He tried again.
ERROR, WRONG PASS CODE.
Unthank grunted, once, very loudly. Did it have to be so hard?
ONE MORE ATTEMPT ALLOWED. IF ENTERED IN ERROR AGAIN, CLEARANCE WILL BE SUSPENDED. CHECK EMAIL TO RESET PASS CODE. THANK YOU!
Unthank waved his hands impatiently at the little screen above the keypad. “Okay, okay, I get it!” he hollered. He channeled his thoughts; he calmed his quivering digits. He thought of the kids, of the orphans. He thought of what he owed them.
He tried again.
The elevator stopped. It hadn’t just come to a smooth halt, like it would if it were to arrive at a floor, but jerked and froze. It had just cleared Elsie’s feet; she felt a tingling sensation over her entire body, as if she were a freshly torn strip of Velcro. Looking down, she could only assume the worst: that somehow Harry’s body had stopped the downward momentum of the elevator. She called out weakly, “Harry?”
Ruthie, having just extricated herself from her hiding place, called down to Elsie. “Are they okay?” she shouted desperately.
Elsie shook her head, mouthing: “I don’t know.”
A minute passed. No sound came in response. Elsie felt a sob welling in her chest.
Suddenly, from a shallow chink in the wall, she saw two dirty hands reach up and grab the top of the elevator car. Shortly, a face presented itself: It was Harry. Squeezing his thick frame between the car and the wall of the shaft, he managed to get himself onto the top of the elevator. His face was streaked with grease, and little red scratches crisscrossed his forehead. He had a wild-eyed look on his face. He turned around and thrust a hand back down the little crevice he’d climbed through and brought it back out with another hand firmly in its grip. It was Oz, who arrived at the top of the car similarly covered in soot and lacerations.
“It stopped . . . ,” mumbled Harry once Oz had been pulled from the crack between the wall and the car. “Just . . .” He held his greasy fingers up, his thumb and forefinger only inches apart.
Elsie wanted to hug him. She wanted to throw her arms around him and just fiercely hug the boy, this greasy boy. But before she could act on the very friendly and comradely instinct, they all heard the sound of whoever it was inside the elevator car they were standing on, trying to get out.
It sounded like a herd of rhinos contained in a small metal box.
Suddenly, a small door at their feet flew open, slamming back with a loud clang.
Elsie looked into the elevator, expecting to see rhinoceri. Instead, she saw two frothing-mad stevedores.
“Let’s GO!” shouted Elsie, and the four of them—Elsie, Harry, Oz, and Ruthie—leapt back onto the ladder and began climbing as if their lives depended on it, which, in point of fact, they did.
They managed to buy themselves some time; the stevedores had a hard go of it, extracting their broad frames from the small opening in the top of the elevator. When they finally managed it, two genies being sucked from the opening of a bottle, they ground their teeth angrily—so angrily that Elsie could actually hear the grating noise from her position on the ladder, twenty feet above them.
“ORPHANS!” shouted one of them, waving his overlarge pipe wrench above his head. “The attack is a DECOY!”
“UNNNTHAAANK!” shouted the other, rather dramatically.
The ladder gave a little quake as the two stevedores, one after the other, clambered onto the nearest rungs and gave chase to the duct-rats.
What the stevedores had over the children in terms of strength and arm span, the Unadoptables well made up for by sheer agility, speed, and a seemingly perpetual supply of adrenaline. They flew up the rungs of the ladder as if it were a web and they were its spider-creators, dashing for a fly caught in the center. Elsie took up the rear, keeping an eye on the progress of their pursuers; they were not far behind.
“Move, guys, move!” she shouted to the three climbers ahead of her.
“We command you to stop!” shouted one of the stevedores. He pulled his pipe wrench from a loop at his leg and swung it in Elsie’s direction. “I’m going to kneecap the lot of you!”
This gave Elsie a needed extra jolt of energy and she doubled her efforts, climbing the ladder rung over rung.
The elevator shaft wheeled below them; the distance, and thereby the potential free fall, to the stopped elevator car grew and grew. The stevedores continued to howl; the duct-rats climbed as fast as their little bodies could manage.
