‘You know, our friend Funaki—’
‘No, Mukesh, there’s no one left, he can’t get hold of anyone!’ Sushma began to sob. ‘No one’s answering at the control centre, and it’s on fire, everything’s in flames down there!’
How strange. O’Keefe couldn’t stop staring at Mukesh. Particularly his nose. It was as though it had gone numb, a pale radish stuck onto Mr Tomato’s face. The subject of his interest laid his arm protectively around Sushma’s shoulders.
‘He’ll get in touch with someone, my love. I’m sure of it.’
‘Has it got a little warmer already?’ Rebecca Hsu’s brow was wrinkled with alarm. ‘By a few degrees?’
‘No,’ said Eva Borelius.
‘Well, I think it has.’
‘You’ve probably got warmer, Rebecca.’ Karla Kramp went over to the landing and looked down. ‘A side effect of stress hormones, increased blood pressure. It’s completely normal at your age.’
O’Keefe followed her. Two storeys below, the spiral staircase ended at a steel barrier.
‘Perhaps we should try to open the bulkheads,’ he suggested.
Funaki looked over at them and shook his head.
‘As long as the indicators on the control panel are still lit red, we’d better leave it alone. There’s a risk of fatality.’
‘But why?’ Miranda fished a strawberry out of her daiquiri and sucked the fruit pulp from its little green star. ‘The automatic system has shut down, so it should be okay for us to take a look, shouldn’t it?’ Her skin was reminiscent of cooked lobster; her face and cleavage glowing. Her chemical-saturated hair had been badly singed above the forehead, and even her eyebrows were damaged. Regardless of all that, she exuded the kind of confidence found only in people who are either especially superior or especially simple.
‘It’s not that easy,’ said Funaki.
‘Nonsense.’ She licked strawberry juices from the corner of her mouth. ‘Just a quick look. If it’s still burning, we’ll close up again quickly.’
‘You wouldn’t even be able to get the bulkheads open.’
‘Finn has strong muscles, and Mukesh—’
‘It has nothing to do with body strength. Not when the partial pressure of the oxygen has dropped.’
‘I see.’ Miranda raised what remained of her eyebrows in interest. ‘Wasn’t he one of the Arthurian knights?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Partial.’
‘Percival,’ said Olympiada Rogacheva wearily.
‘Oh, that’s right. So what does he have to do with our oxygen?’
‘Michio, you old Samurai,’ O’Keefe turned round. ‘Please be so kind as to talk in a way that the billionairess can understand you. I think you meant to say that there’s now a vacuum on the other side, right? Which means we need to think of another way of getting out of here.’
‘But how?’ Eva looked at him helplessly. ‘Without the elevator.’
They had climbed down to Selene in order to inspect the staff elevator, the only one of the three lifts that went through into the restaurant area, but Funaki had energetically intervened:
‘Not until the system or control centre signal that it’s safe! We don’t know what’s happening in the elevator shaft. If you don’t want to be hit by a wall of flames, then don’t even think about opening those doors.’
But the control centre still hadn’t been in touch.
‘If we need to we can climb down through the ventilation shaft,’ he had added. ‘It’s not the most comfortable of methods, but it’s safe.’
A while had passed since then. Karla looked back down into the worm casing of the spiral staircase.
‘Well, I’m certainly not going to let myself get roasted up here,’ she decided.
‘Roasted?’ Hsu’s eyes widened in horror. ‘Why? Do you mean that—’
‘Karla,’ whispered Eva. ‘Do you have to?’
‘What?’ Karla whispered back in German. ‘There’s nothing but stars above us. We can’t get to the viewing platform without spacesuits, and everything’s burning down below. Fire has a tendency to rise, you know. If Funaki doesn’t make contact with the control centre soon, we’ll all meet our maker up here, mark my words. I want to get out of here.’
‘We all want to get out of here, but—’
‘Michio!’ A distorted voice came out of the intercom in the bar. ‘Michio, can you hear me? It’s Tim. Tim Orley!’
Maybe he’d got his priorities wrong. He should have ignored Lynn’s misery and made contact with the others without delay, but in the face of her suffering that had seemed an unbearable prospect. The level of her sobbing seemed to indicate that the medication she had taken was helping a little. He had fetched the elevator at once, calling it down from the very top in order to go to her suite on the thirteenth floor with her. At first, only his subconscious registered the fact that it was unusually warm in the cabin. It was only once they reached the glass bridge that he had remembered the worrying noises from the neck of Gaia, the phantom of smoke in the dome of the atrium and how the architecture seemed, bizarrely, to be in motion. Then he had looked up at the ceiling.
A massive armour shield was stretched out above him.
Perplexed, he wondered where the steel panels and bulkheads had come from all of a sudden. They must have been stored between the floors, hidden from view.
What on earth had happened up there?
By the time they got to the bathroom, Lynn was shaking so much that he had to lay the green tablets and white capsules she asked for on her tongue, one after another, and hold the glass for her as she drank, panting, like a little child. The resulting coughing fit gave reason to fear that she might bring up the cocktail of medicine again in a projectile arc, but then it had begun to take effect. A quarter of an hour later, she had got a grip of herself; at least enough to allow them to leave the suite. They immediately ran into Heidrun and Walo Ögi.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked the Swiss man in a concerned voice as he looked around. ‘Where are the others?’
‘Up there,’ whispered Lynn. Based on the colour of her skin, she could have passed for Heidrun’s sister.
‘We’ve been up there,’ said Ögi. ‘We wanted to go to the meeting, but everything’s locked up and barricaded.’
‘Barricaded?’
‘I think you’d better come with us,’ said Heidrun.
It was only as they went further up that Tim realised just how extensive the armour plating really was. A solid steel wall without even the slightest hint of a gap had descended diagonally over the gallery. The doors of E2, one of the two guest elevators, had disappeared behind it, as had the left-hand side entrance to the neck. The one accessible spiral staircase ended in a closed bulkhead. It was only now that he realised his vision was imperceptibly impaired, as if some wafer-thin film had been pulled over his retina. Here and there, black bits of fluff were spinning through the air. He reached out to catch some and they crumbled into grease between his fingers.
‘Soot,’ he said.
‘Do you smell that?’ Ögi was snuffling all around, his moustache twitching. ‘Like something’s burnt.’
Horror crept over him. If the bulkheads were closed, then that could only mean it was still burning! Filled with dread, they rode down and could already hear Funaki’s urgent calls by the time they reached the lobby. Lynn shuffled over to the controls, activated the speech function, waved her brother over wearily and sank down into one of the rolling chairs.
‘Michio!’ called Tim breathlessly. ‘Michio, can you hear me? Tim here! Tim Orley!’
‘Mr Orley!’ Funaki’s relief was palpable. ‘We thought no one would ever answer. I’ve been trying to reach someone for half an hour.’