Lois Bujold - Cryoburn

Jin had no trouble finding his own familiar route, even when they passed out of range of the lit section, and Vorlynkin drew a small hand light from his jacket to illuminate the steps. Mina, who had walked on her own thus far, took a prudent grip on his wide coat sleeve in the deepening shadows. They trudged upward five flights to come out at last from the exchanger tower door onto Jin’s roof. Vorlynkin wasn’t wheezing too badly, for a grownup, despite carting the carrier.

Jin had lost track of time in the windowless recovery room, but it seemed to have grown very late. The air was damp and chill, lit by diffuse reflections from the street lights in the area that gave everything a funny brown tinge. The city noises had quieted down the way they usually only did after midnight. But around the side of the tower, Jin found his tarps were all still up and taut, not blown loose by the weather yet. His little refuge was littered with a dreary residue of things not taken away the other day—not needed for his creatures, or too big and awkward to fit in the lift van, or too junky to salvage. He’d taken his own hand light down off its wire and packed it along, so it was now less-than-usefully back at the consulate, but Vorlynkin amiably shone his around while Jin explained his old life up here to Mina, and Mina made admiring and envious noises.

When they let her out of her carrier, Nefertiti did not at once take to her new environment. She stared around warily, crouching, then at last went off in a stiff-legged reconnoiter. Jin followed along, explaining to Vorlynkin about the gruesome fate of the baby chicks who couldn’t fly yet. “I can’t tell, if she went over the edge, if she’d just plummet, or flutter down like the big chickens, or even fly away.” The dense muscles Jin had felt beneath the golden fur didn’t help him decide. “Maybe I’d better tie a line around her leg like Miles-san.”

“Hm?” said Vorlynkin, so Jin explained his first night’s safety procedures, which just made Vorlynkin go “Hm!” and set his teeth to his lower lip. But from the way his eyes crinkled, Jin didn’t think he was mad or anything.

Jin’s old bedding of shredded flimsies was still piled against the wall; if he slept out here, he could keep an eye on his new pet. Would Mom miss him? She’d have Mina—or would Mina try to stay out here with him?

Jin rose on his toes to make a grab when Nefertiti stretched her considerable length, put her front paws on the parapet, and peered over, but she drew back without any effort to launch herself fatally over the side. She visited Jin’s latrine corner, and used it properly—Jin explained about the bucket-flushing to Vorlynkin—and Jin made sure to praise her, after the confusions about the corner of the recovery room. The sphinx did not quite look as if she believed him. She stretched and flapped her wings, but folded them again when she went to look over the parapet on the opposite side, toward the narrow parking lot behind the old complex.

And stiffened, growling, staring down with a predatory intensity like Lucky regarding the rats, back when Lucky had been much younger. The fur went up in a ridge along her back, and her wings spread and quivered, making a sinister rustling-rattling noise. Her tufted tail lashed.

“Foes!” she whined. “Foes!”

“What?” said Vorlynkin, sounding startled. He stepped up to peer along with her; Jin joined him.

Mina, who was not so fond of heights, hung back a few paces and asked, “What does she see?”

Jin wasn’t sure what kind of night vision the sphinx had, but what he saw was a van parked in the shadowiest part of the lot, and some dark-dressed men moving about below. One swung some sort of long hammer or bat, three or four dull thumps, and Jin heard a ground-floor window pop out and fall from its frame, inward, perhaps onto a carpet, he guessed from the muffled clatter.

“Somebody’s breaking in to the building,” he whispered back over his shoulder to Mina, who at this news overcame her nerves and joined him to stare.

“Maybe it’s robbers,” she whispered back.

“What would anybody want to steal out of here ?” The building had been stripped of usable furniture and equipment long ago; anything left inside was valueless or non-portable.

Two of the men lugged a big barrel-like thing from the van; they did something to it, then hoisted it through the window and let it fall and roll. A strange pungent aroma seeped up through the night mist, which made Vorlynkin jerk back and swear.

“Not robbers,” he said through his teeth. “Arsonists!” He grabbed Mina’s hand and looked frantically around.

Below, one of the men threw something through the window, and they all ran for their vehicle. They’d evidently left a driver waiting, because they shot out of the lot, past where the chain-link gate had been broken open, in a spray of gravel before the van doors were even all the way shut.

A flash of orange light; below Jin’s feet, the building quaked as a boom echoed out across the lot and broke into mumbling thunder against the buildings across the street. A greasy boil of flame belched from the window, a licking tongue two meters long.

“Fire!” screamed the sphinx, all her fur on end, and her eyes like gilded saucers. “Fire! Foes! Fire!”

“We have to get out of this building, right now!” said Vorlynkin; Mina yelped as his hand tightened on hers. Vorlynkin lurched toward the towers. “Which stairs are farther from the fire?”

“Not that way!” said Jin. “There’s an outside ladder drops down to the alley on the other side.”

Vorlynkin nodded and ran, jerking Mina along with him; Jin grabbed up Nefertiti and ran after him. The sphinx struggled and hissed in his arms. Was there time to stuff her back into her carrier? Maybe not. Vorlynkin reached the opposite edge of the roof and found the steel staples.

“I have to go first, to let down the extension!” Jin yelled to Vorlynkin.

“Mina next,” said Vorlynkin.

“I can’t reach that far!” Mina sounded like she wanted to cry.

“I’ll lower you over, and hold you till you get your grip,” said Vorlynkin. “Go, Jin!”

“Who’ll carry Nefertiti?”

Vorlynkin choked back something short, and said, “I will.”

Jin dropped Nefertiti, hoping she wouldn’t bolt away, vaulted over the parapet, and slapped down the rungs faster than he’d ever gone in his life. Unlatched the ladder, thumped at it, prayed it wouldn’t stick or hang up. It rattled, then reached its full extension with a clang. “All right!” he called up.

Mina’s kicking legs dangled over his head, then she found her footing and started down with no more than one scared meep. The rungs really were too far apart for her to reach comfortably. Above, Jin heard Vorlynkin swearing, and the scrunch of his footsteps, and the sphinx screaming, “Fire! Foes! Fire!” and, apparently confused in her vocabulary by the commotion, “Food!”

Vorlynkin yelped in pain, seemingly from some greater distance, and swore some more. Jin reached the ground and stretched up to catch Mina, whose sport shoes wavered in the air when she ran out of rungs before she ran out of space. “You’re all right! Just let go!” She fell into him, knocking him to the ground; they both rolled, then scrambled to their feet and stared upward. At that point, Jin found out how well sphinxes could fly, when Nefertiti sailed over the parapet, wings flapping madly, and descended. She neither plummeted nor soared, but she did land right-side-up on all four paws like a cat, hard enough to grunt when her belly hit the ground, but not hard enough to break anything.

Vorlynkin’s big dark shape finally swung out over the edge; he dropped the last two meters, hit with knees bending like the sphinx’s, staggered, but didn’t fall. Blood was running down his face from a deep triple scratch below his left eye.