“Easy,” Sliv whispered, his hand on her shoulder.

One of the men looked in their direction, eyed them warily for a moment, then joined his coworkers inside the airlock. The door lowered behind them. Through the plexi, Mistletoe could see the lift ascend until the glass became a solid plasteel tube that merged into the shanty-stack overhead. She followed its invisible progress up through the stack, craning her neck to see the canopy. Above that, the airlock opened into topside ESC.

“So how do I go up the lift without an ID?” she asked. If she set off the trap’s invisible trip wires, flash-coolant would trigger an alarm in a guardhouse nearby; cops and technicians would converge on the scene in a few minutes. She’d witnessed it a dozen times from the street: airlock closed, frozen corpse extracted. Then, while a crowd of onlookers gathered, a decision would be made to display or destroy.

Sliv lifted his gear hand. “You don’t, unless you want one of these.”

“Don’t tell me that.”

“See, the Rio II airlock never used to work right. We could slip past the sensors, no problem. We got pretty comfortable.”

“What happened?”

“They fixed it.”

Sliv pulled a silver clamshell from his belt and attached it to the gears. Mistletoe followed him around the side of the airlock and gagged. They’d waded directly into a pile of black trash bags. Most were torn open, oozing congealed rivers of garbage. She tasted the humid, rotten stench deep within her throat.

“This is friending awful,” she choked. “What are we doing here?”

Sliv used a real finger to flick one side of the clamshell. Three copper keys emerged from its mouth. He sifted through chest-high garbage until he seemed satisfied by something she couldn’t see. Then he plunged his hand straight into one of the bags. Mistletoe held her nose. Three faint clicks, and he pulled open a door that had been completely hidden by the trash.

He gave a mock-serious bow. “Princess, your ladder awaits.”

Her eyes shot thirty stories up the stack to the underside of the canopy.

“It’s an old access shaft for airlock maintenance,” he said. “Bit of a climb, but it’s all we got. You sure you don’t want company?”

For a moment, she wished Sliv was coming topside with her. It would be nice traveling with someone who knew the territory. But even beginning to explain the purpose of her journey seemed impossible.

I just found out I was created by UniCorp. My parents are a metal tube and a couple of weird old men. Not sure what the point of my life is. Hoping to find that out, actually.

“I gotta do it alone. But thanks.”

She peered inside the narrow access shaft. Sure enough, corroded metal rungs stuck out of the cement wall.