Page 24 of Fated, Allegedly

I look across the yard at the long hall, where Isla is feeding people in shifts off two stoves. At the shed, where a yearling deer stands on a leg I set six days ago. At a boy of about six carrying a bucket of water twice his size because somebody has to.

"I'll call you back," I say, and I already know I won't.

The supply route falls out of the freight paperwork that night because I finally stop thinking like a biologist and start thinking like a shipping clerk.

I've got Nash's banker's box spread across the long table with the manifests in date order. Nine consignments, all outbound, all listed as drill core. The trick is that nobody had bothered to reconcile them against the fuel invoices in the same folder.

"Look at this," I say, and Nash leans over my shoulder. "Every consignment leaves the Kestrel area listed as a full trailer of drill core. Non-hazardous, no special handling. The return legs are listed deadhead, empty."

"So?"

"So there's a fuel card statement for every truck, and the outbound legs burn eleven percent more diesel than the return. That means they're leaving Kestrel carrying more weight than the paperwork admits, with the refrigerated trailer running off the tractor."

Owen sets down his tea. "They're taking something out."

"They're taking everything out. The drill-core paperwork is a cover. Those trucks are carrying live cargo away from the valley." I pull the map over and draw it. "Every single consignment crosses the county line at the same weigh station, at the same hour, on a Sunday. Sundays the scale house is unmanned. From there there's exactly one route with the bridge ratings to carry a loaded lowboy to the Kestrel tunnel, and it goes past the aggregate pit on the Fisk road."

Hazel's needles stop. "Past the marina turn."

"Yes, past that," I say, and nobody in the room says a thing, yet everybody in the room is thinking something.

Nash and I build the plan at midnight with the fire down to coals and everyone else gone to bed.

"They'll have the tunnel hardened," he says. "Ram gate, cameras, and a guard force that's had four days to dig in. Front door's a slaughter."

"So we don't use the front. We use the vent." I put the three-point map between us. "The pipe on the bank runs into a cross-cut that doesn't connect to their new works. They stopped short of the connection on purpose, because a second entrance is a second thing to guard. They don't know the old raise is there. I've stood in it."

"Six hundred feet down. No comms."

"No comms, one route out, and positive pressure telling us the face is active." I make myself say it plainly. "Small team through the vent to the laboratory level. Everyone else hits the tunnel hard enough that nobody down there wonders about a draft. The people at the front aren't attacking, Nash. They're a noise."

He rubs his face. "You've just described the most dangerous job in the plan and put yourself in it."

"I've described the only job that needs somebody who can read a drill core and a ventilation calc, and there's exactly one of those in this valley. You're going to say you'll take my notes and go without me."

"I was."

"Don't. You've spent your whole life carrying things alone. Let me be useful at the thing I'm actually good at."

Nash looks across the coals. Then he pulls the map toward him and starts marking the tunnel approaches, which is his entire personality expressing consent.

Later, out on the dock, I tell him about the job.

"Three years, funded, everything I wanted in March," I say. "I'm not taking it."

"Erin…"

"Let me get it out, or I'll lose my nerve. Eleven years, six cities, four field stations. I have never unpacked the bottom layer of a box. When my grant collapsed, two people called me. My brother, and Amelia, and Amelia was calling about paperwork." My throat closes and I go through it anyway. "Eleven wolves walked into a cordon for fourteen strangers who haven't spoken to them since 1948, and the first thing Wyatt asked was whether we got the grandmother. Nobody has ever needed me. They've needed my data. I only learned there was a difference this week."

Nash doesn't reach for me, and I love him a little for the restraint.

"This is the first place I've ever thought about staying that isn't a career move," I say. "It isn't you and it isn't fate. It's me, finally noticing where I belong."

16

NASH

The yard turns into a staging ground by the following Thursday and I stop pretending I'm a game warden.