How long would she be able to keep going?
Her head was ringing. She closed her eyes, pressing the tips of her fingers against her temples. She had to stay upright. She couldn’t allow the dam holding the flood of blackness to break. She was the only one that knew the hotel like the back of her hand. She had built it.
It was all down to her.
Filled with fear, she opened her eyes.
The symbol was back.
‘Help! Help! Can anyone hear us?’
Eva hammered furiously on the intercom button, shouting and shouting, while Sushma threw herself against the closed internal doors and tried to force them apart with her bare hands. Mukesh pulled her back by her shoulders and held her close to him.
‘I want to get out of here,’ she whimpered. ‘Please.’
The elevator had only dropped a metre, but the blood had rushed from all five faces and collected in their feet. As white as chalk, they looked at one another, like a group of ghosts suddenly realising they have already been dead for a long time.
‘Okay.’ Eva abandoned the intercom, raised her hand and tried to sound practical, which she was remarkably successful in doing. ‘The most important thing now is that we stay calm. That means you too, Sushma. Sushma? Okay?’
Sushma nodded, her lower lip trembling, her face wet with tears.
‘Good. We don’t know what’s wrong, and we can’t get through to anyone, so we have to find out.’
‘It can’t be all that bad,’ said Hsu. ‘I mean, there’s only a sixth of the—’
‘Twelve metres on the Moon are like two on Earth, you know that,’ retorted Karla. ‘And I guess we’re about a hundred and twenty metres up.’
‘Sshh! Listen.’
A rising and falling roaring sound filled their ears. A tormented howling mixed in with it, like a material under intense strain. Eva looked up to the ceiling. There was a bulkhead in clear view in the middle. She saw the operator control next to the display. She hesitated for a moment, then activated the mechanism. For a number of seconds, nothing happened, giving rise to the fear that this function had been damaged too. How were they supposed to get outside if the bulkhead had failed? But even while she was still pondering the alternatives, it stirred into motion and slowly rose. A flickering orange-red glow made its way in, the roaring intensified. She crouched down, pushing off from her knees, got a grip on the edge of the hatch, pulled herself up with a powerful swinging movement and clambered onto the roof.
‘My God,’ she whispered.
On the right-hand side, a large section of the dividing wall had been torn away, which meant she could see through to the neighbouring shaft. Five, perhaps six metres above her, was the smouldering, half-destroyed cabin of E2. The side casing was completely gone, exposing its inside, the source of the roaring sound, which was now even louder. Red apparitions darted across the floor of the burning elevator, streaks of rust were collecting further up in the shaft. There was debris wherever she looked. A bizarrely distorted, glowing and pulsing piece of metal was directly in front of her feet. She took a step back. At first she thought the brake shoes of the staff elevator had gripped and surrounded the guide rails, but on closer inspection two of them seemed to be blocked by splinters or possibly damaged. The heat was making thick beads of sweat build up over her forehead and upper lip.
Then, suddenly, the floor collapsed from under her feet.
A collective scream forced its way up to her as the cabin dropped another metre. Eva staggered, caught her balance, and saw that one of the brake shoes had opened up. No, worse than that, it had broken! In panic, she looked for a way out. Right in front of her eyes was the lower edge of the doors which led to the gallery. She wedged her finger between the gap, making a useless attempt to open them, but of course they didn’t move a single millimetre. Why would they? These weren’t normal elevator doors, but completely sealed-off bulkheads. As long as the system didn’t decide to open them, or unless someone activated them from the outside, she was only making a fool of herself and wasting valuable time.
‘Eva!’ She heard Sushma snivelling. ‘What’s happening?’
It was hard for her to ignore the poor woman, but she didn’t have time to tend to the others’ sensitivities as well. Feverishly, she searched for a solution. The still-intact wall, she now noticed, revealed a passage through to the E1 shaft, around a square metre in size. Several metres above, she spotted another passage, too high to reach, and the glowing and smoky fragments of the blasted-away cabin casing were splayed out in it. Feeling an unpleasant pressure on her chest, Eva turned to the other side to get a look at the E2 shaft. The entire upper section of the dividing wall had disappeared, replaced by a huge, gaping hole, the jagged edge of which was level with her forehead. She had to hoist herself up a bit to look over it. Vertical guide rails stretched down into the depths of the unknown. There were crossbars positioned at intervals in between, wide enough to be able to get a grip and a foothold on them, and on the other side of the shaft she saw—
A passageway.
A rectangular hole leading into a short, horizontal tunnel. It lay there buried in the wall, dark and mysterious, but Eva was pretty sure she knew where it led, and it was big enough for two people to crawl along it at once. With a little dexterity, they’d be able to get across to it.
The cabin creaked in its rails beneath her, metal scraping over metal. Mukesh Nair hoisted himself up through the hatch, raised his head and stared, aghast, at the glowing wreckage of E2.
‘Good God! What happened here—?’
‘Everyone out,’ said Eva. She pushed past him and called down to the others. ‘Out, quickly! And be careful, there’s burning debris everywhere.’
‘What’s the plan?’ asked Mukesh.
‘Help me.’
The elevator groaned and dropped a little more, while sparks rained down on her from above. In pain, Eva felt the dot-sized burns on her hands and upper arms. She had picked out a simple, sleeveless top for the evening, and now she was cursing herself for it. Hurrying, she helped Karla, Sushma and the alarmingly stiff Rebecca Hsu clamber out, until they were all standing on the roof.
‘Take your clothes off,’ said Eva, untucking her top from her trousers and pulling it over her head. ‘T-shirts, blouses, shirts, anything you can wrap around your hands.’
Sushma’s head jerked back and forth.
‘Why?’
‘Because we’ll burn our mitts if we don’t protect them.’ She gestured her head towards the gaping opening. ‘We need to get over there. Once you get to the other side, stay right up against the wall. There’s strutting between the elevator rails that you can grip onto to make your way along. Don’t look down, or up, just keep going. There’s a passageway on the other side, and I suspect it leads into the ventilator shaft.’
‘I’ll never make it,’ said Sushma in an anxious whisper.
‘Yes, you will,’ said Hsu decisively. ‘We’ll all make it, including you. And I’m sorry about before.’
Sushma smiled, her lips twitching. Without hesitation, Eva ripped the thin fabric of her top. It had been sinfully expensive, but that was irrelevant now. She wrapped the scraps around her hands and wrists and helped Karla deconstruct her own T-shirt while Mukesh assisted his wife. Hsu cursed as she stripped down to her underwear, despairing at the misappropriation of her cocktail dress. Mukesh handed her strips of his shirt.