Titan (GAIA) (32 page)

The crashing grew louder and she saw Gene sail up through the room to her left. She dived right and down, catching a girder two floors below and diverting her momentum to the right again. She came to rest, her bare feet on another girder. Around her, broken glass settled slowly.

She would not have known he was so close if the shower of glass had not preceded him. He had been walking along the girders, but the weight of part of his foot was too much for an unbroken pane that already supported debris from Cirocco’s passage. It shattered, and the glass came down like snowflakes. She swung around the girder and pushed downward with her feet.

She hit hard, and turned, dazed, to see him land on his feet, as she would have done if she had any damn sense and counted floors. She remembered thinking that as he stood over her, then she saw the hatchet hit his head, and she passed out.

She came to her senses suddenly, screaming, which was something she had never done before. She did not know where she was, but she had been back in the belly of the beast, and not alone. Gene was there, explaining calmly why he intended to rape her.

Had raped her. She stopped screaming.

She was not in the glass castle. There was a rope around her waist. The ground sloped down in front of her. Far below was the dark silver sea of Rhea.

Gaby was beside her, but she was quite busy. She had two ropes around her waist. One went up the slope to the same tree Cirocco was attached to. The other hung taut over darkness. Tears had washed a channel through the dried blood on her face. She was using a knife to saw through one of the ropes.

“Is that Gene’s pack there, Gaby?”

“Yeah. He won’t be needing it. How are you feeling?”

“I’ve been better. Bring him up, Gaby.”

She looked up, her mouth hanging open.

“I don’t want to lose the rope.”

His face was a bloody wreck. One eye was swollen shut, the other merely a slit. His nose was broken and three of his front teeth were gone.

“Quite a fall he took,” Cirocco observed.

“Nothing to what I had in mind.”

“Open his pack and bandage that ear. He’s still losing blood.”

Gaby was building toward an explosion, but Cirocco cut her off with an unwavering stare.

“I’m not going to kill him, so don’t suggest it.”

His ear had been severed by Gaby’s hatchet throw. That had been unintentional on her part; she had meant to plant it in the side of his head, but it had turned in the air and hit him a glancing blow powerful enough to knock him out. He moaned while Gaby bandaged him.

Cirocco began rummaging through his pack, taking things they could use. She kept the provisions and the weapons, threw everything else over the side.

“If we let him live, he’s going to follow us, you know that.”

“He might, and I could definitely do without it. He’ll have to go over the edge.”

“Then why the hell am I—”

“With his chute. Untie his legs.”

She fitted the harness around his crotch. He moaned again, and she looked away from what Gaby had done to him there.

“He thought he killed me,” she was saying, tying the last knot on the bandages. “He meant to, but I turned my head.”

“How bad is it?”

“Not deep, but bloody as hell. I was stunned, and it’s lucky I was too weak to move after what he … after …” Her nose was running, and she wiped it on the back of her hand. “I passed out pretty quick. The next thing I knew he was bending over you.”

“I’m glad you woke up when you did. I made a mess of my escape. And thank you for saving my ass again.”

Gaby looked at her bleakly, and Cirocco was immediately sorry about her choice of words. Gaby seemed to feel personally responsible for what had happened. It couldn’t be easy, Cirocco thought to lie
still while someone you love is being violated.

“Why are you letting him live?”

Cirocco looked down at him, and fought through a sudden burning rage until she felt in control again.

“I … you know he was never like this before.”

“I do
not
know it. He was always a fucking animal underneath, or how could he have done it?”

“We all are. We suppress it, but he can’t anymore. He talked to me like a little boy who’s hurt—not angry, just hurt—because he’s not been getting his way. Something happened to him after the crash, just like something happened to me. And you.”

“But we didn’t try to kill anyone. Listen, let him parachute down. That’s okay. But I think he ought to leave his balls up here.” She hefted the knife, but Cirocco shook her head.

“No. I never liked him much, but we got along. He was a good crewman, and now he’s insane, and …” She was going to say it was partly her responsibility, that he would never have gone insane if she had kept her ship in one piece, but she could not get it out.

“I’m giving him a chance because of what he was. He said he had friends down there. Maybe he was just raving, or maybe they’ll take him in. Cut his hands free.”

Gaby did, and Cirocco gritted her teeth and pushed him with her foot. He began to slide, and seemed to become aware of his surroundings. He screamed as the parachute trailed out behind him, then vanished around the curve of the cable.

They never saw if it opened.

