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Per the tower’s blueprint, Elsie knew there was a ventilation duct that let out into the service elevator shaft; it led, after some meandering, into the panic room itself.
“I think I see it!” Ruthie shouted back. She pointed upward and began climbing again. Elsie looked down at the approaching stevedores; they were gaining, fast. She slapped the shoe sole of Harry, who was just above her.
“Faster, Harry!” she shouted.
Ruthie hollered her arrival at the vent; it was just a few feet off the rungs of the ladder. The girl pulled her screwdriver from her pocket and began carefully removing the screws from the cover’s four corners. Soon, the traffic on the ladder slowed as each kid’s progress was halted by the one before them.
Elsie stopped some yards below Ruthie’s frantic activity, just below Harry, and locked her elbow around a rung of the ladder. “Don’t come any closer!” she shouted to the approaching stevedores. “I’ll kick you in the face!” She swung her leg around threateningly.
The stevedore in the lead gave a leering smile. “Won’t do you no good, kid,” he said. “You ain’t gonna last on this ladder. Gonna pick you like a ripe apple and give you a toss. Gonna make applesauce with ya.” He kept climbing, rung over rung.
Trying to ignore the stomach-turning image the stevedore’s threat had evoked, Elsie looked up, watching Ruthie’s progress, willing her fingers to work faster. The girl handled the screwdriver carefully, unthreading the screws and letting them fall into the open shaft below. “Two more to go!” she shouted.
Elsie felt something at her ankle; it was the meaty hand of one of the stevedores, grabbing her shoe. She screamed and kicked; the man swore loudly as her toe connected with the bridge of his nose.
“Move, Harry! UP!” she shouted.
The boy bolted a few feet up the ladder until he was practically on top of Oz. Elsie scrambled the short distance the boy had bought her, but still their pursuers came on.
“You’ll pay for that, missy,” said the freshly kicked stevedore, a palm held to his face. He lifted his hand away and looked at the results: His sausagelike fingers were stained with blood. “Oh, you’ll pay. You’re gonna fly.” He swatted his hand upward again, just brushing the bottom of Elsie’s feet.
“Only one more to go!” shouted Ruthie; a little screw went whizzing by Elsie’s face.
“Get going!” Elsie yelled at Harry.
“I can’t! Oz’s right here!” It was true; the boys were practically embracing on the ladder.
CLANG. The vent cover came loose and cartwheeled down the elevator shaft, banging its way down to the car far below. Ruthie swung away from the ladder and climbed into the shaft, followed close behind by Oz, having unbraided himself from Harry’s embrace.
Suddenly, Elsie felt a rough pain at her ankle; she looked down to see that the stevedore had her foot in his grip.
“Got you,” he said, calmly, quietly.
Elsie screamed and jerked her body around, trying to lose the man’s grip, but it held tight. Harry had already started to scramble into the duct when he heard Elsie’s shout. Reversing his steps, he climbed out and, firmly catching a ladder rung in the crook of one elbow, reached his hand down to her.
“Grab hold!” he yelled.
Elsie shot her hand up and laced it tightly with Harry’s. Suddenly, she was being torn in two directions, her spin
e stretching like a piece of taffy as the two opposing forces fought against each other.
Something had to give.
Finally, something did.
It was Elsie’s shoe. It glided off the heel of her foot like the burned outer skin of a marshmallow too long over the campfire, and remained in the grasp of the suddenly bewildered stevedore. Elsie shot upward, buoyed by the pull of Harry’s strong arm. They clambered, arm over arm, the remaining distance on the ladder, and within moments the two of them were crawling into the safety of the ventilation duct.
They could hear the wild and enraged cries of the stevedores, just at the entrance to the vent. They even heard a few pained grunts as the stevedores evidently tried to fit their massive frames into the small profile of the duct opening—to no avail. The duct-rats turned a corner in the tiny corridor, and the stevedores’ cries soon echoed into nonsense and were assimilated into the ambient noises of the building itself.
Unthank stared at the television monitor breathlessly, watching the scene play out in vivid black and white. He had his hands to his lips, his mouth slightly open. When he saw the children escape through the duct, he couldn’t help letting out a little victorious yelp.
“Yes!” he shouted, shaking his fist at the screen. “YES!” He then broke out into a song, a song he’d been storing up for a while now, and he belted it loudly in the privacy of the small room. His feet cut a kind of shuffling tap dance on the laminate floor.
And then it dawned on him what must come next. His hand dropped to his side and he backed out of the room, letting the flickering monitors televising the very real revolution that was happening within its many-eyed purview fall away. He closed the door. He locked it. He patted the little box in his pocket and turned around, heading for the stairway and from there to climb the remaining floors to the top of the tower. To Wigman’s office. While he climbed, he remembered.
“You do the honors?” Jacques had said to him, there in the half-light of the saboteurs’ hideout, safe away from the onlookers. The room was alive, so many people, so many children, planning this elaborate caper.
“Yes,” he’d said. “I do the honors.”
