Roxanne did.
“A little bit right,” I directed. I saw Roxanne back away. Now!”
They dropped the desk, hard. A leg that was a three-quarter foot by a three-quarter foot in solid, laminated wood came down. With the books on the far end, the one leg came down independent of the rest.
It broke the pendant. It also punched through abused floorboards. As the other leg on the same end came down, it did much the same, if rather less seriously.
“Shit,” Ty said.
“It didn’t work?” Tiff asked.
“It didn’t work,” Alexis said. “It was supposed to open up the gateway in the moment of-”
The Djinn hit the doors again.
Third time’s a charm.
The door broke. Tiff’s ward went off.
Snow.
Even without the ability to see connections, I could make out how the sudden formation of snow followed certain patterns. Cold air flowed into the room from outside, and where it did, snow appeared, growing in size and intensity as it did. It followed the same general outline as the fractal pattern, causing snow to build up and spread across the shattered door, reinforcing it.
The floor continued to crack and break, something giving way.
The writing desk had punched a hole in the floor, and the hole widened as the pressure of the desk’s weight overwhelmed the integrity of the floor. The desk went onto its side, and then down.
It seemed the pendant wasn’t an acceptable valuable object, but the writing desk served.
I hoped there wasn’t anything too valuable in the drawers, because we weren’t getting it back.
Not from there. The space below was hostile.
“Oh god,” Green Eyes said.
She recognized it too.
Not the Drains. But not the house either.
Some other part of the Abyss.
The Djinn had disappeared as the snow had appeared. Maybe it didn’t like cold. Maybe it had done its task and decided to go. But other Others were now making their way forward, some having more difficulty than others against the miniature snowstorm.
Eva was making her way down the ladder, her brother’s wrists bound together, his arms wrapped around her shoulders. Strong as she was, she was struggling with the burden.
I hated to say it, but if she was going there with that sort of burden, it would probably kill her. I’d hoped to have time to hammer out the rules, to give them some idea of what to anticipate, and how to prepare themselves.
“Grab what you need and go!” I shouted.
I moved to the mirror Alexis was wearing.
We descended together, as Alexis leaped to the nearest available platform.
If I’d had time to warn them, I would have told them not to trust any footing.
It gave way.
The fall was, as falls went, pretty damn rough.
I managed to catch Alexis partway, wrapping my arms around her, and absorbed the worst of the impact. Bent nails, broken glass, and spikes of wood tore at my back and sides.
One of my hands found a handhold. I latched on, feeling my shoulder nearly jerk free of the socket as the sum total of her weight and mine hung from the one arm.
There was no footing beneath us. As the fixture collapsed, it fell. Fragments of wood and chunks of rubble hit the wall and bounced off, or hit other pieces of falling debris and bounced off that. It disappeared into oblivion, far, far below us.
Joining the writing desk, I imagined.
A steep vertical surface, air thick with choking dust, fog, and darkness. As far left as I could see, vertical surface. As far right as I could see… more vertical surface. Up and down… the same. Disappearing into darkness and fog, a good kilometer or five. There was far more light than there had been in the drains, but it was almost more hostile. Red and orange, flickering violently.
The nooks and crannies that dotted the surface, irregular, were windows. Spaced too far apart, or clustered, they took different forms. As if sections of building had fallen and somehow jammed together, like a game of Tetris.
Several hundred feet away, running parallel, there was another building of the same composition.
As the lights in one building died, the lights in the other made up for it, or happened to go out at similar times. A fluorescent light hung half-off the ceiling in the room opposite me, and it made the shadows of handholds dance deceptively. In other places, dirty and burned lightbulbs cast a mottled, dappled light onto the wall, suggesting handholds where there were none.
Apartments. The surface Alexis had aimed for had been something like a flimsy fire escape or a window washer’s platform. Or, more accurately, it was a trap, rigged by some local resident or another.
“Fuck!” I heard Ty hiss.
When I looked up, I saw that he’d found a handhold, only to discover that it was serrated with broken glass. He fought for a foothold and failed to find it, as his fingers bent into a clawed position, trying to avoid the worst of the glass. Blood ran down his hand and arm.
Peter had wrapped his arm around a piece of wood that stuck out from an area of the building where things had simply blown out. His bad hand was now fighting for traction, as the wood creaked.
I couldn’t quite make out the others, due to angle or the like.
My arm strained, creaked and popped as I raised Alexis up, lifting her. She huffed out a small breath, halfway between a gasp and a whimper, as her hands found purchase in a gap where brick became wooden slats. Her arm jerked as silverfish came boiling out.
“Got it?” I asked.
“Not really that good,” she said, her voice strained.
“You won’t find good here,” I said.
“Got it,” she said, her eyes scanning me. I wasn’t sure whether she was answering my question or statement. “You’re out.”
I looked around.
“I’m home, I guess,” I said.
She didn’t have a response to that.
I abandoned her.
Climbing, I ignored the rats that lurked just out of sight, ready to bite as I found a handhold. I held firm when I tested a foothold and it proved to be only rubble, crumbling and falling.
Christoff was struggling to climb up to a ledge. There was a note of panic in the movement.
“Christoff,” I said, my voice as low and soothing as I could get it.
I could see him tense.
He tensed more as he looked down and saw me. Rather than freeze, he started to climb faster. Not out of fear, but because it was the only thing he could do. Up there was a horizontal surface.
My branch-covered fingers dug into stone, oblivious to the scratches and scrapes they endured. I clawed out a position and climbed up.
“Help,” he said.
“Focus on finding a place to hold on,” I said.
“Up there-”
“It’s a trap,” I said. “I guarantee you, it’s a trap.”
He was breathing harder with every passing second. Fear was winning.
“Find a place to hold on,” I said.
He nodded, a tight gesture.
Roxanne, a short distance away, had wrapped herself around a section of wall. The part of her that was more indoors was serving as a platform for innumerable earwigs to flow over her and through her hair. She shook her head, and made small sounds, digging her longer fingernails into her ear, speared and dead bugs scooped out in the curve of her nail, along with blood. I wasn’t sure if it was the bugs making her bleed, or if the panic of having bugs crawling beneath her clothes and into her hair, eyes, and ears was driving her to dig into her own flesh.
Evan flew up to me, wings flapping.
“Help her,” I said.
“What? Man, bugs are not a part of my diet. Except for that one time I was trying to fix my power running out and that was bad and ick and-”