18. Nash
NASH
Eleven people come up out of that raise and not one of them is safe yet, getting them out of the underground was the easy part. All have to move before Helix finish counting empty cells, and none can move the same route. So I split it four ways and run them at once.
I stand in the yard with four radios and no ability to be in any of those places. Caleb's in at seven forty. Wyatt at eight ten, limping worse. My father doesn't call until quarter past nine, and those seventy minutes take a year off me.
The one I can't fix is Ruby Sennet's girl. Weeks under sedation, and she comes off my mother's table in fur and stays that way.
"She's in there," my mother says. "She's forgotten she's allowed out."
"How long?"
"Days. Or never." My mother pushes her braid back. "Go do the part only you can do, love. I've got this one."
The allied leaders meet at noon and it goes wrong inside four minutes.
"We got eleven out clean and the contractors don't know who did it," the Loon River man says. "That's a win. Take it and disperse north."
"With more than a hundred and fifty people, including children and a woman six weeks from delivering twins." I keep my voice flat. "Three weeks of walking, no caches, in country that company has already proven it can reach."
"Better than sitting on their hole in the ground."
Marrow Creek's Alpha cuts across him, because she's lost everything and the room lets her. "What about the ones still down there?"
"We emptied the cells."
"We emptied twenty-two cells. Only eleven were occupied." She looks at me. "Nash. Say the rest."
"Four years of intake records. Three hundred and forty rows in the log we recovered, but only eleven captives were still there.
The disposition records show transfers, deaths in transit, and terminal harvests.
The transferred captives went somewhere else, which means there is at least one more facility. "
"Then it's someone else's fight," Loon River says, without much behind it.
"It was someone else's fight when it was Marrow Creek." I stand. "I won't tell you what your honor requires. I'll tell you what Stillwater does. We don't leave. Not while there are people in boxes, and not while the thing under this lake is still running."
"That's a speech."
"You asked for an answer. That's the answer."
Erin comes in at half twelve with wet trousers and a laptop, reads the room in two seconds, and starts backing out.
"Stay," Marrow Creek says. "You were down there."
She sits. She doesn't take my side, which turns out to be the useful thing.
"If you go north, here's the biology rather than the politics.
" She opens the laptop. "Height-of-land country is granite and muskeg.
It carries roughly one large predator per forty square miles, and that's for animals on a normal budget.
Your people eat seven thousand calories a day.
All of you strip two thousand square miles inside one winter.
Then you're visible, because that scale of collapse gets noticed by exactly the survey I get hired to run. "
Nobody answers her.
"That's not an argument for staying," she adds. "It's an argument that running has a bill, and somebody should say the number out loud before you vote on it."
Loon River studies her. "You're the state girl."
"Erin Lawson. Contracted through October. After that I don't know."
"Would you go down that hole again?"
"Friday, if the drives say what I think they'll say." She shuts the laptop. "Not out of courage. I've met the people in those cells and I can't unmeet them."
He sits back. Something in his face resettles onto new ground.
"All right, Hanson," he says. "Loon River stays. But if you're leading, lead. Don't make me vote on it twice."
Erin catches me outside afterward with the expression she gets before she's honest with me.
"You were prepared to lose that room," she says.
"I was prepared for whatever came out of it."
"You were prepared to hold this valley with all these people and a bad plan and never once ask anyone for help." She folds her arms. "You didn't ask them. You told them what you'd be doing and let them decide whether to stay."
"That's leading."
"That's carrying, and it'll break you." Her hand lands on my arm, which takes the edge off. "They didn't stay because of your speech, Nash. They stayed because somebody sat down and gave them a number. You could've asked me to speak. It never crossed your mind."
I go to argue and find she's right, which is becoming the pattern of my life.
"Next one," I say, "you're at the table from the start."
"Good. Then I'll bring real figures instead of improvising over a wet laptop."
The calls start at six. Three safe houses gone.
The Loon River cache, burned to the slab.
A rented farmhouse outside Deerlick where Bracken families had been sitting since the first night, hit at dusk.
The third takes an hour to confirm and is worse than both: the old church at Redwater, where the northern communities have been leaving their elderly and their pregnant since the trouble began.
Nobody armed, nobody expecting anything.
Somebody drove up, did the work, and left.
Loon River takes it standing. Then he sits down on my father's porch step, an old man a long way from home, and puts his face in his hands. Erin brings the maps out without being asked.
"Show me everything they've hit this week," she says quietly. "Including the ones nobody's told me about."
He marks them. She lays the polygon map alongside and goes very still.
"Nash." Her voice thins out. "It isn't random and it isn't the strongest first. Bracken, Loon River, Redwater, those are the three smallest populations. They're clearing the edges."
"Why the edges?"
"Because the edges are the weaker ones." She glances up. "This isn't a war they're fighting. It's cleanup. They're closing ahead of something that makes the inventory public, and the biggest folder on that server is called SCALE."
I look out at all the people cooking supper in my valley, and I understand that whatever's under this lake was never going to stay under it.