Chapter 11
"Cut the boats loose!" Liam roared. "Cully, cut them loose, get me sail!"
"The tide's against us!"
"Get me sail!"
The boy went up the mast like a spider and Liam threw the tiller over and the sailboat heeled and came around, and behind her the two rowboats and the skiff came swinging around on their rope like a chain of tin cans, and everything slowed to nothing.
"Cut them!" Liam screamed. "Nell, cut the rope!"
"Twenty-five people are in those boats!"
"Then row them! ROW THEM! We are not losing her, Nell, we are not, we are not—"
"Liam."
Isaiah's hand closed on his wrist.
Liam turned on him with murder in his chest and Isaiah did not let go and did not flinch and did not look away.
"Look at the water," Isaiah said.
"Isaiah, I swear to God—"
"Look at the water."
Liam looked.
The flood tide was running north up the Sound like a river in spate, a great muscled current pouring up toward the city, and the crabber was riding it.
She was riding it the way a leaf rides a millrace, half a mile out and pulling away by the second, and the wind was southwest and light and dying with the sun.
They would never catch her.
Not in this hull. Not with four boats on the stern and twenty-five souls aboard and a tide like that under her.
Liam let go of the tiller.
He stood there in the cockpit of a stolen sailboat and watched his best friend row away into the dusk toward a dead city, and he did not move, and he could not move, and he had never in his life felt so completely and totally useless.
"She's going to the door," he said.
"Yes," Isaiah whispered.
"It's taking her to the door."
"Yes."
"Isaiah, it waited." Liam's voice cracked all the way open. "It waited until she was strong enough to row. Six days. It sat in her head for six days and let her heal and it waited until she could row a boat."
James Wilford spoke from the rail.
He had not said a word since he had come aboard. He had stood there with his Bible under his arm and watched all of it, and now he said, quietly:
"Then it doesn't want her dead."
Liam turned.
"What?"
"If a thing wanted your friend dead, son, it could have walked her off that boat and into the water any night this week."
The old man's face was calm. "It didn't. It has spent six days keeping a wounded girl alive, and now that she can hold an oar it has sent her north. Whatever that is, it is not killing her. It is using her."
"For what?"
"For hands," James said.
The word went into Liam like ice water.
It doesn't touch anything. It doesn't leave a print. It doesn't bend a reed.
Eight months in those willows, and it had never once moved a chime.
"It's got no hands," Liam said slowly. "Nell. Nell, it's never had hands. That's the whole reason it has to ask, that's why it stands outside the door and begs, because it cannot open anything itself, it cannot touch anything, it cannot pick up a stone."
Nell Rook had gone white as bone.
"And now it's got a girl," she said.
"It's got a girl who can row a boat," Liam said, "and it's going to a door with a keypad on it, and I am the only man alive who has the code."
He stopped.
The whole world seemed to stop with him.
"Except I'm not," he said.
He turned and looked at Isaiah.
"Isaiah. Where's Chloe's pack."
Isaiah did not answer.
He was staring at the empty place at the stern where the crabber's line had been, and his mouth was open, and Liam watched the color go out of his friend's face all at once, like water out of a broken jug.
"She was carrying it," Isaiah whispered. "She had it on when she came up the ladder. She's had it on for six days. I tied it to her, Liam, at the marina, I tied her pack to her so she wouldn't lose it in the boat, and nobody ever took it off."
Nobody spoke.
Somewhere out in the dark, a gull was crying.
"It has the code," Liam said.
They went north that night.
There was nothing else to do. Liam took the tiller and Cully took the sail and they ran up the Sound on the last of the flood with four boats trailing behind them and twenty-six people aboard, and the towers of the city grew, and grew, and grew.
At two in the morning Cully put a hand on Liam's arm.
"We're at the line," he said.
Liam looked.
He could see it, or he could see what it meant. The old grain terminal was a black hulk on the eastern shore, and past it the water narrowed, and past that the waterfront began, a long dark shoreline with fires burning on it.
Dozens of fires.
And on the water, between them and the city, riding at anchor with lanterns hung in their rigging, were boats.
"That's a picket," Nell said.
"How many?"
"Six, eight. Strung right across the channel." She spat over the side. "Every one of them has men in it and every one of them is watching, and they'll see us come up in the dark, and we are five hulls low in the water with women and children in them and we will be boarded in ten minutes."
"So we don't go up the channel," Liam said.
"There isn't another way."
"There's the west shore."
