Саймон Морден - Equations of Life

The door at the side of the lift shaft was wedged open. The back of a chair peaked from the surface like an iceberg. Petrovitch propped the door wider with his foot and checked that there was no one on the stairs waiting for them.

“It’s quiet. Go.”

Madeleine pushed the chair further in and climbed up the first few steps. She had a tidemark of oil and slime around her hips, and her long legs were coated in dark ooze.

“That was disgusting,” she whispered.

Petrovitch stepped inside the stairwell and eased the door slowly back so that it wouldn’t bang, then he walked up to join her, water cascading from his coat. “I would say I’ve seen and done worse, but I can’t.”

“If I’d been on my own, I could never have done it.”

“Yeah. Know the feeling.” He sat down and lifted his feet above horizontal. Sludge dribbled out of his boots. “We’ve still got fifty floors to go. All the way to the top.”

Above them they heard the long echo of a closing door.

“All the way?”

“Every step.” He looked up, imagining the height of the staircase as it spiraled around the core of the building. “And we have to get to the Jihad before anyone else does.”

She held out her hand, and Petrovitch slapped the pipe into her palm.

“Thanks, but that’s not what I meant.”

“Oh. Okay.” He looked at both his hands, and picked the one without the missing digit. She laced her fingers through his, and they started to climb.

At floor ten—Petrovitch knew because he was counting, not relying on being able to interpret the kanji script—they were confronted by solid fire doors. The springs that held them shut were fierce, and these were what they’d heard banging from the ground floor.

“We do this quietly,” said Madeleine. She raised the pipe and pushed her shoulder against the crack in the double doors. There was a puff of air, the soft sigh of a seal being broken. She waved Petrovitch on, then let the door slowly ease back.

He went a little way on and listened intently. He thought he could make out two sets of footsteps. They sounded weary, grudging. He supposed his sounded the same.

He raised a finger to his lips, and pointed upward. They were on the same section of the stairs. Madeleine nodded slightly, as if vigorous movement might give them away.

They walked in silence from then on: not quite, though, for while Madeleine’s feet made no noise on the cold steps, Petrovitch’s boots did, no matter how carefully he placed them. He contemplated taking them off and slinging them around his neck, but going barefoot to his death was too much for him to consider. Better to die with his boots on.

At floor fifteen, they heard more doors closing. Whoever was with Sonja wasn’t being careful, and that was a good sign: they weren’t expecting company. Petrovitch raised an eyebrow heavenwards, and Madeleine leaned in close to his good ear.

“We’re gaining on them.”

Petrovitch put his hand on his sternum, checking that his heart was still beating. That he hadn’t felt any erratic behavior from it for a while worried him, because he paced life by its various twinges and aches, and let his defibrillator punctuate him when it needed to.

He could be killing himself by climbing at such speed.

The doors below them peeled open and snapped shut. Hoarse coughing rattled the air, going on and on until it ended in a ghastly retch.

“There’s someone else coming,” mouthed Petrovitch.

“Really?” mimed Madeleine back. She pointed to him, then up the stairs. “You, go.”

He frowned.

She tapped herself and held up the pipe.

Petrovitch shook his head.

She pressed her mouth to his ear. “Now is not the time to argue. I’m here to make sure you get to where you’re going. I’ll see to whoever it is coming up the stairs, and then I’ll join you. It’s not like you’re going to make it to floor fifty before I catch up to you, is it?”

He tried to pull back, but she wrapped her arm around his neck and held him still.

“If you take some stupid stray shot meant for me, I won’t know what to do with the Jihad. You’re the one who’s going to stop it. Not me. So I have to protect you, and you have to accept that. Okay?” She kissed the side of his head and pushed him away, flapping her arms like she was chasing a pigeon.

He watched her descend, creeping along, back hard against the inside curve of the spiral stairs. Then she was gone. He couldn’t hear her at all, just the coughing and hawking of phlegm from five floors below.

He turned around and forced his legs to move. Thirty-four more floors.

He reached the top, with barely enough strength to fall through the door and lie on the gravel path. The door swung shut behind him; disguised by a bamboo screen, it blended into its surroundings so completely that when he next looked up, he couldn’t work out how he’d got there.

Stones stuck to his face, his hands, and he barely noticed apart from the rattle they made as they fell from him one by one.

Madeleine hadn’t reappeared, despite her assurance that she would. He’d almost turned back half a dozen times, only to imagine the tongue-lashing he’d get for not keeping his mind on the job.

So he’d kept on going and, now he was there, he was without her. Failure was written all over the venture. He couldn’t even stand.

He rolled over onto his back and let the light from the artificial sky shine down on him. The air was as warm as a bright spring day, yet he was cold, cold to the core.

Feet crunched down the path toward him. He heard a metallic snap, and a shadow covered him.

“Petrovitch?”

He squinted into the glare. “ Konnichiwa, Hijo-san.”

“You… what are you doing here?” Hijo pointed his gun at Petrovitch’s heaving chest.

“I’ve come for Sonja. I just didn’t know it was you who had her. What did you do with Chain?”

“He will not be bothering us again.” Hijo took a couple of steadying breaths and sighted down his arm. “Neither will you, Petrovitch. You are still that loose thread.”

“Yeah, not so much anymore. I’m the thread that’s holding everything together. Pull it and the whole sorry garment falls apart, leaving you naked.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that come dawn, there’ll be two suns in the sky.” Petrovitch let the cultural resonance of that phrase sink in, then added. “You killed your boss because you wanted for free everything he’d built up the hard way. You wanted to be the big man, the—what is it?— taishou . And everything you’ve done since then has just made it worse. Now you have nothing and in the morning you’ll have even that taken away.”

“A filthy Russian street-dog does not have the authority to call down a nuclear strike.” Hijo ground his teeth and his hand shook. “You are bluffing.”

“But you don’t dismiss the idea completely, do you? You’re wondering what you’d trade if it meant you’d salvage something out of this, whether you can get to keep the tower, the company, the syndicate, the girl… ah. She was right.” Petrovitch smiled and snorted. He noticed for the first time that Hijo wasn’t his usual immaculate self: jacket torn, shirt dirty, trousers ragged. His polished shoes were encrusted with filth. “You thought that when Oshicora-san came to see me, he was giving me his blessing. And you couldn’t take losing her to an unworthy gaijin, so you killed him, but Sonja saw you, and so on and so on. Oshicora-san liked me, but he wanted her to marry some Japanese pureblood. He warned me off. I said I’d stay clear of her. We parted on good terms.”

Hijo had gone pale. Sweat trickled down his forehead. “So why are you here?”