Cryoburn - Lois McMaster Bujold [122]
"Mina next," said Vorlynkin.
"I can't reach that far!" Mina sounded like she wanted to cry.
"I'll lower you over, and hold you till you get your grip," said Vorlynkin. "Go, Jin!"
"Who'll carry Nefertiti?"
Vorlynkin choked back something short, and said, "I will."
Jin dropped Nefertiti, hoping she wouldn't bolt away, vaulted over the parapet, and slapped down the rungs faster than he'd ever gone in his life. Unlatched the ladder, thumped at it, prayed it wouldn't stick or hang up. It rattled, then reached its full extension with a clang. "All right!" he called up.
Mina's kicking legs dangled over his head, then she found her footing and started down with no more than one scared meep. The rungs really were too far apart for her to reach comfortably. Above, Jin heard Vorlynkin swearing, and the scrunch of his footsteps, and the sphinx screaming, "Fire! Foes! Fire!" and, apparently confused in her vocabulary by the commotion, "Food!"
Vorlynkin yelped in pain, seemingly from some greater distance, and swore some more. Jin reached the ground and stretched up to catch Mina, whose sport shoes wavered in the air when she ran out of rungs before she ran out of space. "You're all right! Just let go!" She fell into him, knocking him to the ground; they both rolled, then scrambled to their feet and stared upward. At that point, Jin found out how well sphinxes could fly, when Nefertiti sailed over the parapet, wings flapping madly, and descended. She neither plummeted nor soared, but she did land right-side-up on all four paws like a cat, hard enough to grunt when her belly hit the ground, but not hard enough to break anything.
Vorlynkin's big dark shape finally swung out over the edge; he dropped the last two meters, hit with knees bending like the sphinx's, staggered, but didn't fall. Blood was running down his face from a deep triple scratch below his left eye.
"Jin!" Vorlynkin's voice was sharp and hard, brooking no debate. "Take Mina straight to your mother, and do what Dr. Durona tells you to. If this fire spreads, they may have to evacuate all the buildings in the complex." He raised his wristcom to his lips and began snapping connect-codes into it.
Jin dove for Nefertiti, who flapped away screeching.
"Leave the bloody animal!" Vorlynkin snarled over his shoulder, already starting away down the alley. "Both of you, run!"
Chapter Eighteen
Ted Fuwa, the old cryofacility's putative owner, turned out to be more or less what Miles had expected-a big, harried man in his late forties who looked as if he'd be more at home on a construction site than in a conference chamber, even one so strange as Madame Suze's quarters at midnight.
A less-expected presence was the consulate's local lawyer, an alert, composed, compact woman, with wiry salt-and-pepper hair, who stood barely taller than Miles himself. Kareen, Miles was unsurprised to learn, had persuaded her to come here after hours. Madame Xia stared back at him with at least as much covert interest, as the source of the increasingly bizarre stream of legal questions she'd been fielding for the past week or so from her formerly staid and routine client. Miles trusted she was having her accumulated curiosity satisfied tonight.
Miles missed Vorlynkin, told off to stay with Sato and her children, and Suze wasn't happy that Tanaka had been called away to deal with some medical crisis, so he supposed the shifting sides, however you counted them, were still evenly matched. Suze and Tenbury versus Mark and Kareen, Miles as unruly witness with Roic his silent partner, the attorney throwing in comments and questions now and then that gave everyone pause, and Fuwa versus everyone, although Miles wasted little sympathy on him.
Madame Suze folded her arms and stared hard at Mark. "You still have given me no guarantees whatsoever about future provisions for the poor."
"I'm not running a charity, you know," Mark returned, irritably.
"I am," snapped Suze.
"Yes, but for how much longer?" asked Mark. "Sooner or later, and more sooner than later, I think, it would be