72
The elevator shaft is utterly black, and the illumination through the maintenance room’s service door doesn’t come close to puncturing it. A thick haze of grease and overheated ozone pours out to clobber my nose and coat my tongue. Even my lungs feel greasy.
I can barely make out how the shaft drops another three floors onto the roof of a cab. Upward, the shaft dissolves into dark infinity. The shaft’s broad enough for three elevators, each corner of each lane marked with its own columns of steel L-brackets to restrain the cabs.
Deke flips off the maintenance room’s lighting, letting our night vision goggles switch to dark mode. It helps. A little.
I don’t climb elevator shafts unless there’s no other choice. Wiring shafts are far preferable—they have ladders, and air ducts, hand ho
