by Jackson Ford
“The elevator.” She sounds like she wants to murder me or collapse to the ground or possibly both at once. “It doesn’t go to the ground. It only goes to other floors of the site.”
“Oh, come on,” I say, leaning over the side to look. “Of course it…”
Doesn’t.
The elevator runs on two thick vertical metal tracks, neither of which extends below the floor we’re on. Street lights blink up at me from fifty floors down, wind blowing my hair in a thousand directions. I tilt my head back—the tracks go all the way up the building, all the way to what must be the 80th floor.
“But that doesn’t make sense.” My voice sounds very small. “How do they get building materials up here?”
Annie points. I follow her finger to a crane on a vacant lot across the street, its scaffolding shrouded in shadow.
“Oh.”
I didn’t actually check to see if the construction elevator really did go the way down to ground level. I just assumed it did. I’d forgotten about the crane. And now that I think about it, it makes sense to use one for lifting heavy materials, and build a smaller elevator so the workers can get between floors. Definitely more sense than building eighty stories’ worth of elevator strong enough to lift all the materials the construction company needs.
I give Annie my most winning smile. “So. Hide?”
She squeezes her eyes shut, mutters something dark, then shoves past me onto the lift. “Paul,” she says, stabbing at the up button. “Tell Reggie to kill the cameras on the top floors.”
“Uh, copy?”
“We could probably hide here,” I say, pointing to the construction site. “There might be a—”
The look she gives me could shatter concrete.
“I’m going to take us to a floor they don’t know we’re on,” she says sweetly. “If that’s OK with you.”
“Yup.” I give her a thumbs up. “That sounds excellent. Let’s do it.”
FOUR
Teagan
It’s a bumpy ride up. The wind buffets us from all directions, the metal clanking and creaking as the elevator ascends. The tiny engine sounds like it’s going to blow a gasket at any moment. Annie stands by the control box, arms folded, eyes shut tight. I put my hands on the outer railing, looking out over the city—hey, if you can’t admire the view in the middle of a chase, what’s the point? Plus, from this side of the building, you can’t see the fires on the horizon. Which is just fine by me.
“Annie, Teagan.” Paul’s voice is a focused monotone. “Reggie tells me the top-floor cameras are taken care of. What are you thinking? Over.”
“Copy,” Annie says. “We don’t know yet. Over.”
“OK? Are you coming out on the north or south side of the building? If it’s the north side, there’s an alley. We could—”
“We don’t know, Paul. Teagan hasn’t decided yet.”
I ignore the barb, mostly because I don’t want Annie to hurl me off the side.
The construction site on the 80th floor is even more bare-bones than the one on the 50th. Very few of the walls are up, and there’s almost no machinery. Annie doesn’t hesitate, making for the fire stairs at the back of the site. “Paul.” Her voice is soft, as if she’s worried someone might hear. “Can you pull up the blueprints for the top floors and a list of tenants? Over.”
“Got ’em both already. What do you need? Over.”
“Give us an office to hide in.”
“Hold on… OK… All right, looks like somebody just moved out of Suite 8213. Should be clear. Over.”
I’m a little worried we’ll be met by guards, but they probably don’t know exactly where we are yet. And the stairs themselves are quiet, with nothing but the hum of the lights and our feet slapping on the concrete.
The hallways on the 82nd floor are different from the ones below. The marble looks real, and the carpet is thick and soft under my black lace-ups. There’s no one around. Even the aircon sounds muted.
The door to 8213 is another identical one, on the north-west side of the building. Same thick wooden surface. Same completely useless biometric lock. I go to work, reaching into the latch mechanism as Annie hovers nearby.
I must be getting tired. It takes almost six seconds to open this lock. The one on the server room door didn’t take more than three.
“Done,” I say, straightening up. “Let’s—”
Which is when Annie sucks in a horrified breath, grabs me by the shoulders and shoves me through the door.
