Rainbird by Rabia Gale Page A

you techs for a goodly while yet.”
    Rainbird shrugged and managed not to wince from the flash of pain in her shoulders. “Got a new manager. Very uptight he is. Very insistent on timely repairs.” She and the desk manager exchanged glances, one weary veteran to another. He’ll learn , their look said.
    “I ain’t got time to shepherd you around, young’un. Got some urgent paperwork here. It just came through.” Rainbird nodded in understanding. That had been her idea, sending down the payroll forms in triplicate with a “Return ASAP” stamped on them. The Company was known for mysterious paperwork, and any low-level employee ignored such forms at their peril—or the withholding of their pay.
    “I’ll see myself in.” Rainbird swung open the half-door beside the desk and squeezed past the desk man, who was already back at his forms, writing out his 16-digit employee number. She scanned the tattered map on one wall of the corridor, as if re-familiarizing herself with the place, then went briskly to Boiler Room Eight.
     
    Rainbird wedged a piece of piping through the latch of the boiler room door, locking it behind her. It wouldn’t do to be interrupted. She slipped off her coat, then jumped on top of some ancient equipment to get to the duct above it. The metal was cold and hard against her body, and left her hands smeared and gritty with rust.
    Sanders had turned the boiler off hours ago. Crawling through heating ducts with boilers going at full steam would not have been pleasant.
    Rainbird unscrewed the vent cover above the machine whose technical name she’d already forgotten. She had to balance on her toes to do it, the top screws nearly out of her reach. They were rusted tight and a shower of reddish flakes dusted her face.
    Dying iron on her lips, as she worked inside the bone of a dying beast. Rainbird shivered at the thought. A loose screw clanked next to her foot and rolled away out of sight behind the machine.
    The door to the boiler room rattled as someone tried the handle from the other side.
    Rainbird bit her lip and adjusted her grip on the screwdriver, ignoring the ache in her arms, the tremble in her legs.
    Banging on the door, followed by more frenzied attacks on the latch.
    Ignore it, ignore it. Rainbird fought to keep her hand steady as the tip of the screwdriver found the head of the screw. She began to twist.
    The noise at the door subsided.
    Too much to hope that whoever it was had gone away for lunch.
    Almost done. The last screw trembled in place, held in by age and sheer tenacity.
    A boom at the door, almost making it jump out of its frame. The pipe holding it shut bent. The screw jumped, too, and Rainbird moved her foot as it fell. There was no time to rest her protesting muscles; she pushed the thin blade of the screwdriver under the vent cover and pried at it. The ancient cover popped free just as the door gave up its fight.
    Rainbird dropped the cover, not looking around. She backed up from the vent, till she was right at the edge of the machine she’d used as a platform.
    Footfalls behind her, loud, making the metal floor shudder. Many feet. A n impersonal voice barked out, “Stop right there, Miss! Hands in the—”
    Rainbird narrowed her eyes at the vent hole. She drove her heels into metal as she sprang, sprinting for the wall, willing her body to give her its all, to ignore the reality of wall looming large in front of her. Shots rang out, sharp and splintered, around her.
    Don’t stop, don’t stop.
    Rainbird leapt up the wall, achieving vertical running speed for a split second, fingers grabbing and clamping around the edge. Her momentum flipped her entire body into the duct and in another second she was enclosed in dusty metal tubing, plunged into darkness, inhaling dust and animal droppings, the skin of her hands and her wings catching on metal ridges. Her own breathing thundered in her ears, as did the noise of her inelegant scrambling through the ducts.
    Objective