Chapter Five
The other offerings didn’t have much to say to her.
The elevator was ringed with a bench that followed the natural curve of the car. The other offerings had positioned themselves in the segments of this bench as far from the door as they could. There were only three: a boy, a man, and a woman. This struck Ikki as strange, as she knew Minos had mentioned they needed twelve. The boy was slim with stiff, oily hair. He shrank away from the continual “bang, bang, bang” of Ikki’s boot against the silver door. The man was startlingly big, although he hunched to hide it. He had shoulders as broad as the Captain of the Guard. That made Ikki angrier. Her cheek still stung.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid!” she shouted. “All of you are idiots!”
“That may be true, my dear, but you will do little to surpass them, banging at that door. Theoldus here is twice your size, and I can promise you he would no sooner dent it.”
It was the woman sitting nearest who spoke. She had blue eyes and iron-grey hair piled into a fashionable coil. She wore a blue cloak that marked a member of the Atenos Academy, on the Sixth Floor. Her cheekbones were high and her nose was long, which gave her a decidedly hawkish look, but beyond that Ikki could see nothing to indicate a vicious enemy of the tower.
She had a point. Ikki’s anger deserted her in an instant, replaced instead by the shivering chill of her damp clothes. “Do any of you know if there is a power source? I see wires. Do you know where they attach? Can we remove any of the panels?”
The boy shoved his shoulder more firmly against his segment of elevator. The large man, Theoldus, stared sullenly into his hands. The hawkish woman’s eyebrows rose. “My dear, what an odd collection of questions.”
Ikki scanned her eyes over the roof of the elevator. It was a disc that matched the silver floor. The wires crawled up the sides of the gate and combined into a spiral pattern, one that circled into an indentation in the dead center of the ceiling.
“That’s the attachment point. My guess is there’s copper in them. Some sort of metal. The casing will be thick. Do any of you have metal tipped boots? Or buttons? A hairpin? A clasp might work too, although that could take hours. You, Theoldus. You could hold me up.”
Theoldus bent his head lower, as though he might vanish through the floor.
Ikki caught the boy’s eye on his next quiet glance. “Oh, you. You’re pretty tall. You look like you have good hands for it. I could use an extra set.”
The boy made a face and looked away.
Ikki scowled. “If the elevator can’t work they can’t take us. That will give us some time. Maintenance is slow after curfew. Too many people have to be cleared with the Temple.”
When this got her nothing, she looked between the three offerings, trying to stand with her feet apart and her chin high, the way she remembered her mother did when a foreman was giving her trouble. “Well, do you want to be sacrificed?”
The hawkish woman tipped her head to one side. “Child, you show a criminal knowledge of how to escape a confined space.”
“I’m not a criminal!” said Ikki, hotly. “And I’ll bet you aren’t, either. Did the king send you here because you told him something he didn’t like, too?”
“Not as such, no,” said the woman. “I have been brought to judgment because I have enemies that wished to discredit me. Now, child, if you’re going decide things for people, you ought to at least identify yourself. It will make things much easier when the guards decide to punish us for your poor behavior.”
“Ikki of Grand Minos,” murmured Theoldus. “Daughter of Dael the Architect.”
“Dael!” the woman nearly fell off her seat in surprise.
“Oh.” Ikki peered at Theoldus. “Hello. Do I know you?”
The man shrugged. “Not really. I was a member of the regular city guard. I watched the stairs down from Grand Minos to Hestian-Poseidos.”
Ikki laughed despite herself. “I go that way a lot.” Went, her mind automatically corrected for her. Ikki forced herself not to think about that. “You were a guard? Why are you here?”
Everyone knew the guards were selected from the most honest and least imaginative people in the tower. They were the last people to think of ways to do wrong.
“I volunteered,” said Theoldus. He flexed his hands, hopelessly. “Refused an order. From my superior. They were going to take away my post, but I asked them to send me to the Minotaur instead.”
“Why? What was the order?”