“Stop! Now!” someone yells. As Annie pushes me, I get a split-second glimpse of the rest of the corridor. Bob the security chief is there, along with three other guards—ones much bigger than the two who chased us before. They’re sprinting right towards us, and they look pissed.
I stumble into Suite 8213, lose my footing, crash to a tangled heap on the floor. “Close it!” Annie is shouting. “Close the door!”
I react instantly, reaching out and slamming the door closed, locking the mechanism. A second later someone is hammering on it, rattling the handle.
Guess Bob isn’t as dumb as he looks. If I weren’t completely freaked out right now, I might start clapping.
There’s not much in the office—certainly nothing we can use. There’s some furniture: a desk, an ergonomic chair, a disconnected computer tower. The windows are floor to ceiling, and the view is spectacular, even counting the fires on the horizon. Bob is leaning against the door now, the lock straining in the frame. I focus harder, willing both the lock and the door to stay shut.
“Annie?”
“I’m thinking.”
“Annie?”
“I said, I’m thinking!”
The seconds tick by, and she doesn’t move. It’s like she’s running through every possibility, pulling and discarding ideas, desperately trying to find one that works. How long is it going to be before one of them shoots the lock off or batters the door down?
In my earpiece Paul says, “Annie. Get out of there. Over.”
“Uh…” The hammering gets louder. “Yeah, Paul, just a second.”
Now she’s scanning the ceiling. What is she thinking? That we can crawl through the vents? Squash into them alongside the cables? This isn’t Die Hard.
Beyond Annie, through the windows, Los Angeles glitters. The fires paint the night sky.
My amazing cargo elevator stunt didn’t work. Neither did hiding. We are running out of options here, and if at least one of us doesn’t come up with something good, we are well and truly fucked. We may as well just cut to the chase and throw ourselves out the—
My hand strays to my belt. To the giant metal buckle there. Annie’s one is identical.
I reach back with my PK and grab the ergonomic chair behind the desk. The seat is mesh and foam, but it’s supported by a metal frame. There’s a single leg jutting down from below the seat. The base has five points, each with a roller ball, so its owner can scoot around the office when he’s bored. It’s easy to lift and heavy enough for what I have planned. I might have fucked up with the elevator, but not even I could get gravity wrong.
“What the hell are you doing?” Annie says. “That’s not gonna stop them.”
“Got that right.”
I hurl the chair at the plate-glass window. Which doesn’t break. With a deep boing, the chair bounces back into the room, nearly braining Annie in the process.
She stumbles back, hands raised. “Jesus!”
“Sorry.”
Abruptly, whoever is hammering on the door stops. Someone shouts at the others to make room. Which means they’re going to shoot the lock off.
“Frost,” Annie says. She’s using my last name, which must mean she’s really pissed.
There’s a muffled bang from behind the door. The lock judders, but holds.
Snarling, I lift the chair high, turning it so its underside is pointed right at the glass.
Annie shakes her head. “No.”
“Yeah.”
“No. No!”<
br />
I sprint towards her. And as I move, I hurl the chair at the window.
It punches right through. As a rush of roaring wind fills the room, I grab Annie around the waist and hurl us after it as a second gunshot blows the lock off the door.
Which just about brings us up to speed.
FIVE
Teagan
Let me tell you a little something about psychokinesis.
Everyone has these ideas about what you can actually do with it. Scalpel-less surgery, using air molecules as an infinitely sharp blade. Getting a job as an assassin, and pinching off blood vessels or ripping hearts open without even touching your victim.
Yeah. No.
There are a hundred dumb Reddit threads about how many magic tricks you could pull off, or how you could make amazing smoke rings. Whoop-de-fucking-do. Also, gambling. People online love to spitball about how PK could help you win a ton of money, influencing roulette wheels or craps dice. Tanner gave me a friendly warning about that once: If I ever catch you in a casino, I will bury you in the deepest, darkest hole I can find.
