Chapter 5
Nobody in that room heard a thing.
That was the part Liam would keep coming back to, later, when he was trying to make sense of it. Twenty-five people in a concrete box, and every single one of them went absolutely still and listened with everything they had, and there was nothing.
The fire ticking. A baby snuffling behind the crates.
Nothing else.
"Chloe." Liam went down on his knees beside the door she was lying on and took her face in both hands. Her skin was so hot it frightened him. "Chloe, look at me. Look at my eyes."
"I am looking at you."
"What do you hear."
"My dad." She said it perfectly calmly, and that was the worst thing about it. There was no fear in her voice. There was something much worse than fear. There was pleasure. "He's out there, Liam. He's just outside. He's telling me about the ice."
"Chloe—"
"He always used to do that." She smiled.
It was a terrible smile, dreamy and warm and wrong.
"Every fall. First hard freeze, he'd walk me out on the point and show me how to read it. Where it's thin. Where the current runs under and eats it from below."
Her eyes were fixed on the steel door and she was not blinking.
"He's telling me now. He's telling me it's thin at the point."
Isaiah made a sound behind Liam.
"She said that on the path," he whispered. "Liam. She said that on the path when we were carrying her. She said the ice is thin at the point."
"I know."
"She was already hearing it. She was out of her head with fever and she was already hearing it before she even woke up."
Liam did not answer.
He was watching Chloe's face, and he was working the read, and the read was very bad.
Nell Rook crouched down on the other side of the door.
She looked at Chloe for a long moment, and then she looked up at Liam, and her scarred face had gone gray.
"This isn't right," she said.
"What isn't."
"This." She gestured, a small helpless flick of the fingers.
"This isn't how it goes. It doesn't get inside. It has never once gotten inside. It stands out there and it calls and we hear it through the door, all of us, together, the same words at the same time."
Her jaw worked. "It has never whispered to one person."
"It's the fever," Isaiah said desperately. "Nell. That's all it is. She's burning up, she's been out of her head for two days, people say things when they're—"
"She named the ice," Nell said.
"So?"
"She named the ice, and then she stopped, and then she woke up, and the first thing she said was that the thing outside had been listening to every word we said."
Nell looked at Liam. "How would she know that? She's been unconscious since we pulled her out of the cove. She has not heard one syllable of anything I've told you tonight. Nobody explained the willows to her."
Liam's throat had closed.
"Chloe," he said. "How do you know it's been listening?"
"Because he told me," Chloe said.
She turned her head and looked at him, and for one clear second she was there, all the way there, the girl who had faced down Uebert from a bench and told Duncan Rain to his face that their lives were theirs to spend.
"He told me it's been listening to you all night," she said. "He told me it likes you. It thinks you're interesting."
And then she was gone again.
Her eyes drifted, and unfocused, and her head rolled back, and she said, in a voice gone soft and childish, "Dad, it's so cold out there, why don't you come in?"
Liam stood up.
He walked away from her, four steps, five, and stood facing the concrete wall with his hands braced against it and his head down, and he did not trust himself to be near anyone.
He stayed there for a while.
Isaiah came and stood beside him and did not say anything, and after a long moment he put a hand on Liam's back, and Liam let him.
"It's got her," Liam said.
"We don't know that."
"It's got her, Isaiah. It's been sitting outside listening for eight months and learning everybody in that room by heart and now it's got somebody in there who can't tell the difference. It's got somebody with a fever and a hole in her side who can't check."
He pressed his forehead against the concrete.
"We handed it a door that opens from the inside."
"So we don't let her near the door."
"You can't watch a person forever."
"Yes you can," Isaiah said.
Liam turned his head.
Isaiah's round face was set in a way Liam had seen exactly three times before. Once on a bench with Uebert Murray standing over them. Once at the broken bridge. Once in the gray, with a rock in his hands.
"Yes you can," Isaiah said again. "There's two of us. There's twenty-two of them. That's twenty-four people and one girl. We put a body on her every minute of the day and night, in shifts, and if she gets up we put her back down, and if she screams we hold her,
and we do that for as long as it takes."
He was shaking, but his voice was steady.
"That's not hard, Liam. That's just tiring. And we've been tired since Minnesota."
Liam looked at him.
And then he pushed off the wall.
