In reply the spider mech spun around and reared up to walk on its four hindmost legs, waving the front ones menacingly. It stretched a half dozen of its eyes at the nearest strolling passenger and whistled, “Do you look? At what do you look? I look, too! Am I food? Are you food?” Only to turn its attention on the next passenger as the first one fled. “And you, do you also look?”
Minutes later, their stretch of corridor was clear. “Quick now,” Tic whispered then, scuttling back to them, “before someone sends elevator staff to deal with us.” He reared up again and leaned against a door, flattening and spreading to cover it entirely, until Ingray could read the words AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY through its gelatinous body. Its legs seemed to have disappeared, though eyestalks protruded at seemingly random places. Ingray suppressed a tiny shudder as it pulled itself back into its not-quite-a-spider shape.
“Time to go,” said Tic, as the door snicked open. “My other mechs aren’t quite here yet so we may have to wait for a …” Footsteps sounded, and voices, someone saying, It was right up here, Officer … “Go! I’ll see you soon!”
Garal grabbed Ingray’s elbow and pulled her through the door as the spider mech scuttled up to the Safety officer who rounded the corridor’s curve. “You!” whistled the spider mech, waving three or four clawed legs, eyestalks writhing. “I will make such complaints to you!” The door closed again with a click, and Ingray and Garal stood in the grimy quiet of a service passage. “We can’t wait around, even here,” said Garal.
“I know.” Ingray took a steadying breath. She was still dizzy, though whether that was from knowing she was about to climb outside the elevator, or the close call moments ago, or from Taucris’s kiss back on the lower level, she wasn’t sure. “Let’s go.”
They found an airlock easily enough, and a rack of vacuum suits and helmets. For a few terrifying and frustrating minutes it seemed as though there wouldn’t be one to fit Garal, but e said, “Start checks on yours, I’ll look at the next airlock.” Five minutes later e was back, dragging a suit. “Yours good?” e asked. Quietly.
“Yes.” Ingray finished her last check. And then froze. It was time to put the suit on, check once more, and then go outside. Where there would be nothing between her and hard vacuum but the thin shell of the suit. She’d done it before. Had thrown up in her suit, but she’d passed the test. In theory she was fully qualified to do this, to go out into the suffocating nothing of space. Where she would die if she’d made any mistake.
“We’ll be all right,” said Garal, checking over eir own suit.
Ingray wasn’t sure if e was saying it for her benefit, or for eir own. She feared any reply would come out breathy and shaking. Feared she was hyperventilating, and yes, her tingling fingers said she was. Calm. Just stay calm. She’d done this before.
Garal made eir last check. Looked at Ingray. “Are you all right?”
“I’m scared,” admitted Ingray, and yes her voice was breathy, but it didn’t shake quite as much as she’d feared it would.
“I’m not,” said Garal, with the smallest suggestion of a smile. “I’m fucking terrified.” Ingray couldn’t manage to laugh at that. “Suit up,” Garal continued. “We go through the airlock and step out on the ledge and wait for Tic. That’s all we have to do.”
“Right,” agreed Ingray. She girded up her skirts. Shoved and pulled herself into the suit—it was more or less her size but hadn’t been made to fit someone quite as round as she was, and getting it on properly strained the limits of the suit’s adjustability. She closed all the seals and tried to pull on her helmet, but it wouldn’t sit right until she pulled out her hairpins. And then stared helplessly at the pile of pins in her hand. Keeping them wouldn’t do her much good—her hair had only stayed up as long as it had because a servant had done it, back at Netano’s house.
Garal snapped on eir own helmet and closed eir last seal. Looked a question at Ingray.
She stowed the pins in a pouch on her suit, snapped her own helmet into place, stopped herself from testing the communications—they didn’t want anyone hearing them, noticing them—and before she could think too hard about what she was doing she touched the outer airlock control and stepped through the hatch when it opened. Garal came into the lock beside her, triggered the door closure, and pressed the shiny black blob Tic had given em over the inside airlock controls. They stood, waiting for the lock to depressurize. Hopefully without sounding any alarms that might bring elevator staff. Ingray counted, trying to time her breaths, trying to keep them deep and even and not let them go jagged and gasping the way they clearly wanted.
After forever, the outside door swung open. One more breath. Another. And Ingray stepped out into sunlight.
The ledge here was two meters wide. With a rail, thank all the gods of the afterlife. Above towered the elevator cable—or really, cables, a massive bundle of them, shining white, here and there refracting the sunlight into thin rainbows. And looming above that, Hwae. Night darkened half the deep blue Iths Ocean, and east of that the Ados peninsula was laid out clear as a map, striped and whorled with a dozen shades of green. Fine, wispy clouds made a gauzy white veil over the green and brown of Southern Ustia, and though her feet were firmly on the elevator ledge Ingray clutched the rail, terrified. She’d seen this before, from inside the elevator, from inside Zenith Platform, but there it had been merely deliciously disorienting. Out here, she felt that she would slide off the ledge and tumble away into the ocean overhead.
Garal touched eir faceplate to hers. “Look at your feet, Ingray.”
“I can’t!” she gasped.
“Look at me, Ingray!”
She dragged her gaze down. Garal’s own eyes were wide, the first visible sign of fear or anxiety she had seen in em.
“There,” e said. “That’s better. Don’t look up again.” Which was nearly impossible; the broad, bright, rainbow-shot cable led so inexorably up to Hwae, so near and so huge. “If you panic and anything happens to you, you’ll never get to kiss Officer Ithesta back.”
Ingray made a breathy sound that began as a laugh and ended as a sob. “How long until Tic gets here?”
“Not long,” Garal said. “Maybe fifteen minutes?” E seemed so calm, but eir own voice trembled, just a bit.
I can’t do it, she wanted to say, but movement caught the corner of her vision. She turned her head, slowly. Carefully. A black, many-eyed spider mech scuttled along the ledge. “No, he’s here. He’s here already.” She lifted her faceplate away from Garal’s and raised her hand.