Page 28 of Fated, Allegedly

Nash crouches facing me. He's filthy, there's blood on his forearm from the hinges, and he looks at me like the drives aren't the thing he's counting.

He puts his hand over the bag. "What's on it?"

"Something they've been building toward for years and haven't done yet." I close my hand over his. "Nash, everything we saw down there, the labs, the dewars, those cells, that's not the operation. That's the preparation. There's a phase after this one and it's the biggest folder on the machine, and I need three days and a decent computer to tell you what it is."

Behind us, down the pipe, the mountain is silent. No fans. No hoist. Nothing at all except that low steady beat still running under everything, patient as a heartbeat, entirely unaffected by anything we did tonight.

18

NASH

Eleven people come up out of that raise and not one of them is safe yet, getting them out of the underground was the easy part. All have to move before Helix finish counting empty cells, and none can move the same route. So I split it four ways and run them at once.

Caleb takes the water people down the shore by boat at first light, no engine, poling the last mile into the drowned timber where families have been waiting days for news. Wyatt runs the Bracken pair north on foot to the Marrow Creek people, forty minutes cross-country, because that grandmother refuses point-blank to be carried and there's no arguing with her. My father drives the three recovered wolves out to a cousin's place past Deerlick in a hay trailer with a false floor he built in 1991 and has been waiting thirty years to justify. Isla holds the compound as the receiving end for whatever comes back.

I stand in the yard with four radios and no ability to be in any of those places. Caleb's in at seven forty. Wyatt at eight ten, limping worse. My father doesn't call until quarter past nine, and those seventy minutes take a year off me.

The one I can't fix is Ruby Sennet's girl. Weeks under sedation, and she comes off my mother's table in fur and stays that way.

"She's in there," my mother says. "She's forgotten she's allowed out."

"How long?"

"Days. Or never." My mother pushes her braid back. "Go do the part only you can do, love. I've got this one."

The allied leaders meet at noon and it goes wrong inside four minutes.

"We got eleven out clean and the contractors don't know who did it," the Loon River man says. "That's a win. Take it and disperse north."

"With more than a hundred and fifty people, including children and a woman six weeks from delivering twins." I keep my voice flat. "Three weeks of walking, no caches, in country that company has already proven it can reach."

"Better than sitting on their hole in the ground."

Marrow Creek's Alpha cuts across him, because she's lost everything and the room lets her. "What about the ones still down there?"

"We emptied the cells."

"We emptied twenty-two cells. Only eleven were occupied." She looks at me. "Nash. Say the rest."

"Four years of intake records. Three hundred and forty rows in the log we recovered, but only eleven captives were still there. The disposition records show transfers, deaths in transit, and terminal harvests. The transferred captives went somewhere else, which means there is at least one more facility."

"Then it's someone else's fight," Loon River says, without much behind it.

"It was someone else's fight when it was Marrow Creek." I stand. "I won't tell you what your honor requires. I'll tell you what Stillwater does. We don't leave. Not while there are people in boxes, and not while the thing under this lake is still running."

"That's a speech."

"You asked for an answer. That's the answer."

Erin comes in at half twelve with wet trousers and a laptop, reads the room in two seconds, and starts backing out.

"Stay," Marrow Creek says. "You were down there."

She sits. She doesn't take my side, which turns out to be the useful thing.

"If you go north, here's the biology rather than the politics." She opens the laptop. "Height-of-land country is granite and muskeg. It carries roughly one large predator per forty square miles, and that's for animals on a normal budget. Your people eat seven thousand calories a day. All of you strip two thousand square miles inside one winter. Then you're visible, because that scale of collapse gets noticed by exactly the survey I get hired to run."

Nobody answers her.