Their Fractured Light (Starbound #3)(25)

I want to ask if Alexis is okay, but if I can hear the occasional noise from the searchers, I can’t risk even a whisper. Every joint hurts, my muscles and tendons on fire from being forced into such an unnaturally cramped position, and I can feel the sweat trickling down my sides.

It’s nearly an hour before we reach the elevator shaft, and it’s only once I creep out onto the maintenance ledge that I finally take a normal breath. There’s a limited amount of light out here, cast by maintenance lamps every other floor. I turn back for Alexis, only to find her gripping the edge of the ventilation tunnel with white knuckles and closed eyes.

“Hey,” I whisper, reaching out to lay my hand over hers. “It’s okay, we’re still ahead of them. But we’ve got to keep moving if we want to stay that way.”

She gives a tight little shake of her head. “I can’t.” Her voice is clipped and tight. “I—I’m not good with heights.”

I stare at her. “You live in a penthouse.”

She glares back at me. “Yeah, with windows you couldn’t crack even if you threw a grand piano at them!” Her voice sharpens with irritation, and though there’s no reason to be pleased about it—it’s directed straight at me, and we’re standing here instead of climbing—I discover I kind of like it. This, like the one-dimpled, lopsided smile, is real. And most of the time I can’t tell what is, with this girl. “A penthouse view is different from—I can’t climb down there, Gideon!”

Well, screw me sideways. This is going to make my exit strategy a lot harder to pull off. I let my breath out. “You’re in luck, because we’re not climbing down. We’re climbing up.”

That has her opening her eyes, if only to shoot me a horrified look. “How is that any better?” she gasps.

“Trust me, up is a lot easier than down. We’ve only got to get ten floors up, and there’s a skybridge to one of the other buildings.” I rummage in my bag until I find my spare micro-weave harness inside. “Come on out, the ledge is wide enough to stand on.”

“Oh God,” she whispers, her movements jerky and slow as she starts easing first one leg, then the other out of the duct. She keeps her eyes closed, moving by touch—I make sure to be gentle as I reach out for her arm to steady her.

“Doing good,” I whisper, wishing I knew better how to talk her through this kind of phobia—except it’s not really a phobia, because that implies irrationality. We’re twenty floors up, and that fall is plenty to fear for even the most logical of minds. The only upside is that if you did fall, you’d certainly be dead instantly on impact, no lying around in agony with broken bits. I don’t think Alexis would find that comforting, though.

I walk her through putting on the harness—I know she’s freaked, because she doesn’t even blink when I test the bands running around each thigh.

“You’re going to go first,” I tell her. “I’m going to have a rope attached to you, here.” I let her see me tying the lead to her harness. “Your job is to take these”—I hand her the bag of magnet grips—“and make us a path. You press them against the wall, like this, then do a ninety-degree twist, like this, to activate the magnet. Then you just slip the rope through the carabiner until it clicks—and always from this direction, so that if we fall, the rope can’t unclip itself.”

I look up to find her staring at me like I’ve told her to shoot me in the face. “You’re joking.”

I let my breath out slowly. “Not this time.”

She swallows, pressing her back against the wall of the elevator shaft as though she could escape all of this by sheer willpower alone. Her hair’s a mess, and there’s a red, tender-looking spot at one temple that looks like soon enough it’ll be a magnificent bruise. Her mascara’s still tracked down her cheeks in smudged black lines, and there’s a trace of blood at her swollen lower lip, from when her interrogator backhanded her. I’m not expecting the ache somewhere inside, at the sight of her. Then she sniffs. “Then what are we waiting for?”

My shoulders start aching again before we’ve gone a floor, in no small part due to the fact that with Alexis, the climb is taking twice as long. But despite the pain, it’s not all bad news. The view when I glance up to check on her progress is plenty of consolation. I keep that observation to myself. To her credit, she manages her task without complaint, though at one point I hear her breath shuddering as she inhales, and I realize she’s crying with each shaking movement upward.

When we get to the thirtieth floor, she hauls herself up over the lip of the maintenance ledge and stays on her knees, pressed against the wall, shaking. I let her stay there and keep going, adding a few more holds with the magnet grips until I can get at the access panel by the top of the opening. Ideally I’d just hack the panel, but my chip is in its pocket, and my pocket is underneath my harness, and my harness is all that’s keeping me from dropping thirty floors to an admittedly very swift death. I’m going to have to do it mechanically, and that’s not my forte.

I’ve pried off the cover and am tracing the wiring when a noise intrudes on my concentration.

“Gideon…” Alexis is whispering my name. “Gideon!”

“What?”

“The elevator—is it supposed to be moving?”