The plan was simple: wait for dark. Darkness was a blanket, a shroud against the prying eyes of the black-clad sentinels below. They found a hollow shell of an office in the abandoned construction site, watching the grey afternoon bleed into a bruised, twilight purple.
Then the sky broke open.
It wasn't the acidic Red Rain, but a true, torrential monsoon downpour. Water fell in punishing sheets, drumming a chaotic roar on the corrugated metal roofs around them. Thunder growled, a deeper bass note beneath the higher-pitched staccato of distant BRIMOB gunfire, which became more sporadic, hesitant in the deluge.
"The shamblers." Pras peered through a broken window. "They've vanished. Like the rain washed their scent away."
Theo nodded. The rain was a double-edged sword. It would mask their sound and movement, but it would also make every steel rung and beam a slick, treacherous hazard. "We go now. Rain's our cover. But we move like every surface is ice."
They used the remaining light to scour the construction yard's site office and storage containers. Their haul was a lifesaver, left behind by fleeing workers: two battered yellow hard hats, thick leather-palmed work gloves, and, most critically, a coiled length of sturdy safety line with several heavy-duty carabiners. There was even a pair of full-body safety harnesses, dusty but intact.
They suited up in the leaking storage container, the ritual of buckling straps and checking clips feeling both absurd and deadly serious. They were not climbers. They were a technician and a kickboxer preparing to scale a skyscraper's skeleton in a thunderstorm.
As Theo tightened the last strap on his harness, Pras emerged from the back of the container dragging something. It was a long-handled sledgehammer, its head a massive, blunt block of steel.
"Not going up empty-handed."
Theo eyed the tool. It weighed at least eight kilos. "That'll throw off your balance. If you drop it from that height—"
"If something's waiting up there, I want to be able to smash it." Pras hefted it. "Tire iron was good. This is better."
"Your back, your climb." Theo understood the need for a tangible weapon. His own wrench felt pitiful in comparison.
They approached the crane's base. The tower was a giant's ladder, a vertical lattice of cold, wet steel ascending into the rainy gloom. The electric hoist was dead, a silent hulk. This would be entirely manual.
"Watch my moves." Theo clipped his first carabiner onto a solid-looking diagonal beam. "Three points of contact at all times. Clip on, move, clip the next line. We leapfrog the safety. One of us is always anchored."
Pras nodded, his face a mask of concentration beneath the hard hat's brim.
The climb began. The world narrowed to the next rung, the next beam. The rain needled their faces, seeped into their collars. Every grip had to be tested, every foot placement deliberate. The sledgehammer on Pras's back was a constant, swaying threat, but he managed its weight with a fighter's awareness of his center of gravity.
They developed a rhythm. Theo would climb five meters, find a solid anchor point, and clip in. He'd then secure a second line for Pras, who would follow, unclip from below, and re-clip above Theo's position. It was slow, methodical, exhausting. The yellow and black trucks below shrunk to toy size, their flashing lights blurred by rain into faint, swirling halos.
They were nearly halfway up, at a junction where the tower met a major horizontal support, when it happened.
Pras was reaching to transfer his carabiner to the new anchor Theo had just secured. His gloved hand, slick with rain, slipped off the wet steel. He scrabbled for a hold, his boots skidding.
"Shit—!"
The unexpected jolt of his full weight, plus the sledgehammer, came onto the carabiner Theo was holding for him.
There was a sharp, metallic PING.
The carabiner's gate, stressed by the dynamic load and possibly faulty, snapped open.
Pras dropped.
"FUCK!" Theo's reaction wasn't thought; it was galvanic. He threw his own weight backwards, anchoring with his legs, and seized the safety line attached to Pras's harness with both hands. The rope ripped through his leather gloves, and searing, white-hot pain exploded in his palms as the fibers tore into his skin. He roared against the rain, muscles screaming, tendons straining as he arrested Pras's fall after only a meter—but a meter that could have been a hundred if the final carabiner on Pras's own belt had failed.
Pras dangled, swinging gently, the sledgehammer pulling him awkwardly to one side. His eyes were wide with shock, looking up at Theo, whose face was contorted with effort and pain.
"Climb!" Theo gritted out, fury and terror mixing. "Use the line! NOW!"
Galvanized, Pras grabbed his own safety rope and began hauling himself hand-over-hand, finding purchase with his feet against the tower's lattice. It took less than thirty seconds, but it felt like an eternity. When Pras finally clambered back onto the support beam, clipping himself securely to a primary strut with trembling hands, they both slumped, breathing in ragged, shuddering gasps.
Theo looked at his palms. The gloves were shredded, and the skin beneath was a raw, bloody mess. He could feel the deep ache in the muscles of his shoulders and back. The Unbreakable Will whispered to him, offering to knit the flesh. He pushed the urge down violently. Not now. Not here. The metabolic cost, the fever… it would cripple me on this tower.
"The carabiner just... fucking broke." Pras's voice was barely above a whisper, horror edged with survivor's anger.
"It was weak. Fault line." Theo's voice was hoarse. He unclipped the broken 'biner and let it fall, a tiny piece of metal disappearing into the dark and rain below. "We trust the steel, not the clips. From here, we move slower."
The rest of the climb was a silent, nerve-shredding trial. Every creak of the structure, every gust of wind, felt like a prelude to another fall. But they found their rhythm again, more cautious than before.
Finally, their hands gripped not another vertical rung, but the edge of a horizontal steel plate. They pulled themselves onto a small service platform, about three meters square, encased by a chest-high safety railing. It wasn't the top—the crane's cab and the beginning of the boom arm loomed another twenty meters above them, a darker shadow in the rain. This was just a mid-tower landing, a comma in the crane's sentence.
They collapsed against the rail, letting the rain wash over them, their hard hats clunking against the metal. The city lay below, a map of darkness and isolated, blurry lights. The BRIMOB perimeter was a distant necklace of hazy yellow dots.
Theo held his burning hands up, letting the cold rain soothe the raw flesh. They were only two-thirds of the way to hell. The final push to the top, and the long walk out onto the boom, still awaited them.
But for now, on this tiny steel island in the sky, they just had to breathe.