The Bridge Trilogy Part 151

"How've you been?"

Rydell grinned, in spite of everything, that she'd ask him this now.

"I missed you," he said.

She hesitated. "Me too." Then she grabbed his hand again, heading for the plastic around the foot of the cable tower. It looked as though people had cut their way out. Chevette stepped through a five-foot slit. Rydell ducked to follow her. Into warm jungle air and the smell of

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chemical fertilizer. But there was smoke here too, swirling under the glare of the grow lights.

Chevette started coughing. Shadows of people fleeing raced across the translucent plastic.

Chevette went to a ladder and started climbing. Rydell groaned.

"What?" She stopped and looked down.

"Nothing," he said, starting up after her, biting his lip each time he had to raise his arms.

In the distance he could hear sirens, a weird, rising cacophony that blended together, wove in and out, like a concert performed by robot wolves. He wondered if it had sounded like that in the minutes after the Little Big One.

He really didn't know how much of this ladder he could manage. It was metal, stuck to the wall with that super-goop they used here, and he looked up and saw Chevette's plastic-cleated feet vanish through a triangular opening.

And he realized he was smiling, because that really was her and those really were her feet, and she'd said she'd missed him. The rest of the way didn't seem so hard, but when he got up and through, sitting on the edge for a breather, he saw that she'd started climbing up the slanted girder, hanging on to either side of the blunt-toothed track that the little car, which he could make out up at the top, ran on.

"Jesus," Rydell said, imagining himself having to follow her.

"Stay there," she said, over her shoulder, "I'll try to bring it down for you." Rydell watched her climb, worried about grease, but she just kept going, and soon she was there, climbing into the car, which from here looked like one of the waste bins out behind Lucky Dragon, but smaller.

Rydell heard an electric engine whine. With a creak, the little car, Chevette in it, started down.

He got to his feet and the smoke caught in his lungs, his side stabbing him each time he coughed.

"Somebody's been up here," she said, when she reached the bottom. "The grease shows it. I was up here earlier, looking around, and there was dust on it."

"Somebody probably lives here," Rydell said, looking around at the dark flimsy walls that sheathed the tower twelve feet up from the plat 258.

form he stood on. He climbed into the car, and she pushed a b.u.t.ton. The car groaned, creaked, and started up the girder.

The first thing Rydell wasn't prepared for, as they cleared the screening wall, was the extent of the fire. It looked as though the end by Bryant was completely aflame, huge clouds of black smoke billowing up into the night sky. Through that he could see the lights of emergency vehicles, dozens of them, it looked like, and above the creaking of the cog wheel he could still hear the concert of wailing sirens. "Jesus," he said. He looked in the other direction, toward Treasure, and that was burning too, though it didn't seem as intense, but maybe that was just distance.

"You got a flashlight?" Chevette asked.

He unzipped his Lucky Dragon f.a.n.n.y pack and fished out a little Lucky Dragon disposable he'd helped himself to back in LA. Chevette twisted it on and started up the ladder that led to the hole in the floor of the little tower-top cube she'd lived in when Rydell had met her. Just a square opening there, and he saw her shine the light into it. "It's open," she said, not too loud,

and that made Rydell start up after her.

When he climbed through, into the single room, she was shining the light around. There was nothing here, just some garbage. There was a round hole in one wall, where Rydell remembered there had been an old stained-gla.s.s window before.

He saw the expression on her face in the glow from the flashlight. "It's really not here anymore,"

she said, as if she didn't quite believe herself. "I guess I thought it would still be here."

"n.o.body lives here now" Rydell said, not sure why he had.

"Roof hatch is open too," Chevette said, shining the light up.

Rydell went to the old ladder bolted to the wall and started up, feeling damp splintery wood against his palms. He was starting to get the idea this might have been a very bad idea, climbing up here, because if the whole bridge were going to burn, they probably weren't going to make it.

He knew the smoke was as dangerous as the fire, and he wasn't sure she understood that.

And the second thing he wasn't prepared for, as he stuck his head up through the hatch, was the barrel of a gun thrust into his ear.

His buddy with the scarf.

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64. TAG.

AND as Harwood recedes, and the rest of it as well, amid this spreading cold, and Laney feels, as at a very great distance, his legs spasming within their tangle of sleeping-bags and candy wrappers, Rci Toci is there, and pa.s.ses him this sigil, clockface, round seal, the twelve hours of day, twelve of night, black lacquer and golden numerals, and he places it on the s.p.a.ce that Harwood occupied.

And sees it drawn in, drawn infinitely away, into that place where Harwood is going; drawn by the mechanism of inversion itself, and then it is gone.

And Laney is. going too, though not with Harwood.

"Gotcha," Laney says, to the dark in his fetid box, down amid the subsonic sighing of commuter trains and the constant clatter of pa.s.sing feet.

And finds himself in Florida sunlight, upon the broad concrete steps leading up to the bland entrance to a federal orphanage.

A girl named Jennifer is there, his age exactly, in a blue denim skirt and a white T-shirt, her black bangs straight and glossy, and she is walking, heel to toe, heel to toe, arms outstretched for balance, as if along a tightrope, down the very edge of the topmost step.

Balancing so seriously.

As if, were she to fall, she might fall forever.

And Laney smiles, to see her, remembering the orphanage's smells:

jelly sandwiches, disinfectant, modeling clay, clean sheets...

And the cold is everywhere, now, somewhere, but he is home at last.

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65. OPEN AIR.

FONTAINE, wielding the ax now, reflects that he has lived quite a long time and yet this experience is new: to lift the heavy head above his own and bring it down against the shop's rear wall, the plywood booming. He's a little surprised at how it simply bounces off, but with his next swing he's reversed the head, so that the sharp, four-inch spike, rather than the blade, contacts the wall, and this digs most satisfyingly in, and on a third blow penetrates, and he redoubles his efforts.

"Need us some air," he says, as much to himself as to the two seated on his bunk, the gray-haired man and the boy with his head down, lost in the helmet again. To look at these two, you'd think there was no problem, that the bridge wasn't burning.

Where'd that hologram girl go?

Still, this chopping is getting somewhere, though his arms are already aching. Hole there the size of a saucer, and getting bigger.

No idea what he'll do when he's got it big enough, but he likes to keep busy.

And this is the way it always is, for Fontaine, when he knows that things are bad, very bad indeed, and very likely over. He likes to keep busy.

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