Page 109 of One Adult, Please

SKY POLE SITUATION

BECK

Here's the thing about climbing a building at dawn with Joel from Operations: the man treats a rooftop access ladder like a tax form. Every rung inspected. Every handhold evaluated. Every decision preceded by a mental calculation that I can literally hear happening because Joel's brain makes a vibration in the space around him that says, "I'm processing variables and you will wait."

I don't wait well.

"Clear," Joel says from two rungs above me.

"I can see that it's clear. My head is right below your boots, which I'm also getting a very detailed view of, so if you could maybe pick up the pace on the..."

"The ladder has corrosion on rung fourteen."

"Rung fourteen can corrode in peace, Joel, we talked about this: sunrise window, zombie drift patterns..."

Joel climbs. I climb. We clear the hatch.

The roof of the WonderSphere operations center is flat, industrial, and deeply unsexy. Gray rubber membrane. Ventilation units squatting in rows like ugly metal mushrooms. Cable conduits running in organized paths toward the center of the roof where the antenna array rises against the pre-dawn sky like a metal skeleton doing jazz hands.

"The dish needs manual realignment. Give me twelve minutes," Joel says.

Joel kneels beside the antenna mount. He pulls the wrench from his belt, sets it against the first bolt, and the sound is immediate. Metal against metal, sharp, percussive. The kind of sound that carries across open space like a dinner bell.

"Starting," Joel says into the walkie.

Grace found the walkies in the maintenance warehouse last night, and she held them up like she'd discovered the ark of the covenant and said "talking boxes" and Joel said "radios" and she said "I know what they are, Joel."

The walkie crackles. Grace's voice, slightly compressed by the radio's speaker but unmistakably hers. "Copy. Grant says Captain isn't tracking any movement below you. Also I found a vending machine in here and it still has power and it has those little powdered donuts that are basically just sugar wearing a donut costume. I'm going to eat four of them."

"Focus, Grace," Joel says.

"I'm focused and eating a donut. Multitasking. It's my core competency. You said I was the strategist. Strategists need calories."

Joel loosens the first bolt. The sound rings across the rooftop. I scan the perimeter. The big middle stretches below us in the gray light, pathways empty, the fountain visible from here.

Second bolt. More noise. I watch the edges of the big middle. The places where the pathways meet the perimeter walls. The gaps where the drift comes through. The drift is what Joel calls the wrong people wandering in from outside, finding gaps in the fencing, squeezing through maintenance gates, drawn by sound and movement. We secured the big middle but it doesn't stay cleared.

"Movement," I say.

Joel doesn't stop. "Where."

"Southeast. Two. Maybe three. Coming through the maintenance gate near the food room. Two hundred yards. Slow drifters."

"We have time."

Third bolt. Joel rotates the dish. The sound is worse now, a grinding, screeching protest of metal. It echoes off every flat surface in the big middle and bounces back to us like the building is tattling on our location to everyone within a half-mile radius.

The walkie crackles. "That sound is very loud."

"We know, Grace."

"Like very loud. Grant says Captain sees something."

“He's fixated on the southeast approach,” Grant says. “Something’s moving toward the sound.”

"Options," Joel says.

"I go down," I say. "Draw them off and give you time to finish."