“I know that she wasn’t lying,” Violet said before Sabrina got a word out. “And if Markus is here, he’s here for the truth. He’s special. In ways he doesn’t know. Which means that I…” She fell silent, and her eyes filled with tears. “Look at you. Oh my God, just look at you. What I’ve allowed. Embraced.”
“Help me, and we will leave together. I promise.”
Violet shook her head.
“I can’t leave. My fate has called me here. You were brought against your will, and there is no other way to look at that, is there? And yet I tried to find one. Because the goals are good, they’re critical. Someone has to speak for the earth. It’s past time for that. But all of this…” She shook her head again. “This isn’t the way Eli promised it would go. It’s nothing like he promised. I wanted to believe in him, but the morning council was wrong. He was false. I’ve always put my faith in the wrong places, but only while searching for the right one. No one would believe that.”
Outside there was gunfire, sharp, cracking shots. Sabrina jerked at the sound and almost lost her balance atop the precariously leaning bed frame.
“Please cut me down. Please!”
“I let him change her fate too,” she said. “Lauren’s. My own daughter-in-law. Think about that. I allowed it to happen to her.”
She pushed her thumb against the blade. A bright bead of blood appeared and Sabrina winced at the sight, but Violet seemed unmoved.
Another fusillade of shots echoed outside. Sharp, high pops interspersed with low, echoing booms. Violet moved the hatchet away from her thumb and stared at the blood as it dripped down her arm.
“I never heard what happened,” she said. “They never told me, but I didn’t try to find out either. I probably didn’t want to see. That’s the problem for me. I want the truth but I never see it.”
She sighed and lowered her hand, showering the floorboards with speckles of blood.
“I just hope she told him the things I’d asked her to tell him,” she said. “I’d hoped she would be the one to convince him to believe.”
There was a long silence, and then Violet lunged forward, swinging the hatchet high over her head and then whistling the blade down. It cleaved through the rope on Sabrina’s left side and drove into the wall, and she swung free, knocking the bed frame away. For an instant she was hanging only by her right side, but Violet wrenched the hatchet out of the wall and swung it once more, cutting the second rope. Sabrina fell to the floor, and Violet left the hatchet in the wall this time and reached down to help her up. Her left hand was hot with blood.
“Can you walk?” Violet said.
“I think so.” Sabrina was struggling to her feet when she saw the bloody hole in Violet’s stomach for the first time. It was a deep puncture, and the blood that filled it was bright red and flowing fast.
“My God…what happened?”
“Garland’s knife.” She said it simply but sadly. “Go on now, dear. And be careful.”
“Both of us.”
“No.”
“Violet…yes! When he wakes up, he is going to kill you.”
“Perhaps. But this is my fate, dear. I’ve been on a long, strange road to get here. I can’t leave. I think you can, though. I think you should.”
Sabrina didn’t pause to argue. Outside the gunfire had begun again, and she didn’t know how long Garland Webb would remain unconscious.
“Thank you,” she said.
Violet nodded and said, “Yes, dear,” for the last time as Sabrina went to the stairs. She stepped over Garland Webb’s inert form. He was facedown, the dart no longer in his throat but trapped in his massive fingers.
At the bottom of the steps she turned back, prepared to ask Violet to join her, but she was nowhere to be seen.
65
Jay had completed a second climb, secured another cable, and was on his way back up with a third when he heard the first creak from the steel.
It wasn’t a menacing sound, not like the corona discharge. Inside his hooded suit, it sounded muffled and almost friendly, a low moan with a high, whining finish, like the yawn of a sleeping dog.
Then the tower began to move.
At first, the sensation was so subtle that he almost didn’t believe it. Chalked it up to dizziness again; the world had been reeling around him plenty up here.
The dog’s yawn turned into a scream then, the shriek of torquing metal, and Jay had a tenth of a second to think, Oh shit, it’s real, before the angled upright closest to the tracks tried to pull apart from the rest of the tower.
It was the highest spot Pate had reached to remove bolts. Jay saw the brace shifting as he began to fall, watched it lean from sky to earth like a palm tree in gale-force winds, and then he lost his footing and plummeted down.
He hit the steel before the air, landing on his chest on the crossbar he’d been standing on an instant earlier, a feeling like catching a pull hitter’s bat at the end of his swing.
The pain saved him. Pain powered instinct that his brain hadn’t been able to conjure earlier, and he reached for his chest as his feet swung free. The steel crossbar was between his hand and his chest. He hooked it with his left arm and caught himself with a jarring impact, the crossbar pinned under his armpit. Beneath him he saw his booted feet kicking impotently at the air, searching for nonexistent purchase, and the distant ground below.
His aching arm was squeezed tight as a python around the steel, so tight that it pressed into the meat of his biceps like a dull knife.
Right arm, right arm, right arm! he thought frantically, but when he swung to grab with his right, it forced his left loose, and for a moment he was sliding again. Then his right hand clamped over the crosspiece and held.
Beneath him, the tower groaned again as the wind freshened and the loose brace, which had to weigh several thousand pounds, strained to adhere to gravity’s demands.
The overhead lines didn’t let it. They’d given all the slack they intended to give, and now the loose brace was held up by their strength.
Jay took three quick but deep breaths, then heaved himself upward, like a man trying to pull himself out of the water and over the stern of a boat. He got his chest onto the crossbar and then wrapped his arms around it and clasped his left wrist with his right hand.
The tower holds you up, bud, not the other way around. Stop squeezing her so tight.
He laid the side of his face against the steel and gasped in air, blinking sweat out of his eyes. His chest and arm ached and he felt a strange pressure along his spine and thought, I’ve broken my back, before he realized that it was the hot stick, still slung in place over his shoulder and still attached to the cable Pate had anchored below.
When the voice came over the radio, he thought the sound was from the tower again, and he tightened his grasp, ready for the inevitable fall. Even after he realized the source of the sound, it took him a few seconds to process the words.
“Don’t look like police. But the woman is running toward them.”
Jay lifted his head. The tower didn’t shift; the steel was solid again beneath him. Only seconds ago it had occupied his every emotion. Now the radio summoned them elsewhere.
The woman? Were they talking about Sabrina? But then the update came from a man named Garland: “Right here. With the other one. Baldwin. She is secured.”
A hundred feet below, Eli Pate lowered the radio and shouted to Jay in a calm, cold voice.
“You just heard the man! Sabrina is in capable hands! Time to get up, Jay! Back on your feet!”
Jay pushed up slowly but didn’t rise to his feet. He shifted into a sitting position astride the crossbar, his feet dangling free, and adjusted the hot stick. The ground cable was still secure, unbothered by the excitement. Jay wasn’t even sure if Pate had been aware of it or if he’d been distracted by the men on the radio. Did anyone have any idea how close it had been?