Page 132 of The Only Way Out Is Up

“It’s hard to explain,” I say, knowing how inadequate that sounds. “There’s a… a terrible person, and he wants to hurt me, so he found you—”

“I figured that out,” Spike says, rubbing furiously at her good eye. “I’m not a baby. But what does he want from you? Why are we on Hod? Where are they taking us?”

“I’ll explain everything as soon as I have a chance, I promise,” I go on. “But he’s promised to let you go as soon as this fight is over.”

“Who are you fighting?” Spike says immediately. “Does Star get to help you? Are you going to win?”

“Do you trust him?” Somi says softly.

My stomach sinks, and I shake my head silently. Somi doesn’t say anything, but I feel the accusation in his eyes.

My fault. My fault.

“How long are we to be kept waiting?” Devon Dreikin demands, to murmurs of assent from the other Councilors. Hisham mops his brow and looks past the line of guards.

“I believe, um, any moment— Ah, there he is.” He waves, relieved. Alzimyth stalks around the corner and past the guards, ignoring Hisham’s gesture. He carries a small satchel over his shoulder.

“Take us up,” he snaps. “I’m finished with this dung heap.”

The Specials step inside, and a door slides smoothly shut across the entrance.

I’d been wondering if the low ceiling with its crystal lamps would slide aside to reveal the lift that would take us to the surface, picturing a sort of basket on a rope like the ones back at Stair #3. Instead there’s a hum, a faint lurch, and the feeling like my stomach is being pulled down into my guts. The whole room is the lift, smooth and powerful, its sigwork hidden behind the walls. My ears pop.

The Council, of course, have done this before, but some of them still look a bit queasy. Ky crouches like she’s in a swordfight, not trusting her balance. Alzimyth taps his foot, impatient.

I have no idea how fast we’re moving. We stand in silence for a long while, a few minutes at least. Then there’s the opposite feeling, my gorge rising into my throat as the lift slows. It comes to a halt and the door slides open without even a chime. I narrow my eyes, not sure what to expect from my first sight of the surface—blazing sun, the moon shining down, the stars—

Reality is more prosaic. The door opens onto something that looks very much like what we left behind: steel floor underfoot, fences and wire, tall poles with painfully bright sigwork lamps casting a harsh glow over everything. Alzimyth strides out, beckoning peremptorily for everyone else to follow. The Council files after him, grumbling, eyes on the floor beneath their feet.

“I suggest that you don’t look up,” Hisham says to me and Ky. “Not, um, immediately, at least. It can be rather, um, distressing.”

Quech and the Specials are pushing my family to their feet. Spike catches my eye and I want to explain where we are, what she’s about to see, but there are too many guards between us. All I can do is follow them out the door.

It smells different. That’s the first thing I notice. The Heap mostly smells of dust and metal, while Hod has the unfamiliar—to me, anyway—scents of plants and grass and dirt. But over the past week I’ve become acquainted with all of that; this is something else entirely, the air full of salt and tang and a thousand things I don’t have proper names for. Through the fences in the middle distance I can see green, trees and grass, the land rolling up into a hill larger than any manufactured hummock on a Hod estate—

“Fuck.” Ky grabs my arm, squeezing it so tight I want to scream. “Fuck fuck ohhh fuck I’m going to fall, Taj, I’m going to fall…”

She has not followed Hisham’s advice, her head craned back, her eyes as big as saucers. I follow her gaze automatically, and a moment later the world around me seems to drop away.

You read about a thing, and imagine you understand it.

The sky, for example. Somi’s Little Forest Stories talks about the sky. There are pictures, too. It’s blue, usually with a fluffy cloud or two. I’m not saying that when I look up I’m expecting to see a child’s pencil drawing, but—

Maybe I am, if I’m being honest. What I get is… not that.

The sky is not one color, but many, teal blue at one horizon fading through violet and midnight purple to black at the other. The clouds are black streaks like knife wounds, not fluffy at all, and they move as I watch, which makes the vertigo all the worse. And what the books don’t convey—how could they?—is the incomprehensible vastness of it, the depth, a chasm bigger than the entire world. It sucks at the soles of my feet like it wants me to jump and never come down.

All this in an instant. A heartbeat to master myself and think, That’s not so bad, fighting back the wobble in my legs and wondering what all the heavy breathing from Ky is about. Then, still following her gaze, I turn and the… thing comes into view.

I don’t have the words to properly describe it. At first I think it’s part of the sky, a strangely shaped cloud, or one of those mountains whose nature I was never quite clear on. My eyes follow it down, down, down until it meets the ground, not more than a few kilometers away. Seeing it through the walls and fences gives me a sense of scale. I track it back up, heart seizing all over again, toward the impossibility hanging over our heads—

Breathe, I remind myself. Breathe.

The thing looks vaguely like the lift we just emerged from. Bigger, certainly, perhaps two or three times as wide, but that’s not the impossible part. It’s matte black, a cylinder picked out by the last rays of the setting sun as it rises up, and up, and up, perspective shrinking it first to the width of a pencil, then to a thin thread almost lost against the clouds. Almost, but not quite—rings of red lights shine from it at wide intervals. The crimson glows, fainter and fainter, let me track the thread higher and higher into the sky.

And then there’s a black disc, like a hole in the world. If not for the lights it could be a plate held at arm’s length, foreshortened into an oval. But the line of red lights tracks all the way up to it, meets it, and more colored lights trace out geometric patterns on its underside. It is a disc, but so, so high up; the mind rebels at the scale implied by those lights, insisting that it can’t possibly be as far away—and therefore as big—as it looks—

Because if it is, the disc must be wider than the entire cavern below us. Much wider, with all those kilometers of tower between us. And it still blocks out a substantial chunk of the sky.