Mara and Caldris climbed the cold stair at the fifth hour.
They left the cage alone. Its control was still the directors’, and its indicator lamp still amber, and nobody in the lowest chamber would ride it while the directors held the switch at the top. So they climbed the ladder: the iron rungs bolted to the rock beside the shaft, worn smooth in the middle, with the lagged return pipe running hot beside them all the way up.
Mara climbed one-handed. Her burned arm was in its sling; she could not use it on the rungs. She climbed with her right hand and her feet, slowly, a rung at a time, with Caldris below her. Sen had sent Breda up first, above Mara, to call the landings. Sen stayed on the pumps.
“Don’t touch the pipe,” Breda called down, at every landing. “Listen to it.”
Mara listened. The pipe hummed beside her, hot. She kept her hand off it.
At the top of the ladder, a hatch. Breda opened it. They came out into a corridor.
It was the corridor outside the engineering hall. Mara recognized it from the descent: the concrete passage at the bottom of the service stair, with the hall’s door at its end. The door was shut now. Beside it stood a guard. Directors’ grey. Young. With a sidearm at his belt and a slate in his hand.
