The Companions by Sheri S. Tepper

freight lift to level. As it turned out, I was under Tower 3.
    Aunt Hatty lived in Tower 29, seven to nine miles from where I stood, depending upon which side of Tower 3 I would exit from and which side of Tower 29 I would come to first. It was late evening. Since traffic slightly decreased during hours of darkness, the only light at the lower levels was coming from the lighted podways that crisscrossed the urb towers like a giant gridiron. It was actually a good time to travel inconspicuously. Level Patrol officers are supposed to keep an eye on the down-dwellers, but they don’t pay attention to anything short of a full-scale riot. Many of the people around me were wearing robes and masks or veils, which I hadn’t seen before. Others wore ordinary clothes, perhaps not as dirty as those I had on, but dirt wasn’t remarkable at level. Down-dwellers were dirty by definition. Dust had to be cleaned off solar collectors, dirt had to be washed off the sides of towers, which meant it all ended up in the bottoms of the chasms, coating the podways, building up beneath them, even making mud sometimes, when it rained. Once in a great while, the cleaning machines came through and took all of the muck out to the farms. From the looks of it, they hadn’t been in Baja Urb for ages.
    According to Joram, some urbs had unlicensed taxis at level, that is taxis without monitors. Perhaps they’d existed when Joram was young, but I didn’t spot even one of them. I was too tired and achy to hurry. Besides, I had to locate all the past-this-point monitors before I passed one without realizing it. Often that meant quite lengthy detours. I didn’t reach Tower 29 until the sky above the urb canyons was growing light. Joram’s rule for covert travel was “Go high or go low,” so I took a freight rampway down into the first sublevel garage section. Since we’d never had a flit, I’d never been in a garage section, but it looked much as Joram had described it, emptier than other places, and, except for cross walls separating the four quads and sixteen sectors, more open. The nearest walls had huge numbers at each entry, dark yellow on a lighter yellow field. Yellow is the uniform code for northeast, so I was in the northeast sector of the northeast quad, one of the twelve outer sectors used for deliveries and parking. The core, the four inner sectors, was where all the machinery that kept the tower running could be found.
    I found an unmonitored service link along the wall and spoke Hatty’s code into it.
    She answered. “Where are you, dear?”
    â€œIn the garage.”
    â€œWhich sector, dear?”
    â€œYellow-yellow.”
    â€œYou’re directly down the wall from me. I can’t bring the flit down to you because I’m identichipped for Blue-blue. Can you…?”
    â€œI’ll get there.”
    â€œDo be careful. I’ll meet you in Blue-blue, fifth level down.”
    â€œI’ll be there. It may take me a while.”
    I located a convenience unit along the wall and stayed there for a brief rest while I ate my last nutrient bar and washed the exposed parts of my body. The bruises were suspicious enough without the filthy clothes, but I couldn’t do anything about that. Wearily, I resolved to be very, very sneaky.
    Blue meant northwest, and the most direct route to Blue-blue was along the outside wall, as Hattie had said, which had the added advantage of keeping me well away from theworkers who thronged the service core. I had no idea how I’d get through the sector wall, but blue sector of yellow quad would be straight ahead. I shambled wearily in that direction, taking refuge behind parked flits or stacks of supplies whenever freight carriers rumbled by or flits screamed into parking areas.
    About halfway along the wall, I came upon a pile of small cartons someone had been working on with a routing labeler. A robe and veil were hung on the wall behind