The Steps

The doors of Vance Tower were made of glass, so I could watch the man I loved decide to let me die.

It was Day 61 of the heat. The sign above the entrance, the one Preston had paid extra for so that all of Halbrook could see how cool his tower was, read 59°C. Beneath it, in smaller green letters: INSIDE 19°C. I had been staring at those two numbers for an hour.

I had walked nine kilometres to get there. The road had melted in places, and my shoes had gone soft, so that every step felt like walking on warm toffee. I had no water. I had given my last bottle to a woman on the bridge who was holding a baby, and I did not regret it, which tells you something about the person I used to be.

My lips had split. But I could still stand and I could still hammer on the glass, so I did, over and over, until I could no longer feel my hands.

'Preston!' My voice was a croak. 'Preston, please!'

I had paid for that glass. People forget that when they tell this story. I paid for the foundations, the generators and the steel. Lane Logistics took on the loans, and I put my name on every guarantee because Preston asked me to, and because he held my hand when he asked. 'There will always be a place for you, Dess,' he had said, back when the tower was only drawings on our kitchen table. 'Top floor, east side. Your name on the door.'

Nia had been dead for forty-nine days. She died in the second week, on her feet, treating other people's children. I had not heard from my brother since the phones went down on Day 10. Somewhere behind that glass was Teddy, if he was still alive. Nobody would tell me.

Behind me the crowd had gone quiet, the quiet of people who had stopped expecting anything. A girl lay across her mother's knees. Nobody moved them.

Then the lift at the back of the lobby opened, and Preston walked out.

He looked well. That was the first thing I noticed, and it hurt more than I expected. His shirt was crisp, his hair neat, and he had the faint shine of a man who had been drinking enough water. Dahlia was beside him, and she was wearing my grandmother's pearls.

I knew them at once. Ruth's pearls, three strands, which I had left on my dresser, in my house, in a city that no longer existed. For two months before the heat she had been 'Preston's cousin', a distant relation just returned from abroad. I had let her sleep in my guest room. I had lent her my dressing gown.

Preston leaned towards the intercom, and his voice came through the speaker beside my head, flat and crackling. 'Dess. You shouldn't have come.'

'Let me in.' I pressed my palms to the glass. It was cold, and I nearly wept at the feel of it. 'Please. I only want to see Teddy. I'll sit on the floor.'

'There isn't room.' He said it gently. That was the worst part, the gentleness. 'We counted twice.'

'Then give me my own place.' My laugh cracked. 'Top floor. East side. It has my name on the door.'

Behind him, beside the lift, a brass directory board caught the light. I read it twice before it made sense. PENTHOUSE: MISS D. QUINN.

'That was never yours, Dess,' Preston said, and he sounded almost sorry. 'The suite was always Dahlia's. You paid for it, and I'm grateful, truly. But somebody has to be practical.'

Dahlia smiled at me. She lifted the pearls an inch from her collarbone so that I could be certain I had seen them. Then Preston turned away, the way you turn off a tap, and she followed him to the lift.

My knees went. I slid down the doors and sat on the top step, and the stone scorched me through my clothes, and I thought, quite calmly, that this was how it would end.

'Hey.' A shadow fell across me. 'Hey. Look at me.'

A man had come out of the crowd. Behind him, in the road, three trucks with a spark-in-a-circle logo stood dead, their tyres melted flat. He was tall and broad, in a grey work jacket, with a toolbag over one shoulder and grease up to his elbows. He crouched in front of me, and his eyes, grey and tired and very steady, moved over my face as if he were reading a gauge.

'I wired this panel,' he said. 'The override is behind the plate. Give me two minutes and I'll have these doors open.'

'They won't let you.'

'They don't get a say.' He looked at my bleeding hands, and something in his jaw tightened. 'What's your name?'

'Odessa.'

'Odessa.' He said it carefully, as though he meant to remember it. 'Hold on. I mean it.'

He went to the panel, and for the first time in weeks I felt something unfamiliar. Someone was on my side. Sparks jumped as he prised off the plate, and a light on the wall turned from red to amber. I heard a lock begin to turn. I tried to stand and could not, but I put out my hand, and he reached back without looking and caught it. His palm was rough and hot, and he held on as if I might be carried away.

'Nearly,' he said. 'Nearly.'

The first shot cracked off the stone beside us. He did not let go. The second hit him. I felt it through his hand, a jolt that ran through his whole body, and then he was down beside me with his head against my arm, and his blood was warm on my wrist when everything else in the world was too hot to feel.

The doors had not opened. The light on the wall was red again.

'Stay,' I said. 'Please stay.'

He turned his head and said something. I saw his lips move, but the sun had taken my hearing by then, and I could not catch a single word. I only knew that his grip was still on my hand when I stopped being able to feel it.

Through the glass, Preston stood by the lift with Dahlia at his elbow, watching. I saw him make a small, tidy gesture to a guard, a wave that meant leave them. Then he turned away again.

My vision narrowed to a tunnel, then to a pinprick. I was still holding the stranger's hand. I would not let go of it.

If I ever got another chance, I thought, I would not forgive and I would not forget. I would repay every one of them, every single one, for every door they had closed on me.

If I ever got another chance.

The light went out