Chapter 4 #3
"You have the code," she said.
It was not a question.
The whole room seemed to lean in, and Liam felt it, and he understood suddenly and completely what he had just done. He had walked into a starving village and told them he had the only key to the only locked door in a dead world.
He thought about Uebert Murray, and the way his face had changed when the blanket slipped.
You know what that rifle's worth, Perry?
"Careful," Isaiah murmured, very low, at his shoulder.
But Liam had already made the read.
"Yes," he said. "We have the code."
The blockhouse exhaled.
"It came from the man who built the place," Liam said, and he said it to the whole room now, clearly, because half measures were worse than nothing here.
"His name was Marcus Vance. His brother carried the code across the country in his head and he walked into my camp with a fever and drew it on a piece of paper an hour before he died. That paper is on this hill right now, in Chloe's pack, wrapped in oilcloth,
and it has been the most valuable object in North America for four months and nobody has known it but us."
Nobody moved.
Nobody, Liam noted, went for a weapon. Nobody looked at anybody else. Twenty-two thin gray faces just looked at him, and after a moment Dawes said, quietly, "What's in it? The lab. What's actually behind the door?"
"A cure," Liam said.
"For what?"
"For a sickness that's killing everyone I love."
He let that sit.
"That's it," he said. "That's what's in there. It's not food. It's not guns. It's not gold. It's a room full of medicine for a plague that's moving east to west across this whole dead country, camp by camp, and it will get here too, in a year or two years,
and when it does it will go through this village like fire through a hayloft, and you will not be able to fight it, and it will not care one bit that you've been living in a concrete box to stay away from something else."
He looked around the room.
"So no," he said. "I'm not going to lie to you about what we have. You've been honest with us all night and you pulled my friend out of the water when you had no reason to. You want to know what's behind the door. It's the reason your children get to grow up."
Nell Rook stood.
She stood, and she looked at him for a long moment, and then she did a thing Liam did not expect at all.
She turned to the room.
"Petyr," she said. "Wake the little ones. Marla, get the packs. Dawes, count the water."
"Nell?" Dawes said.
"Because we're leaving," Nell Rook said.
The room erupted.
Everyone talking at once, twenty voices, and Nell stood in the middle of it with her arms folded and let it go on for about ten seconds and then she said one word, "Enough," and it stopped.
"We have been dying by inches for eight months," she said. "Nine of us in the trees. The smokehouse gone. Cully gone. We have been sitting in a concrete box every night telling ourselves that if we just hold on, if we just don't open the door, we will outlast it."
She swept a hand at the walls.
"We are not outlasting anything. We are being eaten from both ends. The willows take us at night and the Sawtooth take us by day and we are twenty-two and we were thirty-one, and there is no version of this where we are still here in two years."
"Where would we go?" the woman with the babies said.
"North," Nell said. "With them."
Isaiah's mouth fell open.
"Nell—"
"They need to get to that waterfront and they need to get there past ten Sawtooth men and a dead city full of killers."
Nell Rook's scarred face was hard as a hull.
"And I need to get my people off this ground before it eats them. And I need my boy back, and my boy is up there somewhere, diving for men who took him off my beach."
She looked at Liam.
"You said it's a room full of medicine," she said. "And you said it's on the waterfront. And I have got twenty-two people who know that water, who have fished the Sound their whole lives, who can row and sail and read a tide, and who have not got one single thing left to lose."
She stuck out her hand.
"You want a way into that city from the sea," she said. "I want out of these trees, and I want that boy, and I want a reason to still be alive. So let's you and me make a trade."
Liam looked at the hand.
He thought about Duncan Rain, who had never once, in two years, looked at him and seen anything worth talking to.
He took it.
"Deal," he said.
And behind him, from the corner by the fire, in a voice that was cracked and dry and small but perfectly clear and perfectly awake, Chloe Buck said, "You should probably know that thing outside has been listening to every word."
Liam turned around so fast he nearly fell.
She was propped up on one elbow on the door, gray as ash, sweat standing on her forehead, and her eyes were open and they were hers, they were focused, they were seeing, and they were looking straight at him.
"Chloe."
"Hi," Chloe said.
And then her eyes moved past him, to the barred steel door, and everything in her face went wrong.
"Liam," she said. "Why can I hear my father?"