Now it was her turn to grab him, pull him out, but she pulled him out into the path of a fresh batch of panicked bridge people, fleeing whatever was happening toward Bryant. They both went down, and Rydell saw the chain gun drop through a hole sawn in the deck to admit a bundle of sewage-tubing. He braced for an explosion when the thing hit bottom, but none came.
“Look,” Chevette said, getting to her feet, pointing, “we’re at the foot of Skinner’s tower. Let’s try to get up there.”
“There’s no way off that,” Rydell protested, his side killing him as he got up.
“There’s nothing to burn, either,” she said, “once you’re past the ‘ponics operation.”
“Smoke’ll get us.”
“You don’t know that,” she said, “but down here it’ll get us for sure.” She looked at him. “I’m sorry, Rydell.”
“Why?”
“Because I was trying to make all this your fault.”
“I sure hope it’s not,” he said.
“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 257 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 button. 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.