Chapter 13
Nobody moved.
Twelve Pike men stood in a half circle on the ruined street with their lanterns held high, and every one of them was staring at the eight inches of white electric light coming out of the hillside, and not one of them took a step toward it.
Liam understood why.
That light was wrong.
It was not firelight and it was not lamplight and it was not the sun.
It was flat and hard and perfectly even, and it did not flicker, and it threw shadows with edges so sharp they looked cut, and Liam had lived under lights like it every day of his life until he was twenty and now it made his stomach turn.
"Nobody's gone in," Doyle said.
He was standing at Liam's shoulder with his hat in his hands.
"Nobody's gone near it," Doyle said. "Renner found it like that an hour ago and he came up the stair so fast he broke a tooth on the wall and he's been sitting in the square making a noise I've never heard a grown man make."
Liam crouched.
He picked up the oilcloth.
His hands were shaking so badly that he had to set it down and pick it up again, and he unfolded the paper inside, and there it was. The crude waterfront. The crude buildings. The crude X below them, drawn in charcoal by a man dying of a fever in a cabin two thousand miles east.
And the cramped desperate handwriting beside it.
Numbers.
Liam looked at them for a long moment.
Four digits. That was all. Four digits scratched on a scrap of paper by a dying man, and a thousand men had died on this hillside for two years for want of them, and here they were in his hand.
He turned the paper over.
DON'T COME IN
"That's her writing," Isaiah said. His voice was hollow. "Liam. That's Chloe's writing."
"I know."
"So she wrote it."
"Yes."
"She wrote it, which means she's herself, which means she got control of herself for long enough to walk back to that door and put the map on the ground and jam it open with her boot and warn us—"
"Isaiah."
"She's fighting it, Liam. She's in there fighting it and she got out a message and she's telling us not to—"
"Isaiah."
Isaiah stopped.
Liam held up the paper.
"Look at it," he said. "Look at what she gave us. She put the map on the ground where I would find it. She weighted it down so the wind wouldn't take it. She jammed the door so it couldn't lock."
He looked at his friend.
"She gave us the code," he said, "and she gave us the way in, and then she wrote don't come in."
Isaiah's face slowly changed.
"That doesn't make sense," he whispered.
"No," Liam said. "It doesn't."
"Unless—"
"Unless it isn't a warning," Liam said. "It's an invitation."
The Pike men shifted.
"Say that again," Doyle said quietly.
Liam stood up with the map in his hand.
"There's a thing living in my friend's head," he said. "It's been in there six days. It came out of a willow swamp forty miles south and it has no hands and no feet and it cannot touch anything in this world, and the only way it can get a door opened is to get a person to open it."
He held up the boot.
"So it takes her here," he said. "It puts the code in. It walks her through the door and the door locks behind her, and it's inside, and it's got what it wanted."
He turned the boot over. "And then it comes back and props the door open and lays out the map where the one man who's chasing it will find it."
"Why?" Doyle said.
"Because it wants me to follow," Liam said.
Nobody spoke.
"And it knows," Liam said, "that the fastest way to get a man to walk into a room is to write don't come in on the door in his best friend's handwriting."
James Wilford had come down the stair.
He stood at the back of the little crowd with his Bible under his arm, and he had been listening, and when Liam finished he closed his eyes.
"That's very good," he said.
"What?"
"I mean that as a criticism, son." James opened his eyes. "That is a very good piece of reasoning and it is exactly the sort of reasoning a man does when he has already decided to go in and needs a story that makes it sound like his own idea."
The words hit Liam like a slap.
"You want to go in there," James said. "You have wanted to go in there since the moment you saw that light. And so you have built yourself a very clever explanation in which walking through that door is not falling for a trap, it is seeing through one."
"Pastor—"
"Answer me one question," James said. "If that paper had said come in, would you have gone?"
Liam opened his mouth.
And found he had nothing.
"No," he said.
"No," James agreed. "So the note worked exactly as it was designed to, and you have spent five minutes proving to yourself that you're too clever to be caught by it, and the end result is that you are standing four feet from an open door with your hand on your holster."
The silence stretched.
"He's right," Isaiah said miserably.
"I know he's right," Liam said.
"So what do we do?"
Liam looked at the eight inches of hard white light.
"We go in," he said.
"Liam—"
"I know it's a trap, Isaiah!" It came out of him raw.