"Nell," he said. "We're rigging a watch."
They tied her down.
That was the ugliest hour of Liam's life, and he had had some.
They loosened the cords across her chest and thighs and re-ran them, doubled, and added one across her wrists, and Chloe fought them, weakly, and then not weakly at all, and it took Isaiah and Petyr and the heavy woman with the axe to hold her while Liam pulled the knots.
She called him a coward.
She used her father's words to do it, and she used her father's cadence, and Liam pulled the knot tight and did not stop and did not answer and did not look at her face.
When it was done he walked out of the firelight and stood in the dark at the back of the blockhouse and was sick against the wall.
Nell Rook found him there.
She did not say anything for a while. She just stood next to him and held out a rag.
"I've done that too," she said.
"Have you."
"Twice." She waited while he wiped his mouth.
"Doing the right thing is not the same as it feeling right. Nobody ever tells you that. They let you think you'll get a reward for it, some little warm feeling in your chest that lets you know you chose well."
Her mouth twisted. "You don't. You just get to keep the person."
Liam handed the rag back.
"Nell," he said. "It knows things it shouldn't."
"I know."
"No. Listen." He straightened up. "You said it only knows what it's heard. That's what I told you and you agreed with me and I was proud of myself for working it out. But it told Chloe it thinks I'm interesting."
Nell frowned.
"So?"
"So that's not a memory," Liam said. "That's not something it overheard through a wall. That's an opinion. That's a thing it thinks now, about a man who walked into this cove yesterday." He looked at her. "It isn't just replaying the dead, Nell. It's got something of its own in there."
Nell Rook was quiet a long time.
"I don't know what to do with that," she said at last.
"Neither do I."
"Then put it in a box and shut the lid, because the sun comes up in five hours and there are ten men on my beach, and we can only carry so much at once."
She pushed off the wall. "Come on. If we're doing this, we do it properly. Bring your fat lad. He thinks in machines and I need somebody who thinks in machines."
They took over the far corner of the blockhouse.
Nell drew the cove on the concrete floor in charcoal, and she drew it well, quick and clean, and Liam watched her hand move and understood that she had been drawing this cove her whole life.
"Here's the bar," she said. "Runs three quarters across the mouth. Deep channel on the north side, right up against the rock, and that's the only way in and out for anything bigger than a canoe."
"That's where they came in," Liam said.
"That's where they came in. That's where they'll go out."
She drew the beach, and the sunken half of the Landing, and the standing half, and the path up through the willows to the blockhouse on its rise.
"They'll be up at first light," she said. "They'll come up through the trailers when the fog burns off enough to see. And they'll find them empty, and then they'll come and stand at the bottom of my hill and call up to us, polite as you like, and tell us to open the door."
"And you'll open it."
"We always open it." Nell said it flatly. "What's the alternative? They wait. They've got fish, we've got three days of water. They know it. They'll sit on that beach and wait us out and take everything, and it'll cost them nothing but time."
Liam looked at the charcoal lines.
He looked at the deep channel drawn tight against the rock at the north end of the bar.
"Isaiah," he said. "Where's our boat?"
Isaiah blinked.
"Our boat?"
"The sailboat. Where did we leave her."
"We anchored her." Isaiah's eyes went wide. "Liam, we anchored her in eight feet of water at the south end of the cove, behind the bar, on the inside, tucked up against the willows. We waded ashore."
"Can they see her from the beach?"
"No." Isaiah was up on his knees now, staring at the charcoal map.
"No, they can't, the bar's between. The bar and the willows. You'd have to come around the inside of the cove and look back to see her, and they came in from the north and they landed north, they never went south, they had no reason to—"
"They don't know we have a boat," Liam said.
Nell Rook sat back on her heels.
"They don't know you exist," she said slowly. "They don't know anything about you. They've never seen you and they've never heard of you and as far as those men are concerned this is a village of twenty-two starving fishermen who roll over every time they show up."
"Yes."
"They think they know exactly what's up this hill."
"Yes."
Nell looked at the map for a long moment.
Then she looked up, and there was something in her face that Liam had not seen there once in the whole long night, and it took him a second to recognize it, because he had not seen it on anyone's face for a very long time.
It was appetite.
"Tell me," she said.
Liam picked up the charcoal.