Chapter 9 #3
"There's a big outfall. Under the old piers, down at the south end of the market ground. My uncle showed me, we used to fish it, because the crabs collect where the fresh water comes out."
Cully's voice was very small. "It's big. It's brick. It's the size of this cabin, you could walk in it standing up if the tide was out."
Nobody said anything.
"But it's underwater at high tide," Cully said. "All of it. Twelve feet under. And the tide runs in and out of it hard, and there's two years of junk in the mouth of it, and I don't know how far back it goes, and my uncle said only a fool would ever put his head in it."
"And at low tide?" Liam said.
Cully looked up.
"At low tide," he said slowly, "you could row a skiff into it."
Nell Rook turned around and walked to the far rail and stood with her back to all of them.
Liam let her.
After a minute she said, without turning, "He's fifteen."
"I know."
"He's fifteen and I have had him back for one day."
"I know, Nell."
"And you want to put him in a black brick pipe under a dead city with a hundred armed men standing on top of it."
Liam looked at her back.
"No," he said. "I want to go into the pipe. I want him to tell me where it is."
Nell turned around.
"You'd drown in the first fifty feet," she said. "You've never dived in your life. You'd panic and you'd breathe and you'd die in the dark and we'd never even get your body back."
"Then it's the skiff, at low tide."
"And if it's blocked?"
"Then we find another one."
"And if there isn't another one?"
Liam did not have an answer.
And that was when Chloe said, from the companionway, in a voice like sandpaper, "Low tide's at four in the morning."
Everyone froze.
She was standing on the ladder.
She was standing on it, holding on to the hatch coaming with both hands, white as a sheet and shaking so badly that the boat's motion nearly took her off it. The cords they had tied her with were hanging off one wrist, sawn through.
Her eyes were clear.
They were absolutely, unmistakably clear.
"Chloe," Isaiah whispered.
"Hi," Chloe said. "Somebody want to tell me why I'm tied to a bed?"
Liam could not move.
He stood at the tiller of that boat and looked at her and the world went absolutely silent, and he was aware, distantly, that he had stopped breathing.
"Say something," he said.
"I said several things. You're being very rude."
"Say something only you would know."
Chloe leaned her head against the ladder, exhausted, and closed her eyes.
"You threw up in the snow outside Ashford," she said, "and you made me promise never to tell Isaiah, and I never did, and I'm telling him now because you tied me to a bed."
Isaiah made a noise.
And then Liam was across the cockpit and he had her in his arms, and she was crying out in pain because his hand had gone straight onto the wound in her side, and he was apologizing and not letting go, and Isaiah crashed into both of them and got his arms around them and lifted,
and the three of them stood there in the wind on the deck of a stolen sailboat two miles from the end of the world and held on to each other.
She was back.
She was back and she was crying and Liam was crying and Isaiah was making a sound that was not language at all, and behind them Nell Rook turned away and put her hand over her mouth.
"How long," Chloe rasped.
"Six days."
"Six days?"
"You've been gone six days." Liam pulled back and held her face in both hands.
"You went into the water at the marina and the tide took you north and the willows caught you and Nell Rook pulled you out and you have been out of your head with fever since, and Chloe, listen to me, listen, there is something you need to know and it is going to be very hard."
Chloe looked at him.
And something moved behind her eyes.
Something small and cold, and it was there for less than a second, and Liam felt it go through him like a nail.
"I know," she said.
"You know what?"
"I know what's in my head," Chloe said quietly. "I've known since the cove. I could hear all of it, Liam. All of it. I was in there the whole time, behind my own eyes, listening to it use my mouth, and I could not make my mouth stop."
Isaiah went gray.
"It's still there," Liam said.
It was not a question.
"Yes," Chloe said.
She looked out at the black towers of the dead city, rising out of the smoke, and her face was very calm and very tired.
"It came with us," she said. "It's in me, and it's been in me since the water, and it is very, very interested in that door." She turned her head and looked at Liam. "And I need you to understand something, and I need you to understand it right now, before we go one more mile north."
"Say it."
"When we get to that door," Chloe said, "you cannot let me anywhere near it."
And behind them, from the north, out of the fog, came the long low sound of a horn.
Liam spun.
Coming down the Sound toward them, out of the haze, in line abreast, close enough now that he could see the oars rising and falling, were three longboats.
And in the bow of the lead boat, standing, with a rifle in his hands and a scope on top of it, was the man from the rock.