Neon lights pulsated and car horns blared. A bevy of drunks swayed while belt-ing out the national anthem, tears streaming down their faces. In the shadow of the Morrow Tower, a subway station disgorged its passengers; they scuttled out and flowed away like a sea of cockroaches fleeing the light. Not one of them headed for home, for deep night was their only chance at freedom. Only then could they stuff greasy food and cheap alcohol down their throats, waste their money in rigged claw machines, and pretend they were enjoying them-selves.
They would think they had, come morning.
In the scattering crowd, only one person stopped and lifted her eyes to the looming Morrow Tower. She was a young woman in a pleated miniskirt and leggings, a pair of butterfly clips in her hair. A fleeting vulnerability danced over her face; then her head ducked, her expression becoming a shyer version of this city’s habitual mask of busy importance. Hitching her backpack, she headed for the nearest crosswalk. She was Agent Lawrence, but hardly any-one at the Agency would have recognized her.
The crowd moved, and Lawrence’s sneakered feet took her across the street and to the edge of the Morrow Tower. Impossible to see if anyone noticed what she was doing, if any predator watched those firm thighs and white neck. Anyone in the street might have followed her, and anyone might have looked down from the numerous office windows that remained lit despite the hour.
Checking around as if suddenly nervous, Lawrence ascended the Morrow Tower’s nearest entry patio. When the door did not open automat-ically, her brow furrowed and her mouth pouted. She reached to press the handicap plate and paused with her fingers resting lightly, reading aloud: “‘Keycard access afterhours.’ Is that right?”
Chewing her lower lip, Lawrence pulled a folded paper from her back-pack’s side pocket. Its front had been filled with a round, black font. Its title, double-underlined and bold, read: “The Real Secret Floor Game!!!”
Lawrence skimmed past the warnings with the air of one who has read them many times, and stopped at the first paragraph of instruc-tions. She stepped back to the sidewalk and craned her neck to count windows. Twice, careless passersby bumped her, but the main areas of her backpack had been secured by small locks, and nothing went missing.
“It has over a hundred floors,” she said, childishly petulant. “But how do I get in? There isn’t even a buzzer! If I had come during the day and hidden—but tomorrow will be too late. Oh, I don’t want her to laugh at me!”
She swung away from the edge of the building, scrunching on the edge of tears, trembling against her future humiliation. Then a revelation came over her, and her fist tightened on the paper. “How do I know it’s locked, if I haven’t tried? Maybe someone forgot to lock it. And if it is locked, that’s a sign I wasn’t meant to play—that this is just a stupid game and not real at all. So!”
False chutzpah over fragility, Lawrence marched back to the door and slammed her palm upon the handicap plate.
The door, whose lock was set by a timer, refused to budge. It was over-rid-den. Grudgingly, it rotated to life, offering Lawrence a brief opportunity.
She took it, amazed. Did this mean she was meant to play? That she was special?
No, no. This city raised its children to be as cynical as they were super-sti-tious; any offer too good to be true was too awful to be false. The door had opened because she had taken advantage of someone’s lazy forgetful-ness. As they deserved to be taken advantage of.
Neon gave way to the half-light of the after-hour fluorescents. Lawrence stood on the ground floor, but not in any sort of lobby: the Morrow Tower housed many businesses of many varieties, and if they wanted anything special, they’d better provide it themselves. The Tower gave them nothing but long hallways of beige vinyl and greenish paint, spotted regularly with the frosted panes of doors and their decaled names and numbers. To the left was a letter-board listing the locations of various businesses; to the right, around the corner, was a pod of eight eleva-tors. Fingerprints smudged their steel doors, and grime lined the buttons by their sides.
Lawrence held her printout directly under one of the dim lights and mur-mured, “‘. . . In an elevator at exactly midnight.’ But which elevator? It must not matter. ‘Exactly midnight.’”
The hands of her watch indicated 11:54. Had she cut it too close? No, she had plenty of time. Clicking her tongue, Lawrence made a circuit, pressing the Up button by each elevator door. Six of them opened immediately; the seventh had to travel down a dozen stories, and the eighth took nearly four minutes to arrive.
Two minutes until midnight. She had to be exact.
Leaving nothing to chance, Lawrence made another circuit, pushing Up buttons. She staggered her timing so that doors were always opening and always closing. Around and around she went, eyes on her watch.
Ten seconds until midnight. Five. Two. Lawrence ran at closing doors. One. She leapt through and landed in a crouch, her fingers catching and pull-ing the knob of her watch. Time stopped on closed doors.
