Page 31 of Fated, Allegedly

"Would you have?"

"No."

"That's why." He takes my hand and turns it over. "Everyone else has told me a gentle version of things. My father did it to protect me and I only found out afterward how much it cost. You give me it straight and let me carry it. Nobody's ever done that."

I don't have an answer, so I put my head on his shoulder and we sit there while the window brightens from the sun rising.

The location falls out at six, from a document nobody thought was sensitive. It's a mechanical schedule, chilled water, tons of cooling, with pipe runs and elevations. I chase the elevations because that's what they're for.

"Nash, wake up. The laboratory we hit isn't the facility." I'm already pulling the drift map. "That chamber was on the four-eighty level. This schedule serves a plant at nine hundred and forty feet, under the center, and the cooling load is massive, that's not benches and freezers, that's power conversion. There's a whole second level below the one we were standing in, and it sits directly over the source horizon."

He's up and reading over my shoulder. "How do we get to it?"

"That's the other thing." I find the commissioning schedule and my hands go cold on the keys. "They've been running load trials since the ninth. Ramp tests, escalating, and there's a milestone at the end of the sequence marked full draw." I count the dates twice to be certain. "Nash, it's four days out. Whatever SCALE is, they intend to start it on Sunday."

20

NASH

Isend Wyatt out at seven with the copies and instructions to hand them to people who've told me to go to hell before.

The page is Erin's. One figure, their field-strength contour laid over the polygon map, with each community's own name sitting inside its own anomaly. She wrote four sentences under it in plain language. No argument, no appeal, just the shape of the thing.

They come. Not all, but more than I've ever had in one place: Marrow Creek and Bracken, Loon River, the two Kettering families off the outlet, and, this is the one that stops the room, three of the drowned-timber people, carried up the shore in wet tarps by Caleb and set in a stock tank in the long hall so they can speak for themselves. Wolves and water folk under the same roof. Hazel says it hasn't happened since 1911 and she'd know.

I open by handing the floor to Erin, because I told her I would. She stands at the butcher paper with three days of no sleep behind her eyes and doesn't waste a word.

"You've all seen the page. Here's what it means and then I'll take questions, and if I don't know something I'll say so." She draws the dome in two strokes. "There's a source under this lake. It emits continuously. Its strength falls off with distance and reaches background about two miles inland, and every settlement on their inventory sits inside one of these. Yours included."

Loon River leans forward. "You're telling us what we are."

"I'm telling you what their instruments measured, and I'll show you the raw data afterward if you want it." She lets that sit. "Four years they tried to take your material somewhere else and grow it in a laboratory. It failed every time. It doesn't express off the field. So they stopped trying to move the material and decided to move the field."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning they've built a plant, directly over the source, with a cooling load big enough for a small power station. They've been running load trials since the ninth. There's a full-draw milestone on the schedule for Sunday."

Marrow Creek's Alpha asks the question everyone's holding. "And if they do it?"

Erin doesn't dress it up. "The gradient collapses. Not instantly, it'll fail outward from the middle, same as the fish did, over weeks. Then the entire dome goes to background. I can't tell you what that does to a person, because nobody's ever measured it. I can tell you the timber families won't survive it, because they can't leave the water."

One of the water folk answers her from the tank, in that slow crushed-glass voice they have, and Caleb translates.

"He says: then we are already dead, unless."

"Unless," Erin agrees.

The plan she builds takes two hours, and by the end I've stopped being the person running this room.

"Their weakness is thermodynamic and it's not fixable," she says. "The tons of cooling at that depth means a chilled-water loop, and there's nowhere down there to reject the heat. So it goes into the water. There's a heat-exchange gallery on the schedule at the two-forty level with intake and discharge to open water."

"Meaning?" Loon River says.

"Meaning the entire plant is hanging off a pipe that runs through the lakebed, and pipes have valves, and valves have surface access for maintenance because no engineer alive builds an unserviceable heat rejection loop under a lake." She marks it. "Kill the cooling and the plant trips on high temperature. They can't override that; the trip is what stops it melting. That buys us hours instead of the forty minutes we bought last time."

I watch Marrow Creek and Loon River lean over the same sheet of paper together, which is a thing I'd have bet my life against a month ago.

"Three efforts," Erin says. "The tunnel, hard and loud, because they must believe the fight is out the front. The lake-bank vent, held open, because it's our route in and out. And a small team down the raise to the nine-forty level."