You’re not going to do any of those things, I told myself quietly. There was nothing firm or stern about my little inner voice: if anything, I sounded despairing even to myself. I wasn’t going to go back, and I wasn’t going to come up with another escape plan, because there wasn’t another escape plan. It was this or nothing.
Knees shaking with the effort of keeping me suspended in place, I pulled one hand cautiously away from the wall and wiped my palm dry on my sweater. Placing my hand back against the wall, I repeated the process with the other hand. Then, taking a deep breath, I began to climb again.
If it had been hard before, it was pure torture now. I was dead tired, lactic acid was building up in my muscles, and falling was no longer an abstract “maybe”: it was a thing that had happened once and could easily happen again. I dug my nails into the grooves between panels of tin, climbing ever higher, trying not to think about what awaited me if I slipped. I’d managed to catch myself once. I wasn’t going to be so lucky a second time.
My right hand quested upward for the wall, and struck empty air. I trembled, forcing the rest of my limbs to remain rigid as I felt around, trying to find where the wall had gone. Finally, reaching down, I found the point where the vent curved. Hope surged through me, hot and red and burning. I was at the top. I had to be.
That, or the bend was going to lead me to a whole new tunnel system, and take me no closer to the exit. I pushed that thought aside. It was unproductive, and besides, I could feel the cool air flowing toward me. It was just a trickle, held back by whatever grating was on the front of the vent, but it meant that I was moving in the right direction, if nothing else.
With trembling hands, I pulled myself around until I was facing into the bend. There was still no light. Still, I hadn’t come this far to turn around at the first sign of trouble, and so I squirmed forward, working my way one inch at a time into the new leg of my journey.
The bend was barely the length of my body. Then it curved again, resuming its ascent—but the angle this time was more slope than sheer, and I was able to pull myself along without nearly as much fear of falling. My pulse was beginning to calm. There was something pleasantly familiar about moving through the dark this way, like it was part of what I had been made for. In a way, I suppose that was exactly the case. I was designed to live in dark, tight spaces, inside a human body. This was just life inside a building. Not that much difference, given the change in scale that I’d already undergone.
The slope ended at another bend, and as my head popped up over it, a new element introduced itself back into the world: light. Bloody, reddish sunset light, trickling in through the slits in a grate that was almost close enough for me to touch. I sped up, pulling myself forward until I could brace my hands against the grate and shove. This was the moment of truth. If it was bolted on from the outside, then I had traveled all this way for nothing.
To my relief, the grate shifted as soon as I pushed against it. I pushed again, and it gave way, dropping out of my field of view and hitting the roof with a loud clang. The noise should have worried me, but it didn’t. I had other things to focus on, like the sunset that was painting the sky in a thousand shades of rose. I climbed rapidly toward the opening, hungry for the light.
“That didn’t take you as long as I thought it would.” The voice was Ronnie’s, calm and almost disinterested. I barely resisted the urge to jackknife back into the vent. Instead, I gripped the edge and turned to see him standing some five feet away, his hands folded behind his back, one of them holding a gun, and his attention focused calmly on the sky. “You’re a fast climber. I guess desperation is a pretty good motivation.”
“How did you know?” My voice came out in a whisper. I didn’t move.
“You vanished from the monitors. There aren’t many places in the store that aren’t on the monitors, so I checked them all. You didn’t put the grate back in the changing room. Sloppy, Sal. Very sloppy.” Ronnie didn’t look at me. “You can come down from there. Hanging out in the air-conditioning isn’t going to change what happens next.”
“What is going to happen next?” I couldn’t figure out how to turn and put my feet out first, so I just pushed forward and toppled to the roof in an ungainly heap. My cheek landed on the fallen grate, and I felt it slice through my skin, adding the smell of blood to the eucalyptus and pigeon feather odors otherwise pervading the roof.
It should have smelled terrible. It smelled like freedom. Something tightened in my chest, and as I climbed to my feet, I decided that no matter what happened next, it wasn’t going to end with me going back into that mall. Either Ronnie would shoot me, or I’d get the gun away from him somehow… or I’d go over the edge of the roof. Whatever it took to keep myself out of Sherman’s hands.
I felt bad about the idea of dying before I got to see Nathan again. If he ever found out what had happened to me—what Sherman was planning to use me to do—he would understand why I couldn’t just go along with things. He would forgive me.
“Something,” said Ronnie, still sounding disinterested. “I don’t get you, Sal. Here you’ve got a guy like Sherman falling over himself to make you a queen, and all you can do is fight and try to escape. Lots of girls would die to be in your shoes.”
“And when he kills me by mistake during one of his little experiments? What happens then?” I glared at him, starting to pick bits of gravel out of my palms. “I didn’t volunteer to be a lab animal. Sherman of all people should know how much I hate having other people make my decisions for me, but he still thinks he has the right, just because he’s older than I am. Fuck him. I have my own life.”
“A life you stole.”
Ronnie’s words were mild, but they still stung. I snapped back, “Like he didn’t? We’re all thieves here. The only difference is that I decided to stop stealing once I had what I needed. He’s going to keep going until he has everything he wants, and that’s really different. That’s not okay.”
Ronnie finally turned enough to let me see the small smile on his face. “You’re a wimp,” he said, not unkindly. He made it sound like a statement of essential fact: we were on a roof, he was probably about to kill me or something, and I was a wimp. “You don’t act soon enough, and you don’t take risks when you really should. If I were you, I would have been out that vent weeks ago, and screw anyone who tried to stop me from escaping. You pretty much asked to be swept off the street and locked in a cage by somebody. Hell, if you want proof of that, look at where you are—trying to escape from a cage that you were put in by the man who took you out of the last one.”
“There’s nothing wrong with being a wimp,” I said, picking the last of the gravel out of my left hand. The cut on my cheek was still bleeding sluggishly, but it didn’t feel like it was serious enough to worry about. I’d probably need a few stitches, assuming I lived long enough to get them. “The world can’t be made up entirely of leaders. Someone has to be willing to follow.”
“That sounds like something a wimp would say.”
I shrugged. The edge of the roof was about ten feet away. I couldn’t see the street from where I was standing, but the angle on the trees across from me made me think that we were standing on the third floor. That would mean a thirty-foot drop to the street, and I wasn’t going to survive that.