Midnight exactly. The brushed steel interior of the elevator waved her image back at her. The hissing of other doors closing—the anger of the driv-ers outside—the restless rumbling of the subway—the drunk catcalls of the city’s elite—
Lawrence could hear none of them. In this isolated world of stale air and discarded dreams, there was only the buzzing of worn-out pop songs from the speaker above, and her own breathing.
Lawrence straightened, facing the back of the elevator. It had its own set of double doors for offset floors, but the buttons awaited her at the front: Open. Shut. Emergency. Key lock. Numbers from -3B to 104.
Midnight, insisted her watch. Midnight, and time is stopped.
Lawrence shook herself and gave a little laugh, like she wasn’t sure if she should be pleased. She smoothed out the instructions, consulting them again. “‘Take the elevator to the hundredth floor. The elevator MUST NOT stop, and if it stops, the doors MUST NOT open, or you’ve failed and will have to try on a different night.’ —No, it has to be tonight.”
. . . Tonight? Why tonight? Did she still live with her parents, at her age? Was there someone else who would stop her from sneaking out? Old as she was, her mentality remained childish. Look at her, in that outfit ill-suiting a grown woman. Pathetic. People like her, who projected such a tough exterior. They snapped like balsawood under real pressure.
The perfect candidate, in other words. And what a waste it would be, if some departing employee stole her only opportunity to play!
Lawrence depressed the 100 button. It lit in response, and the elevator rose smoothly. If anyone hailed it, it sent its sisters in its stead. A full five minutes passed before, with a ding, it spread its doors for the hundredth floor.
As part of some international company, the hundredth floor existed only to store cubicles and their human drones. This late at night, it was nothing but the hum of weary electronics, the sour memory of cheap coffee, and the framed faces of illusory joy. In other words, it was a glimpse of her future: the inevitable grind until death that awaited every child of this city.
The doors remained parted to show their wares, but no one got on, and no one got off. At length, they moaned closed again.
Lawrence exhaled, as if she’d suffered a narrow escape. Then, she pushed each descending button, from 99 to -3B.
You’re training the elevator to stop at every floor, the instructions explained. If you succeed, this will include the Secret Floor!!
“The Secret Floor,” Lawrence breathed. She jerked and clamped her hand over her mouth, remembering the next paragraph of instruc-tions. Pulling her chin down, she resisted every temptation to look around: tensing when the doors behind her opened, relaxing when it was the doors in front of her.
On the 92nd floor, heeled shoes clicked onto the beige vinyl behind her, and a steady gaze raised the hairs of her neck. Lawrence clenched her teeth and focused on the instructions, reading and rereading them.
Mysterious Stranger!! If your elevator has two sets of doors, you may be joined by a Mysterious Stranger. They might be another Traveler like you, or they might be a Visitor to our world returning home. Either way, you MUST NOT look around or speak to them until after you’ve exited the elevator. Other-wise, you might anger the Mysterious Stranger into attacking!
Lawrence lidded her eyes against the wavery reflection. The elevator dinged, and the button lights extinguished one by one. Floor 68: the doors opened, the light died, the elevator descended. Floor 67: open, close, descend—and the elevator juddered. Lawrence grabbed at the smooth wall to keep her balance. The ceiling light sparked and snapped out; the anemic pop music lost its battle with static. Metal shrieked, and the elevator thud-ded heavily upon uneven ground.
The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
Ding, submitted the elevator, and opened its doors upon the scarlet sky and glass weeds of an alien hellscape.
Breathless air penetrated the elevator, arid and metallic. Neither heat nor cold relieved the bleakness of the sand beyond; neither sound nor move-ment hinted at life. Time might have stopped here as well—if this place could have birthed such a kindly killer as Time.
Lawrence, aghast, remained equally motionless. Not even the urgent exhor-tations of the printout propelled her beyond the dubious safety of her steel shell. Just as it seemed she might remain there forever, a distant ting! pierced the world.
It was not the ding of an elevator, but a distant relation thereof, as a flute is the filthy half-breed bastard of a scream. Or perhaps that should be the other way around; for this ting! rang out achingly beautiful, insidiously enticing, and beguilingly gruesome. It was not a sound to be comprehended by human ears; it was a sound to slice the delicate veins of your wrists to and leave you bleeding out on the ashy gray sand.
As if hypnotized, Lawrence walked out of the elevator, away from the vinyl and brushed steel of her future. When you explore the Secret Floor, murmured the instructions, which Lawrence seemed to have forgotten, start your watch again. The elevator will leave in one hour, and if you aren’t on it, you’ll be trapped forever.
The click of heels on vinyl followed Lawrence, but she still didn’t look back. Instead, she shrugged off her backpack, revealing the weapons beneath: lesser sword crossed over greater. Her face had rearranged itself at some point, and it no longer bore any memory of vulnerability.
