Chapter 4 #2
She was quiet for a long moment.
"They're on the beach," she said. "They're not in the trees."
"No."
"They know," she said slowly. "They know the willows are the danger. So they camped on the open shore, where they can see all around them, and they built a fire because it can't touch them, it can only call, and a man who is not alone and not quiet and not grieving is a man it can't get at."
"Yes."
"They've worked out the rules." Nell lowered the rifle, and her scarred face was hard. "They've worked out our rules, and they use them, and they come here whenever they like."
"How many times have they come at night before?"
"Never."
"Then something's changed," Liam said. "Nell, look at those cans again."
She looked.
"Five cans of fuel," Liam said. "You said they took your smokehouse in November. You said they'd come back in spring for more fish. So why are they here in February with fuel?"
"I don't know."
"Guess."
"I don't—"
"They didn't row that fuel down here to burn on your beach," Liam said. "You don't haul five cans of gasoline twenty miles in a longboat to sit around a driftwood fire. That fuel is going somewhere. And they stopped here on the way to it."
Nell went very still.
"We're not the raid," she said. "We're the waypoint."
"You're the waypoint." Liam took the rifle back.
"You're a safe harbor, halfway to wherever they're actually going, with a cove they know and a bar that stops the weather and a village full of people too broken to fight them. They put in here overnight and in the morning they'll take whatever you've got, and top off, and go on."
"Go on where."
Liam looked at her.
And Nell Rook looked back, and the same thought landed on the two of them at the same instant, and Liam saw it land.
"North," she said.
"North," Liam agreed. "Up the Sound. Toward the city. Toward the waterfront."
"Toward the door."
Isaiah stood up so fast he knocked over his cup.
"Nell." His voice was shaking. "Nell, you were about to tell me something. Before the screaming. I asked you if anyone ever got the door open and you were about to answer me and then that thing started up and you never said."
Nell Rook let out a long breath.
"Sit down," she said. "Both of you. And I'll tell you what Cully told me, and I'll tell you what I think it means, and then you can decide whether you still want to go north."
She sat.
The fire was low now. Somebody fed it, and it came up, and the light moved on twenty-two faces that had settled in to listen, because everyone in that room was going to hear this whether Nell liked it or not.
"Cully went up with his uncle twice," she said. "Trading. On the edges, like everyone does, out on the water where the factions come down to the docks to deal. He never went into the city. Nobody does. But he heard things, the way boys do, and he came back and he talked my ear off for a week."
"Tell me about the door," Liam said.
"It's real."
Liam closed his eyes.
He had not known, until that moment, how much of him had been braced for the other answer.
Four months. Two thousand miles. Wolves and storms and Ashford and a trapper and the mountains and a broken bridge and a bullet through Chloe's side, all of it resting on a charcoal drawing made by a dying man's shaking hand.
"It's real," Nell said again. "It's under the market on the waterfront, cut back into the hillside, and it's steel, and there's a name carved on it, and there is a little glass panel beside it with a keypad behind the glass, and the keypad has lights in it."
"Lights," Isaiah breathed.
"Lights."
"So it's got power."
"It's got power." Nell shook her head slowly.
"That's the whole thing, boy. That's the reason a thousand men have died on that waterfront. Everything in the world is dark and has been dark for two years, and there is one door in the ruins of Seattle with a light on it, and everybody in Sound country has seen it,
and everybody in Sound country wants to know what's on the other side."
Liam's mouth had gone dry.
"Has anyone opened it."
"No."
"Nobody?"
"Nobody." Nell held up a hand and counted on her fingers, flat and grim.
"They've tried. God, they've tried. They took torches to it and burned the paint off and got nowhere. They took sledges to it for a month. Two brothers from the Ballard crowd tried to dig around the frame and hit poured concrete four feet thick on every side.
Somebody got hold of some mining powder from somewhere and set it against the hinges and blew a hole in the hillside and killed nine of his own men and the door didn't move."
"Because it's not a door," Isaiah said.
Everyone looked at him.
"It's a vault," Isaiah said. "It's a vault with a door in it. You don't beat a vault, you can't, that's the whole point of a vault, it was designed by people who assumed somebody would come at it with sledges and torches and powder. They planned for that."
He was up and pacing now, his hands moving, the fixer running.
"That's why the frame's set in four feet of concrete. That's why the hinges are internal. Whoever built that place spent a fortune making sure that the only way in is the way they meant for you to come in."
"The code," Liam said.
"The code."
Nell Rook looked between them.