Hwa had to physically lift her bad knee with her good hand in order to get up the stairs. Eventually she just sat down on the stairs gingerly—the ice—and started pushing backward on her good knee. It was probably for the best. She was already seeing stars. Probably being completely upright was a bad idea anyway.
“I could probably just go to sleep, right here,” she said, after the second flight of stairs. “That’d be a thing to do.”
When her eyes opened, she was further up the stairs.
“Ping RoFo.” She pushed up another slick stair. “Prefect, get RoFo on this shit.”
Prefect said nothing. Probably the system was trying to reach her in its own way. Hwa looked around for cameras. There was an ancient-looking dome, black and smooth like a shark’s eye, and she waved at it. She doubted it would help. Half those things were dummies anyway. She twisted around—pain searing up her sciatic nerve from her ankle to her shoulder like someone had replaced her tendons with twisted wire hangers—to look at the rest of the stairs. Far up above was a rectangle of white light. What time was it? How long had she been in the shaft? What if everyone had evacuated?
What if she was the last one in town?
She started crab-walking as fast as she could. Her breath left little clouds of steam as it hissed between her teeth. Her knee felt fuzzy. Like someone had replaced the joints with steel wool. She started reciting “My Bonny Lies over the Ocean” to herself. Not singing it so much as breathing it, using it to keep pace.
“Bring back,” she muttered, pushing herself up stair by stair, “bring back, oh bring back my bonny to me, to me…”
Her knee throbbed. Her tailbone ached. Her hands froze into claws. Sweat trickled down her back and pooled at the base of her spine. Then it cooled on her body and she shivered. Her teeth chattered. Without her earbud and her watch she was alone. No augments. Just meat. Just flesh and bone and blood and breath. A solitary figure crawling up the leg of the city, like a bedbug or a flea.
She pushed.
At the top of the stairwell, she rested. The gate to the stairwell formed a natural break from the wind, and she sat there for a while watching the snow whisper down. She could just barely make out Tower Three, and if she turned—oh, Christ, that hurt—she could see Tower Two only a little bit better. That was good—if it got too cold to snow, then she really could die of exposure.
Up ahead, there stood a set of blinking roadway blocks. They were yellow and black where they weren’t covered in snow. And beyond them stood two columns of tents, also that special shade of caution yellow, with a snowy aisle in the middle. In the special quiet made by the snow, Hwa heard radios coughing to each other.
She was almost there before someone in a bubble coat came jogging out to meet her. He wore massive mirrorshade goggles. Both were flecked with snow.
“Where you to?” he asked. She thought she recognized his voice. “Holy shit, Hwa!”
He ripped the mirrorshades off. Underneath, Wade still had the face she’d almost broken. He hadn’t left the city after all. Her vision tilted. Went sideways. At first she thought she’d fallen down. But Wade was carrying her. And running. “FATHER!”
Her vision bounced along as they cleared the roadblock. Then they were in a tent city. It smelled of instant food: oatmeal and coffee and freeze-dried orange juice. Someone cut through the crowd. Father Herlihy. The priest ushered them through the tents. The white sky turned to yellow tarp, orange cable, and dolly tracks. Someone brushed past her foot and her knee twinged and she yelped.
“Is your ankle broken?” Wade asked.
“I think my everything is broken.”
He lay her down on something. It felt like a dentist’s chair. Then he put a blanket on her that looked like foil. It was immediately, stunningly, blissfully warm.
“I rode an elevator in free fall,” she said. “Twenty floors. Twenty floors? I don’t know. Do you know in France, they don’t even count the first floor?”
“DR. MANTIS! DR. MANTIS, WE NEED YOU OVER HERE RIGHT NOW!”
Dr. Mantis swooped down from the dollies. His thorax clung to the network of steel tracking rods above, but his many eyes and claws swung low to look at her.
“Miss Go!” he chirped. “Hello. What seems to be the trouble?”
“I think I have a concussion. And my knee hurts.”
“She’s hypothermic,” Wade said.
“Oh, dear. That’s not very nice, is it?”
“My mom died,” Hwa said. “I think.”
Dr. Mantis strobed its vision into her eyes. “You are concussed. Your knee has also sustained some damage. I am going to inject your leg with freezing to bring down the swelling. There’s also a joint filler to help the cap start to seal.”
A sharp pain in her knee that dulled as she breathed. She imagined the needle as the hardest thing in the wad of jelly that was her joint. Would she ever kick again? She used that leg to pivot.
“And you need to rehydrate. This is saline.”