6. Nash
NASH
Idrop her at the cabin at four p.m. with a bruised set of ribs she keeps insisting are fine, and I drive to my father's house with sawdust still in my head.
The elders are already gathered on Owen's porch when I pull in, which tells me Wyatt's mouth got there ahead of me.
Hazel's in the good chair with a mug of tea and her cane hooked over the arm.
My mother's at the rail with her sleeves pushed up, and she glances at my hands before she looks at my face, because she's been a healer for forty years and that's the order she does things in.
"Whose blood," Grace says.
"Nobody's. Bridge came apart under her."
"Under her, or under both of you?"
"Under her. I was still on the bank."
My father, Owen, doesn't say anything at all. He just moves over on the step and I sit next to him like I'm nineteen.
Hazel taps her cane twice on the boards. "Tell him about Kestrel Shaft."
They've been in the old workings since before Christmas.
My father lays it out flat. Two of the younger wolves have been running the mine district since February, mostly out of boredom, and what they found in March they didn't understand well enough to report.
They thought it was authorized state work until Wyatt connected it to the activity around Erin's sites.
Now it's got a shape. The Kestrel tunnel, collapsed since 1971, gated by the state, the gate rusted shut inside my lifetime, has a new gate.
Steel, powder-coated, on a hydraulic ram.
There's a graded track cut back into the alders wide enough for a lowboy trailer.
There's a generator pad poured within the last year, and a second one going in, and last week a crane on tracks came in over the Fisk road in three pieces and went down that tunnel.
"Down," I repeat. "Not in. Down."
"There's a hoist," my father says. "You can hear it from the ridge. Two, three in the morning, when they think nobody's listening. It runs eleven, twelve minutes at a stretch."
Eleven minutes of cable at industrial speed is a very long way underground. And Kestrel is on the east side, half a mile inland from the wetland, on the same bearing as every red dot on Erin's map.
"They're not mining," I say.
Hazel makes a sound in her throat. "No. They're going under."
The porch goes quiet. Behind the house one of Isla's students is shrieking with laughter over a soccer ball, and the ordinary sound of it makes my back teeth hurt.
"The old people had a word for what's under Stillwater," Hazel says.
"I won't say it out in the open. But I'll tell you what my grandmother told me, and she had it from hers.
Everything that lives strange in four hundred miles lives strange because of that water.
The lake isn't a place we hid in. It's the reason there's anything here to hide. "
"And if they drain its power?"
"Then we find out what happens to a flame when the wick is pulled out."
Caleb comes up the drive at dusk, but not up the steps, that's how I know before he opens his mouth there's something amiss. We walk to the dock together. He's got a handheld radio in a plastic bag, the cheap kind, and a notepad covered in his terrible handwriting.
"Wyatt pulled a scanner set on their working channels," he says. "They're encrypted on the main net. But the perimeter guys get lazy on the local repeater after midnight, and last night they were passing traffic in clear."
"And?"
"They've got a designator for her. 'The state asset.
' They talked about her boot prints, the bridge, and then somebody at the top of the net said…
" He looks at the notepad. "'If the state asset reaches the east perimeter, she doesn't leave it.
' Confirmed twice by two stations. Nash, that's not intimidation. That's a standing order."
The water sloshes against the bank, and I breathe in and out, calming myself.
"She was close to the east perimeter this morning," I say.
Caleb puts the radio in my hand. "And she is going back, you know she is. She's got fifty rock cores and a hole in a map and she's being the most stubborn human being I've ever watched walk uphill."
"Then we move the line out. Two on her from wake to sleep, close , a hundred yards, not two hundred.
Isla takes days on the cabin road; nobody looks twice at a schoolteacher parked with a stack of grading.
You and I take the east approaches. Wyatt runs the mine district and does not go past the alder line, and if he argues, remind him what happened to Bess Kettering's boy at Kestrel in ninety-four. "
"That's six wolves on rotation. That's most of the working adults."
"I know what it is."
"Isla will do it," he says. "But she asked me last night what happens to our kid if this goes bad, and I didn't have an answer, and neither do you."
I don't, every hour of keeping Erin alive is an hour of my pack's throat left uncovered, and I'm the one who decided that trade without asking anyone.
My mother catches me at the truck. She's got a jar of something in her hands and she pushes it at me.
"Arnica and comfrey. Her ribs will be bruised by Friday and she'll pretend they aren't." When I take it she doesn't let go of the jar right away. "Nash. How long are you planning to carry this alone?"
"How did you…"
"Just answer the question."
"As long as it works."
"That's not a plan, love. That's a habit." She lets go. "Your father did the same thing for years and it nearly cost him his hearing and both of us our marriage. Tell her."
"Tell her what? That the world she's spent her whole career measuring isn't real?" I hear my own voice go rough. "She's rebuilding her life because of a broken reputation, Ma. If I hand her this she doesn't get to be a scientist anymore. She's to be a person who knows a secret."
"Or she gets to be the person who's told the truth by somebody who didn't have to."
Later that night, I'm in her driveway at nine with the jar, and I stare at the kitchen window.
She's laid out, in a row, the cores. Her sleeves are shoved up, tape measure, hand lens, and a pencil behind her ear.
She's been on her feet for hours and had a bridge fall out from under her, yet she's working.
Every ten minutes she stops and presses her side, but keeps going.
Once she picks up the last core, she turns it, and turns it again — patient, methodical, refusing to look away from a thing that makes no sense.
She's going to get there, not next month. Soon. She'll find the collar of that borehole or she'll find the hoist noise on the ridge, and my wolves cannot stand between a determined woman and the answer forever.
Like a coward I sit in my truck, and decide that she will get the truth.
From me, not from a muzzle flash, or from a shape coming out of the trees at her.
The moment I can't put a wall between her and the truth, I stop protecting her from what I am and start arming her with it.
I get out and knock. She opens the door with the hand lens still in her fist.
"Good, you're here. The core's doing it again." She catches my sleeve and pulls me inside before I can answer.