Cully's head came up.
"Liam," he said. "The west shore's Ballard."
"The west shore is dark." Liam pointed. "Look at it. There's no fires on that stretch for a mile. Whatever's over there, nobody's holding it right now, and there's a bluff, and there's beach under the bluff,
and I can put five boats on that beach in the dark and nobody on that picket line will ever see us."
"And then what?"
"And then we walk."
Nell stared at him.
"You want to put twenty-six people ashore in Ballard territory and walk them into the city."
"No," Liam said. "I want to put twenty-six people ashore on an empty beach and hide them under a bluff with the boats. And then four of us walk."
He turned and looked at the small crowd on the deck.
"Me," he said. "Isaiah. Nell." He paused. "And the pastor."
"Absolutely not," Nell said.
"Nell—"
"He's sixty-three and he's got no gun and he buried his whole church last week."
"I'm coming," James Wilford said.
"You are not."
The old man looked at her with perfect gentleness.
"Mrs. Rook," he said. "I have been walking into rooms full of people who wanted to kill each other for thirty-one years. It is the only skill I have left. If this boy is going to try to talk his way past a hundred armed men, he is going to need somebody who has done it before."
Nell opened her mouth.
And shut it.
And said, "God help us all."
They landed at four in the morning.
The beach was stone and slick and steep, and they got the boats up under an overhang of the bluff where the tide would not take them, and Nell put Petyr in charge with the shotgun and the crabber's absence hanging over all of them.
And the four of them went up the bluff and into the city.
Liam had thought he was ready.
He was not ready.
The scale of it broke something in him. He came up over the lip of the bluff onto a cracked street between two apartment buildings and he stood there in the dark and looked at a canyon of dead concrete running away in both directions for as far as he could see, and he understood, for the first time,
in his body, what ninety percent meant.
Cars. Thousands of them. Rusted into the roadway, doors open, some still with things in them that he made himself not look at.
Trees growing out of the sidewalks. Actual trees, twelve feet high, roots buckling the pavement.
Blackberry.
It was everywhere. It had eaten whole blocks. It had climbed the fronts of buildings and pulled down fences and swallowed cars whole, a great thorned green ocean, and the four of them walked down the middle of the street because the sidewalks were gone.
And bones.
Liam stopped looking at those after the first hour.
"Two miles," Isaiah whispered. "It's two miles to that market. Liam, this is going to take all night."
"Then it takes all night."
They saw people twice.
The first time was a light in a window on the fourth floor of an apartment block, and it went out the moment they came into view, and they walked faster and nothing followed.
The second time was worse.
It was a woman.
She was standing in the middle of the street two blocks ahead of them at dawn, absolutely still, watching them come, and when they were a hundred yards off she turned and walked into a doorway and was gone,
and by the time they reached the doorway there was nothing behind it but a stairwell full of rubbish.
"She's telling somebody," Nell said.
"I know."
"Liam, she's telling somebody right now."
"I know, Nell."
They found the market at eight in the morning.
They came at it from the north, down a long street that ran parallel to the water, and the great steel sign came up over the rooftops ahead of them, rusted red, its letters bent.
PUBLIC MARKET.
Liam stopped in the middle of the street and looked at it.
Four months. Two thousand miles. Wolves and Ashford and a trapper and the Rockies and a broken bridge and a marina and a cove full of willows and a girl in the water.
And there it was.
"Liam," Isaiah said softly.
"I know."
"We're here."
"I know."
They went two more blocks.
And then the street opened out into a square, and Liam saw the barricade, and he saw the men on it, and he saw that they had been seen a very long time ago.
The barricade was forty feet of stacked car bodies and steel plate and sandbags, and it ran across the head of the street, and there were men on top of it with rifles, and there were more coming out of the buildings on both sides.
Twenty of them. Thirty.
And in front of the barricade, standing in the open, waiting for them, was a man with a pistol on his hip and a smile on his face.
He was young. That was the thing that surprised Liam. Twenty-five, maybe. Handsome in a hard bright way, clean-shaven, with a red scarf knotted at his throat.
"Well," he called out. "Look what walked up the street."
Liam stopped forty feet from him.
"Easy," the young man said. "Easy, easy. Nobody's shooting anybody yet." He spread his hands. "You're four people. There's thirty of us. Let's all be reasonable."
"We want to talk," Liam said.
"Everybody wants to talk."
"To whoever runs this ground."
"That's me."
"No it isn't," Liam said.