Page 32 of Fated, Allegedly

"Who goes down?"

"Nash and me. Caleb and two."

"That's five under a lake with the whole company between them and daylight."

"It's five the company has no reason to look for," I say, "if the other two hundred of you are convincing enough. That's the job. It's the harder one, and it's the one that costs, and I'm asking rather than telling."

Loon River leans back and something shifts.

"Well," he says. "He's learned to ask."

The room empties out into a yard where somebody's started a cook fire and people from four communities are eating out of the same pots, which is not a thing I ever expected to see.

I take an hour and walk down to the water with Erin because I won't get another one.

"You ran that room," I tell her.

"I presented findings. You held it."

"They looked at you when they wanted the truth and at me when they wanted a decision. That's a partnership." I sit beside her. "Here's the thing I've been carrying. I've been afraid of the future. Not dramatically. Just the low kind, every day, doing the math on who might get hurt on my watch. My father had it. His father had it. I assumed it came with the job."

"And now?"

"And now I'm four days out from taking five people under a lake, and I'm not afraid." I turn. "Not because it's less dangerous. Because I'm not the only one holding it anymore. You do the part I can't and I do the part you can't."

Erin's quiet. Then she leans her shoulder into mine.

"I've been doing math," she says. "Not tactical. Personal." She picks at a lichen. "My contract ends in October. If the reservoir is still here in October, somebody has to study it, properly, over years, with a permit and funding and a reason to be standing in the water. Amelia would sign that. She'd fight for it."

"You'd stay for a monitoring program."

"I'd stay for a monitoring program because it lets me stay." She looks over. "I'm telling you that now, before Sunday, so you know it wasn't decided in a crisis by somebody who'd nearly died. I want the version we build afterward. I want a permit and a lab bench and an argument with your father about the tractor."

I don't have words, so I take her hand, and we sit there watching the flattest water I've ever seen.

The equipment starts coming in on Friday, and Wyatt's people log all of it from the ridge above Fisk road.

Two lowboys with transformers on them, oversize load, escorted. A cable reel truck. Four flatbeds of switchgear. Then, at dusk, a tracked crane in three pieces, going down the same road as the one my father heard about in April. Erin reads Wyatt's photographs with a headlamp on and works out the ratings off the nameplates.

"That's a step-up bank," she says. "They're not powering a laboratory with that. That's the final tie-in. Nash, they're commissioning."

Behind us, up on the ridge, the beat underneath changes. It doesn't get louder. It gets faster, a small increment, then it holds there, steady and patient. Caleb comes down the trail.

"Loon River's scout says the perimeter's tripled since noon," he says. "And Nash, the hoist has been running all afternoon. Down only. They're putting people in, not taking them out."

I look at Erin. She's already folding her map.

"Then we don't wait for Sunday," she says.

21

ERIN

The convoy stages at the aggregate pit on Saturday morning, and I put on a state jacket with the department flash on the shoulder. Lanyard with a badge that's expired by six days and looks perfect from three feet. Clipboard, sample kit, a GPS unit, and the truck with the government plates that's been sitting under a tarp behind Owen's shed since the night they took my cabin apart. Nash hates it in a way he manages not to say out loud until we're at the turn.

"Twenty minutes," he says. "Then I come in whatever condition the road allows."

"Thirty. Twenty isn't enough to be boring, and boring is the entire disguise."