"I know. The pastor's right, and I know it, and I don't care, because Chloe Buck is on the other side of that door and there is a room full of medicine behind it and everything we have done for four months and two thousand miles is sitting eight inches away,
and I am not going to stand out here and be clever about it."
He turned to Doyle.
"How many men do you have."
Doyle's face closed like a fist.
"Forty," he said.
"How many can you spare."
"None."
Liam stared at him.
"You owe me," he said.
"I do." Doyle put his hat back on his head, slowly. "And I'll tell you what I'll do with what I owe you, son, and you're not going to like it, and I'd ask you to hear me out before you say anything you'll regret."
He gestured at the door.
"That thing has been shut for two years," he said.
"And every one of my men has stared at it every day of that time, and every one of them has built a picture in his head of what's behind it. Food. Guns. Gold. Medicine. Whatever the thing is that he wants most in the whole world, that's what he's decided is in there."
"So?"
"So now it's open," Doyle said. "And it's been open an hour. And I've got twelve men standing here looking at it and I've got twenty-eight more up the hill who don't know yet, and I am telling you as a man who has held this ground for two years and buried more friends than I can count."
He looked Liam in the eye.
"The second word gets out that the door's open," he said, "there will be four hundred men on this hillside inside two days. Ballard. The Yards. The Shore and their powder barge. Everybody. And they will not be coming for medicine and they will not be coming to ask."
Liam felt the floor drop.
"How long," he said.
"Word's already going," Doyle said flatly. "Renner ran up the hill screaming. There's men in that square who've already gone to tell their brothers. It's out. It was out an hour ago and there was nothing I could do about it."
"So how long, Doyle."
Doyle looked at the sky.
"Tomorrow night," he said. "Maybe the night after."
"Then give me your men."
"To do what, son?" Doyle's voice rose for the first time. "Walk into a hole in the ground? I've got forty men and a barricade and a war coming, and you want me to send them down a corridor to fight a ghost?"
"Then give me the barricade."
Doyle stopped.
"What?"
"You've got two years of holding this ground," Liam said.
"You know every approach. You know where they'll come from and how many and how fast."
He stepped forward. "I don't need your men to go in. I need your men to hold the outside long enough for me to get out. That's all. That's the whole debt. You hold that stair and I go down that hole and I come back up with whatever's down there, and then, Doyle, I swear to you on Nell Rook's grave,
I will give it to your people first."
Doyle went very still.
"Say that again," he said.
"You heard me."
"Say it in front of my men."
Liam turned around.
He looked at twelve Pike men holding lanterns in a ruined street, and behind them, at the top of the stair, at forty more coming down, and at the twenty-two people of Willow Landing standing in a knot by the debris wall with Cully at the front of them.
"There's a plague coming," Liam said.
His voice carried up the hillside.
"It's east of here and it's moving west and it kills nine out of ten and it does not care how hard you are or how many men you've got or how long you've held this ground."
He held up the map. "And there is a cure behind that door and I have the numbers to open it, and when I bring it out, this city gets it first. Before my camp. Before anybody. This city, and everybody in it, and I don't care whose colors they wear."
Nobody spoke.
"Because that's what she'd have done," Liam said.
He did not have to say who.
Doyle took his hat off again.
"You'll have the stair," he said.
They went in at midnight.
Four of them. Liam, Isaiah, James Wilford, and Cully, who simply put himself at the door and would not be moved and who was fifteen years old and had lost a sister to a thing in the trees and would not be moved.
Liam had tried.
"Nell would kill me," he had said.
"Nell's dead," Cully had said. "And you promised her you'd get me out of this city, and you can't do that if you don't come back out yourself, so I'm coming."
Doyle gave them lanterns they did not need.
That was the strange thing. The light inside the door was better than any lantern.
It was electric. It ran the length of a poured concrete corridor going back into the hillside, a row of fixtures in the ceiling, half of them dark and half of them burning that hard white light, and Liam stood at the threshold and could not make himself step over it.
"It's warm," Isaiah whispered.
"What?"
"Feel it. There's air coming out." Isaiah put his hand up. "Liam, there's ventilation. Something's moving air in there. Something's running."
Liam stepped inside.
The corridor was two hundred feet long. Bare concrete. A yellow line painted on the floor. A conduit running along the ceiling.
And at the far end, another door.
They walked it in silence.