Page 26 of Fated, Allegedly

She finds me on the dock afterward and we sit with our feet over the water.

"You put us in the same team," she says. "You've spent a month keeping me out of rooms."

"I've spent that time learning that it doesn't work." I take her hand and hold it on my knee. "Whatever's down there, I'd rather be beside you for it than safe somewhere and wondering. That's new for me. I've never once wanted a partner in a fight. I wanted quiet people behind a line I was holding."

"That's a terrible way to live."

"It's the only one I knew. Say it back, then. If you mean it."

"I mean it." Her thumb moves over my knuckles. "Whatever's under this lake, we go at it together. Not you carrying it and telling me afterward. Not me running off with a receiver and a stupid note from a fridge."

"That note saved your life."

"That note was the second-best decision I made in April," she says, and lets me work out the first one on my own.

Wyatt comes down the dock at eleven at a dead run, limping on the bad calf, and I'm on my feet before he speaks.

"Ridge line," he gasps. "The whole basin. Nash, you have to hear it."

We go up. From the granite shoulder the water lies out flat and silver, and at first there's only wind. Then it comes up through the stone into the soles of my boots. A low beat, steady, deeper than the hoist, running without pause. Erin crouches and puts her palm flat on the stone.

"That's not the fans," she says. "The fans cycle. This doesn't." She counts under her breath, timing it. "Nash, it's constant load. They've started."

Out over the middle of the reservoir, a mile of water turns pale for about three seconds, a soft, sourceless glow under the surface, wide as a field, and then it's dark again and the loons are screaming across the whole basin.

I turn to Wyatt. "Wake everybody. Full assembly, twenty minutes."

"And then?"

"Then we go down."

17

ERIN

We go down the raise at four in the morning with the fans already dead, and I notice that rock has stopped breathing.

Caleb's team took the lake-bank vent plant at ten past three. Wyatt's people put the tunnel fans down four minutes later. I've been counting since, because in a drift this long with no forced air we have somewhere between forty and fifty-five minutes before the atmosphere at the face goes from unpleasant to fatal, and the difference between those two numbers is a guess I made from a ventilation calc I found in a banker's box.

There are six of us. Nash on point, then me, then Caleb, then three from Marrow Creek who move like they've done this before.

The old workings are exactly as I left them, timber, rail spikes, the smell of wet granite. Then we come around the stope into the section they blasted, and everything changes at a line you could draw with a ruler.

Smooth wall. Poured invert underfoot. A cable tray bolted along the back with fiber and three-phase in it, and every forty feet a fixture still burning on emergency power.

"They ran services the whole length," I say. "Nash, that's not exploration. That's infrastructure with a design life."

Half a mile in, the drift opens. I stop walking and I don't mean to. A chamber ahead is cut resembling a gymnasium, big, floored, lit, and full of the kind of equipment I've only ever seen in institutions with endowments. A blue-and-silver insignia is printed across the nearest cabinet and repeated on the equipment cases: HELIX BIOSYSTEMS. It is the first actual name we have had for the people behind any of this. Fume hoods. Two class-II cabinets. A cryogenic bank with ten dewars in a row, gauges live. There's a bench with a sequencer on it that costs more than every piece of gear my department has ever owned.

"Twelve minutes," Caleb says behind me. "Nash."

"Erin. Work."

I photograph everything in a grid and I narrate into the recorder because my hands know that job even when my body has gone numb. The dewar logs are on a clipboard hanging off the rack, and I read them and have to brace my hand on the bench.

"These are tissue banks," I say. "Ten dewars, four hundred and something cryovials logged, and the source codes match the binder Nash pulled off the Fisk road." I flip the page. "There's a column here for yield, and it's got a species-equivalent conversion factor at the bottom of each sheet. They've been calculating exchange rates."

Nash doesn't answer. When I look up he's standing very still with his hand on the cabinet, and I remember that some of those codes have his cousins inside them.