Day Eight #2
“Back to back,” she said. “Like we used to. You don’t need your hand—we’ll just link arms and stick our feet out.”
Rowan blinked at her a little more, but not for long.
“Okay,” he said. “You can do that with your hands cuffed?”
“I can try.”
“Okay,” said Rowan.
They both turned around and backed up to each other.
Kelli kept her elbows sticking out as far as she could, but it didn’t leave a huge opening.
He hooked his left arm through her right arm without too much trouble; but he couldn’t do the other one without jostling the injured wrist, and he hissed in pain and swore under his breath.
He managed it, though, eventually. They were touching now as tightly as an embrace.
Even now, in some corner of her panicked mind, Kelli couldn’t help but be aware of Rowan’s body, warm and heavy, tight with stress.
Though there wasn’t any time to think about it.
They both kicked up and struggled upwards until they managed to balance a couple of feet above the ground, back to back, arms linked, feet pressing against opposite walls.
Then they climbed.
It was hard going, placing one foot above the other, bracing carefully with every step.
As Rowan’s arms pulled Kelli’s backward, the hard cuffs dug into her ribs, and the spot where the man had kicked her protested.
They were both bigger than they’d used to be at fourteen.
Their centers of gravity had shifted; gravity itself was stronger here.
They went up, though. A step up. Another step.
Something rumbled in the walls.
“We gotta go faster,” said Rowan, tensing at the sound, and Kelli still didn’t dare to ask him why but she moved her feet faster, sweating and straining.
Just as they stepped over it, the retracted hatch began to move. Rowan almost tripped in his haste to get above it in time, and Kelli wavered, briefly panicked, feeling his half of their brace against the walls almost give way. They only barely managed to right themselves.
The hatch itself was metal, a foot thick, with a heavy glass porthole in the center.
It rumbled across the width of the shaft, closing with a clank and sealing the pile of garbage below it.
There was the click of a heavy lock, then a whirring of air—the sound, which Kelli had begun to recognize, of an airlock.
“Keep going,” said Rowan, panting as he recovered from the near fall. “Do not look down.”
But Kelli couldn’t help herself, just like she hadn’t been able to help herself in the fire. She kept her feet moving in time with Rowan’s feet, but she looked.
There was a second rumble, like a second hatch somewhere just out of sight.
All at once, the whole pile of garbage fell down.
All the way down: all of a sudden Kelli couldn’t see anything through the window but Io’s bubbling yellow surface, hundreds of feet below them.
It was so far to fall that the whole black scatter of bags and broken furniture vanished from sight long before it hit the ground.
“You just drop your trash on the surface?!” said Kelli, scandalized. On Callisto, they would have said that was filthy.
“Why not?” said Rowan, gritting his teeth. “Sooner or later it’ll just get covered over with more lava.”
Only a moment later, and only intermittently audible between the blaring klaxons and the rumble of machinery, Kelli heard running feet.
She tensed so hard that she almost lost her balance again, expecting another goon.
But then, with a creak, the gate she’d fallen in by flapped open.
Ting’s skinny head and shoulders poked through.
“Rowan!” they said, panting like they’d sprinted all the way here. “Kelli? How did—never mind, you’re both alive! I’m sorry, I tried to get here quicker but Conchita’s guys were everywhere and Zhaleh needed—okay, let me get a rope. Hang on.”
This was so close to what Kelli had said when she first arrived that she almost expected someone to show up and push Ting in here with them.
But Ting had more experience with high-stakes climbs in tight spaces, and also, seemingly, more experience with the Brimstones’ procedures.
Nobody came up to fight them. They pulled something off their belt—not a regular rope but a flexible metal cable with grabby handles and gripping claws at both ends.
“You were almost too late,” Rowan said sourly as they lowered the cable down. “They cycled the system already.”
“Oh, fuck.” Ting almost dropped the cable. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. It’s just, Zhaleh had to be out of the room so she could set the alarm, we weren’t going to be able to get to you until people were evacuating, and by then—”
So it was Zhaleh. Kelli felt Rowan twist around behind her, crane his neck in Ting’s direction. “Wait, is this even a real fire, or just—”
“Oh, it’s a real fire. She’s serious. If it was just a drill, they’d have—hey,” Ting added as Rowan laboriously got a grip on the cable with his good left hand, “you’re hurt.”