“I refused to remove the support bolts from an old debtor’s home. She hadn’t paid the King her shop rent,” Theoldus said. “I could not be sure she had left the building.”
His own words upset him. He went pale and pressed his mouth shut, as though he could unsay them.
“If the house had support bolts that means it was an old wall shack, wasn’t it?” Quietly, the ex-guard nodded. “Removing those would have brought the whole roof down! If she’d been in there you would have killed her.”
“The Captain was well aware of the possibility,” said Theoldus. “And I showed poor faith in his decisions. Removing me from my post does not remove my disloyalty. I hand myself over to the gods for judgment. They will tell me if I made the right choice.”
“I think not destroying a house and killing an old woman is probably a good one.” But the ex-guard just moaned into his hands. Ikki gave up and turned her attention to the boy. He must have been only a few years older than her. “What about you? Did you volunteer?”
“Aw, Hades no,” said the boy. “None of this stupid repentant sinner crap. I tried to hack the Oracle Consul.”
Ikki stared. This was the first thing she’d heard that day that sounded remotely like a crime. The Oracle records were considered sacred. “But … why? Those records are free.”
“Only some of them,” said the boy. “They make you pay for more. Those priests and oracles, they charged my old mum half her savings to tell her when to plant her tomatoes. It pissed me off.”
“What did you want them to tell you?”
The boy grinned. “You mean what was I going to get them to say. I’m here because half my genes match the chief oracle. So if I die because he charged me, he’d commit filicide under the eyes of his precious gods. Oops. So he’d rather have the gods bump me off instead, so his conscience can be nice and clear. So how about you, Miss Nose? You here for being loud and annoying?”
“I’m here because I built a flying machine and flew over Helios,” said Ikki.
The boy went grey. Theoldus’s hands fell away from his face. The scholar gave an owl-like tilt of her head.
“I beg your pardon?” she said.
Despite herself, Ikki stood a little taller. “Just what I said. Me and my …” She couldn’t very well say “friend” anymore. “I built a flying machine from pictures my mother had on record.”
“An ancient instrument,” murmured the Atenos Scholar. “Yes, Dael the architect was the Atenos Chair of the School of Structural History. She would have access to such things … yes, yes …”
“And you just made it?” goggled the boy. “Just like that?”
“The schematics weren’t complete. I had to make up a few things, but it flew.” Oh did it. The memory of that first flight almost made Ikki forget where she was for a moment. The thrill of the way she’d felt the canvas wings catch the sky echoed in her head. “There’s a breach up in the dome. It opens up outside. And here’s the amazing part. The sky? It isn’t grey or green like they always said it was. It’s blue. It’s completely blue.”
Theoldus made a quick gesture to the gods.
The Atenos Scholar pursed her lips. “And you are sure that this is what you saw?”
“Definitely. I even got it on feed. Oh, and the footage must be so good.”
“No wonder you’re in here,” said the boy who’d hacked the Oracle. “You’re completely out of your head. You’re crazier than the last bugger to hire me.”
Too late, Ikki saw the faces of her fellow offerings. They were staring at her with a mix of pity, disappointment, and, in Theoldus’s face, complete fear.
“What?” asked Ikki. “What?”
“So this is where the line of Dael the Architect has gone,” murmured the Atenos Scholar. “Gods preserve us.”
“It’s true. I could prove it if they’d just let me get to my workshop.”
“Prove what?” asked Theoldus, there was a sudden deep heat in his voice. “That you nearly brought Zeus down on us all for a hallucination?”
“What, no! Look, what I said about the wires will work. If one of you would just …”
“Would you just shut up?” said the boy.
“No,” said Ikki. “Because I shouldn’t be here. And neither should any of you.”
It was no use. One by one the other offerings turned their faces away, not wanting to look her way. Ikki tried a few more times to start conversations, but none of them would respond readily, and if they did it was with the clear hesitance of someone convinced they were talking to a crazy person.
Ikki supposed she could have hung in their faces and asked questions, but that would only prove their point.