Superior Saturday (The Keys to the Kingdom 7)

Both chains moved at the same rate – about as fast as Arthur could run, he gauged. As soon as he saw them, he knew that this was how the grease monkeys were going to get higher up in the tower.

Alyse stopped and gestured, and the line of grease monkeys spread out to gather around her.

'You know the drill,' she said. 'But we've got two washed-between-the-ears folk with us today, so we'll go over it again. This is the north-east Big Chain, which provides the main motivation power for all the north-east Little Chains. Because it's the Big Chain, we can travel two per link. We get on together, and we leave together. If you see the link looks oily or has a problem, you shout "Wait" before your partner gets aboard it, and you take the next. Now, let's see-'

She took a piece of paper out of a pocket and unfolded it, at the same time hopping to the right to avoid a sudden downsplash.

'We're helping the automatons do a move today. There's someone going up from Level 6995 to Level 61012, and across forty-two offices on the diagonal chain. We'll do the vertical first and make it as quick as we can – we don't want to give this lucky chap's neighbours time to cause trouble. So we get off at 6995. Everyone got that? Suze and Ray?'

'Yes,' said Arthur. Suzy nodded.

'Good,' said Alyse. 'Ray, come over here. You'll jump on the first link with me, and Suze, you jump on the second with Vithan.'

Arthur splashed over to Alyse's side. She held out her hand commandingly and took his, almost dragging him toward the rising chain before he caught up.

'The trick is not to jump, because you'll probably fall,' Alyse cautioned. 'You just sidle up close and then step onto the rising link as it comes up.'

'Whatever you say,' said Arthur.

It wouldn't be so bad if only the chain wasn't going so fast, he thought. I could get my leg torn off here . . .

'Come right up to it,' Alyse instructed. They walked closer to the chain, moving around so they faced the open link and were only a step away. Arthur could feel the rush of the chain's movement, too close for comfort if a link swayed out of line. It still looked to be going too fast to simply step on.

'You ready?' asked Alyse.

'Yes,' said Arthur, and he was – until a huge shower of water landed on top of him, so much water that the peak of his cap collapsed into his face and he leant back and almost went down on one knee. In the middle of it all, he heard Part Six of the Will.

Arthur! You have to come and get me in the –

With a jerk, Alyse pulled him forward. Blinded by his collapsed cap and all the water in his eyes, Arthur had no choice but to step out, not knowing whether he was with her or had fallen that deadly half a step behind that would mean he would miss the inside of the link and instead fall into the grate and be mashed to bits by the next massive piece of the monster chain.

He stretched out and his foot went down . . .

THIRTEEN

LEAF'S EYES NARROWED and she blinked hard several times. Arthur had vanished. One second he was there, and then he wasn't.

She looked around and scowled. Not only had Arthur disappeared but everyone else had become frozen –

The army is going to fire nukes at somewhere very close by, Leaf suddenly remembered. At one minute past midnight. So why I am standing here with my mouth open like some stupid goldfish?

'Arthur!' she shouted again. Then she started running, out through the ward with its frozen statues of sleepers. 'Arthur!'

No one answered her. Leaf stopped at the end of the ward and looked around. Not only was everyone frozen, but there was also a kind of weird red light around them. Like a faint aura that she could only see when she looked out of the corner of her eyes. That same red glow was around the ward clock, high on the wall, which was stuck at three minutes to twelve.

Or not stuck. As Leaf looked, the red haze vanished. The minute hand sprang forward, and simultaneously the ward came alive with shuffling sleepers. Leaf heard someone call out from the office. Not Arthur – a woman's voice. Probably Vess or Martine.

Two minutes! thought Leaf in panic. There's not enough time to do anything. We're all going to die!

The clock stopped. The sleepers became petrified once more. The red aura effect came back.

But Leaf could still hear the woman's voice, and it got louder and louder until Martine burst into the ward.

'What is going on? Where's Lord Arthur?'

