Chapter 3 #5
You fire it when the shot is certain and the need is real and not one second before.
Liam took his finger off the trigger.
He lowered the rifle and stepped back from the slit and stood in the dark with his heart going hard.
"You could have taken him," Nell said. She was watching him. "I saw your hand."
"Yes."
"Why didn't you?"
"Because there's ten of them," Liam said.
"And if I drop one in the dark, the other nine go to ground and I've spent a round and told them exactly what we have and exactly where we're sitting. And because in the morning we still have to walk out of this door, and it's better if they don't know I exist until the second it matters."
Nell Rook looked at him for a long moment.
"Where did you come from," she said. "Really."
"Minnesota."
"Nobody comes from Minnesota."
"I know."
"You walked here."
"Yes."
"In winter."
"Yes."
She shook her head slowly, and then she did something that surprised him. She reached out and put her hand on his arm, the way Tom used to, the way old people did when they wanted to say something they could not fit into words.
"What are you actually doing here," she said. "You and the fat lad and the girl who's dying in my corner. You didn't cross a continent to look at my trees."
Liam thought about it.
He thought about Sarah's cabin, and the blanket over the window, and the folded paper. Not to Duncan. Not to anyone.
And then he thought about Tom Darcy standing in the fog, and what that meant, and he thought about the camp on the frozen lake where the fires might already be out.
He was done keeping secrets from people who fed him.
"There's a door in Seattle," he said. "Under the old market on the waterfront. Behind it there's a lab that runs on its own power and never went dark, and inside it there's a cure for a sickness that's eating my camp back east."
He watched her face. "We came two thousand miles for it. We're three hundred miles short. And your cove is where the water put my friend when I thought I'd lost her, so as far as I'm concerned this is the luckiest place on earth."
Nell Rook did not laugh.
That was the thing he would remember. Every single person he had told, from Duncan on down, had laughed, or scoffed, or pitied him.
Nell Rook stood very still and looked at him with her scarred face and did not laugh at all.
"Say that again," she said. "The part about the market."
"Pike Place. The waterfront. There's a maintenance door in the hillside underneath it with a name carved in it."
"Marcus Vance," Nell said.
Liam stopped breathing.
The whole room, the fire, the crates, the barred door, the black willows outside, all of it went very far away, and there was nothing left but a thin scarred woman in an oilskin coat looking at him across three feet of concrete.
"Say that again," he whispered.
"Marcus Vance." Nell Rook's voice had gone strange. "It's cut into the steel about shoulder height, and it's not stamped, it's carved, somebody did it by hand with a chisel and did a bad job of it."
"How do you know that."
"Because Cully told me."
"Who?"
"The boy they took." She was gripping his arm hard enough to hurt now.
"Cully. The diver. Fifteen years old. Before they took him, he'd been up the Sound twice with his uncle, trading on the edges, and he came back full of it, and he wouldn't shut up about the market. About what's under the market."
Her eyes were bright and terrible. "Because everybody in Sound country knows about that door, son. It's the biggest story there is up there. It's the whole reason the factions fight over that waterfront in the first place."
"No," Liam said. "No, nobody knows. It was a secret. A dying man drew it on a piece of paper, he carried it in his head for two years, he told nobody, he—"
"He told nobody in Minnesota," Nell said.
And Liam Perry stood in a concrete box in the dark, three hundred miles from the end of the world's longest walk, and felt the ground he had been standing on for four months quietly give way beneath him.
"Everybody knows about the door," Nell said.
"They've known for two years. Every faction in the Sound has men on that waterfront. They've had crews digging at it and hammering at it and burning at it since the first summer, and they've killed each other by the hundred over who gets to stand in front of it."
"And?" Isaiah's voice cracked. "Nell. And? Did anyone get it open?"
Nell Rook opened her mouth.
And outside, out in the black willows, very close to the blockhouse, close enough that they heard it clearly through two feet of concrete, a girl's voice began to scream.
It was young. It was terrified. It was screaming a name over and over, and the name was Nell.
And every face in that room turned, not to the door, but to Nell Rook, and Liam watched the old woman's scarred face come apart like something dropped on stone.
"That's Cully's sister," Dawes said quietly. "That's Ada. Nell. That's Ada's voice."
"Ada's dead," Nell whispered. "Ada died in October. Ada was the fourth one."
But her hand had already come off Liam's arm.
And she had already taken one step toward the door.