Plenty of people online claim they have PK, but you only have to do about five seconds’ worth of digging to see that they’re lying out of their asses. If they really could move things with their minds, they’d either be dead or in Tanner’s programme.
It’s just me.
Plus, my ability has limits. Anything over about three hundred pounds is a no go—I’ve been up to that line before, more times than I can count, and it’s like a weightlifter reaching failure point. The harder I try, the bigger the headache is afterwards, and the more food I need to get my energy back.
And I can’t lift organic matter—no carbon or hydrogen molecules. They don’t listen to me, no matter how nicely I ask them to move. My parents were never able to figure out why, and neither could the government science geeks after Wyoming went to shit. I have an effective range of ten feet, no more.
And as for air molecules? I’m surgical, but I’m not that surgical.
It takes about ten seconds to fall from eighty-two floors up, and Annie and I have already spent about two. If I’d taken a moment to think, which is what Reggie is always telling me to do, I might have realised that while I was perfectly capable of lifting both myself and Annie—even together, we’re well under the three-hundred-pound limit—the belt buckles weren’t. I concentrated all of our weight onto two points, both of which decided this wasn’t really their scene. Snap. Even if I’d applied force to them slowly, which I tried to do, they were just never going to cut it.
All the same, give me some credit: when the buckles snap, I don’t panic. I go for the next best thing: our crappy uniforms, with all their synthetic fibres. But there’s too much organic material there, too much cotton, so the weight ends up spread across too few points. It slows us for a second, then the clothing starts to tear, my jacket and shirt splitting across my back.
I let go. The only thing worse than splatting onto the sidewalk would be doing it naked.
Annie screams, arms flailing at my back, an expression of sheer, stunned horror on her face. My stupid tie flaps against my forehead, the freezing air howling in my ears. If I don’t come up with a brilliant idea right now, there isn’t going be enough left of us for Tanner to—
The chair.
The one I used to smash the window glass. It’s tumbling just below us.
I don’t think; I just do, throwing my PK as far out as it will go. I feel the chair almost immediately and rip it towards us, fighting with the buffeting air and the chair’s kinetic energy. Almost there. Almost…
The plan is to flip the chair upright, then pull myself and Annie into the seat. Then we’ll float down on our magic chair, make a smooth landing using the roller wheels on the metal legs, and high-five before making our escape into the night. What actually happens is that the chair hits me side on, wedging my body between the base and the seat.
I grab on tight, holding onto the mesh seat like it’s a life raft. “Hang on!” I shout to Annie, my words ripped away by the rushing air.
We’re too heavy for me to stop completely, not with our momentum and our combined weight. But I can slow us down. A lot.
It’s a really weird sensation—like trying to hold a door closed when a thousand tons of water are pushing on the other side and you’re also on a moving bus. An ache blooms at the base of my skull, my body fighting to deliver enough power. The Edmonds Building rushes past us, the windows strobe-lighting as we fall. We’re perhaps three seconds from hitting the ground.
What I want to do is turn our fall into a sweet-ass glide, all the way to the ground. What actually happens is that we start to move sideways.
Really, really fast.
We zip past the buildings, maybe forty feet off the ground, lights from cars on the freeway just visible. We’re heading right for the strip of tarmac on the building’s north side: an alley filled with dumpsters and parked cars and giant potholes. The Edmonds Building is on our right, a multi-storey car park on our left.
If there’s anyone in the alley, they’re about to get one hell of a surprise.
The chair slides, threatening to slip away from me. At least Annie has stopped screaming. She’s moved on to the panicked-hyperventilation section of tonight’s programme.
“It’s OK!” My voice is just audible over the rushing air. “I’ve got th—”
“Frost, watch out!”
We’re heading straight for a sign, one advertising EASY DAY RATES! and EARLY BIRD PARKING! I swear loudly, throwing us sideways, only just managing not to splatter us across it. Unfortunately, the move tilts us, which means we start to slide off the chair’s frame. We’re ten feet off the deck, coming way too fast.
“Hang on!”
