Century Rain Part 62

Auger started making her way back to the double doors just as the room shook again, more violently than ever before. She halted in her tracks and looked up with a horrid sense of inevitability. The plinth and lathe eased through their flimsy restraints with a final squeal of freedom. Untethered, the equipment dropped through the air and landed on the upper surface of the sphere's support harness, before sliding off and falling to one side with a deafening chime of metal on metal.

The sphere rocked, but for a moment nothing more happened. Auger forced herself to move again, gripping the iron bar.

Then she stopped and looked at the sphere again. There was a whisking, whipping sound as the guy line's many const.i.tuent threads began to break, one by one. She only had an instant to register this before the entire line snapped, whiplashing against the harness with appalling force.

The sphere dropped.

It hit the floor and cracked wide open along its casting flaw like a piece of ripe fruit. Distorted now, not even approximately spherical, it still managed to roll, picking up momentum with each rotation.

Auger followed its trajectory with horror: it was rolling towards the double doors, and Floyd. She opened her mouth to scream something-some useless warning, as if Floyd could possibly not have seen what was happening-but by then it was far, far too late. The mangled sphere trundled into the double doors, forcing them open and wedging itself in the gap. The metal emitted a horrible noise as it buckled. It almost sounded like a human scream, cut off with sickening swiftness.

"No..." Auger breathed.

Everything was suddenly very quiet. Even the demolition machines had stopped. She let go of the bar and heard it clatter to the ground in some distant corner of the universe. Auger slowed as she neared the doors, trying not to think about what she was going to find.

Floyd was flat on the ground, lying perfectly still. His face was turned away from her, bright blood matting his scalp. His hat had rolled away into a corner.

"No," Auger said. "Don't be dead. Please don't be dead. You had no business being here. You didn't have to get involved."

His body had fallen inside the doors, to one side of the sphere's path, and it didn't look as if it had rolled over any part of him. She took his head in her hands, very gently, and turned it so that she could see his eyes. They were closed, as if he had fallen asleep. His mouth was slightly open and his chest was rising and falling, but with a worrying irregularity, as if each breath was a struggle.

"Stay with me," Auger said. "Don't go dying on me, not now that we've come this far. Now that we've actually started to get somewhere. Now that I've actually started to like you." She squeezed his head, her hands wet with his blood. "Are you listening to me, Wendell? Wake up, you sad excuse for a detective. Wake the f.u.c.k up and talk to me!"

Laying his head gently on the floor, she stood, appraising the gap that the sphere had made in the doors. She could squeeze through it without difficulty, but there was no way she was going to leave Floyd to be buried alive. Sitting back on her haunches, she put an arm around his shoulders and slid another beneath his back and, groaning with the effort, she managed to arrange Floyd into a sitting position, balanced against the right-hand sliding door. His head lolled on to his chest, his eyes still closed.

Leaving Floyd where he was, with his back to the door, she scrambled over the sphere and through the gap it had made as it wedged itself between the doors, catching an elbow on the edge of the door as she went through. Beyond, just as Floyd had predicted, was a sloping ramp leading up to ground level. The air swirled with the dust of collapsed buildings.

She turned back to Floyd, reaching through the gap and grabbing him under the armpits. "Come on," she said.

Gritting her teeth with the effort, she managed to drag Floyd off the floor, so that he was halfway between a standing and a sitting position, but she could not lift him high enough to pull him through the gap. Exhausted, her arms feeling as if they were about to pop from their sockets, she fell back down on to the concrete of the ramp. Every instinct told her to get away now, before the machines caused the entire structure to cave in.

She found some last gasp of strength. This time she managed to get his head and shoulders to the level of the gap. His shirt ripped on the edge of the ruined door as she felt his weight shifting towards her, and then suddenly he was falling through the gap, on to the concrete ramp. He landed in an undignified sprawl, arms and legs tangled, face squashed against the ground, his mouth open like a drunkard's.

Carefully rolling him over, she knelt beside him and took his face in her hands, gently smoothing his hair back from his cheeks and forehead.

Floyd groaned and opened his eyes. He took a deep breath and wiped his tongue across his lips. "What did I do to deserve this?"

"Thank G.o.d. You're all right."

"All right? I've got a headache you could park the Hindenburg in."

"For a moment back there I thought you were dead."

"No such luck."

"Don't say that, Wendell. I really meant it. I was worried sick."

He touched the back of his head and came away with a wet palm. "I guess I took a hit in there. Was it

worth it?"

Still cradling his head, she drew his face towards hers and lowered her own to meet his, and kissed him.

He tasted of dust and dirt. But she held the kiss, and when she moved to pull away, Floyd gently stopped her.

"It was worth it," she said.

"I guess it must have been."

She pulled away now, suddenly feeling awkward and silly. Floyd hadn't rejected her, but she felt as if

she had made a terrible misjudgement. She looked down and willed the ground to open up.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I don't know-"

Floyd raised a hand, tangling his fingers in her hair, and pulled her in again. "Don't apologise," he said.

"I've made a fool of myself."

"No," he said. "You haven't. I think you're wonderful. The only thing I can't understand is what a nice

girl like you would ever see in a crumpled old has-been like me."

"You're not a has-been, Wendell. Crumpled, maybe. And you could lose a bit of weight. But you're a good man who believes in finishing a job once you've started it. And you care enough about your

friends to put your own life in danger trying to help them. This may come as a shock, but there aren't that many people like you around."

"OK, but what about my good points?"

"Don't push your luck, soldier." She eased back from him. "You think you can stand? We need to leave

here before we get into any more trouble. I'm still worried about your head."

"I'll survive," Floyd said. "I'm a private detective. If I don't get clouted on the head at least once a week, I'm not doing my job properly."

He got to his feet, wobbling a little, but able to make his way una.s.sisted.

"We'll still need to get you checked out," Auger said.

"I'll last until we're back in Paris," Floyd replied. He touched the back of his head again, but the

bleeding had slowed. "Verity-there's one thing I need to say."

"Go ahead, Wendell."

"Now that we've broken the ice a bit..."

"Yes?"

"From now on I'd really like it if you just called me Floyd."

"I will," she said. "On one strict condition."

"Which is?"

"You call me Auger. Back home, only my ex-husband calls me Verity."

"You sure about that, Auger?"

"d.a.m.n sure, Floyd." She helped Floyd up the gentle slope of the ramp, towards level ground. "You start

seeing double, or feeling nauseous-I want to hear about it, all right?"

"You'll be the first to get the news. In the meantime, do you want to tell me what it is you figured out

down there?"

"I didn't figure out anything."

"But when I rang the bell, it...rang a bell for you, didn't it?"

"I don't know," she said, shaking her head. "I thought for a minute..."

"Thought what?" he prompted, as her voice trailed off.

"The spheres are designed to ring. I'm pretty sure of that. The shape, and the specified accuracy of the

machining, and the way they are meant to be suspended...everything points to the same conclusion. But

they're not intended to be rung like a bell. Nothing strikes them."

"Then what makes them ring?"

"In my work," Auger told him, "in the job I did before I got involved in this mess, we worked with a lot

of sensitive equipment. I'm actually an archaeologist, for what it's worth."

"Aren't archaeologists supposed to be greying spinsters with half-moon gla.s.ses who never get to see daylight?"

"Not the kind I hang out with," Auger said. "We get our hands dirty."

"With this sensitive equipment?"

"Thing is, in order to make it sensitive, we have to run a lot of it at very cold temperatures. We cool it

down, really cold, so that it can work better."

"And when Altfeld mentioned cooling requirements-"

"I started wondering if the spheres were part of some kind of detection apparatus, yes." Auger bit her lip,