Page 29 of Fated, Allegedly

"That's not an argument for staying," she adds. "It's an argument that running has a bill, and somebody should say the number out loud before you vote on it."

Loon River studies her. "You're the state girl."

"Erin Lawson. Contracted through October. After that I don't know."

"Would you go down that hole again?"

"Friday, if the drives say what I think they'll say." She shuts the laptop. "Not out of courage. I've met the people in those cells and I can't unmeet them."

He sits back. Something in his face resettles onto new ground.

"All right, Hanson," he says. "Loon River stays. But if you're leading, lead. Don't make me vote on it twice."

Erin catches me outside afterward with the expression she gets before she's honest with me.

"You were prepared to lose that room," she says.

"I was prepared for whatever came out of it."

"You were prepared to hold this valley with all these people and a bad plan and never once ask anyone for help." She folds her arms. "You didn't ask them. You told them what you'd be doing and let them decide whether to stay."

"That's leading."

"That's carrying, and it'll break you." Her hand lands on my arm, which takes the edge off. "They didn't stay because of your speech, Nash. They stayed because somebody sat down and gave them a number. You could've asked me to speak. It never crossed your mind."

I go to argue and find she's right, which is becoming the pattern of my life.

"Next one," I say, "you're at the table from the start."

"Good. Then I'll bring real figures instead of improvising over a wet laptop."

The calls start at six. Three safe houses gone. The Loon River cache, burned to the slab. A rented farmhouse outside Deerlick where Bracken families had been sitting since the first night, hit at dusk. The third takes an hour to confirm and is worse than both: the old church at Redwater, where the northern communities have been leaving their elderly and their pregnant since the trouble began. Nobody armed, nobody expecting anything. Somebody drove up, did the work, and left.

Loon River takes it standing. Then he sits down on my father's porch step, an old man a long way from home, and puts his face in his hands. Erin brings the maps out without being asked.

"Show me everything they've hit this week," she says quietly. "Including the ones nobody's told me about."

He marks them. She lays the polygon map alongside and goes very still.

"Nash." Her voice thins out. "It isn't random and it isn't the strongest first. Bracken, Loon River, Redwater, those are the three smallest populations. They're clearing the edges."

"Why the edges?"

"Because the edges are the weaker ones." She glances up. "This isn't a war they're fighting. It's cleanup. They're closing ahead of something that makes the inventory public, and the biggest folder on that server is called SCALE."

I look out at all the people cooking supper in my valley, and I understand that whatever's under this lake was never going to stay under it.

19

ERIN

It takes me eleven hours to get into the drives, and I only manage it because Helix's security is excellent at the perimeter and lazy on the inside.

The two hot-swap drives are RAID members and useless on their own. The internal one I took out with a screwdriver is a workstation disk with a user profile on it, and the profile has cached credentials, and somebody with root access on a facility server had saved his key material to his own desktop in a folder called misc. I don't know his name and never will. I would like him to know I'm grateful and appalled in roughly equal measure.

At one a.m. the Phase II tree opens and I stop being able to pretend this is a wildlife survey. Nash brings me coffee at two and sits with his back against the wall, and I read to him because reading it alone is not survivable.

"Start with the geology," I tell him. "Because they did, and because it explains everything else."