The Great Ellini (Book One of The Powder Trail)

Chapter Fifteen: Indescribably Dark

Jack grabbed Ellini by the waist when she reached the fourth landing, and he was surprised to find that there was no scream—just a sudden intake of breath and a kind of limpness in her body, as though she'd temporarily fled from it in expectation of what was coming next.

When she recognized him, and maybe recognized that the hands around her waist were gripping her as though she was nothing more interesting than a candlestick, he saw the life flow back into her eyes. All the guards settled back in place. But not quite as much as if he'd been Sergei, or Sam, or Alice Darwin. He was getting somewhere.

In fact, if her stomach muscles hadn't tightened under his hands when she recognized him, Jack could almost have believed his presence was a comfort to her.

"Come on," he said, patting those taut muscles in a companionable way. "We're going out."

He turned to the window, hoisted it open, and leaned out with his whole torso, balancing his palms on the sill, and breathing appreciatively.

The air was brittle with frost. He felt as though he was breathing in tiny ice crystals with every gulp. But it was just what he needed. It woke him up—to the extent that his permanent clouds of boredom and medication would allow. It didn't wake up any feelings for the skinny, nervy, intriguing little lump of flesh beside him, but he supposed it would have to do, for now.

"You did say you don't mind heights?" he added, turning back to her.

"Um," said Ellini—which was good enough for Jack. He swung his legs out of the window, let them dangle for a few seconds over the twenty-foot drop into the garden below, and then sprang sideways onto the nearest protruding ledge.

Oxford was amazing for handholds. Even the Georgian buildings—which were short on gargoyles—had cornices, pediments, lintels, and ledges to help the truly bored and desperate inhabitants of the city to escape.

And it was beautiful out there—especially to a man whose head was still fizzing from the electric lights of Alice's laboratory. All that serrated architecture rising into the sky. A crescent moon as thin as a nail-clipping. And Ellini back there on the landing, half-buried in shadow, nervous and unfathomable and desperate to escape. And it didn't matter if they never did—just as long as they had each other's company while they were dreaming about it.

"I don't think I'm supposed to leave the Faculty," she said, sticking her head out of the window.

"Because you might make all the bats up here fall madly in love with you?"

She hesitated. "You promise we're just going up onto the roof?"

"I don't like to promise, Miss—" Jack paused, looking back at her from his ledge. "Look, do you have some kind of a pet name? A nickname? I suppose they've all got bad associations," he muttered, hauling himself up onto the next ledge. "I bet it was all 'my angel', 'my darling', 'my reason for living', 'my reason for throttling anyone who so much as glances at you'."

Ellini laughed—a little against her will, it seemed to Jack. But she was still standing at the window, making no effort to follow him.

"Then I'll call you mouse," he said, stepping onto the slates of the Faculty's roof. "You can't get less romantic than mouse, can you?"

"Probably not without being insulting."

He made his way up the slates, hoping she would follow if he disappeared from view. But this probably didn't look as casual as he'd intended, because he started back as soon as he heard the sounds of climbing.

Ellini had got up on the windowsill. She was standing on tiptoe, with the heels of her ankle-boots projecting out over the sill. She steadied herself against the window-frame and stepped sideways onto the ledge. He had expected her to struggle, but she leapt from one ledge to the next like a mountain goat. When they got up onto the roof, she even knew to test the slates with her toes before putting her full weight on them, in case they were coming loose.