It took about an hour to get the first set of doors opened. They defaulted to locked, for one thing. For another, the mass of the doors was a lot more than the usual lift gates. In the end, it had taken Amos, Sullivan, and Morris on one door and Konecheck with his modifications on the other to pry them open enough to slip through. Twice, the ground had shaken, and the second time harder than the first; the whole damned planetary mantle was ringing like a struck bell. By the end, Amos was starting to get thirsty, but he didn’t see the point in mentioning it.

The shaft was in darkness, which Amos had expected. It was also wet, which he hadn’t. Black drops like filthy rain pattered down from above, smearing the walls and making them slick. He couldn’t tell if it was leaking through from one of the floors above them or if the building at the ground level had been sheared off. The guards had flashlights, but all the beams showed were dirty steel walls and a recessed track that the car ran on. A set of repeating steel access panels ran along beside the track looking like cabinets stacked one on top of the other, going up forever into the gloom.

“That’s the maintenance ladder,” Rona said, playing a circle of white light over the cabinet doors. “The doors retract, and there’s handholds.”

“That’s great,” Amos replied, leaning out into the empty air. The shaft went down another three meters or so. The black soup at the bottom might have gone deeper than that, but he was hoping not to find out. The air smelled like ashes and paint. He didn’t want to think too much about what was leaking into the shaft or where it was coming from. If the whole place was ass-deep in toxic crap, it didn’t change what they had to do.

The gap between floors was maybe half a meter. Craning his neck, he could see the lines of the elevator doors set flush into the wall. Not so much as a fingerhold. He thought maybe there was something way at the top of the shaft – a spot of brightness that came and went in an eyeblink.

“Can we get to the next doors?” Clarissa asked from behind him. “What’s it look like?”

“It looks like we need a plan C,” Amos said, coming back into the prison hallway.

Konecheck chuckled, and Sullivan turned on the man, lifting the gun-like thing to the prisoner’s head. “You think that’s funny, asshole? You think it’s all so fucking amusing?”