This was not a place for humans.
Lawrence sidestepped, drawing her lesser sword. She regulated her breath-ing, taking in everything, watching for everything—and guarding Daisy as she worked.
More than twenty girls between the ages of eleven and nineteen had disap-peared into this scenario over the past two weeks. In one case, an office worker had disappeared the same night. That had been what’d suggested to the agents that they could take advantage of the Mysterious Stranger clause.
“I will be the one to play the game,” Lawrence had informed Daisy. “You don’t have the experience to survive solo, and I am closer to the correct age.”
“Then we should arrive early,” Daisy had said. “I’ll see if anyone on the upper floors needs a temp—the higher the better, so no one beats me to it. And I’ll have to check which floors face the back.” She’d grinned. “You think my work experience will translate?”
It hadn’t, but everyone on the 92nd floor had forgiven her anyway. Stay-ing late had been easy; the real trick had been timing her exit to look natural. Now, she knelt in the elevator’s threshold, briefcase open. She laid out her silver gloves, a pair of sneakers, and the all-important, nigh-indestructible, agency-issued anchor. In theory, it should prevent the elevator from leaving without them; and to this theory, Daisy added her own insurance in the form of finely netted threads, glistening and silvery.
Lawrence was watching her; she was sure of it. But she was doing noth-ing any control expert could not do, and there was no rule against reinforcing equip-ment. And even if there were—
Well, no matter.
Daisy stood and told Lawrence, “You’re quite the actress.”
Lawrence didn’t answer, and Daisy wished she hadn’t spoken: this place gouged the humanity from her voice, stripping it of everything except noise. That noise flattened and flowed wide, breathing upon the listening glass weeds. The soft white threads within those weeds vibrated in response, blindly hunting the voice’s owner.
Lawrence drew her compass and Daisy moved close, to where Law-rence’s shadow would have been, if the light had been direct enough to cast a shadow. The compass needle pointed dead ahead, away from the cringing elevator. In a testing sort of way, Lawrence turned on an angle and took three steps.
The world swam sickeningly around them as it reoriented, threads contort-ing inside their glass to accommodate the change. The compass needle spun with the landscape, and finished by pointing dead ahead in their new direction.
Daisy smiled grimly. So it was one of these: the inevitable meet-ing between target and Heart, a meeting so forced that geography would tie itself into knots to accomplish it. A sort of maze-in-reverse, where direction didn’t matter because there was only one direction.
Sand plumed around their ankles as they walked, and the world revolved around them. After about thirty steps, when they were too far away to sprint back (but close enough to think they might make it), the elevator doors hissed shut. They hit the anchor and pressed. They shrieked, opened slightly, and tried again, but the anchor remained firm. They banged against the anchor, but their own steel would have cracked before it did. The doors squeezed against it, but they could not squeeze so tightly that an agent could not pass between them.
Daisy and Lawrence walked, and the soulless sky observed them. No moon or sun broke into it, but there were a million stars: tiny pinpricks alluringly distant and pressingly close. It was a sky into which you might fall, if you stared long enough; but a sky at which you could not help staring. It stretched over and into the land, pervasive and impossible, until that you thought you might scream at it to go away, go away—scream and cry and run shrieking over the weeds, dancing through their broken glass, and—and—
And again came the pure, distant, excruciating ting!
Daisy’s shoe brushed a glass weed, and it shattered, oozing maggot-white into the ashy sand. Her heart caught, welling up with the desire to—
To what? What could she possibly do in a place like this? What grand delusion had she been pursuing despite the truth that she—that this person who called herself Daisy Allen—was nothing? Not a speck of a speck in this vacuous universe? She could do nothing, and nothing she did mattered, because nothing mattered.
Daisy stopped walking. These were not her feelings; these were not her thoughts. They felt like hers and they sounded like hers until she peered closer; and then they resembled only the razor edge of the beautiful ting!
A psychic attack, then. Now that she recognized it for what it was, she could resist it; but recognition alone was not enough. Knowing you are feel-ing such-and-such irrationally does not make you feel otherwise. And any-way, hadn’t these feelings and these thoughts been something like her own, for so many years in Romance? No matter what she did, no matter how hard she worked—
I never failed, Daisy reminded herself. I never died. I sometimes had to retreat, but I never let the scenario win.
—she could never make her partners see reason. Never make them good at their jobs. She could not improve them or help them; she could only control them. But that couldn’t last forever, could it? One day, there would be a foe too great for her alone. Or one day, she would be caught. In some way or other, her control wouldn’t be enough, and all her struggle and strife would be for nothing.
