of steel pipe that would make good window breakers.
If anyone could throw them across the gap, he thought, as he dragged one back to where Ella and Ninde were almost finished tying the rope together. He hoped they knew their knots. It was a long way to the ground.
“Good work!” said Ella, taking the pipe and hefting it easily in one hand. Then she walked right up to the edge of the building, the toes of her boots meeting the edge of emptiness that marked the five-story drop to the street.
The building across from them was all glass and steel, stretching up at least twenty more floors.
Lots and lots of glass. Floor-to-ceiling windows, the blinds still drawn back to catch sunlight that wasn’t there.
Ella looked at the window immediately opposite for a moment, imagining how it might have been. With the lights on and people bustling behind the glass, clutching papers, talking on the phone…
Her parents had both worked in buildings like this. She had dim memories of going up in the elevators, of looking out through a window just like that one…
The bolts on the trapdoor suddenly screamed in protest. Gold-Eye and Ninde both let out strangled, frightened yells… and Ella threw the pipe as hard as she could towards the window.
It flew true, glittering with reflected stars, smashing through the window in a blaze of shards. Clouds of smaller splinters followed the big shards down, strange snow falling from starlight into shadow.
“Drum!” shouted Ella, holding out one end of the rope. “Think it across!”
“Throw it first,” said Drum, that clear, almost angelic voice still seeming out of place in his great body. “It’s much easier.”
Even before he finished speaking, Ella was throwing the end of the rope, hurling a loop of it out towards the gaping hole where there once had been a window.
Halfway across, the rope end suddenly faltered and hung suspended, like a snake waiting to strike. Then it lunged forward through the hold, to lash about in the room beyond.
Gold-Eye could no longer see it, so he watched Drum instead and saw the sweat burst out on his smooth face, beads glittering, running together to form rivulets that soaked his shoulders, turning green cloth to black.
His hands were twitching too, fingers crossing and circling in a strange arabesque – and Gold-Eye realised that Drum’s hands were mimicking what his mind was doing. Tying the rope to something in the room across the street.
“It’s secure,” he said finally, hands falling flat to his sides. He looked terribly weary, as if he’d just run for miles with something fearful at his heels.
“Thanks,” said Ella, but it was an automatic, perfunctory expression. She was already tying the rope at their end to a sturdy antenna mounting and checking the tension. Unfortunately, the makeshift rope seemed to have a tendency to stretch.
“We’ll have to go hand over hand,” she explained. “But use your feet as well for safety. Then, at the end, you’ll have to swing down into the room. Be careful to aim for the centre of the hole. And remember to swing forward… or it’ll be a very long drop. Ninde, you go first.”
“I will not!”
“Shut up and get your hands on the rope,” commanded Ella. “Can’t you hear those Ferrets? They’ll be through—”
Even as she spoke, the trapdoor sounded with a sickening boom and one of the restraining bolts screeched, stretched… and let go.
Held only in one corner, the trapdoor buckled inexorably upward to show the white teeth and red eyes of the Ferret blow, brilliant against the darkness of the steps. Drum stepped towards it, thrusting with his sword, and it ducked back down, the trapdoor falling shut behind it.
Without another word, Ninde launched herself on to the rope, twining her legs around it and pulling herself along with her hands.
“Like a rat on a hawser,” muttered Ella, but she seemed to be saying it to herself. So Gold-Eye didn’t ask her what a hawser was. He already know about rats.
“Gold-Eye! You’re next!”
Gold-Eye knew better than to argue. He’d seen what Ferrets could do to people. Did do to people.
Thinking about that got him halfway across before he even realised that the rope was swaying, the knots stretching, the ground swimming into focus so far below.
Then he made the mistake of stopping and looking down.
For a split second the idea of a possible fall seemed almost attractive. It would be an easy end, better than having his blood slowly drunk in some dark Ferret nest till there was just enough to keep his brain alive for use in the Meat Factory.
Then the rope jerked and the sudden fear of a real fall gave him the impetus for the second half of the crossing, and in just a few seconds he was swinging on to the carpet in the new building. Where Ninde sat on the floor, looking surprised that she’d made it.
There seemed to be a brief argument on the other side, ending with Ella furiously swarming across the rope. She came far faster than Gold-Eye and had barely swung in when she was testing the knot at the end and yelling at Drum.
“Come on!”
Drum was the real test of the rope. He pushed himself off with slow deliberation, looking like a cable car on maximum load… and the rope stretched and sagged still further.
He was two thirds of the way across when the Ferrets came boiling up out of the broken trapdoor, moving together in a sinuous wave of spitting, hissing death. There were five of them, each as long as a car, but no wider round the middle than Gold-Eye or Ninde. Something between a snake and a stretched-out rat, with only their paw-hands evidence of human origin. That, and their clever minds.
Rearing up a safe distance from the edge (for not even an Overlord could make them face such a height) they hissed together, showing long mouths with their rows of tiny teeth – and the two sharp fangs at the front. Hollow fangs, for drinking blood. Human blood, if they could get it. Otherwise, they resorted to rats, cats and dogs… or each other.
The rope held.
“Right,” said Ella wearily as Drum swung into the room. “Let’s get six or seven floors higher up, in case they have another go before dawn. We could all do with a bit more sleep before we start back.”
VIDEO ARCHIVE INTERVIEW 1906 • GOLD-EYE
I am Gold-Eye.
Ninde is angry because Shade does this video now, without months’ wait. He not say why.
I remember Dorms. But not getting out. Petar and Jemmie took me.
Petar did something. Here. No scar like Ella, but no lump for monitor. It went away.
Peter said he was brother. My brother.
Older, bigger. His job to look for me. He said.
Jemmie
