lid. This time there was light, even if it was only dim. Other robots trundled between various machines, having their supplies of cleaning fluids refreshed and wastes flushed away before returning to the elevator and being taken to a new floor to continue their endless drudgery.
He climbed out and made his way to an area bounded by yellow lines: a safe path through the hardware for maintenance workers. Once happy that he wasn’t about to be decapitated by some swinging mechanical arm, Eddie looked around. He was in the skyscraper’s central core, so he couldn’t be far from the elevator shafts. The metallic rumble of a high-speed elevator car came from nearby. He followed the path toward the sound and opened a door—to find himself at the edge of a man-made precipice.
“Shafted,” he said, peering at the vertiginous drop beyond the safety railing. A bank of eight elevator shafts descended into darkness, the saucer-sized maintenance lights between the doors across the rectilinear crevasse shrinking to pinpricks far below.
The hiss of fast-moving cables and a rising rush of displaced air prompted him to move back from the edge as a car rocketed up the shaft, stopping a few floors above. Eddie looked up. He was six levels from the fiftieth floor, but this block of elevators only went as high as the forty-ninth. He needed one that went all the way …
A short distance along the narrow walkway, he found a guide in the form of a floor diagram on an electrical switchbox. The text was Japanese, but the numbers were self-explanatory. There were two main banks of elevators, eight shafts in each—and another two shafts set apart from the rest. Number one, he assumed, was Takashi’s private elevator, making the other the maintenance access to what he took to be a machine floor above the penthouse. He got his bearings and set out for the latter.
This shaft turned out to be narrower than the others. The car, out of sight somewhere below, would hold three or four people at most. The cables were stationary, which was a relief—he could use the girders forming the shaft’s framework to climb up the remaining six floors. Or, a thought striking him, seven floors. If he went to the machine level rather than the penthouse, there would be far less chance of being spotted by surveillance cameras or tripping an alarm, and there could be air vents or access hatches that would allow him to pick the best entry point.
Seven floors it was, then. He carefully clambered over the guardrail and edged across a girder until he reached one of the vertical struts, then started his ascent. It took less than half a minute to reach the next floor. Six to go. The next stage took the same amount of time, the third a little longer as his body began to feel the strain. It wasn’t the climb itself that was wearing, but the effort of maintaining a grip on the featureless steel. Only the pressure of his hands and feet kept him from a very long plunge.
Three floors to go, and he paused to let the aching in his muscles fade. He took out the torch and shone it upward. There were the doors to the penthouse … which had extra wiring around them. Alarms. Going the extra floor to the machine level was the right decision.
He set off again. Grip the strut, push his feet against it for support, bring up his hands one at a time, hold tight, raise his feet, repeat. The cramp in his hands returned—
An echoing metallic clack from below, the grumble of machinery building up speed … and the cables started to move.
The elevator was rising.
Shit! He looked down, seeing the tiny pinprick lights going out one by one as the car blotted them out. It was maybe twenty floors below him—and picking up speed.
He was halfway between levels. There was no way he could climb up to the next before it reached him, but if he dropped back down, the slightest mistake would pitch him down the shaft.
No choice. He swung sideways, let go, fell—
The drop was about eight feet, onto unyielding, narrow steel. Even bending his legs to absorb the impact, Eddie still felt pain slam up through his feet into his knees and hips. He wobbled, grabbing at the strut as he pivoted to push himself back against the wall …
One foot slipped.
Fear shot through him. He clawed at the metal frame, fingertips desperately