The Exodus Towers

Bright sunlight began to fill the cabin, in a sharp line that climbed her boots, then her legs, then her torso. Sam raised her arm instinctively as the glaring rays reached her face.

Once her eyes adjusted, she realized a welcoming party waited outside. The sight gave her a brief flashback to the inspection Russell Blackfield had made of the Melville, so many months ago. Only it was Grillo who now waited at the bottom of the ramp, and his posse of bodyguards were plain-clothed.

She’d seen little of Nightcliff’s leader since the alien cube had been recovered from Old Downtown. He’d left her at the airport gate that night, almost as an afterthought, before he and his Jacobite friends had caravanned off with their strange prize.

What had become of the object, Sam had no idea. Grillo had not mentioned it once, and she’d been reluctant to ask. Whatever the hell it is, I don’t want anything to do with it. Nightmares of that mission still woke her some nights, and Sam wanted nothing more than to forget she’d ever seen the thing.

Since that day, all of her scavenging requests came via messages delivered by courier. His promise to allow her a visit with Kelly had not been mentioned, and with each day her desire to keep working for the man dwindled.

“Dirt,” Sam said by way of greeting. “Six tons. As requested.”

“Nutrient-rich topsoil,” Grillo said to correct her. “Excellent work, Miss Rinn. As always.”

Sam shrugged, leaned against the aircraft’s wall, and studied the men with him. They made no move to come aboard and start the unloading process. “Dump it here as if my plane had a bowel movement, or …?”

“A crew is on the way to handle transport,” Grillo said. “I came to see you, actually.”

“Well, here I am.”

A patient smile formed on the slumlord’s thin lips. “Would you come with us, please?”

“Am I in some kind of trouble?”

“No, no,” Grillo said. “The opposite, in fact. Kelly’s here. I thought you might want to see her.”

Sam bounded down the ramp, the clangs from her boots echoing off the interior of the cargo bay. “Here? Why?”

Grillo dismissed her concern with a wave. “To get her some fresh air, I suppose.”

“What kind of hole have you kept her in?” Sam asked. Four heavy steps down the ramp and she stood in front of Grillo, towering over him. His bodyguards moved forward, hands reaching for concealed weapons.

“Relax, everyone,” Grillo said. His voice had an uncanny ability to calm, and he used it to full effect. “Kelly waits for you on the roof above my office. I’ll give the two of you some time to chat, and then we can discuss the future.”

The future. Sam let her fists unclench, and she thought back to the terms Grillo had set when she started working for him. He wanted to be convinced of her allegiance. Only then would he release Kelly.

He gestured toward the control building that straddled the Elevator cord. Sam glanced back and barked an order to her pilot, James, to return to the airport after the workers emptied the cargo bay. The old man waved from the interior door. A former commercial pilot, he had no nose for combat but handled any aircraft they sat him in as if it were an extension of himself. When sober, at least.

Grillo set a languid pace across the dusty yard. In dry season Nightcliff became a miserable place, hot and bone dry. The sweet salty smell that came in from the ocean during the wet months turned into an odor Sam liked to call “rotten seaweed.” Gusts came in from the water in irregular intervals and filled the air with that stench. Less than a minute out of the Advantage Sam found herself breathing through her mouth.

“Three months,” Samantha said. “I’ve been wondering when you’d make good on your promise. I figured you’d forgotten about it after we found that—”

“I must remind you not to talk of prior missions,” Grillo said in a rush. “Forgive my delay. I’ve been busy.”

He had at that. Though Sam had not been allowed to leave the airport, she had heard plenty of talk at Woon’s. Garden buildings fell to Grillo on an almost daily basis. Every week one of the skyscrapers that still had power seemed to suddenly find reason to form an alliance with the man. Those that didn’t were increasingly isolated, and talk of running street battles was a constant topic at the tavern.

Gardens flourished on the rooftops of those buildings that did join his fold, and they were defended with zeal by Jacobites according to the gossip. Indeed the sect seemed to be experiencing an explosion of converts. Some spoke of groups of the religious freaks patrolling streets around the fortress and out into the Maze. Temple Sulam, the Jacobites’ original house of worship in Darwin, attracted huge crowds on Sundays now. Ten thousand worshippers on a recent morning, by some accounts.

