We should try using the toolkit that we are carrying before shooting/ripping at the hatch.
You rummage around in your pack until you find the small metal toolbox. You open it up and try to figure out what you should use to remove the bolts. In end, you settle on a small rod-like machine and a hexagonal attachment for it. You're not very familiar with these sorts of things but you've seen Dad use a similar device. Hydrospanner, you think it's called. If it works like you think it works, then there should be a button or a switch on it that makes it turn... Aha! There it is! Now, to open the hatch...
You carefully prepare for the jump. You place the spanner in your mouth and bend your legs. You aren't feeling very confident about your ability to do this. You push, but suddenly the muscles in your legs feel full of fire. You only make it halfway to the ceiling of the elevator. Even if you'd reached it, you'd probably had been too distracted to actually do anything.
You won't give up so easily. You remove your pack to reduce your weight and spread your wings, ready to give yourself a boost. You jump as hard as you can but now it is inexplicably too much. You slam on the ceiling, leaving a dent on the hatch and barely manage to dig your claws into it. You do your best to hold on even as the fire spreads to the muscles of your arms.
Slotting the bolts into the hydrospanner's head while swaying around is the hardest part of the process. It's not only swaying, it's also like your muscles aren't obeying you, giving too much strength one moment and too little the next, making you wobble as if drunk. Once the spanner is in position, you just need to hold it there and push the button and in a couple of seconds the machine has removed the bolt. When you've removed three bolts, the hatch swings open, finally allowing you to access the elevator shaft.
The shaft is dark. The only light comes through your elevator and the grates in the ceilings of other elevators. There's also small blinking lights on machines and elevators, but they are not enough to provide illumination, they just help give you a sense of scale. Through them you can tell the shaft goes deep. Really deep. At least 100 levels. Maybe more. Looking up, the situation is similar, though it's a lot harder to judge the number of levels.
The elevators move around on rails attached to the walls of the circular shaft. There's also much larger rails near the center of the shaft. Some sort of larger elevator? You think you see an access point for it 5 levels below.