Shock by Francine Pascal

elevator.
    â€œIs this where Casa del Carpets is?” she asked, putting a hand on her hip and letting Earl get a good long look at her. She was wearing a tank top—it was almost guaranteed Earl wasn’t going to remember her face.
    â€œNo, it’s not,” he said to her chest. “Casa del Carpets is down the street.”
    â€œOhmigod, sorry to bother you. Thanks,” Gaia said, and left the building.
    Oh, great. That was one of the dumbest moves she’d ever made. Walked right into a security guard, or elevator operator, or whatever he was. She had to get past that guy and into the elevator—and there was no guaranteeing she’d get through the shaft even if she did get in there. Damn it, Gaia could feel time slipping away.
    As if on cue, a huge dump truck, trundling down the street, stopped a few feet away. The driver got out and ran into a deli. Gaia could see him directing the guy behind the counter to pour him some coffee. This was her shot, and she took it.
    In a flash she was up in the cab of the truck, faced with the dashboard. Mostly it looked like the usual car controls, but below the stereo, on the floor, there was a huge black box with an extra set of buttons. If she could just figure out which one…
    CLANG!
    That was it! The back of the truck began rising, lifted by the huge hydraulic cylinders that unfolded from its belly. Gaia pulled back on the lever that made it rise faster. If she was right about her calculations, the pile of garbage in the dump bed was too heavy to stand for much of a—
    THUD!
    Gaia felt the truck pitch backward as its dump bed hit the asphalt behind it, pulling the front wheels right off the ground. She gave a nervous laugh: It felt like an earthquake, the way the concrete buckled under the truck, and the huge load of ash created a choking cloud that gave Gaia just the cover she needed. She whisked out of the passenger door of the truck before the driver could get out of the deli and was safely in a crowd on the sidewalk by the time he ran up to the cab of his truck, frantically tugged at the controls, and waved his arms, as though that were going to undo what Gaia had done. The truck was a mess and would be completely unmovable until all the ash was cleared away. More important, everyone on the street was awestruck by the colossal mess.
    Including Earl.
    With the elevator guy gaping openmouthed and watching as police cars sped onto the scene, Gaia had the opening she needed. She slipped into the building, stepped into the old-school elevator, and yanked a huge metal lever back so that the doors closed.
    â€œHmmm,” she said. The walls of the elevator enclosed her, but she wasn’t moving. A huge old crank stood to her right. She turned it and the elevator lurched upward. She rode it too fast up two floors, then brought it gently down so that she was between one and two. Then she yanked open the doors again, exposing the dank shaft in all its concrete-and-metal glory.
    Layers and layers of filth, going back half a century or so, caked the walls. The only things that looked well used were the gears and cables, slick with oil, that kept the thing in motion. Gaia peered down into the shaft. She thought she could shimmy through the narrow hole into the open area below her. But once down there, she had to hope there was some way out. Because if the elevator went into motion, she’d be crushed like a bloody, bony pancake.
    Still, it was her best option. She thought she saw a ventilation shaft opening down there. There was only one way to find out if she was right: She squeezed her legs into the narrow opening between the door of the elevator and the wall of the shaft, then shifted her hips so they hitched through the tiny space.
    â€œOw,” she muttered, feeling the uneven edge of the elevator’s lip scrape the button of her jeans. Then the cold metal grated against her chest, and for an awful moment she thought the life was being