where Ziva waited. Sloane followed her in, and Ziva closed the door behind her.
“I can set a temporary working to bar the doors,” Ziva said. “But it will deteriorate within minutes. If we need more than that, I’ll have to reset it, so don’t let me forget.”
Sloane nodded. She walked to the siphon in the floor, which was covered by a gold plate, six feet across. The tickle she had felt at the back of her neck below the Camel was now distinct pressure on both sides of her head, like someone was trying to crush her skull. There was no mistaking it anymore—the Needle was calling to her. The question was whether she wanted to answer.
Ziva was kneeling beside the siphon fortis. She had tried to lift the large metal cover with a whistle, but it didn’t budge. Now she had hooked her fingers beneath it and was pushing against its weight. “It’s resistant to magic,” she said. “I think we have to move it by hand.”
Sloane knelt beside her and braced herself against the lip of the cover. Even with both of them pushing against it, it hardly moved, and the edge bit into Sloane’s palms.
She thought of marching into the Dome, of the way the Needle had sent the front door right through the roof and made it hover.
“Shit,” Ziva said. She brought her hand down on the cover, hard. “Shit!”
“You used to live in this building, right?” Sloane said, feeling oddly detached. The Needle was another heartbeat in Sloane’s chest, a presence at her shoulder. She felt it even now, a universe away from it. And the Needle was where she always turned when she was desperate.
“Why does that matter?” Ziva sat back on her heels.
“I might have a solution,” Sloane said. “But it requires me getting to the river without going out the way we came in. Where does that door go?” She pointed to the other end of the room, where there was a rusted door. It looked small enough for a child to crawl through it, given the size of the hall.
The river was only one block north of the Camel. If she ran, she could get there and back in ten minutes.
“It’s a back door,” Ziva said. “No telling what’s out there, but you could find your way to an emergency exit.”
“Can you hold those doors?” Sloane said, gesturing to the entrance. “Just for a few minutes.”
Ziva squinted one eye at her again and then nodded.
Sloane ran for the little rusted door. Just beyond it was an empty hallway, like the one they had walked through to get into the hall, but shabbier, dirt and debris clumping in the corners, the gray stone splitting in places or missing whole chunks. It looked like a utility hallway, the pipes in the ceiling exposed.
She took a right, on a whim, and searched for the glow of an emergency exit sign. Two women pulled apart when Sloane passed them, intruding on their stolen moment. She huffed out an apology, already out of breath.
At the end of the next hallway, there was a sign directing her toward a stairwell. She burst through the door, then peered around the bottom of the stairs to check for another door. There was one, but she didn’t know where it would lead. The stairwell smelled like garbage, and she could hear footsteps above her, echoing.
She decided to take her chances. The door opened into an alley, where a line of dumpsters waited, stuffed to the brim with black garbage bags and flattened cardboard boxes. It led her to a street she didn’t recognize, but she could see the gap between the buildings ahead of her that signified the river, and she ran toward it, almost colliding with a taxi in the crosswalk. The driver honked at her and screamed something out his window, but she was already running.
Once she was across Wacker and close to the river’s edge, she slowed and climbed on top of the barrier that kept pedestrians from toppling into the water one story below. There was no time to find the stairs that led down to the river walk. Sloane’s body was burning now, tingling, aching with the need to reunite with what she had once hated so much she had mutilated herself to get rid of it.
She threw one leg over the railing and then the other, her back against the barrier . . . and then jumped.