Chapter 9 #2
It was tiny. At two miles through fog it was almost nothing, a green pinprick, and it flickered as the haze moved across it, and Liam stared at it until his eye watered and he had to look away.
"It's real," he said.
His voice did not sound like his own.
"Isaiah. It's real. There's a light on it. There is a light burning on that door right now and it has been burning for two years and I am looking at it."
Isaiah took the rifle from his hands.
He looked. And he did not say anything at all, and after a while Liam realized his friend was crying, silently, with the scope pressed to his eye and his shoulders shaking.
"Two thousand miles," Isaiah said.
"Yeah."
"We walked two thousand miles for a green light."
"Yeah."
Isaiah lowered the rifle and wiped his face with his sleeve and laughed, ragged and wet.
"Sarah was right," he said. "That mad woman was right. Duncan said it was a fairy tale and I sat there in the snow and I believed him, in the gray, on the plateau, I said what if it's not real and now there it is." He looked at Liam. "It's there, Liam. It's right there."
"Yes."
"So how do we get to it?"
And Nell Rook said, "You don't."
She said it flatly, and everyone turned.
She was standing at the rail with her arms folded and her face like the side of a cliff.
"Look at it," she said. "Look at what's between you and that green light. Two miles of open water, watched by four crews. A waterfront held by a hundred armed men who have spent two years killing anybody who comes near that hillside. And they don't want your code, boy,
they don't care about your code. They've stopped believing there is one. They've been standing in front of that door for two years and it's stopped being a door for them and started being a religion."
"So we go at night."
"They watch at night."
"Then we go under."
Everyone looked at him.
Liam turned to Cully.
"You're a diver," he said.
The boy went very still.
"Yes," he said.
"You dove for Rennick's crew all winter. That's why he took you. That's what you're for."
"Yes."
"How deep?"
Cully's jaw worked.
"Forty feet," he said. "Fifty on a good day. In that water, in the cold, you get maybe ninety seconds on the bottom before your hands stop working and your head starts telling you lies."
"What did he have you diving for?"
The boy did not answer for a moment.
"Everything," he said finally. "Fuel, mostly. There's tanks in half those wrecks and they're still full, because the engines died before they burned it. And copper. And guns, off the naval boat. And once, a body, because a man's family wanted him back." He looked away. "And once, off Alki, a bank."
Liam looked at the city.
"Isaiah," he said slowly. "The market's on a bluff. It's above the waterfront. Sarah said the door's built into the hillside underneath it."
"Right."
"Under the market and above the street."
"Right."
"So the door's not on the water." Liam was working it now, fast, the cold clear thing coming up through him like a tide.
"It's up the hill from the water. Which means even if we come in by sea, we still have to cross the waterfront on foot and go up. Through the Pike men. Through a hundred men on ground they've held for two years."
Isaiah's face fell.
"Yeah," he said. "That's the problem. That's always been the problem, we just didn't know how bad."
"So there has to be another way in."
"There isn't."
"There's always another way in," Liam said. "You told me that on a broken bridge."
Isaiah stared at him.
And then, slowly, something began to happen behind his eyes.
"Liam," he said. "What did Sarah say. Exactly. About the door. Say it exactly."
Liam closed his eyes.
He had heard it a thousand times on the road. He had lain awake in the cold and turned it over until the words were worn smooth.
"She said it's built into the hillside under the market," he said. "She said it looks like nothing. She said it looks like a maintenance door. A utility access."
Isaiah went white.
"Say that last part again."
"A utility access."
"A utility access to what?"
And there it was.
Liam felt the whole world tilt.
"Isaiah," he said.
"An access door doesn't lead to a lab," Isaiah said, and he was talking fast now, and his hands were moving.
"An access door leads to infrastructure. That's what it's for, that's what it's pretending to be. And the man who built that place picked that disguise for a reason, and the reason is that it was true enough to survive an inspection."
"You're saying there's a tunnel."
"I'm saying there's always a tunnel." Isaiah grabbed Liam's arm.
"Liam, that's a hundred and thirty year old waterfront city built on a hill on top of a mudflat. You know what's under a city like that? Everything. Storm drains. Sewers. Steam tunnels. Utility runs. There was a whole street level under that market, I read about it once,
they raised the whole city after a fire and just built on top of the old one, there is a buried city under the buried city."
"And it connects to the water."
"Everything connects to the water!" Isaiah was almost shouting. "That's what a storm drain is, it's a pipe that carries a hillside's worth of rain into the sea, and there is a hillside above that door, and the rain has been falling on it for two years!"
Liam turned and looked at the city.
Two miles of gray water. A ruined waterfront crawling with men who would kill him. A green light burning under a market.
And underneath all of it, in the dark, a hundred and thirty years of pipe.
"Cully," he said.
The boy looked up.
"How far under can you go," Liam said, "and how far in?"
Cully did not answer right away.
He looked at the city, and he looked at the water, and he chewed the inside of his cheek the way a fifteen year old does when he is deciding whether to be brave.
"There's an outfall," he said.
Nell's head came around.
"What?"