Elsie craned her head upward; she could see the clambering feet of Ruthie, leading the pack some thirty feet above her. “Keep an eye out, Ruthie!” she shouted. “The vent!”
Per the tower’s blueprint, Elsie knew there was a ventilation duct that let out into the service elevator shaft; it led, after some meandering, into the panic room itself.
“I think I see it!” Ruthie shouted back. She pointed upward and began climbing again. Elsie looked down at the approaching stevedores; they were gaining, fast. She slapped the shoe sole of Harry, who was just above her.
“Faster, Harry!” she shouted.
Ruthie hollered her arrival at the vent; it was just a few feet off the rungs of the ladder. The girl pulled her screwdriver from her pocket and began carefully removing the screws from the cover’s four corners. Soon, the traffic on the ladder slowed as each kid’s progress was halted by the one before them.
Elsie stopped some yards below Ruthie’s frantic activity, just below Harry, and locked her elbow around a rung of the ladder. “Don’t come any closer!” she shouted to the approaching stevedores. “I’ll kick you in the face!” She swung her leg around threateningly.
The stevedore in the lead gave a leering smile. “Won’t do you no good, kid,” he said. “You ain’t gonna last on this ladder. Gonna pick you like a ripe apple and give you a toss. Gonna make applesauce with ya.” He kept climbing, rung over rung.
Trying to ignore the stomach-turning image the stevedore’s threat had evoked, Elsie looked up, watching Ruthie’s progress, willing her fingers to work faster. The girl handled the screwdriver carefully, unthreading the screws and letting them fall into the open shaft below. “Two more to go!” she shouted.
Elsie felt something at her ankle; it was the meaty hand of one of the stevedores, grabbing her shoe. She screamed and kicked; the man swore loudly as her toe connected with the bridge of his nose.
“Move, Harry! UP!” she shouted.
The boy bolted a few feet up the ladder until he was practically on top of Oz. Elsie scrambled the short distance the boy had bought her, but still their pursuers came on.
“You’ll pay for that, missy,” said the freshly kicked stevedore, a palm held to his face. He lifted his hand away and looked at the results: His sausagelike fingers were stained with blood. “Oh, you’ll pay. You’re gonna fly.” He swatted his hand upward again, just brushing the bottom of Elsie’s feet.
“Only one more to go!” shouted Ruthie; a little screw went whizzing by Elsie’s face.
“Get going!” Elsie yelled at Harry.
“I can’t! Oz’s right here!” It was true; the boys were practically embracing on the ladder.
CLANG. The vent cover came loose and cartwheeled down the elevator shaft, banging its way down to the car far below. Ruthie swung away from the ladder and climbed into the shaft, followed close behind by Oz, having unbraided himself from Harry’s embrace.
Suddenly, Elsie felt a rough pain at her ankle; she looked down to see that the stevedore had her foot in his grip.
“Got you,” he said, calmly, quietly.
Elsie screamed and jerked her body around, trying to lose the man’s grip, but it held tight. Harry had already started to scramble into the duct when he heard Elsie’s shout. Reversing his steps, he climbed out and, firmly catching a ladder rung in the crook of one elbow, reached his hand down to her.
“Grab hold!” he yelled.
Elsie shot her hand up and laced it tightly with Harry’s. Suddenly, she was being torn in two directions, her spin
e stretching like a piece of taffy as the two opposing forces fought against each other.
Something had to give.
Finally, something did.
It was Elsie’s shoe. It glided off the heel of her foot like the burned outer skin of a marshmallow too long over the campfire, and remained in the grasp of the suddenly bewildered stevedore. Elsie shot upward, buoyed by the pull of Harry’s strong arm. They clambered, arm over arm, the remaining distance on the ladder, and within moments the two of them were crawling into the safety of the ventilation duct.
They could hear the wild and enraged cries of the stevedores, just at the entrance to the vent. They even heard a few pained grunts as the stevedores evidently tried to fit their massive frames into the small profile of the duct opening—to no avail. The duct-rats turned a corner in the tiny corridor, and the stevedores’ cries soon echoed into nonsense and were assimilated into the ambient noises of the building itself.