Sam stole a glance at Grillo and wondered how deep his ties to the cult ran.

The inside of Nightcliff’s control tower offered little respite from the repugnant furnace of the yard. A bit cooler, perhaps, and the smell changed from ocean decay to the stale, sweaty scent of a locker room. Air-con on the fritz, Sam guessed. She knew of at least a dozen places within a two-hour flight from Darwin to fetch spare parts for the equipment, but she kept that to herself.

Grillo took the stairs with the same maddeningly slow pace. Sam mustered every last ounce of self-control not to elbow him aside and rush to the roof to see her friend.

The flights of worn concrete steps ran together in a blur. Sam had made this trek once before, when Grillo summoned her the night of her escape attempt, but it hadn’t seemed so far. Her thighs burned from the effort by the time two of Grillo’s bodyguards stayed behind on a landing, an indication that they were close.

The slumlord opened the next door and Sam was hit by a wall of humid air. He went through and led her down a narrow corridor that vaguely reminded her of Gateway Station, and for a second she saw herself back there, Kelly in front of her as they scurried from one junction to another evading Alex Warthen’s guards. Unpainted concrete walls were almost hidden beneath pipes that rusted at their joints. The heat made breathing a chore.

A door at the far end entered into another stairwell, and here Grillo went down. Odd route, Samantha thought. Grillo must be trying to prevent her from seeing something. That, or he didn’t want her to be seen. Either option made gears turn in her mind.

He descended only one flight before he pushed through another door. This one led into a foyer Samantha had previously seen. It fronted the office Grillo used, formerly occupied by Russell Blackfield.

“Still warming Blackfield’s chair?” she asked before her brain could tell her mouth to shut.

Instead of a spoken response, Grillo forged ahead through double doors.

Sam barely recognized the office within. None of Russell’s sloppy furnishings or tasteless decorations remained. Cramped and haphazard before, the space had seemed modest, if not small.

Now, though, the room bordered on palatial. A simple wooden desk sat at the middle of the far wall, with two identical chairs on either side of it. A matching wood file cabinet was parked underneath. To Samantha’s right, two large windows framed the corner of the room, with a wide view of Darwin’s crowd of skyscrapers.

The view of the crumbling city from here impressed her, despite the fact that she’d seen Darwin from aircraft a thousand times. Samantha could see east to the horizon, over the garden-studded rooftops of the chaotic Maze. South loomed a wall of skyscrapers, the lower floors hidden under a crust of bolted-on rooms where living space had been extended to the maximum. The upper floors were a patchwork quilt of glass panes and improvised coverings in the numerous places where the glass had long ago been broken. Drapes, blankets, and plastic tarps of every color and pattern filled the holes. Some open windowsills had cups, bottles, and buckets along the bottom to catch what rain they could. In wet season every window would, but during these months the chances were few and far between.

With an effort she focused on the immediate room again. Natural light streamed in and fell upon four red love seats that formed a square. Two men sat there, each with a cup of tea in hand. They both stared at her but made no move to get up and greet her. Neither said a word.

“I’ll be with you in a moment, friends,” Grillo said to them. He went to his desk and sat behind it. Above him on the wall an enormous painting had been hung. Two meters tall and a meter wide, the image depicted a ladder stretching up into a cloudy sky. The rails and rungs of the ladder, on closer inspection, were composed of people. They stood on one another’s shoulders, clasped arms, teamed together to hoist others higher, all in order to keep the ladder’s shape solid. The strain on their tiny painted faces was evident, even from where she stood. A superimposed image of Christ on the cross covered all this, with the ladder of course forming the vertical portion.

The presence of the artwork dashed all remaining doubt Sam had as to Grillo’s level of involvement with the sect. He was in deep. Pigs in a blanket.

“Where’s Kelly?” she asked.

Grillo pointed toward a door off to her left. “You have an hour.”

An hour. We could flee. Scale the wall down to the yard and run.

