12. Nash
NASH
Caleb and I go into the Fisk road compound at two in the morning, and it takes us a limited amount of time to understand that we're late.
It's a staging yard, not a facility, six acres of gravel behind the old aggregate pit, a scale house, three modular office units on blocks, and a fuel bladder under a shade structure.
What tells the story is the ground. There are tire impressions from at least twenty heavy movements, all baked hard, none fresh. The fuel bladder is drained.
"They pulled out," Caleb says.
"They consolidated." I run my hand along the scale-house doorframe. Dust on the sill, undisturbed. "Everything they had up here went down."
The scale house has a gutted rack where a server sat, cable ends cut rather than unplugged, and a burn barrel out back with about nine inches of ash in it. Whoever did the destruction was thorough and in a hurry, which is a combination that always leaves something.
In the second modular, under a desk, in a banker's box somebody stacked on top of a floor drain and forgot is paper. Actual paper, because in this organization they clearly print things.
Caleb holds the light while I go through it.
Most of it's procurement, pump specifications, cable rating sheets, a ventilation calculation for working below a datum.
There's a personnel roster with the names blacked out and the roles left in, and the roles are what stop me cold.
Nineteen technical staff. Four with the credential line DVM.
Two cryobiology. One comparative genomics.
Then there's the binder. It's a lab log, or a summary of one, printed and three-hole-punched. Column headings: Source, Intake, Tissue, Viability, Disposition. The Source column uses codes. C-series, A-series, L-series. The Intake dates run back four years.
"Nash."
"I see it."
The Viability column has numbers in it, most of them low. The Disposition column has four entries repeating. Hold. Transfer. Terminal harvest. Expired in transit.
There are three hundred and forty rows. I sit on the floor and read the names of people, and Caleb doesn't say a word.
The map's in the last folder and it's the reason we came. It's a regional sheet, printed satellite, with hand annotation in two colors. Someone has drawn polygons. Nine, scattered across miles of country, each with a code and a rough population estimate written beside it in a small tidy hand.
I know all nine. Stillwater is the largest, marked C-1, with the number 60 beside it.
That's one off. The Marrow Creek pack is there, and the two families in the Loon River drainage, and the hill people down at Bracken who haven't spoken to an outside wolf since 1948.
There's a polygon over the drowned timber marked A-2, with the number 14, the count from November, before the disappearances started.
Somebody has been surveying us for years. They have a good inventory, and it is more accurate than the one Hazel keeps.
"How?" Caleb's voice has gone flat and dangerous. "Bracken's forty miles from a paved road. You can't drive by that. You can't fly it. Somebody told them."
"Somebody told them."
"That's a human. That's a local human with a boat and a lifetime of listening to old men talk at a marina…"
"Don't." I fold the map and put it inside my jacket. "Not a name out loud, not on a guess, not until I can prove it. You start naming people and you tear the valley in half whether you're right or wrong."
Caleb breathes out hard. "You know I'm right."
"I know you're probably right. That's not the same, and you're my Beta, so you're going to hold the line with me."
He hates it, but he does it, which is the whole reason he's my Beta.
We get home at seven and I don't go to bed. The compound is doing its Monday. Isla's hauling a crate of books to the truck for school. My father's arguing with the tractor. And through the open door of the long hall I can hear a voice pitched to carry to the back row.
"—so it's not a guess. Wyatt, hold that up. What's the difference between what Junie drew and what Bo drew?"
I stop in the doorway. There are kids at the long table, ages about six to fourteen, and every one has a page of data sheets in front of them.
Erin's at the head with a marker and a roll of butcher paper stuck to the wall.
Wyatt is standing on a chair holding two drawings up like a game-show assistant.
"Junie counted six," says one of the little ones.
"And Bo counted two. So one of them's wrong, right?" Erin waits. Nobody bites. "Wrong. Neither is wrong. Junie was at the shore at six in the morning and Bo was there at noon. What did we learn?"
A gap-toothed nine-year-old says, "That the time is part of the number."
"Yes." Erin points the marker at him like he's just won something. "Which is why every single sheet gets a time and a place or it's decoration. Okay. Junie's got six ducks on the west shoal. Anybody know what ducks eat?"
Six voices: "FISH."
"So if the fish go…"
"The birds go!"
"And if they go, what does that tell us about the water?"
Somebody's mother is standing beside me with a coffee cup, watching her daughter argue about a data sheet. Hazel is in the corner knitting with the look of an old woman recalculating.
Erin has her sleeves shoved up and marker on her wrist. She's put a wounded-deer chart on the wall next to the bird counts, and Wyatt has clearly been promoted to something with a title. She's been in this valley less than three days.
She catches me in the doorway, but doesn't stop teaching. She just tips her head an inch toward the empty chair by the wall, and I sit in it, and the children turn around to see if the Alpha's in trouble.
Later, when the hall's empty, she's peeling butcher paper off the wall and rolling it.
"They're good," she says. "Not kid-good. Good. That fourteen-year-old caught an error in my own transect sheet and had the nerve to tell me about it."
"That's Bo. He'll be insufferable for a week."
"He earned a week." She snaps a rubber band on the roll. Then she looks at me properly and her face changes. "You found something out there."
"I did."
"Bad?"
"Yes." I place my palm on the map inside my jacket. "I'll show you tonight with the elders, because you'll see things in it I won't. But there's something I need to know first, on our own, and it's time I stop putting it off."
She goes still. Not frightened. Attentive, in the same manner she goes still over a rock she doesn't understand.
"Okay," Erin says. "Before the elders. Just us."
"All right."
She picks up her roll of paper and heads for the door, then stops with her hand on the frame. "Nash. Whatever it is, I've had a wolf roughly as big as a pony and a tunnel under a lake this week. Your bar for shocking me is extremely high."
"It's not that kind of thing," I say. "It's the kind you get a choice about."