Frank Tayell - Work. Rest. Repeat.

He fumbled at his waistband and pulled out the pistol.

“Don’t move,” he said, as he levelled it at her. The barrel wavered slightly.

“Hello Ely,” she said calmly. “You took your time.”

“Don’t move,” he said again.

“I’m not,” she said.

There was something in her left hand, something small. It appeared to be a handle without a blade. It didn’t look like a weapon, but then Ely remembered the L-shaped piece of metal in his boot, and the bolt in Nurse Gower’s back. He tightened his grip.

“I suppose you have some questions,” she said.

“No, not really.”

“Oh, come now,” she said. She was smiling, just as the other two ghosts had been, “I can see that you do. You want to know who we are. Who I am. That’s what you asked Gabriel.”

“Who?”

“The man down in the tunnels. I saw what happened. And you’re right, that was an accident. A tragic, stupid accident.”

“You were there? You were listening?”

“Of course. We hid in the one place no one would think to look. A place that even they had forgotten about.” She took a step towards him.

“I said stop! Don’t move,” Ely yelled.

“Okay, okay. I’ve stopped. And what happens next?”

“We’ll repair the Tower. We’ll undo everything you’ve done…” Ely began, but then he trailed off.

“You won’t,” she said. “The Tower’s broken. I saw to that. Food can still be grown, and water can be purified, but there won’t be enough power to run anything else. It’s time for the light to be let in, not that you know what that means.”

“It means everyone will die,” Ely said.

“Death comes to us all, Ely, but it doesn’t have to come to everyone in the Tower today. But what I was asking is what you are going to do next. You can’t arrest me.”

“There should be a trial,” he said.

“Really?” She laughed. “In front of what court? You don’t have the authority to arrest me, nor to judge. All you can do is try and kill me, but I promise you this, if you pull that trigger, you will die.”

She’d taken another step, Ely realised, but she was still twenty feet away.

“Maybe,” he allowed. “But then, so will you.”

“No, at this distance, I probably won’t.” There was a touch of genuine sadness in her voice.

“Lie down,” Ely said. He’d had enough. “On the ground. Now.”

“You really don’t want to ask who I am or what this has all been about?”

He did, but more than that he didn’t want to play her game.

“You can answer questions later.”

“If you won’t listen,” she said, as she moved over towards the wall, “then I’ll just have to show you. Keep your mouth open.”

“I said don’t—”

Her hand moved. The doors to the airlock exploded.

All he could see were lights. All he could hear was noise. All he could feel was air rushing past him. He tried to move. His legs didn’t work. No, he realised, they did but he was on his back. There’d been an explosion, and the blast had knocked him down. As he rolled onto his side, a jagged piece of metal sliced across his cheek, and the pain from that cut through the fog. He pushed himself to his knees. ‘Breathe,’ he told himself, ‘breathe’. And he was breathing. It wasn’t hard.

Bracing himself on the wall, he stumbled to his feet. Then he remembered the ghost. Expecting her to attack he turned, lashing out blindly with his arms. She wasn’t there. The corridor was full of dust and dirt, but the ghost had gone. He realised his hands were empty. He’d dropped the gun. He looked down, saw it, bent to reach it, and half fell after a sudden spasm of pain from his leg, but when he straightened he had the gun in his hand. The ghost had gone. Could she have got past him and run back into the Tower? No.

Steadying himself with one hand on the wall, he moved towards the airlock. His vision began to clear. The explosion had been small, its effect magnified by the close confines of the corridor. It had been very small, he realised. All it had done was blow a neat hole through the central locking mechanism. The doors had been pushed apart.

Ely limped into the airlock. A message came up on his wristboard. ‘I can’t see you. What happened? Where are you?’ He ignored it.

The outer doors seemed undamaged. As he got closer he saw why. There was no lock on them. Nor, like the other doors in the Tower, did they slide back into the wall. They opened outwards, on hinges. Bracing himself for the cold and rain and suffocating wind, he pushed the doors open.

Light.

That was the first thing he registered.

It was everywhere.

As his vision slowly adjusted, he saw blue.

Blue sky.

There was no wind, just a gentle breeze.

There was no rain. The air was filled with a dry heat. Automatically, he took a breath. The air was sweet, rich, with a beguilingly unfamiliar fragrance. Gun in hand, and for the first time in his life, he stepped outside.

It was a transport pad. Or it had been, long ago. The roof was flat in one corner, and jutting out over the edge of the building stood a raised area of cracked black asphalt. On it, bafflingly, someone once had painted a letter ‘H’. Out of the middle, its purple flowers and wide leaves waving back and forth, grew a spindly eight-foot high shrub.

Something buzzed past his ear. He jerked out of the way. A small, mostly orange insect hovered in the air a few inches from his face. He marvelled at it for a moment until he was distracted by the noise. His ears were still ringing. No, not ringing. There was another sound, a low steady drone. He looked up and saw four large windmills towering above him. Their white paint was chipped and stained with rust. Only three of the turbines were moving.

“Welcome to the real world, Ely. What do you think?” It was the ghost. In his shock, Ely had temporarily forgotten about her.

“The rain…” was all he could find to say.

“It’s the summer,” she said. “It hasn’t rained much for months. But it will. Give it a few weeks and the rain will come back. After that, there will be snow, but then the sun will come out again. It always does. It always has.”

Ely turned slowly around. She was leaning against a wide metal vent. He began to raise the gun.

“Don’t, Ely,” she warned. “Just look around.”

“I’ve seen outside,” he said. “Down in the Twilight Room.”

“And was there anywhere more aptly named? They’re just screens, Ely. It wasn’t real. Don’t take my word for it. Just look for yourself.”

He did. He looked down at the dry grey roof, at the thriving shrub, at the yellow-flowered weeds growing out of the cracks around the metal vents.

“Who are you?” he asked.

She told him.

Twenty minutes later Ely walked back through the airlock. He hesitated at the end of the corridor. He didn’t think she was lying, but he had to see for himself.

A voice in his head told him there wasn’t time. A louder, newer voice said that, now, there wasn’t anything but time. He turned left and kept walking, past the infirmary, until he reached the doors of Councillor Cornwall’s office.

He’d seen the doors before. Not often. He wasn’t meant to patrol Level Seventy-Seven, but on a few occasions when he’d had to visit the nurses, he had gone to look at the doors to the office that he hoped would one day be his.

The doors themselves were identical to all the others in the Tower, save that there was a small plaque affixed to the wall next to them that read, ‘Office of the Councillor. Meetings by Appointment Only.’ He’d never been inside. He’d never tried to make an appointment.