Unthank stared at the television monitor breathlessly, watching the scene play out in vivid black and white. He had his hands to his lips, his mouth slightly open. When he saw the children escape through the duct, he couldn’t help letting out a little victorious yelp.
“Yes!” he shouted, shaking his fist at the screen. “YES!” He then broke out into a song, a song he’d been storing up for a while now, and he belted it loudly in the privacy of the small room. His feet cut a kind of shuffling tap dance on the laminate floor.
And then it dawned on him what must come next. His hand dropped to his side and he backed out of the room, letting the flickering monitors televising the very real revolution that was happening within its many-eyed purview fall away. He closed the door. He locked it. He patted the little box in his pocket and turned around, heading for the stairway and from there to climb the remaining floors to the top of the tower. To Wigman’s office. While he climbed, he remembered.
“You do the honors?” Jacques had said to him, there in the half-light of the saboteurs’ hideout, safe away from the onlookers. The room was alive, so many people, so many children, planning this elaborate caper.
“Yes,” he’d said. “I do the honors.”
“One charge, top floor. Wait till the kids are out.”
“One charge, top floor.” He’d stopped there. “What if the kids aren’t out, tra la tra lee?”
Jacques had shaken his head, hadn’t he? “No singing,” that’s what he’d said. Another reminder. Had he answered the question, though? Unthank had asked him again:
“What if they aren’t out?”
“The kids will be out,” Jack—Jacques—had said.
“And if they’re not?” Unthank had pressed. He’d remembered.
Jacques stared at his old compatriot, hard. He perhaps hadn’t expected blowback from a reportedly crazy person. “Then we’ve got a few more martyrs for the cause.” That’s what he’d said. “All in the service of bringing down the greatest industrial power this country has known. We’re dealing the killing blow here, Joffrey. No time for cowards and quitters.”
“No time,” repeated Unthank. “Yes. No time.”
And so here he was, panting wildly as he walked the eight stories to the thirtieth floor, the thing in his pocket weighing more and more with every flight he climbed.
CHAPTER 20
The Kiss; Across the Threshold
Martha Song was dreaming. Or at least she thought she was. She was standing in front of a large crowd of people, receiving an award. Someone was standing near her; she turned to see who it was and immediately recognized the man as the mayor of Portland himself. She’d never actually known who the mayor was—Unthank had kept the orphanage under a pretty serious information lockdown—but it was as if her unconscious self was implying that the man in front of her—tidy three-piece suit, horn-rimmed glasses, neatly pomaded hair—was, in fact, the mayor. She must’ve remained suspicious, as, out of the ether, a sash suddenly appeared over the man’s shoulder, reading MAYOR OF PORTLAND. The bespectacled man pointed to the sash, smiling.
“Oh,” said Martha. “Hi.”
“It is my utmost pleasure to present to you, Martha Song, the key to the City of Portland,” the mayor said, speaking into a funny spaceship-like microphone. The jubilant crowd that stretched out into the horizon cheered loudly. The mayor continued, “For your hardships, for your sacrifices. Just so you know they have not gone unnoticed.”
“Well, thanks,” said Martha, bowing her head so that something could be placed over it. It felt strange, the award, and Martha put her hand up to her face, feeling the wispy tendrils of a long, gray beard.
She looked up and saw that she was suddenly in the middle of a very dark chamber, made of smooth stone. A small glint of light came in from a barred window, high above. Her hands were dirty; she saw that she’d been using them to dig a tunnel. The opening to this tunnel presented itself, clawed out of the corner of the stone wall. She spat into her palm and crouched low, preparing to continue her labors.
That was when she was shaken awake. An alarm was sounding. Soft, thudding explosions could be heard somewhere, far off, like pillows dropping from a great height. She opened her eyes.
“Elsie?” she managed. Another thing presented itself to her: The back of her head was slightly damp and pounded with a very rare kind of dull pain. The blur of her eyes gave way, and the girlish contours of the nine-year-old’s face came into focus. “How did you—”
“We don’t have time!” shouted Elsie. She was out of breath; it seemed that she’d just undergone some great travail to be there, looming over Martha like an orbiting planet. “What happened to Carol?”
