Page 44 of Fated, Allegedly

"Then we hold sixteen minutes."

Erin has the laptop off the chair and the drives in the bag and she's behind me before I've finished turning. That's the whole of my six weeks with her in one movement — she doesn't freeze and she doesn't argue.

"The regulator bank," I say, low. "Where exactly?"

"North deck. Gray cabinet on the cradle side, hard-wired, barely as large as a chest freezer."

"Which is directly behind them."

"Yes," she agrees. "There's a walkway on the far side of the cradle. It's a hundred and forty feet round and it's got no cover for the last fifty."

"Then I'll be the reason nobody's looking at the last fifty."

She grabs my wrist. Her fingers are white with cold and they don't shake at all.

"Don't die winning," she says. "That's the only condition."

"Noted."

I shift on the deck in a foot of water and go straight up the middle at them, and it is not clever and it doesn't need to be.

They shoot. Two hit and one of those goes through something that matters, and I take the first man off his feet and put him into a transformer skid and don't stop moving, because stopping is how you die in a room with four rifles. The second one I get by the weapon and the arm and we aren't happy about the outcome. The third breaks left and runs for the stairwell and I let him go, because Erin is already out on the far walkway and the whole point is that these people are watching me.

Trent doesn't shoot. He puts the weapon down on a cable tray, deliberately, and steps out into the water with something short and heavy in his hand, and he waits for me.

He's good. That's the honest part. He's been trained for something big and fast and he's not frightened, and the first pass he opens my shoulder to the bone and I only get a mouthful of vest. Second pass he goes for the eyes and nearly gets them. Third pass I take his forearm and he uses it — lets me have the arm and drives the blade into my ribs twice while I've got it.

I don't let go. That's all it comes down to in the end. I've got four hundred pounds and a torn side and eighty-one people who got out of a drift tonight because somebody stood in it, and he's got a knife and a contract.

The water's up over my hocks by the time it's finished.

"Nash!" Erin's voice, ragged. "I'm at it! It's a load-bank cabinet, it's dumping into a resistor stack — Nash, I can't cut it, it's carrying current from the coil!"

I shift back and get to the rail and I can barely make her out through the spray coming off the dome.

"Then don't cut it! What does it need?"

"It needs cooling, same as everything else in this building — the stack's air-cooled and there's a fan bank on the top!" She's got a panel open. "If the stack overheats the regulator drops out and there's nothing left to catch the quench!"

"How do you kill fans?"

"Badly and permanently!"

She takes the fire extinguisher off the bracket beside the cabinet and puts it through the fan grille. Then again. Then she reaches in with a piece of cable tray and jams the blades, and the whole thing shudders and dies.

The stack starts to smell within forty seconds. Ninety seconds after that the coil above the ring changes its note.

What happens next takes about a couple of seconds and I'll be trying to describe it for the whole of my life.

The whine climbs into something that isn't sound. The frost on the casing goes off it all at once as a white cloud, and the field over the ring — the thickness in the air that's been pressing on my eyes since we came down here — collapses inward like a held breath let go.

Then the noise arrives, and it isn't from the coil. It's from the rock.

A hundred and eighty feet of granite with two hundred feet of Stillwater on top of it has been carrying tunnels itself for eighteen months, and everything holding that arrangement together has just changed at once. The dome cracks along a line I can see. Water comes through it in a solid column the thickness of a truck.

Erin's over a hundred feet away on a walkway with her hand still on a cabinet. I remember the deck plating lifting under me and the column of water walking sideways across the chamber, and I remember reaching the walkway and finding her already running toward me, because she never once needed rescuing and I keep having to learn it.

I get her over my shoulder at the stairwell door, and she swears at me the entire eight flights, and I would not trade it for anything in my life. The four-eighty level is a river.