She forced herself to descend slowly and carefully, pressing herself flat against the rungs whenever the car went by. By the time she had descended perhaps fifty or sixty floors, the building had come awake; all of the cars were in constant motion, and when they went past her, she could hear men talking excitedly inside them.
Light flooded into the shaft several floors below. The doors had been forced open. A couple of Fists thrust their heads out carefully into the shaft and began looking up and down, shining torches here and there. Several floors below them, more Fists pried another door open; but they had to pull their heads in rapidly as the ascending car nearly decapitated them.
She had imagined that Madame Ping's was playing host to an isolated cell of Fists, but it was now clear that most if not all of the building had been taken over. For that matter, all of Pudong might now be a part of the Celestial Kingdom. Nell was much more profoundly isolated than she had feared.
The skin of her arms glowed yellow-pink in the beam of a torch shone up from below. She did not make the mistake of looking down into the dazzling light and did not have to; the excited voice of the Fist below her told her that she had been discovered. A moment later, the light vanished as the ascending elevator interposed itself between Nell and the Fists who had seen her.
She recalled Harv and his buds elevator-surfing in their old building and reckoned that this would be a good time to take up the practice. As the car rose toward her, she jumped off the ladder, trying to give herself enough upward thrust to match its velocity. She landed hard on the roof, for it was moving far more rapidly than she could jump. The roof knocked her feet out from under her, and she fell backward, slamming her arms out as Dojo had taught her so that she absorbed the impact with her fists and forearms, not her back.
More excited talking from inside the car. The access panel on the roof suddenly flew into the air, driven out of its frame by a well-delivered kick from below. A head popped out of the open hatch; Nell skewered it on her knife. The man tumbled down into the car.
There was no point in waiting now; the situation had gone into violent motion, which Nell was obliged to use. She rolled onto her belly and kicked both feet downward into the hatch, spun down into the car, landed badly on the corpse, and staggered to one knee. She had barked the point of her chin on the edge of the hatch as she fell tjirough and bitten her tongue, so she was slightly dazed. A gaunt man in a black leather skullcap was standing directly in front of her, reaching for a gun, and while she was shoving her knife up through the center of his thorax, she bumped into someone behind her. She jumped to her feet and spun around, terrified, readying the knife for another blow, and discovered a much more terrified man in a blue coverall, standing by the elevator's control panel, holding his arms up in front of his face and screaming.
Nell stepped back and lowered the point of the knife. The man was wearing the uniform of a building services worker and had obviously been yanked away from whatever he had been doing and put in charge of the elevator's controls. The man whom Nell had just killed, the one in the black leather skullcap, was some sort of low-level official in the rebellion and could not be expected to demean himself by punching the buttons himself.
"Keep going! Up! Up!" she said, pointing at the ceiling. The last thing she wanted was for him to stop the elevator at Madame Ping's.
The man bowed several times in quick succession and did something with the controls, then turned and smiled ingratiatingly at Nell.
As a Coastal Republic citizen working in services, he knew a few words of English, and Nell knew a few of Chinese. "Down below— Fists?" she said.
"Many Fist."
"Ground floor-Fists?"
"Yes, many Fist ground floor."
"Street— Fists?"
"Fist, army have fight in street."
"Around this building?"
"Fist around this building all over."
Nell looked at the elevator's control paneclass="underline" four columns of tightly spaced buttons, color-coded according to each floor's function: green for shopping, yellow for residential, red for offices, and blue for utility floors. Most of the blue floors were below ground level, but one of them was fifth from the top.
"Building office?" she said, pointing to it.
"Yes."
"Fists there?"
"No, Fist all down below. But Fist on roof!"
"Go there."
When the elevator reached the fifth floor from the top, Nell had the man freeze it there, then climbed on top and trashed its motors so that it would remain there. She dropped back into the car, trying not to look at the bodies or smell the reek of blood and other body fluids that had gotten all over it, and that were now draining out the open doors and dripping down the shaft. It would not take long for any of this to be discovered.
She had some time, though; all she had to do was decide how to make use of it. The maintenance closet had a matter compiler, just like the one Nell had used to make her weapons, and she knew that she could use it to compile explosives and booby-trap the lobby. But the Fists had explosives of their own and could just as well blow the top floors of the building to kingdom come.
For that matter, they were probably down in some basement control room watching traffic on the building's Feed network. Use of the M.C. would simply announce her location; they would shut off the Feed and then come after her slowly and carefully. She took a quick tour of the offices, sizing up her resources.
Looking out the panoramic windows of the finest office suite, she saw a new state of affairs in the streets of Pudong. Many of the skyscrapers had been rooted in lines from the foreign Feeds and were now dark, though in some places flames vented from broken windows, casting primitive illumination over the streets a thousand feet below. These buildings had mostly been evacuated, and so the streets were crowded with far more people than they could really handle. The plaza immediately surrounding this particular building had been staked out by a picket line of Fists and was relatively uncrowded.
She found a windowless room with mediatronic walls that bore a bewildering collage of images: flowers, details of European cathedrals and Shinto temples, Chinese landscape art, magnified images of insects and pollen grains, many-armed Indian goddesses, planets and moons of the solar system, abstract patterns from the Islamic world, graphs of mathematical equations, head shots of models male and female. Other than that, the room was empty except for a model of the building that stood in the center of the room, about Nell's height. The model's skin was mediatronic, just like the skin of the building itself, and it was currently echoing (as she supposed) whatever images were being displayed on the outside of the building: mostly advertising panels, though some Fists had apparently come in here and scrawled graffiti across them.
On top of the model rested a stylus— just a black stick pointed on one end-and a palette, covered with a color wheel and other controls. Nell picked them up, touched the tip of the stylus to a green area on the palette's color wheel, and drew it across the surface of the model. A glowing green line appeared along the track of the stylus, disfiguring an ad panel for an airship line.
Whatever other steps Nell might take in the time she had left, there was one thing she could do quickly and easily here. She was not entirely sure why she did it, but some intuition told her that it might be useful; or perhaps it was an artistic urge to make something that would live longer than she would, even if only by a few minutes. She began by erasing all of the big advertising panels on the upper levels of the skyscraper. Then she sketched out a simple line drawing in primary colors: an escutcheon in blue, and within it, a crest depicting a book drawn in red and white; crossed keys in gold; and a seed in brown. She caused this image to be displayed on all sides of the skyscraper, between the hundredth and two-hundredth floors.