Our steady, trudging ascent rarely saw interruption. The most interesting part of each day was when we reached the end of a floor and climbed the thirty cold stone steps up to the next one, only to there repeat the process all over again. In my younger years I had taken to counting the number of floors I passed in a day. I had even found a small, leatherbound diary and a beaten old metal pen to tally them up, and every time I settled down to sleep I’d compare them to the previous day and the numbers would be the same. Sixteen or so hours, five hundred floors, every day, for eternity.

Sometimes I had tried to walk faster, others slower, but somehow the count always came out the same, as though it were some law of the world like the dark below and light above, or the food that never ran out, or the songs in the walls that lulled you to stasis. Such a law itself beckoned to stay, for it made me wonder, was to linger behind the only way to change that five hundred into something else? To stop moving? To freeze?

There was no chance of that. I was few things, and weak of will was not among them. I had long since stopped keeping record in that diary because I knew that in the end it didn’t matter; in the end, I would keep going no matter how many floors there were and no matter how fast or slow I took them. How many years had I lived? Thirty? Thereabouts? How many floors had I seen in that time? All were the same, yet when I closed my eyes to slip into sleep, the darkness found me content and accomplished. I was going somewhere. I was going up.

From time to time, the climb led me past the dead and dying. The elderly, too weak to carry on, collapsed by the wayside and were condemned to watch as the world passed them by. Sometimes their younger relatives stayed with them, but more often than not they had no one or those they did have simply abandoned them, too afraid to stop in case they never started again. There was plague in the Tower; hunger, hazard and strife; but the greatest killer of all was time. Where the mind held strong, as the years flew by like sand flowing to the bottom of an hourglass, the body weakened. In the end it didn’t matter how resolute you were, how fiercely you longed to keep going, keep ascending, break through the endless repetition and reach the light ― your muscles withered, your skin drooped, your bones ached, and your body failed. Time always has its due, in the end.

Then there were the skeletons; echoes of a person who had once been, who had put their life towards the climb the same as the rest of us, and ended up where? Here? By my feet as I moved to climb the steps to a new floor? Their skull was cracked, missing several teeth, and stared back at me with black, helpless eyes, and I wondered if the thing some people called a soul might be in there, still trapped in those dusty old bones. If all the reward for carrying on was to crumble away until only your brittle frame was left behind to remind those who passed them by that someone had once been there, but tell them nothing of who you were, then what really was the point of it all? When one skeleton could so easily be swapped for another and no one would know the difference, was there really anything left to suggest you had ever existed in the first place?

As I reached the top of the stairs, my gaze fell on a sight I had seen only a handful times before. There were frozen here, so many of them, crouched in doorways, wrapped in blankets, coughing into their arms. That alone would have been a horror to look upon, to see so many souls imprisoned on a single floor, but the real danger, the danger to me, was plain to see on the boils peppering the face of the small frozen boy who raised his eyes to look up at me. I reached round to one of the pockets on my rucksack and pulled out a mask, placing it over my mouth and nose as the boy looked away again, his interest in me dissipating.

I had come upon a plague sector. There would be a dozen or so floors of it, each full to bursting with the infected. Though their symptoms could vary, they all carried the same ill; a pathogen that permeated the air and swam in their blood and tears and crawled just below their skin, begging them to reach out and touch, to cry for help, to spread its spores. Fortunately, they were slow and weak and mostly kept to the doorways and the rooms at the side, so it was easy enough to avoid them. Still, you had to be careful. If they touched you…

I came to a halt, faced with one of the nurses, who had been walking with her head down and almost collided with me. Taking a step back, I gave a small nod and edged around her, keeping my hands behind my back. The nurses had been touched, and now they stayed behind to help those more sickly than them in the knowledge that they would one day become just the same. I had never been quite clear on how quickly the plague progressed, how long it was before you could no longer help yourself and collapsed into one of the rooms to await a nurse of your own, but some part of me felt it was probably years. Nothing happened too quickly in the Tower. Nothing except that one moment, that one instant of horror you felt as your hand brushed ever so softly against the skin of the infected.

At least, that was how the dying old man I had once met far, far below had described it to me. I remembered that man’s face well, better than my own lost family’s. He had been so gaunt, his skin stretched so taught like tape across his face that I had thought even then he could only be days from becoming a skeleton himself. But he had talked to me in his frail, rasping voice; told me of the ails that befell him, of the fury he felt towards his legs as they refused to carry him any farther. But that had been years ago. I didn’t speak to the ill any more. I didn’t speak to any of the frozen. I heeded his words, his dying wish for me, a stranger with whom he had spent at most ten minutes.

I kept going up.