Except that that never happened.
—and wasn’t that utter pointlessness like a scream that went on and on for years? Wasn’t that her blood on the sand?
Yes.
Life was a pathetic struggle, a futile existence. Why was she even working for the Agency? She had never wanted any of this. She had joined having no idea what it would be like, all to follow some man. She’d never dreamed of being a hero, of beating back evil.
That’s right, Daisy agreed, welcoming the psychic attack deeper into her mind, feeding it piece by piece.
What did it matter, if she thought herself a hero? What could her small victories do, against the universe’s vast, eternal, faceless evil?
Is “evil” the right word? Daisy purred. Evil only exists in relation to Good; and where there is Good, there must be hope.
—What could her small victories do, against some vast, eternal, uncar-ing existence? No matter how she tried, one day it would crush her for no better reason than that it could—
Could it be, Daisy wondered, that there was then a “reason” in the universe? A greater purpose?
—one day it would roll over and crush her for no reason at all, without even the knowledge of what it did. It merely crushed her in its sleep. That was the way the universe worked, because nothing mattered—
If nothing matters, then there’s no point in detailing it, is there? Daisy asked triumphantly, and the voice had nothing to respond. She crushed her own mind down upon it and snuffed it out, and it could do nothing more to resist her than if it was a speck of a speck in a universe bursting with life.
Daisy blinked and seemed to awaken. She stood in the sand, a mess of threads shriveling upon her shoe, spent and dead. Lawrence stood next to her, lesser sword on guard. Her eyes were clear, and Daisy could see no expression beyond them. Had the attack not touched her, then? Or had she fought it off already? Or had it, perhaps, slid off the icy fortress of her mind?
Daisy’s old partners would have crumpled under a psychic attack of half, of a quarter that intensity. Lawrence had drawn her sword.
(Was there even anything to attack, behind those empty eyes? Any vulner-able humanity? How would Lawrence react to the over-whelming longing of a Romance? Of the bursting lust, the suicidal jealousy?)
Lawrence watched her and waited. Daisy closed her eyes and opened them again, observing the pattern of this world. Pinpricks of despair tore at her cheeks. Not strong enough to breach her defenses, but enough that she needed defenses. The psychic attack had definitely not come from the weed or from the threads within; but weed and threads had provided a location for it, a focus. Now that she knew how to look, she could see it was raining—continual drips of desolation, micro-scopic but ubiquitous. Individually, they were mildly unpleas-ant; combined into a torrent, they would drown even the wary. Or—no, more than that. This single weed had alerted only a small area. Should the agents truly draw the scenario’s attention, that earlier attack would be a trickle beside a waterfall. If, indeed, Daisy had followed her first urge to strip off her shoes and dance upon the ashy sand, crushing glass weeds with her bare flesh—
Protecting against such an attack as would then come would be impos-sible.
The problem was that there were so many weeds, some of them mostly hidden by sand. If she stepped on a weed and, instead of freez-ing, stum-bled, it would be only too easy to blunder into another weed and another, cascading into devastation.
Daisy could not guarantee against a stumble, no matter how careful she was. But she could, she thought, prevent a cascade. She would only stumble again if distracted by the psychic attack. She was prepared against the rain now, but a stronger attack might surprise her. The trick, then, was to not let the attack hit her in the first place. Not to prevent it—she could no more do that than prevent the ordinary sky from dripping ordinary rain—but to divert it. An umbrella, sharply peaked for runoff and arched for stability.
Alone, Lawrence would have had to simply avoid the weeds and bull her way through the attacks, but Daisy could provide a much better solution. Not all agents could use gloves well; Daisy had never seen Law-rence try even as a backup. That meant Daisy had something of real value to offer. Something worth preserving her over.
You’re the one who broke the weed, murmured her mind, protected from the gentle pinpricks of rain.
Lawrence remained on guard, one eye on her without ques-tioning or push-ing.
Daisy smiled at the rain. If this was a test, she would rise to it. If it wasn’t, she would rise above it. She drew the crimson grayness of defeated despair from her thoughts and spun it thin, slicking it with silver. Rain hit the net and found nothing to soak into, nothing to cling to. Despair balled up and rolled away, groaning with disaffected disin-terest as it made its way to the ashy sand.
Daisy threw the umbrella above them, as she might a kite, and spun it until it spread further. It hovered, covering their heads, though a few stray drops wet-ted their ankles. She held it by a single silver strand, gleaming and fine and stronger than steel.
Relief came immediately, as sunlight breaking over the mountains. Daisy grinned at Lawrence. Despair was like that. It seemed all powerful until it evap-orated like rain against the dawn of hope.
