“I bought a gun,” she corrects him, “after you told me about the mad scientist—literally, a very mad scientist—and his mercenary. It wasn’t easy, but I figured it’d be worth the trouble.”
“Wasn’t easy? Japan’s gun laws are among the most stringent in the world.”
“Your world maybe.”
Jonas looks back at the pair of Macons. “You killed those men—”
“From what you’ve told me, there are millions of others where those two came from.”
“What I mean is . . . where’d you learn to shoot a gun?”
“My husband taught me. He wanted me to be safe.” Her voice grows distant. “I don’t really want to talk about him right now.”
They walk in silence, following the curve of the tunnel, skulking in haste for what seems like half a mile before the tunnel’s curve reveals the presence of two security guards. Both men in their early thirties. Both armed.
Jonas’s adrenaline spikes. One of the guards reaches for his sidearm while the other keys his walkie-talkie’s shoulder microphone.
“Roku-Gōki kara chūō e. Sekushon san-hachi ni shin’nyū-sha ni-mei. Otome,” he reports in rapid-fire Japanese.
Eva throws Jonas a panicked look. What do we do? Shooting the Macons was one thing, but the cold-blooded murder of two security guards doing their duty is quite another. Before Jonas can answer, the guard with the sidearm points it straight at Eva.
“Anata no buki o otose,” he orders.
Eva doesn’t seem to understand whether he wants her to put her hands up, get down on the floor, put her gun down, or some combination of the three.
“Anata no buki o otose,” he repeats, only louder. As if lack of volume is the only reason she can’t understand him. He takes a mighty step forward and slaps the gun out of her hand. It clatters to the floor, and he kicks it down the length of the tunnel, back in the direction where Jonas and Eva came from.
Meanwhile, his partner spins Jonas around, pressing him against the tunnel wall. The armed guard does the same with Eva.
“Wait. I can explain,” Jonas says, but the protestation sounds pathetic.
“Ashi o hiroge. Buki o motte imasu ka?”
The guard with the walkie-talkie begins frisking Jonas. His partner confiscates Eva’s purse. Both maneuvers are executed with more violence than seems necessary.
The armed guard tears through the contents of Eva’s purse, producing a small black Moleskine notebook. He rifles through the pages, finding them all covered in Jonas’s baroque equations and crude schematic drawings of the tether’s inner workings. “Kore wa nan da,” he demands. Tell me what this is.
Jonas asked Eva to bring the notebook “just in case,” a stopgap to buttress the formulae inked on his arms. Belt and suspenders. Now, though, the calculations and sketches look like the ramblings of a madman, the plans of a would-be bomber.
His mind churns, working the problem, trying to think of a way out of this mess. Dozens of excuses and explanations and apologies flood his consciousness, but he doesn’t even know if these men speak English. He contemplates overpowering them, using surprise to his advantage, but the guard’s grip is too strong.
Three gunshots ring out, echoing in the tunnel, made louder by its confines. Jonas’s heart jumps. Did the other guard shoot Eva? He looks over, panicked, but she’s okay. His relief is quickly pushed aside by confusion. If the guards didn’t fire, then who did?
The man pressing Jonas against the wall uses his free hand to trigger his shoulder mic. “Chūō, are wa nanideshita ka? Jūsei ga kikoemashita . . . ,” he says with a frightened urgency, apparently as unnerved by the gunfire as Jonas is.
The only reply is a fourth gunshot, this one filtered through the radio, and the sharp crackle of static. The man shoots a worried look at his partner. Jonas can see that they’re both scared. The Spire is a scientific facility. Their presence is for insurance purposes only. Their guns are for show. They would see more action guarding a cathedral.
With the guard distracted, Jonas throws his head backward, the back of his skull striking the guard in the face. He staggers back, dazed, and Jonas headbutts him again. A pinwheel of tiny fireflies crosses his vision, but he stays conscious. The guard does not.
As the man drops, his partner bulldogs toward Jonas, instantly forgetting Eva and, apparently, the fact that he has a gun. Eva is screaming at Jonas—“What are you doing?”—but his focus is on the guard hurling himself at him. Macon prepared him for this, taught him to turn an opponent’s inertia against him, to use his environment as a weapon. Jonas grabs the guard by his uniform and uses the man’s momentum to send him careening into the wall. He might as well have hit the guard with the tunnel. The man falls, unconscious, inches from his partner.
“Oh my God,” Eva repeats over and over.
Klaxons begin bellowing, and the overhead lighting unexpectedly changes, instantly bathing the entire tunnel in red.
“We have to move,” Jonas says.
But Eva seems rooted in fear and confusion.
“Eva,” he reiterates, “we have to go.”
She turns to retrieve her gun, but Jonas stops her. “There’s no time.”
Almost on cue, more gunshots ring out. Louder this time, which means closer. Jonas darkens. Fear challenges him. He wills himself to avoid its grip.
“How many Macons could he bring here?” Eva asks.
“I don’t know,” Jonas says. “As many as he could construct tethers for, I suppose.” He grabs Eva’s wrist. “It doesn’t matter. We have to keep moving.” As he pulls her, he sees one of the guards clambering to his feet.
Jonas virtually drags Eva down the long corridor, hearing the guard’s footfalls—the machine-gun steps of a man in better shape—closing in. As they run, the tunnel begins to slope away, the path corkscrewing downward. Gravity is a wind at their backs, pushing them on.
Then a door appears to their right. Steel, with a metal push bar. Jonas throws himself into it, hoping it’s not locked. It isn’t. Thank heaven for small favors. It swings open, and he explodes out onto a narrow steel catwalk, one of several that spiral out from the towering SLA to connect with the Inner Ring’s corkscrew, like spokes on a bicycle wheel.
A low frequency thrum greets them. It’s not generated by the power surging through the SLA but by the air flowing through the massive cavern more than two thousand feet above ground. The catwalk feels as slender as a tightrope, and the shaft beneath them appears bottomless. With a drop greater than one hundred miles, it might as well be.
The view reminds Jonas of those precious hours spent on rooftops with Amanda, tempting fate, embracing vertigo. Without that experience, he’d be gripped by nerves and nausea right now, frozen by panic. He offers up a silent prayer of gratitude to his wife.
With Eva right beside him and, he imagines, the guard not far behind, Jonas surges forward, faster than is sensible, given the altitude. His footfalls tap out a cadence as he flies down the catwalk.