The two women sat there for a long time. Cirocco was afraid to say anything. There was the possibility she would start crying and be unable to stop, and there was no time for it. There were wounds to care for, and a trip to finish.

Gaby’s head was not bad. It should have had stitches, but the disinfectant and a bandage was all they could do. She would have a scar on her forehead.

So would Cirocco, from her impact with the castle floor. There would also be one from the point of her chin to her left ear, and another across her back. None of the cuts were serious enough to worry her.

They tended each other and loaded their packs, and Cirocco looked up at the long stretch of the cable yet to climb before they reached the spoke.

“I think we should go back to the castle and rest before we tackle it,” she said. “A couple days. Get our strength.”

Gaby looked up.

“Oh, sure. But the next part’s going to be easier. Bringing you two down here, I found a stairway.”

The stairway emerged from a heap of sand at the uppermost border of the glass castle and went straight as an arrow until it could no longer be seen. Each step was a meter and a half wide and forty centimeters high, and appeared to have been carved into the face of the cable.

After Cirocco and Gaby had followed it for a time, they began to think it might actually do them little good. It was curving to the south, toward the drop-off. Before long it would surely be impassable.

But the steps remained perfectly level. Soon they were walking on a terraced shelf with a huge wall rising on one side and a sheer drop on the other. There was no handrail, no protection at all. They pressed close to the wall, and trembled with every gust of wind.

Then the shelf began to turn into a tunnel.

It was a gradual thing. There was still open space on the right, but the wall had begun to curl over their heads. The path was curving under the cable.

Cirocco tried to visualize it: always rising, but corkscrewing around the outside of the cable.

After another 2000 steps, they were in pitch blackness.

“Stairs,” Gaby muttered. “They build a thing like this, and they put in stairs.” They had stopped to get out their lamps. Gaby filled hers and trimmed the wick. They would burn one at a time and hope there was enough oil to get them out the other side.

“Maybe they were health nuts,” Cirocco suggested. She struck a match and held it to the wick. “More likely this was an emergency measure, for a loss of power.”

“Well, I’m glad they’re here,” Gaby admitted.

“They were probably here all the way but down lower they’re covered with dirt. It means this place has been unattended for a long time. The trees up here must be new mutations.”

“Whatever you say.” Gaby held the lamp high and looked ahead, then back where she could still see a wedge of light. Her eyes narrowed.

“Look, it’s like we’re at an angle in the road. It curves along the outside, then it cuts to the left and goes straight in.”

Cirocco studied it, and thought Gaby was right.

“It looks like we might be cutting right through the center.”

“Oh, yeah? Remember the place of winds? All that air is going through here, someplace.”

“If this tunnel led to it, we’d know it already. It would have blown us right off the side.”

Gaby looked at the ascending staircase in the flickering lamplight. She sniffed the air.

“It’s pretty warm in here. I wonder if it gets hotter?”

“No way to know but by going in.”

“Uh-huh.” Gaby swayed and the lamp threatened to fall from her fingers. Cirocco put a hand on her shoulder.

“You all right?”

“Yeah, I’m … no, dammit, I’m not.” She leaned against the warm corridor wall. “I’m dizzy, and
my knees are weak.” She held out her free hand and looked at it; it trembled slightly.

“Maybe a day of rest wasn’t enough.” Cirocco studied her watch, gazed up the corridor, and frowned. “I’d hoped to be out on the other side and back on the top of the cable again before we rested.”

“I can make it.”

“No,” Cirocco decided. “I don’t feel so hot myself. The question is do we camp here in the corridor where it’s so hot, or go outside?”

Gaby looked back at the drop-off many steps behind them.

“I don’t mind a little sweat.”

There was something about having a fire, even when the weather was unbearably hot. They did not discuss it; Cirocco took small twigs and moss from Gene’s pack and started to build one. Soon she had a small blaze crackling. She fed it like a miser as they went about the mechanical business of setting a meager camp. Sleeping bags were unrolled, pans and knives brought out, provisions searched for the night’s food.

We’re a good team, Cirocco thought, hunkered down while she watched Gaby dice vegetables into the bubbling remains of last night’s stew. Her hands were small and deft, with brown dirt ground into the palms. They could no longer spare water for washing.

Gaby wiped her brow with the back of her hand and glanced up at Cirocco. She smiled—a flickering, tentative thing that broadened when Cirocco smiled back. One eye was nearly covered by a bandage. She dipped the spoon into the stew and slurped noisily.