'I don't know,' Leaf said. 'Is there anything underneath this hospital? I mean underground levels . . . even a bomb shelter?'

'I haven't been here for twenty years!' exclaimed Martine. 'Ask Vess.'

Leaf looked around, then pointed. Vess was standing frozen in a corner of the ward.

'Oh,' Martine said. 'Well, twenty years ago there were operating theatres on B3, and there was a bomb shelter once. I mean, this place was built in the fifties, so what do you expect?'

'We have to get everyone down there,' said Leaf firmly. 'You and me. As quickly as we can.'

'But they're like statues . . .'

'We'll wheel them in beds. Two or three to a bed. I wonder if the elevators work? The lights do.' Leaf saw the hesitation on Martine's face. 'Come on – help me load these two into this bed.'

'I don't understand,' Martine said. 'I thought that once I finally got back home, everything would be all right. But I still don't understand anything. Why are we taking everyone downstairs? Why do we need a bomb shelter?'

'Arthur said the army is going to nuke East Area Hospital at 12:01 because it's a plague nexus. And East Area is not so far from here. Arthur's done something to stop time, I guess, but it restarted a moment ago. It could restart again in a second, or a minute, who knows? Please, we have to get going!'

'No,' said Martine. 'No.'

She turned and ran away sobbing, crashing through the swing doors and disappearing.

Leaf stared after her for a microsecond, then went and examined the closest hospital bed. It had wheels with brakes on them, which she clicked off. There was already a sleeper in the bed, so she grabbed hold of the rail and pulled the bed out and swung it around. It was harder than she'd expected, possibly because the bed had not been moved in a long time.

'You're number one,' she said to the man asleep in the bed. 'We'll pick up Aunt Mango on the way, and that'll be two. After you, I'll only have approximately one thousand nine hundred and ninety-eight people to get to safety. In two and a half minutes.'

It took Leaf a lot longer than two minutes to find the elevators, and then she was dismayed to find that they weren't working. Clearly, things that stayed the same from one moment to the next – like lightglobes – continued to work while things that moved were stuck in place. Luckily, there was a map next to the elevator bank that showed where there was a wheelchair ramp to get to the lower floors .

She'd loaded not only her aunt Mango but two other people onto the bed. They were the two smallest she could find in the immediate vicinity of her aunt, but even so, her back ached from dragging them across the floor and then levering them onto the bed. They actually were like statues to move, though fortunately ones made of flesh and blood, not marble. Still, their rigidity made them difficult to shift and manoeuvre.

There was another wall map near the top of the ramp, but it didn't indicate where the operating theatres used to be, or the old bomb shelter. Leaf would just have to find them through trial and error. As she wheeled the bed along, she noticed a frozen TV at one of the nurse's stations. The corner of the screen said it was 11:57, and a video image of some news was paused mid-sentence. The newscaster's mouth was wide open and a frozen type crawl across the bottom said only measures may include drastic.

Once she got to the bottom floor, she saw it had long been deserted. It was dusty, there were cobwebs trailing from the ceiling, and only one in three ceiling light panels worked.

But there was also a faded sign on the wall, and colour-coded trails on the floor, which she could just make out through the dust. The red trail was to the operating theatres and there was a blue trail to something euphemistically called 'Survival Centre,' which was almost certainly the bomb shelter.

Leaf pushed the bed into the corridor, then left it to scout out where she should push it to, her running footsteps sending up clouds of dust as she raced along the corridor.

The Survival Centre was a disappointment. It was definitely a bomb shelter, featuring a reinforced door with a hydraulic wheel to open and shut it. But it was way too small and could only ever have sheltered perhaps twenty people standing up. All its pipes and fittings had been removed as well, leaving ugly holes and hanging wires. Leaf figured she might be stuck wherever she was going to be for some time, and she didn't want that place to have no toilet or running water.

