Cecelia Holland - Floating Worlds

He made an indefinite sound. For a long while they sat in the dark without saying anything. Finally, he said, “I would love to pay them back. More than anything. I’d pass up getting away to pay them back.”

“I’d sooner get away.”

Another silence fell. She got up and walked up and down the room, trailing her fingers over the wall. The seamless plastic felt cold to the touch. There was no way out but the door. Maybe she had misjudged his intentions. Maybe he had no way to escape. She sat down but in a few moments she started to pace around the room again.

“Don’t step on me,” Bunker said.

She went around and around the room in the dark, avoiding him. Her mouth was dry with thirst. For eight days she would get no water. Finally she sat down in a corner. Hours seemed to pass, or maybe just minutes. Bunker got up and went down the room to the door. He returned to his place against the wall opposite her.

She managed to doze. He shook her awake.

“Let’s go. The guard’s left for a few minutes.”

Muzzy with sleep, her heart pounding, she followed him to the door. She could hear a faint metallic click, like a combination lock being dialed, and then the door opened. The bright light hurt her eyes. They went into the long empty corridor.

“Hurry.” He took her arm and pulled her along, and they ran down the corridor, past the vertical and past the door to her room. The guards were all gone. Many of the overhead lights were out. It seemed to be late at night. At the end of the corridor was a door marked EXIT. Bunker led her through it onto a stair landing.

“Sssh.” He put his finger to his lips. The stairwell was painted glossy gray. She looked up overhead, up the stairs, and went to the rail and looked down.

“Which way?”

He started down. She took her shoes off, to keep from making noise, and went after him. The stair treads chilled her bare feet. They passed another door, marked with a big red 5.

Below them, voices sounded. The hollow of the stairwell distorted them so that she could not make out the words. Bunker stopped. She went by him, cautious, down past the door marked 4, and he came after her. On the third-floor landing she put her head out over the railing.

On the next landing down was a table, with three men sitting at it. She held her breath, disappointed.

“Hey, did you hear this one?” said a man on the landing. “How do you tell when an anarchist is lying?”

She raised her head. Bunker was on the steps above her. She shook her head at him.

“You got me,” another Martian voice said, below her.

“His lips are moving.”

There was general laughter. She climbed back away from it, and Bunker turned and preceded her. At the third-floor landing, he pushed the door open onto the corridor where Cam’s office was.

“What—”

He beckoned her after him. The corridor was dark except for a single light over the vertical doors. Her feet sank into the deep carpet and she stopped to put her shoes on. Bunker went ahead of her to Cam’s door, fastened his magnetic key to the lock, and bent to fiddle with it. He had given up on escaping and was going for his revenge.

She went at a trot down the hall to the vertical. There had to be some way out of the building. She could not take the vertical down for fear of meeting someone else, but there was certainly some other way. A chime rang over her head, and she jumped. The vertical arrow flashed. Someone was coming to this floor. She sprinted back down the hall to Bunker, who was just sliding Cam’s door open. They went into the office.

“What are you going to do?” She made sure the door was locked again. The office was dark, but as she spoke Bunker turned on a light midway down the room.

“I didn’t ask you along,” he said. He circled behind Cam’s big desk to the big wheel-file against the wall.

Paula looked up at Marat, hanging on the wall over the door to Cam’s private lift. The wound in his chest was like a mouth, like his slack mouth. Bunker was trying to open the drawers of the file with his key. She sat in Cam’s chair and tried the desk drawers.

They were unlocked. She yanked them out and turned the contents over in a heap on the floor. When she tipped over the deeper drawer on the bottom shelf, a mass of photographs and slides fell out, and a little white egg rolled after. She picked it up.

“Dick.”

He turned, and she held Sybil Jefferson’s eye under his nose. He sucked in his breath. When he put his hand out to take the eye, she closed her fingers over it and put it in her pocket.

Bunker pushed the file box. “I can’t open this. It must be important.” He gave the box a savage kick.

Paula took the cigarette lighter off the desk and knelt by the pile of papers and film on the floor. “They killed her.” She held the flame to the edge of a photograph.

“That’s your diagnosis, is it?” He punched the call button on the vertical several times with his thumb.

“You need a key for that, too.”

The flames caught and ran over the heap of papers. The holographs burned better than anything else, and she took one by the corner and torched the rest. Bunker was pushing and rocking the waist-high round file cabinet.

“I have an idea. Help me.”

She helped him push the box up onto two legs. It fell over onto its side and he caught it before it toppled onto its back.

“Now.”

The door of the vertical slid open easily, exposing the empty shaft. They propped open the door with a chair and pushed and groaned and heaved at the file box until it rolled like a wheel between the wall and the desk toward the vertical. Paula’s fire was beginning to light the carpet. She rushed around ahead of the file, pushed the chair through into the shaft, and held the door open, and Bunker guided the rolling file through the gap. It crashed below. Bunker leaned after it. He braced the door open.

“Look what happened.”

She put her head over his shoulder out into the shaft. The file had broken into the car parked in the basement of the shaft. Bunker stretched his arm toward the back wall and caught a heavy cable hanging down from the darkness above. He yanked hard on it to test it. The fire leaped crackling in a burst toward the ceiling. Paula wrinkled her nose at the smoke. Bunker swung himself into the shaft, clinging to the cable, and climbed down hand over hand.

An alarm bell in the ceiling clanged. Bunker was scrambling through the hole torn in the roof down into the vertical car, Paula wrapped her hands around the cable. Using her leg around the cable to brake herself, she slid down after him.

Voices sounded in the room she had just left. She jumped down into the vertical car. The floor was covered with loose film. Her feet slipped out from under her and she landed on her backside.

“Hurry up. I can’t see.”

She went after Bunker out the car’s usual door, into a vast darkened room. She could tell by the sound his voice made that it was large but not empty, and she smelled dust and cardboard and guessed it was a storage basement. Now, about twenty feet away, she made out a faint gray oblong. A window. She grabbed Bunker by the sleeve and towed him through the room toward it. They met a wall of boxes and climbed over them. Two or three alarm bells were ringing insistently overhead. She put her hand out and touched the wall. The window was an arm’s length over her head. She felt over it for a latch. Bunker put his arms around her legs and boosted her up so high a spiderweb draped itself over her face. She found the latch and the window swung open. They crawled out to the cool open air.

“Put that thing away.”

She cupped her other hand over the false eye. “I keep thinking we ought to do something with it.”