It all came wheeling back to her: They’d just been sitting there, in the room. The room that was not the dusky basement of some craggy castle, but in fact the weird room that led off from Brad Wigman’s office. They’d been there, Martha and Carol, when the first explosion rocked the building, sending a tremulous shake up to this, the top floor, like a shiver up a spine. They’d been in the middle of reading, hadn’t they? She’d dropped the book and locked eyes with Carol, even though Carol couldn’t see. That was when the door to the room had drawn back and that man Roger had appeared, strangely dressed in some kind of ceremonial robe.
“He closed the door behind him,” Martha continued to explain, lifting herself onto her elbows, “murmuring something about a book, about how easy it had been. Then he grabbed Carol, really hard, by the arm. I jumped up to stop him and he hit me over the head with something. A bottle, maybe? I don’t know. It hurt. I fell. Everything kind of went dark. And that’s when you showed up.”
More of her fellow Unadoptables were now appearing, as if materializing from the walls. She rubbed her eyes and tried to refocus. “Oz? Harry? Ruthie? What are you all doing here?” She couldn’t help but feel a warm glow of relief spread through her chest.
The three other children, all piled into the small room, had the same look of desperation on their faces as they studied the room’s every corner with the flightiness of spooked jackrabbits.
Another thing was happening, something that Martha realized had somehow figured into her dreamlike unconsciousness: Someone was pounding on the wall. Martha sat up; the other children froze. A voice came through, a voice dipped in a dialect that sounded like something one might hear pealing away as one rode a belled troika across the Russian steppe.
“I demand the door is opened!”
The children all recognized the voice: It was the voice of their old orphanage matron, Desdemona Mudrak.
“No!” shouted Elsie, taking initiative. “Not until you tell us what happened to Carol!”
Silence reigned on the other side of the wall; Desdemona was evidently rejiggering her circuits to these strange new phenomena. Apparently Carol was not in the room, but instead had been replaced by one of the other orphans—an orphan who had not, to her best recollection, been in the room before.
“Who is speaking?” she called.
“It’s Elsie Mehlberg, Miss
Mudrak,” cried Elsie. “And we’re here to save our friends.”
“Carol is not in the room? Not Mr. Swindon, neither?”
Elsie glanced around the room, as if to confirm. The room was barely ten feet square; its interior decoration was limited to a wall of shelves faced by two chairs, one of which was toppled over. The other now carried the weight of Martha Song, who had her head in her hands. “Nope,” said Elsie.
Desdemona seemed to chew on this information for a second before saying, “Open door. I help you.”
Elsie looked around. “There’s no door.”
“There is,” came the response. “Keypad is below shelf.”
Sure enough, a small ten-key calculator-like pad presented itself below the first shelf on the far wall.
“Punch in five-eight-three pound key nine,” instructed Desdemona.
Elsie did so, and the door slid open. There, standing silhouetted by the lighting in the gigantic room beyond her, stood Desdemona Mudrak. She eyed the five children in the small room and frowned. “That TУΠИЦЯ,” she said, directed at the man who was not present, the man who had scuttled off with Carol. Elsie guessed it had been a bad word. “What happened?”
“You tell me,” said Martha. “We were in here one moment, next moment your guy comes in wearing a dress and hits me over the head. Grabbed Carol and”—she made an explosion noise with her lips—“vanished.”
“Elevator,” said Desdemona. “They take secret elevator.”
“Right!” shouted Elsie, remembering herself. “They didn’t just vanish.”
“There was an elevator in here?” asked Martha, suddenly very deflated.
“Secret elevator,” qualified Desdemona. “Required access pass. Roger must know pass.”
“He didn’t need to know the pass. The security is turned off,” said Elsie. “Mr. Unthank did that. That’s our escape route.”
Desdemona, on hearing her former boyfriend’s name, seemed to lapse into a silent stupor. As if moving by a control that was not her own, she walked into the room and proceeded to peel back a panel on the other side of the small space. It rolled sideways fluidly, following unseen tracks, revealing the twin metal doors of a rather small elevator. An illuminated button, the size of a silver dollar, was inset in the panel to the left of the doors and it flashed a few times; an upward-pointing red arrow, lit, suggested that the elevator had just deposited its load and was in the process of returning to the top floor.