Chapter 20
"CULLY!"
Liam was over the stern before anyone had moved.
He hit the water and it was so cold it took the breath out of his body, and he went under, and he came up with the black river closing over the sound of his own name and the fog swallowing everything past ten feet.
"Liam!" Isaiah, screaming from the deck. "LIAM, GET BACK ON THE BOAT!"
"He's in the dinghy—"
"Liam, you can't swim him down, he's got oars!"
Liam trod water in a black river in a swamp and listened.
The oars went on.
Creak. Splash. Creak.
Slow and even and patient, going away into the willows on the far bank, in no hurry at all, because the thing at the oars had all the time in the world and nothing in this life had ever made it hurry.
"CULLY!" Liam screamed. "CULLY, IT'S NOT YOUR SISTER!"
The oars did not stop.
They dragged him back aboard.
James Wilford and two of Nell's people got him under the arms and hauled him over the transom, and he lay on the deck coughing river water while Isaiah shouted at everyone at once.
"Skiff! Get the skiff, Petyr, get in the skiff—"
"You'll never find him in that fog," Marla said.
"Then we take lanterns—"
"And he'll see them coming and he'll row somewhere else," Chloe said.
Everyone stopped.
She was sitting up in the bow. She had gotten herself upright somehow, tied hands and all, and her face in the lantern light was the color of ash.
"It's not stupid," she said. "It has never once been stupid. It's had a boy sitting six feet from an untied dinghy for three days and it has been talking to him the entire time and none of us noticed, and now it has hands and a boat and a head start and a swamp to hide in."
"So what do we do," Isaiah said.
"We think," Liam said.
He got up.
He stood there dripping on the deck of that boat with his teeth chattering, and he made himself stop, and he made himself work the read, and it was the hardest thing he had ever done because every part of him was screaming to get in a boat and row.
"Isaiah," he said. "What does it want."
"Liam, we don't have time for—"
"What does it want."
Isaiah stopped.
And Liam watched his friend do the thing that Isaiah Macklemore had been doing since he was a boy in a workshop full of broken machines, which was to stop panicking and start looking.
"It wants hands," Isaiah said.
"Right."
"It's always wanted hands. That's the whole thing. That's the whole entire thing about it."
He was moving now, pacing, and his voice was steadying with every word.
"Liam, listen. Everything it has ever done in its whole existence comes down to one problem and it can't solve it, and the problem is that it cannot touch anything."
"Go on."
"Eight months in that cove and it never moved a chime." Isaiah was talking fast. "Nell said that. She built an alarm out of crab shells and spoons and it never once went off, and it stood in those trees a hundred nights and it never bent a single reed."
He turned around.
"So it begs," he said. "That's all it can do. It stands outside a door and it uses a voice you'd open the door for, and it asks. Nine people at the Landing walked out of a locked room on their own two legs and shut the door behind them,
and every single one of them did it because something they loved was standing in the fog asking them to."
"And it gets nothing out of it," Liam said. "That's the part I can't make fit."
"No," Isaiah said. "That's the part nobody could make fit, and it drove Nell mad for eight months, and the answer's been sitting in front of us the whole time and I only worked it out this afternoon."
He looked up.
"It's practicing," he said.
The whole boat was silent.
"Nine people," Isaiah said. "In a swamp. In a cove nobody's ever heard of. That's not a monster feeding, Liam, that's not a thing eating people, because it doesn't do anything to them, they just walk out and they're gone."
His voice was rising. "That's a thing running the same experiment over and over. How do I get a human being to do what I want. What voice works. What lie works. What grief works."
Liam felt the deck move under him.
"And then we came," he said.
"And then we came." Isaiah's face was terrible. "Three people who'd walked across a continent, and one of them fell in the water, and it got a body for the first time in its life, and everything it had learned in that swamp on those poor people, every single thing, it used on us."
"It practiced on Willow Landing," Liam whispered.
"It practiced on Willow Landing for eight months," Isaiah said. "And then it got out."
Nobody spoke.
The fog moved through the willows and the river ran and somewhere out in the dark the oars went on, patient, unhurried.
"Then it doesn't want Cully," Liam said slowly.
Everyone turned.
"Say that again," James said.
"It doesn't want Cully." Liam's mind was moving now, cold and clear, the tide of it coming up through him.
"Cully's fifteen. He's got no code and no rifle and no map and he doesn't know a single thing this world needs. Why would it take him? Why would it spend the one pair of untied hands it could reach on a boy in a dinghy?"
