twisted in all directions. The bike circled wildly. The display blinked like the lights on a fruit machine. Just by chance Jericho touched two of them, and the carousel-ride came to an end, but he was carried instead towards the front of the control room; he shifted his body weight, narrowly avoiding collision, and flew in an extended 180-degree turn. His eyes scoured the surroundings.

No trace of Yoyo or Zhao.

He gradually got the knack of turning. He brought the bike up, but neglected to pivot the jets at the same time, which immediately got him into trouble again, because the bike now soared into the sky like a rocket. He felt himself sliding helplessly out of the saddle, and struggled with darting fingers to correct the mistake, regained control, and took another turn with his eyes on the blast furnace.

There they were!

Yoyo had made it to the inlet, where the conveyor belt began, followed by Zhao, who hung two metres below her in the scaffolding. Jericho forced the machine upwards, in the hope that it would react as he wished. He saw the hitman give a start and hunch his shoulders. Less than half a metre away from him, Jericho swung the airbike round, turned a circle and bore down on the furnace once more. On the edge of the conveyor belt, Yoyo was looking charmingly helpless. He understood exactly why as he flew over the belt. Where there should have been rollers and struts, part of the construction had simply broken away. For a long stretch only the side braces remained. Getting down from there would have required the skills of a professional tightrope-walker.

Yoyo was trapped.

He cursed himself under his breath. Why hadn’t he taken the blond guy’s pistol off him? There had been weapons lying around all over the control centre. He watched furiously as Zhao’s head and shoulders appeared over the rim. With one bound the hitman was on the inlet. Yoyo recoiled, went down on all fours and gripped the brace of the conveyor belt. She nimbly let herself down on it until her feet touched a rod further below, tried to find a halfway solid footing, began lowering herself down, hand after hand, inch after inch—

Slipped.

Horrified, Jericho saw her fall. A jolt ran through her body. At the last second her fingers had closed on the rod she had just been standing on, but now she was dangling over an abyss a good seventy metres deep.

Zhao stared down at her.

Then he left the cover of the girderwork.

‘Bad mistake,’ Jericho snarled. ‘Very bad mistake!’

By now his glands were firing considerable salvos of adrenalin, whipping his heartbeat and blood pressure up to heroic levels. With each passing second, he was more in control of the machine. Carried on a wave of rage and euphoria, he sent the airbike shooting forward and took aim at Zhao, who was at that moment crouching, about to climb down to Yoyo.

The hitman saw him coming.

Baffled, he came to a halt. The bike shot over the conveyor belt. Anyone else would have been swept into the depths, but Zhao managed to pirouette himself back onto the edge of the inlet. His gun clattered far below. Jericho turned the bike and saw the blond guy staggering out of the control centre and getting onto one of the remaining airbikes. No time to worry about him too. His fingers twitched in all directions. Where on the display – no, wrong, you did it with the handlebars, right? He just had to bring the right handlebar down a touch—

Too much.

The bike plummeted like a stone. Cursing, he caught it, climbed, put his foot down and then immediately decelerated until he hung, jets hissing, right under the wildly flailing Yoyo.

‘Jump!’ he shouted.

She looked down at him, her face distorted, as her fingers slipped millimetre by millimetre. Gusts of wind grabbed the bike and carried it away. The girders trembled as Zhao jumped gracefully from the edge of the inlet and landed on the lower part of the scaffolding. The hitman plainly didn’t suffer from any kind of vertigo. His right hand came down to clutch her wrist. Jericho corrected his position, and the bike spun back under Yoyo.

‘Jump, for God’s sake! Jump!’

Her right foot struck his temple, and he couldn’t see or hear a thing. Now he was underneath her again, looking up. He saw Zhao’s fingers stretching out, touching her ankle.

Yoyo let go.

It was a bit like having a sack of cement dropped on him. If he had imagined she would land elegantly on the pillion, he could think again. Yoyo clutched his jacket, slipped off the bike and dangled from him like a gorilla from a rubber tyre. With both hands he pulled her back up, as the bike hurtled towards the ground.

She shouted something. It sounded like maybe .

Maybe?

The turbine noise rose to a scream. Yoyo’s fingers were everywhere, in his clothes, his hair, his face. The dusty plain rushed up at them, they would be smashed to pieces.

But they weren’t smashed, they didn’t die. He had clearly done something right, because at the same moment as her hands closed around his shoulders and she pressed her torso against his back, the bike shot straight upwards again.

‘Maybe—’

The words were shredded by the squall. The blond guy was approaching on the left, his face a mask of dried blood, from which hate-filled eyes stared across at them.

‘What?’ he shouted.

‘Maybe,’ she yelled back, ‘next time you’ll learn to fly the thing first , you fucking idiot!’

Daxiong floated to the surface.

His first impulse was to ask Maggie for a cappuccino, with plenty of sugar and foam, of course. That was why they were here, after all. To have breakfast together, since Yoyo had appointed Andromeda as her summer residence again, as Daxiong jokingly put it, except that right now it seemed to make more sense to go into hiding in the steelworks for a while.

Maggie only ever brought coffee for him. The others, Tony, Yoyo, Maggie herself, Ziyi and Jia Wei preferred tea, like good Chinese. And like good Chinese they had wontons and baozis for breakfast, they ate pork belly and noodles in broth, swallowed down half-raw shrimps, the whole deal, while for unfathomable reasons his heart still beat for the Grande Nation and was devoted to the buttery, warm smell of freshly baked croissants. By now he was even toying with the possibility that he might have French genes, which anyone who saw his face would strenuously have denied. Daxiong was as Mongolian as a Mongolian could be, and Yoyo was forever rattling off all the wonders of the fun, authentic China that had no need of imported Western culture. Daxiong let her talk. For him, the day began with a proper milk foam moustache. Maggie had called and croaked ‘Breakfast!’ into the receiver, and Ziyi had yelled and screamed.