THE PLATINUM RAVEN

27 Through the Spire to the Pinnacle

27   Through the Spire to the Pinnacle

By no means does the Chocolate Raven's descent progress all the way to the base of the Burj Khalifa, nor even as far down as her own apartment on Level 63: rather, she contrives to ascend quite mightily, in the aggregate, having first descended no more than is necessary to reach the nearest major cross-over lift-lobby (whose Level number she is still in far too much of a swirl to notice or remember).

This down-to-go-back-up manoeuvre is followed by a jagged lightning symbol's progress: past Level 152 again without stopping, and up the rest of Tier 15; alighting then to effect a most fortunate breaching of the usually impermeable membrane between the highest front-of-house Level 155 and the lowest back-of-house Level 156 at the base of Tier 16 (this being a key step and frankly the Chocolate Raven's secret weapon); soon enough embarking on a sequence of ever-tinier industrial landings, discreet passages over unwonted thresholds, clattery service lifts and industrial hatches, so as to rise through the inorganic mechanical sterility of Tiers 16 to 26, in themselves the height of a cathedral in the sky; and finally via a head-spinning series of metal stepladders, up through the dim cool quiet endless flue of Tiers 27 to 30, the Spire ... to wriggle up through that final hatch into an enormous sky.

Rising, she steps away from the hatch and rests her hands on top of the rail encircling this little space that she never thought she'd see—here, for the first and only time in her entire life of lusciously chocolaty Ravenicness, paying the Ultimate Terrace Visit to crown her entire prized collection of terrace visits—the Pinnacle!

She smiles like a child.

Beneath her, Dubai spills its molten metal light across the sand, fractured into amber grids and tracks, strips and pools and points, flowing bright with tiny cars or rearing upward in a complicated bed of little geometric towers. The crackle and the pulse of the whole city fills her ears at once: the glazed bleep of life-support machines in diapason with the honky bleep of vehicle alarms; the tick of traffic signal boxes flicking lights from red to green, and the silent tick of money flickering green on computer screens; car dispatchers' street directions spat through radios in cabs, a million numbers fed through phones, and countless voices buzzing, screeching, purring, barking, squeaking, droning through the air or on the airwaves; towns of electric wire on struts in gravel compounds, fenced-in and humming, sprouting insulator cones; insect needles twitching on unfathomable dials; and the hum of CCTV cameras everywhere, from concrete isolation-wing corridors to sleekly polished skyscraper penthouse lobbies.

She hears the brutal hardness of all this hardware in sharp plastic clarity, she sees the wash and flicker of the software within it, and the spectre of their confluence she loves as a home.

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For some nice reviews and interviews about The Platinum Raven, see http://www.rohanquine.com/press-media/the-novellas-reviews-media/

For a quick synopsis of it, see http://www.rohanquine.com/the-platinum-raven/synopsis-of-the-platinum-raven/

For some tasters from it, see http://www.rohanquine.com/the-platinum-raven/

For links to the retailers, see http://www.rohanquine.com/buy/the-platinum-raven-novella-ebook/

And for its Amazon pages, see http://amzn.to/1mBtKkH and http://amzn.to/Np4HkJ

The Platinum Raven is triple convulsion whereby our heroine Raven escalates herself into the Chocolate Raven and then the Platinum Raven, from London to Dubai to the tower in the hills in the desert – then back down again, forever changed. A lot of its action happens in my favourite building, the fabulously flashy Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the world's tallest skyscraper.