Chapter 23: Carol and the Open Sky

The roof hatch stuck on the third try, the way it always stuck, and Zara put her shoulder into it and felt the seal give and came up into the gray morning air with her route map under one arm and her pencil behind her ear and the particular intention of someone who needed a ceiling higher than twelve feet.

Carol was already there.

She was sitting on the equipment housing near the northeastern edge, the flat concrete block that had once held an aeration motor and now held nothing but weather and old bolt-holes. Not standing. Not pacing. Just sitting with her elbows on her knees and her face tilted up at a sky the color of old dishwater, and she didn't turn when the hatch opened.