“Frost, I’m gonna fucking kill y—”
I throw every ounce of PK energy I have into the chair, pulling it back, pulling us back. We rear up like an attacking cobra, and then we’re dumped onto the ground.
We’ve got plenty of momentum left. It sends me rolling, tarmac scraping my exposed hands. A shattered bit of glass slices through my jacket, scratching the arm beneath, right before I slam into the side of a dumpster.
Things go blurry. There’s a ringing alarm going off right next to me. I stick my finger in my ear to block it out, only to discover that it’s inside my head.
I sit there, head bowed, waiting it out. When it drops to a low ringing, it’s replaced by a tidal wave of pain—one that starts at the base of my skull and goes all the way down to my toes.
“Fucking…ow.” I squeeze my eyes shut. Somewhere ahead of me, Annie is groaning.
Very slowly I get to my feet. I’m banged up, the world fuzzy at the edges, the lights above us way too bright, but at least I can stand. Nothing broken, as far as I can tell. I touch the graze on my arm, finger pushing through my torn jacket. It’s not as bad as it feels. I think I’m good.
The alley we’re in is typical downtown LA: dumpsters, bags of reeking garbage, puddles of unidentifiable brown liquid, walls so graffitied that the original surface isn’t even visible any more. The chair, its seat shredded to hell, lies nudged up against one of the dumpsters. Above us, light paints a fire escape’s shadow onto the wall. It’s hot—in the nineties, easy—and there’s the definite stench of smoke in the air, a scent that’s been hanging over the city for days as the fire chews at its northern edge.
A series of fire doors lines the Edmonds Building—new, but already starting to rust. There’s nobody around. Although there is a siren, a real one this time, getting closer by the second. Who knows what the security guards would have told the cops when they called them? Police? Someone impersonated one of us, then dived out a window on the 82nd floor. No, we don’t see a body. No, we don’t know why they did it. Please don’t hang up.
“Annie? You all right?”
Another groan answers me. She’s up on all fours, head hanging, a puddle of puke underneath her.
Amazingly, I still have my
earpiece. “Paul. We’re in the alley. North side. Come get us.”
I don’t register his reply, because right then I get real woozy. I bend over, hands on my knees until it passes. The base of my skull throbs, like it has its own heartbeat.
I stay there for a minute until it subsides, then stumble over to Annie. “Any survivors?”
She lurches away from me, moving like she’s drunk, almost slipping in a patch of puke and ending up collapsed against the wall. Her clip-on tie is gone, torn away, and there’s a nasty scrape on her cheek.
“What,” she says. “The fuck.”
“Oh come—”
“What the fuck?” Suddenly she’s just yelling, angrier than I’ve ever seen her. “What? What?!”
“You’re welcome!” What is she freaking out about. We made it, didn’t we?
Annie buries her face in her hands, then slides her arms up until they’re cradling her head. “I’m done,” she says after a long moment, letting her arms drop. “No more. No more jobs with you. I don’t care what Tanner says. Fuck you, and fuck her. We just… That was… No. Never. I’m done.”
“I didn’t see you coming up with anything.”
“I didn’t get the chance!” she roars at me. She’s shaking. Like, really shaking. Her dark skin has gone grey, and her eyes won’t stay still. “We wouldn’t even have been up there if it wasn’t for you.”
Maybe it’s the look on her face, or just the adrenaline catching up with me, because it’s then that I start to shake too.
A car horn. Loud and insistent. Carlos and Paul, parked across the alley entrance, the van sideways to us. Annie and I stumble over, still shaking, somehow managing to make it to the van without falling over. Carlos is behind the wheel, cap pulled down low over his eyes. A few yards down, on our side of the street, the garish open sign of an all-night convenience store blinks at us.
We reach the van as the side door slides open. Paul peers out, blinking behind wire-framed glasses. He’s wearing his usual striped button-down, his bald head gleaming under the street lights.
“How on earth did you get down so fast?” he says.
