The Blue Light Project (22 page)

 

Obi-Wan Kenobi,
Star Wars: Episode IV

THURSDAY

OCTOBER 24

SOMETHING FLUTTERED ACROSS HIS EYELIDS, a moth, a bat, and Rabbit blinked awake among the roof ducts and ventilator shafts, gray silhouettes rising to a stained sky. He’d had a good fast sleep, which, considering he’d been forced to stay on a roof overnight, meant that he hadn’t been discovered or lost any of his gear. He checked inventory and everything was where it should be. Pack tucked tight under his head, foil wrapped around his shoulders. No face hovering, grooved with disdain, waiting for an explanation or worse.

Only birdsong, high clouds. The weather had been threatening each morning, but had not yet broken.

Rabbit rolled to his knees on the gravel and began to pack his things. He was under the overhang of a storage compartment built into the side of the service shaft, where he’d crawled after making his jump late the night before. Nothing broken, but he’d landed hard and the bridge of his nose had made solid contact with the corner of a duct housing. He’d stayed there in the shadows, bleeding and motionless, watching the roofline of the Peavey Block back across the alley in darkness behind him. He’d waited many minutes like that, holding a cramped
position on his knees and palms until he was sure he hadn’t been heard.

Nothing. No radio squelch, no silhouettes above the brickwork. So he was safe but trapped. Forget the alley-side fire escape. Forget going down through the interior of the building in the middle of the night. There was a software company in the top three floors, a temp agency below that. Both would be burglar-alarmed with monitored security. So he’d known immediately he had to sleep there and gone about finding a hidden spot, deeper darkness under a lip of cover. And there he’d made his nest. Foil, extra layers.

Now, in the thin and still-grainy light of the morning after: fresh problems. How to get down? Going down through the building the day before had been a straightforward matter of what Freestealers sometimes referred to as “credibility engineering.” Software meant cubicles, disc towers, cables underfoot, people faced in to screens. It meant young staff and no dress code, so he wouldn’t look particularly out of place. He’d simply gone down the roof access and walked out into the main room. He crossed that space in view of dozens of people, moving quietly, as if he’d done this a hundred times, talking in a low voice into his phone and gesturing once with his free hand. Confidence, self-possession. Rabbit knew these qualities were among the most reflective, and that people who belonged in these spaces would reliably turn them around, matching and endorsing them, awarding him the legitimacy he had originally copied from them.

So, the day before, he’d made it easily across the entire sixth floor to the elevators before he heard a word from anyone. He was still talking into the phone. Held up one finger, scanning available information, imagining the trade, the what for the what. The
if-then
statement. She was maybe twenty-three. Hardworking, going places. First year with the company. On her way from a meeting. Hurrying back to her workstation. Her question left a neat furrow in her brow, the place where patience temporarily alighted.

“This is a restricted floor. Can I help you?”

“Babes, can you wait a minute?” Rabbit had said into the phone, which was in fact turned off. Then holding it covered with one hand, he’d allowed an expression of deep embarrassment to cross his features, mouth sloping, a glance to the side and away. He looked back at the young woman and said: “Not unless you want to talk to my wife here and tell her that I didn’t get the job.”

And off he went to the lobby and the welcoming street.

Of course, Rabbit thought—shouldering his pack and looking around himself in the light of this new day—talking your way out of it was a game you could play to win, but not two days in a row in the same place.

He checked his phone. It was just coming up to seven. Not many people would have started below. The elevators would still be quiet. He climbed out from under the overhang and made his way to the roof door. Inside and down one flight, there was a landing and another door into the elevator room. It was locked. But just as predictably there had to be a safety key nearby. Rabbit found it in less than a minute, fingertips surfing the top of the doorframe, the underside of the lintel. Then he noticed the electrical panel mounted low on the wall, popped the door and there it was.

Rabbit let himself in, closing the door behind him, then toggled on his flashlight to assess. It was a two-car elevator system built in the mid-seventies. Both elevator pulleys were spooled in cable but weren’t moving, which was a good sign he’d beat the morning rush. Better still, at the top of each shaft, next to the pulleys, there was a small access door.

Rabbit got onto his knees and inspected one of these. Padlocked. And this time there was unlikely to be a key nearby as the doors would rarely have been used. Elevator inspectors and repair people would normally access the shafts from inside the cars, through doors that
opened in the top of each. Breaking one of the key rules of Freesteal then, Rabbit extracted bolt cutters from the leg of his pants and snipped one of the padlocks free.

The door swung out towards Rabbit, releasing several decades’ worth of dust, which glinted in the air around him. Suppressing a cough, he rolled away from the opening, covering his mouth with one hand while fumbling in his side pocket for a dust mask with the other. He pulled it into place, snapping the elastics back and over his head, his breath suddenly alive in his ears, the heat of it against his face. He went back to the opening and stuck his head and shoulders through, shining the light down into the murk to find the cars below.