She raced on, flinging open doors. Most of the rooms were small and useless, but the operating theatre complex was more promising. Though it had been cleared out, there were four big operating theatres clustered around a large central room that had several sinks with taps that worked, and there was a bathroom with at least one flushing toilet reached from the corridor outside.

Leaf propped the doors open and ran back to get her first bed-load. As she pushed the bed back to the theatre complex, she wondered what on earth she was going to do. There was no way she could bring all the sleepers down here on beds. Even loading them up was very hard for her, given that nearly all of them were bigger than her, some of them weighed at least twice what she did, and their rigidity just added to the level of difficulty. She would be exhausted before she transported a dozen of them, even if she could do that before time restarted for everyone else.

I'll have to just pick out the smallest, she thought. And do my best.

'What have you got me into now, Arthur?' she said aloud. 'And where have you gone?'

FOURTEEN

ARTHUR DIDN'T FEEL a sudden shock of pain as he was mangled by the rising chain, and Alyse was still holding his hand, so he flipped back the peak of his cap and shook his head to get the water out of his eyes.

'Careful!' said Alyse. 'No sudden moves. Grab hold of the ring, there.'

They were standing in the chain link that was rapidly rising up through the middle of the stacked office units. Arthur grabbed the ring welded into the link's left inner wall, and Alyse let go of his hand to nonchalantly step over and hold the ring on the other side.

'Good view of one of the Drasils coming up,' Alyse pointed out. 'Or as good a view as you can get with the rain. Level 6222 is always empty, so you can see through it.'

'Why is it empty?' asked Arthur. 'And what's a Drasil?'

He was still wondering what the Will had tried to say, and why it had only spoken to him at that moment, and for such a brief time, so he forgot to put on the vacant, gormless expression of the recently washed-between-the-ears.

Alyse looked at him sharply before answering, but Arthur's mind was still on the Will and he didn't notice.

'Dunno why they're empty. There's empty offices from 6222 to 6300, at 6733 to 6800, and I've heard there's a bunch just below the top as well, whatever the top is now. It's probably near 61700, or something like that.'

'Sixty-one thousand seven hundred levels?' Arthur was paying attention now. 'But each of the office cubes is about ten feet high, which would make the tower six hundred thousand feet high-'

'Nah, the levels just have a six in front for some reason. They start at sixty-one,' said Alyse. 'Tradition, I suppose. Depending on where the top has got to this week, it'll be about seventeen thousand feet. I'd love to see up there.'

'We don't go up that far?' asked Arthur, somewhat reassured.

'Not yet, we haven't,' said Alyse. 'Other gangs do a bit up there. Most of the top construction work is done by automatons. Hey, triple two's coming up. Look that way.'

Arthur stared out at the offices flashing by, blurred images of green lamps and different-coloured umbrellas and Denizens in black or dark-grey coats hunched over identical desks.

Then that view suddenly disappeared. Arthur could see the skeleton of the tower, empty office units that were just cubes of wrought iron, with exposed horizontal and vertical driving chains here and there, and the network of pneumatic message pipes. The view was broken in places by closed vertical shafts or walled-off rooms, but for the most part he could see through and out of the tower to the rain-swept sky beyond.

Far off in the distance, there was something he thought was another tower – a dark, vertical smudge on the horizon that went up and up until it disappeared into the sky.

'Good view of that Drasil today,' said Alyse. 'I wouldn't mind climbing one of them too, if it weren't for the insects.'

'Insects?' Arthur didn't like the sound of that. He wanted to ask more about what a Drasil was, but he had finally noticed that Alyse was looking at him suspiciously, and he was wondering if he had pushed the washed-out memory excuse too far.

'Yes, Sunday's guard insects that patrol the Drasils. And the trees defend themselves too, I've heard. You know, now that you're clean, Ray, you don't look much like a Piper's child.'

'I don't?' asked Arthur. The cascade of water had taken all the mud off his face.

'Nope.' Alyse had her hand on her wrench, and her eyes behind her rain-washed goggles were very cold.