Chapter 4: Walking In the Air

Amy hated modern glassy buildings. They felt overexposed, vulnerable. Now, in the dark, she was beginning to realise exactly how vulnerable they could feel.

She and Cerys had struggled to get away from the window, but only because everyone in the building wanted to look out. Once they were past that press, the most dangerous obstacles were chairs and bookcases. Cerys headed for the downward escalator, while Amy flicked her torch around looking for a staircase.

Her light caught a tall, thin man with dark hair and glasses, standing awkwardly in a too-cheerful Christmas jumper, and swinging a torch.

‘Can I help you?’ he asked politely.

‘Where are the toilets?’ she asked.

He pointed behind her, to the other side of the escalators. ‘Over by the lifts. Do you need me to walk with you?’

‘No, thank you.’

She turned around and walked away slowly, hearing him start talking to one of the other librarians. Hopefully, he was no longer looking at her, as she rounded the corner—and turned off her phone torch. Surrounded by a bubble of darkness, Amy turned around and faced the floor again. She had walked in a straight line—how hard could it be to go back?

Blinking a few times to will her eyes to adjust to the light, she started forward, heading towards the beacon of the librarians’ torches. Careful not to get too close, she waited until the stair guard had taken a couple of steps away, before heading for the banister farthest from him and taking the first step up.

Her shoes made little sound on the smooth steps, the metal rail cold beneath her sweaty palm. She had no idea how far she would have to climb to reach the top or even where these stairs went. With the lights all behind her, the way before her was pitch black, each step another one into the unknown.

She closed her eyes. Somehow, that made it easier to take the next step. If she wasn’t expecting to see something, her brain paid more attention to the pressure of her shoe on the step, her hand on the rail. She felt every molecule of her body straining to feel her way through. It was like being back in the bunker, except there she had been hunted down by violent ex-cons. This would be nothing.

Then she tripped.

She hit the stairs hard, biting her lip as she went down. But she did not cry out. She heard voices down below, questioning what was going on in the darkness above them. No one approached, though, and she allowed herself a minute to count her bruises and feel her way back to standing.

Her downfall had been a platform in the middle of the staircase. She had been so focused on moving up the stairs that she’d failed to plan for the ground evening out. Next time, she would be ready.

The first step had her body complaining at top volume, but Amy had grown used to ignoring it. She had learned to calm her racing heart and her panting breaths—ignoring a few bruises would be easy. But she was slower now, and her thoughts drifted towards Jason. Any person willing to plunge a city into darkness on Christmas Eve was an uncaring bastard at best, and Jason would have to defend both himself and the girls.

Did the hacker have a weapon? A bomb? What did they even want? To watch the world burn, to intimidate, to seize power? Too many unknowns. No data. This was Amy’s nightmare—flying blind without information, without knowledge.

That’s why she had to make this climb up into blackness. If there was a chance to find out what was going on, she had to seize it. She knew her limitations—she couldn’t go down there with her fists swinging, like Cerys or Jason could. But she also knew her strengths, and to be at her best for them, she had to find data.

When her left foot couldn’t find the next step, she carefully lowered it next to her right and slid it forward. Solid floor met her sole, and she slid her hand off the end of the rail, bumping against a smooth pillar. She had reached the end of the staircase!

She glanced behind her, at the dots below. She seemed to have come up a long way, perhaps more than one floor of the vast building, but they would still see her phone torch like a twinkling star above them.

She turned back to the darkness. Sliding forward one foot at a time like a skier, Amy swung around the column to her right. She paused and reached out all around her in a circle. She found something solid to her left and, dropping her hand, trailed the soft spines of books. Edging towards the bookcase, she moved until the lights below were obscured and then sank to the floor. This would be her base of operations.

She fumbled with her satchel and pulled out her tablet. It had a full charge and hinted at two bars of mobile signal with a low data connection. It was better than nothing, but answers would be slow in coming.

She called up her news aggregator and Twitter to find out the latest information on the power cut. Her timeline loaded within a few seconds, showing that #CardiffBlackout was trending. From what she could see, the city centre and the surrounding boroughs were all affected, including the student area of Cathays and Jason’s mam’s house in Canton. Early news reports claimed that a circuit breaker in a local electrical substation had been tripped—whatever that meant.

Some pictures and videos had made it through the mobile traffic overload, and most of them seemed to be from on high—her instinct had been correct. She tried to play one, testing the strength of her signal. It was looking down on the dots of light milling around the space outside, all making a beeline towards the building the person was in.

Amy froze. There were other tall buildings opening their doors, surely? But the pattern of lights and the space they occupied was very familiar, especially when she saw the glints of metal that indicated two columns that faintly glowed and a third object between the crowd and their destination. Like the ring and arrow of the sculpture.

Something was wrong with the picture though. Of course, anyone could’ve been filming next to them, but they’d had no signal. She couldn’t quite pinpoint what was off about it, but there was something about the angles, the size of the lights…

The video was taken from higher up. The angle was steeper, the lights smaller—and the view was from one of the higher floors of the library. Where she was now also lurking in the dark.

She wasn’t alone.