The one in the shaft he’d chosen was just twenty or thirty feet below, waiting at the fifth-floor doors. This position high in the shaft was good news and bad news. Bad if someone decided to take the car up while Rabbit was in the shaft. He’d have no time to react and would be crushed when the car reached the top. But it was good news in the sense that he’d be exposed to that risk only for as long as it took him to get down to the car using the service ladder that ran down the wall of the elevator shaft. Once he was there, Rabbit knew, he could use the maintenance override panel on the top of the car to take control of it, freezing all the buttons inside the car.

Rabbit pulled himself out of the doorway and checked his things a final time. He knelt, listening to the building, to ambient groans and creaks. Nothing regular like a footfall, like the murmur of conversation or a radio. No steady tones from the plumbing, flushes or running taps. Then he rolled into action. He swung his legs through the small door and shimmied back on his stomach, holding to the doorframes with both elbows and stretching his feet down into the blackness to find the rungs of the ladder.

Once he had a toehold, he eased himself back, reaching down with one hand to find a rung. And when he was fully in the shaft he dropped
down quickly rung by rung, flashlight bobbing, painting the walls and cables in streaks and loops as he descended to the car. The instant his foot hit the cold surface, he knelt and steadied the light. Control panel, here. Toggle main control from Operate to Inspect. Roll the red Inspector switch from off to on. And the car was his.

Rabbit knelt in the dim light on top of the car, allowing his breathing to steady. With every shift of his weight, the car swayed on its cable, guide wheels knocking the vertical tracks and releasing a metallic
wow
that looped up the dusty shaft and back to him, then down to the bottom and back again. Rabbit’s light caught the rising particulate matter. Hardware encased in grease. Ducting. Sheathed cables. The busy, invisible workings, the inside of the machine. Much more beautiful than people imagined, Rabbit thought, these true interiors. The gut reaches of a building shared something with the deep interior stretches of a natural landscape that way. In Oregon, Rabbit lived for months in places that were miles from the nearest footprint, deep among the trees, inside walls of vegetation. In the dunes, where at night the sand shelves leaned over with coarse grass, and a person could hide his body from his own eyes and look only outwards. Outwards across an immense plane. It wasn’t a sense of isolation that made him seek those moments and still enjoy them now. Rabbit thought that all places beyond the common path—beyond roads and trails, outside of the stairwells and between the floors, shared a similar potential: connection and trespass combined.

Rabbit breathed in and out through his mask, felt the moisture of his own breath, from his own mysterious inner regions. He was aware of himself swinging gently, suspended at the center of a mechanism, condensation and dust all around. Clouded in fundamental particles.

Time to move. He brought his attention back to the controls. Flashlight tucked under one arm, he pressed the Down and Run keys simultaneously, and the elevator whined to life, the car now dropping
smoothly, the counterweight shooting past the other way, scything into the darkness that bloomed overhead.

He counted floors. Five, four. He stopped on three. He could have tried riding to the lobby at that hour. Probably nobody waiting there. But a middle floor was safer, more likely to be quiet. So he released the switches, the car jerking to a stop, sounds reverberating through the shaft. He toggled the panel back to default settings, then popped the roof hatch and lowered himself into the car. Here, his light and mask stowed, a quick look at himself in the distorting brass plate around the floor buttons, he pressed and held both the Lobby and the Close Door buttons for five seconds to switch the elevator to express mode and off he went. Down to the empty lobby. To the front door. And out into the new light, pack swiveled around and onto his back. He was free.

Walking clear. And in doing so, he thought of Alto again, as if that mysterious figure could give him wisdom. Walk calmly. Swing the arms just so, not too high, not too low. Strides about the length of a shoulder width. This was the geometry of innocence, or so it seemed to Rabbit. No edges or lips, no crevices or rough patches on which the glance might snag, over which a thread of curiosity or imagination might catch and pull. Alto would have walked this way instinctively, swinging the arms, loose and low. Stepping with the whole foot, not rising onto the toes or hitting the heels with any determination. Neither hurrying nor stalling. It was a gait for slipping through the world.

Rabbit walked a half block south of the plaza, then stopped for the light on Jeffers. He was almost ready to let himself feel satisfaction, the project finally complete. It was last night’s feeling intensified further, a view of the stars, rooftop moss underfoot, his last unit in place and beginning to charge, ready to activate as early as that evening. Rabbit was smiling.

The traffic lights changed and he stepped out briskly into the
intersection. And his mind was just cycling back to the day at hand, lowered skies and threatening weather. Black smoke and the smell of gasoline, the sense of atmospheric pressure and alert nerves, poised fear. But these thoughts were interrupted almost the moment they started—thoughts of children, gunmen, cordons, consequences—because as Rabbit reached the far curb, a car door sprawled open in his path and someone climbed out and stood in his way.

Blue uniform, wide stance, a routine grained into every movement. The hand to the gun hip, the other one raised to catch his attention. Now the voice, no rush or alarm in it. A steady insistence: “Just a moment, please.”

Rabbit raised his eyes and brought them level. He smiled again to indicate calm and an easygoing nature. And he kept that smile in place while the questions started. Where he was going, where he worked, where he lived.

“Just down in Stofton,” he said. “I’m going there now.”