Isaiah's mouth opened.
"Oh God," he said.
"Say it."
"It's not taking him away from us," Isaiah said. "It's taking him somewhere it wants us to follow."
"Yes."
"It's baiting the hook."
"Yes."
"It's doing the same thing it did at the door," Isaiah said, and he was almost shouting now. "It propped that door open with her boot and it laid the map out on the ground where you'd find it and it wrote don't come in, and you walked in anyway, and you knew it was a trap and you walked in anyway."
Chloe made a sound.
"That's what it does," she said.
Her voice was very small.
"That's what it does. It doesn't make you do anything. It never once made me do anything." She was staring at the deck. "It just puts the thing you love in a place you shouldn't go, and then it stands back, and it waits."
Liam looked out at the black willows.
And for the first time in nine days, he understood exactly what he was fighting, all the way down, and it was so simple and so ugly that he wanted to be sick.
It had no hands.
It had no power at all.
It had exactly one weapon in the world, and it was love, and it had been using it on human beings for longer than any of them had been alive.
"We don't follow," Liam said.
Isaiah stared at him.
"Liam."
"We don't follow it into that swamp."
"He's fifteen."
"I know how old he is."
"Nell died in the street, Liam!" Isaiah was screaming now. "She died in the street and the last thing she said was get my boy out of this city and you promised her—"
"I KNOW WHAT I PROMISED."
Liam's voice went up the willows and came back and there was nothing left of it.
He stood there shaking.
"I know what I promised," he said. "And it knows what I promised, Isaiah, because it was tied up on the bow of this boat listening when I said it out loud, and it has been sitting on that promise for nine days waiting for the right night to spend it."
Isaiah's face went white.
"So we let him go," he said.
"No," Liam said.
"Then what?"
Liam turned around.
"We make it come to us," he said.
They lit every lantern they had.
That was the beginning of it, and it was Liam's idea, and it was the maddest thing any of them had ever done.
They hung lanterns from the shrouds and the boom and the mast and the rails of all five boats, and they lit a fire in a barrel on the mudbank, and they turned that little side channel in a black swamp into the brightest thing for forty miles.
"They'll see us for miles," Petyr said.
"Good," Liam said.
Then he put every single person into one boat.
All twenty-five of them, into the sailboat, jammed shoulder to shoulder in the cockpit and on the deck and down in the cabin, with the four other hulls tied empty alongside.
"Nobody is alone," he said. "Nobody stands watch by themselves. Nobody goes to the rail on their own. Nobody walks off into the dark for any reason, and if you hear a voice you love, you say so out loud, immediately, to the person next to you."
He looked around at them.
"It cannot make you do anything," he said. "It has never made anybody do anything in its entire existence. It asks. That's all. And it asks people who are alone."
He picked up Chloe's hand.
"So nobody's alone," he said. "Not tonight. Not ever again."
And then he cut the ropes off Chloe Buck's wrists.
Isaiah lunged.
"LIAM, NO—"
"Sit down."
"Liam, are you insane, she's the one it—"
"Isaiah." Liam did not raise his voice. "Sit down."
Isaiah sat down.
Liam knelt in front of Chloe and took the belt off her wrists and off her ankles and threw it over the side into the river, and then he sat back on his heels and looked at her.
She was shaking all over.
"Liam," she whispered. "What are you doing?"
"I'm untying you."
"You can't—"
"Chloe." He took her hands. They were freezing and torn and the marks of the leather were sunk into them.
"It has been telling you for nine days that you're the danger. It has been telling you that the safest thing for everyone is for you to go in the water. And I have been proving it right by keeping you tied up in the bow like a bomb."
"I am a—"
"You're the only person on this boat who knows what it sounds like from the inside," Liam said.
Chloe stopped.
"You've had it in your head for nine days," Liam said. "You've heard every trick it has. You've felt it reach. You beat it for eleven minutes in front of a door that it wanted more than anything in the world and you got a note out, and it has never forgiven you for it."
He gripped her hands.
"You're not the danger, Chloe," he said. "You're the only weapon we've got."
Chloe Buck stared at him.
And then she began to cry, and she did not stop for a long time, and nobody on that crowded boat said one word about it.
They waited.
That was all. That was the whole plan. Twenty-six people in one lit boat in a black swamp, packed together, nobody alone, nobody at the rail, and the fire burning on the mudbank, and every light they owned burning in the fog.
And they waited for it to come back.
It came at three in the morning.