As she stepped through the door, Sam pushed that line of thinking away. Grillo had promised to release Kelly to her if he decided she could be trusted. Months of hard work had her close to that goal, and once achieved they could flee on an aircraft at their whim. Find somewhere far away to live, or—Samantha reminded herself Kelly was not immune. Maybe they could join the runaways, then, wherever they were. Hide somewhere in Darwin as a last resort.

That last would be difficult, she knew. Grillo’s grip on the city spread like a flu, and unless Darwin’s thousands of neighborhood kingdoms got their collective shit together, no one would be able to challenge him. She’d never been a big-picture kind of girl, and she still couldn’t decide if Darwin under Grillo would be a bad thing. There’d be food, order, and law. But she guessed there wouldn’t be much in the way of fun.

Beyond the door, Samantha found another narrow flight of stairs that led to a heavy steel door. A faded plaque indicated “roof access.” Sunlight poured in as she pushed it open, and gravel crunched under her boots.

Sam raised a hand to shield her eyes from the brightness as she scanned the rooftop. Kelly was nowhere to be seen. Instead, a Jacobite nun stood near the edge of the roof, in a hooded robe of white flowing cotton. If not for the frayed hemline at the woman’s feet, the garment could have been brand-new. The Jacobites’ red ladder-and-cross sigil had been painted on the back of the robe. Someone once told Sam the symbol was painted with the acolyte’s own blood as some sort of initiation rite. But she’d seen enough blood splash on her own clothing to know the color was wrong. Too bright, too red.

“Hello?” Sam called out. “I was told I could find Kelly Adelaide here.”

The priestess half-turned, and Samantha recognized her friend instantly. “Hello, Sam.”

Unable to hold it back, Sam erupted into laughter. “What the fuck are you wearing that for?”

Her laugh died when Kelly’s expression remained impassive. She looked thin, and her mannish hairstyle was gone. Gray-brown hair came down to her neck, combed straight and simple and framed by the white hood.

“No, seriously,” Sam said, composing herself. “What the fuck are you wearing that robe for?”

“I took the vows,” Kelly said simply. She held out a hand and added, “Come and speak with me.”

Samantha crossed the roof one slow, tentative step at a time. When she stood next to her friend, the woman seemed like a complete stranger. All the fire, all the spunk was gone. Instead she seemed almost demure. Pious, Sam decided, and she wanted to spit.

“It’s good to see you,” Kelly said as if reading a script. Her eyes flicked up and met Sam’s for an instant, and then she cast her gaze downward. “You look well.”

“And you look … Shit, I hardly recognize you,” Samantha said. “What have they done to you?”

Kelly’s lips pursed. “Nothing. I’ve simply discovered my true self, and found salvation.”

The words sounded sincere on the surface. But Samantha knew Kelly. She’d heard her bluff past workers and even guards on Gateway Station.

A gust of hot wind swept over the roof. The white robe billowed around Kelly’s body, revealing her shape beneath, a thin frame. Too thin, Sam thought.

As the wind gusted around them Kelly whispered something. It sounded like “Listen to the ghost.…”

The wind died out, and her strange words trailed off with it. Kelly’s mask of piety returned.

For a time they stood in silence, Kelly soaking in the view of the city and Sam staring at her, looking for some hint as to what she meant. Listen to the ghost? I’m standing right here. How could I not be listening? Possibilities flooded her mind. Scenarios that would lead Kelly to don such vestments, which must be a deception. Perhaps it was part of some elaborate escape plan. Perhaps Kelly didn’t know that Grillo would soon let her leave to stay at the airport.

“Have they treated you well?” Sam asked carefully.

“I have my own room,” Kelly said, as if that settled the matter. Then she saw the dissatisfaction at her answer on Sam’s face and went on. “It’s not a cell, don’t worry. Your work has spared me from that. No, this was a hospital room once, but now it’s more like a hotel. I can see the city from my window. The stadium is magnificent to behold at night. But nothing compares to Jacob’s Ladder, when the climbers are on it. I can see that, too, if I lean against the window.”

Sam’s mind raced. There were enough clues in that statement to guess where they held her. A hospital complex near Grillo’s headquarters in Lyons, just north of the football stadium. Samantha wanted to shout at her friend in frustration. Why tell me this? So I can break you out? You know Grillo plans to release you into my care, so what the hell are you up to?