“It happens,” Rowan said impatiently. “So she’s, what, staging a coup?”
“I don’t know! I think so? I didn’t even know this was the plan until like ten minutes ago. You know how she is.”
With some pulling and tugging and grunting and cursing, Ting eventually got them both up and out the door, back into the normal corridor.
Kelli stumbled with relief as soon as she had a proper floor to stand on; she wanted to put out a hand and steady herself against the wall, but she couldn’t with the handcuffs on.
The alarm was still blaring, and Kelli was starting to smell smoke—the unmistakable, awful smell of a fuel fire.
She’d smelled that only once before in her life. She’d never forgotten.
“Here,” said Ting, motioning to Kelli as Rowan flinchingly untangled his arms from hers. “I can get those unlocked.”
Kelli held out her cuffed hands, and Ting pulled out a lockpick and fiddled with them. She tried not to cough in the foul air, or to wonder if she saw visible curls of dark smoke out of the corner of her eye. Ting looked grim, their face paler than usual and their jaw set.
“Zhaleh says the original plan was to take you with us,” Ting said, “on the Infinite Lattice, but the plan changed. She wasn’t expecting Inspiration to get here so soon. Now both sides, Inspiration and the cops, are on the lookout for Kelli and if they see her with us—”
“If you can’t take Kelli with you,” Rowan interrupted, “then you can’t take me.”
Kelli looked over at him in surprise. Ting pressed their lips together. She thought they were going to object, but instead they took a quick, deep breath and yanked Rowan into a tight hug.
“Zhaleh said you might say that,” they said when they separated.
“Listen, right now all the cops are helping fight the fire in Quadrant Beta-Three and all the Brimstone types who haven’t escaped already are dealing with other stuff, and that means the way to the hangar where you landed is clear.
You can make it to the Wildfire if you hurry. We’ll make contact in orbit.”
The cuffs sprang free from Kelli’s wrists, and she pulled her hands close to her chest, rubbing at the red marks on her wrists. Rowan, beside her, sniffed the air, which was smelling fouler and fouler all the time.
“Wait,” he said. “Wait, but this is a fuel fire.”
“Yeah, so?”
“As in, the same fuel lines that connect to the fuel tanks in the fucking hangars, where a fire will make the whole place fucking explode.”
“If the fire gets there,” Ting countered, with a determined set to their jaw.
“It hasn’t yet. They sealed off the lines at the quadrant junctions, so for now it’s still contained in Quadrant Beta-Three.
But I wouldn’t dawdle.” Ting clapped Kelli on the back, more roughly than she would have liked, and the same to Rowan. “Run.”
They ran.
Kelli didn’t even remember which way the hangar was, but Rowan did, and she rushed after him. The air smelled worse and worse with every passing moment. She coughed as she ran, barely registering the dark and iridescent walls and the incomprehensible paintings on them.
“THIS IS NOT A DRILL. FIRE IN QUADRANT BETA-THREE.”
But she screeched to a halt when they got to the hangar.
The pressurized tunnel that led from the inside of the platform to the Wildfire’s airlock was mercifully still in place.
But through that tunnel’s transparent walls, past that all-too-thin-looking glass barrier, all Kelli could see was flames.
When they’d landed here, there’d been other ships in the hangar, each perched at the ready in between deep trenches for the exhaust. A few of those still loomed, faint shapes amid the billows of smoke, but mostly there were only awful yellow pillars of fire, and gouts of smoke too big for those trenches: smoke that reached the ceiling, smoke that filled everything.
Was that what Rowan had been afraid would happen?
Was this what it looked like after a hangar’s fuel stores exploded?
“Rowan!” Kelli called. She yanked on his left hand, the nonbroken one; she was only dimly aware that she had been holding it while they ran. “We can’t go that way! The ships are on fire!”
“No, they’re launching,” Rowan panted. “See? Ships, up. Fire, down.”
He gestured with his chin. Each of those awful yellow pillars of fire had burst into being underneath a ship, right below the engine nozzles.
As Kelli watched, one of those ships rose up in the air, its yellow flame rising behind it.
Flames the size of a house; smoke that would have swallowed her and Rowan whole if they hadn’t been sealed in here.
It felt horrible to look at that much fire. It was an amount of fire she’d never wanted to see again. But she got a hold of herself and ran forward into the airlock.