He would have laughed aloud had it been possible, unable to contain the rush of exaltation. His body might still be bound, but with the opening of his prison his ka was free.
Free? freed? feed.
Chapter Two
'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Detective-Sergeant Michael Celluci frowned at his companion. "What the hell are you babbling about?"
'Babbling? I was not babbling. I was ruminating on the monuments that man builds to man." Pushing her glasses securely into place, Vicki Nelson bent, stiff-legged, and laid both palms against the concrete at her feet.
Celluci snorted at this blatant display of flexibility- obviously intended to remind him of his limitations-tilted his head back and gazed up the side of the CN Tower. From their position at its base, foreshortening made it appear simultaneously infinite and squat, the radio antennae that extended its height, hidden behind the bulge of the restaurants and observation deck. "Cows ruminate," he grunted. "And I assume you mean man in the racial sense rather than the genetic."
Vicki shrugged, the motion almost lost in her position. "Maybe." She straightened and grinned. "But they don't call it the world's tallest free-standing phallic symbol for nothing."
'Dream on." He sighed as she grasped her left ankle and lifted the leg up until it rose into the air at a better than forty-five-degree angle. "And quit showing off. You ready to climb this thing yet?"
'Just waiting for you to finish warming up."
Celluci smiled. "Then get ready to eat my dust."
A number of charitable organizations used the one thousand, seven hundred and ninety steps of the CN Tower as a means of raising money, climbers collecting pledges per step from friends and business associates. The Heart Fund was sponsoring the current climb; as well as a starting time, both Vicki and Celluci had starting pulses measured.
'You'll find the run pretty clear," the volunteer told them as he wrote Vicki's heart rate down on a slip of paper. "You're like the six and seventh up and the others have been serious racers."
'What makes you think we aren't?" Celluci asked belligerently. With his last birthday, he'd started on the downhill run to forty and was finding himself a little sensitive about it.
'Well?" The younger man swallowed nervously-very few people do belligerent as well as the police. "? you're like both wearing sweats and normal running shoes. Climbers one to five were seriously aerodynamic."
Vicki snickered, knowing full well what had prompted Celluci's question. He glared but, recognizing he'd probably come out the worse for any comment, kept his mouth shut. With their time stamped, they ran for the stairs.
The volunteer had been both right and wrong. Neither of them cared about racing the other climbers or the tower itself, but they couldn't have been more serious about racing each other. Competition had been the basis of their relationship from the day they first met, two very intense young police constables both certain that they were the answer regardless of the question. Michael Celluci, with four years' seniority, an accelerated promotion, and a citation, had some reason for believing that. Vicki Nelson, just out of the academy, took it on faith. Four years later, Vicki had become known as "Victory" around the force, they'd discovered a number of mutual interests, and the competition had become so much a part of the way they operated that their superiors used it to the force's advantage. Four years after that, when Vicki's deteriorating eyesight compelled her to choose between a desk or leaving, the system broke down. She couldn't stay and become less than what she was, so she left. He couldn't just let her go. Words were said. It took months for the wounds left by those words to heal and more months where pride on both sides refused to make the first move. Then a threat to the city they'd both sworn to serve threw them together and a new relationship had to be forged out of the ruins of the old.
'Blocking me is cheating, you long-armed bastard!"
It turned out not to be significantly different.
The yellow metal steps switchbacking up the side of the CN Tower were no more than three and a half feet wide-easy enough for a tall man to keep one hand on each banister and use his arms to take some of the strain on the muscles of his upper body. And, incidentally, make it impossible for anyone behind to pass.
Six landings up, Vicki put on a burst of speed and slid between Celluci and the inner wall, the damp concrete scraping against her shoulder blades. She pulled out ahead, two stairs at a time, feeling Celluci climbing right on her heels. At five ten it was almost easier for her to climb taking double strides. Unfortunately, it was definitely easier for Celluci at six four.
Neither of them paused at the first water station.
The lead switched back and forth twice more, the sound of high tech rubber soles pounding down on the metal stairs reverberating throughout the enclosed space like distant thunder. Later in the day, the plexiglass sheets that separated the climbers from the view would begin to cloud over with the accumulated moisture panted out of hundreds of pairs of lungs, but this early in the morning, the skyline of Toronto fell away beside them with vertigo-inducing clarity.
Giving thanks in this one instance that she had almost no peripheral vision and therefore no idea of how high they actually were from the ground, Vicki charged past the second water station. Three hundred feet to go. No problem. Her calves were beginning to protest, her lungs to burn, but she'd be damned if she'd slow and give Celluci a chance to get past.
The stairs turned from yellow to gray, although the original color showed through where countless feet had rubbed off the second coat of paint. They were into the emergency exit stairs for the restaurant level.
Almost there? Celluci was so close she could feel his breath hot against her back. He hit the last landing seconds behind her. One, two strides to the open door. On level ground, his longer legs brought them even. Vicki made a desperate grab at the edge of the doorway and exploded out into the carpeted hall.
'Nine minutes, fifty-four seconds. Nine minutes, fifty-five seconds."
As soon as I have enough breath, I'll rub it in. For the moment, Vicki leaned against the wall, panting, heart pounding with enough force to vibrate her entire body, sweat collecting and dripping off her chin.
Celluci collapsed against the wall beside her.
One of the Heart Fund volunteers approached, stopwatch in hand. "Now then, I'll just get your finishing heart rates?"