26. Nash
NASH
The drift narrows to eleven feet at the old junction, and that's where I decide the whole night gets settled.
Behind me the evacuation is strung out for four hundred yards — four stretchers, eleven Helix technicians with their hands still half-raised, and every ally who can still walk, all of them moving toward the raise and the vent because it's the only road home.
In front of me is a tunnel with lights coming up it.
Helix has finally understood that the tunnel was theater, and they're pushing east to cut us off from the pipe.
They can't flank in a tunnel. That's the only gift the geometry gives us, and I intend to take it for as long as my body allows.
"Caleb!" I shout back down the drift. "How many still behind you?"
"Eighty-one!"
"Then I need eighty-one minutes. Move faster."
He starts calling people through the stope by name, and that's the sound I'll be hearing for the rest of my life. Sennet, go. Ketterings, both together. Grandmother, you're next and I don't want a debate, I've been warned about you.
They come in rushes and I shift on the second one, because there's no version of this a man wins.
The first pair don't get their muzzles level. The second pair are better and one of them puts rounds into my flank and I finish him anyway. It doesn't hurt yet. It will.
We give ground in yards, never in rushes, and every yard costs them somebody. Two Marrow wolves hold my left. The older one is the brother of the wolf we lost on the eastern approach an hour ago, and he fights like a man with nothing left to protect except other people's families.
At half past four they stop pushing the drift and put a team into the dead-end cross-cut.
It's the one from our first raid, the one that goes nowhere. Nobody bothers with it unless they've read the same 1957 survey sheets we did, and somebody has. They come out behind the line, into the section with the technicians and the stretchers and not one weapon among them.
I hear it start and I cannot leave this junction. If I turn around, everything comes down this tunnel at once and reaches the raise before anyone else does.
Caleb turns around instead. He puts himself in the mouth of that cross-cut with three wolves and he stays there.
I hear him take two of them. I hear the burst that catches him.
Then I hear him keep making noise afterward, loud and filthy and continuous, because a Beta who goes quiet tells the enemy the door is open.
They close it. It takes ninety seconds. Two of the three come back. My father comes on the handheld at twenty to five and it's the second-worst conversation of my life.
"Nash. Pull back. There are forty out and the rest can run the last section on their own."
"They can't. Half of them can't run at all."
"Then they run slower with you alive." His voice does something I've never heard from it. "I held a line at the outlet in eighty-one because I believed the pack couldn't survive me stepping off it. Four of them died coming back for me. Four, son. Don't make my mistake."
"Dad, this junction holds as long as somebody's standing in it. That's not pride, it's arithmetic."
"Then let it be somebody else's arithmetic."
"There isn't anybody else yet."
He goes quiet. When he comes back his voice is flat and steady. "Understood. Your mother's got the receiving station at the pipe. Bring them to her."
They drag Caleb past me on a sheet of plywood at quarter to five and he swears at the Kettering boy the entire distance.
Then he gets hold of my leg. His grip is still ridiculous and his hand is cold and his eyes won't quite focus.
"Don't do the thing," he says.
"What thing?"
"The one where you stay." He's gray around the mouth. "Isla's twelve weeks. I haven't told anybody. I'm telling you now so you've got it in your head when you start being noble in about ten minutes."
My hand goes over his and I hold on hard enough to hurt us both.
"Get up the pipe, Cal."
"Say you heard me."
"I heard you."
Erin comes on the handheld at three minutes to five and the whole night reorganizes itself around her voice.
"Nash. I'm in the gallery. Wyatt's with me.
" She's shouting over machinery and there's water in the background.
"The chilled water isolation is a twelve-inch gate valve on the resistor bank supply and it's hand-wheel operated and I cannot turn it.
Both hands, full weight, and it hasn't moved a degree. "
"How many turns?"
"Fourteen! And it has to be inside four seconds of the compressor going down or the protection catches it and we've wasted the only attempt we get!"
"Wyatt takes the valve, you take the compressor."
There's grunting, then Wyatt, wrecked and furious with himself. "I can't, Nash. Not with the calf. I can't brace against anything. I've tried it three times."
I look up the drift. There's another rush coming — I can hear the boots settle into position. There are maybe thirty people still behind me in this tunnel.
There's also a valve eighty feet above my head and twenty-two minutes on Erin's clock, and there is exactly one person in this mountain who can turn fourteen revolutions of a seized gate valve in four seconds.
The older Marrow Creek wolf shifts back to say it, which costs him time he can't spare.
"Go on, then."
"There's thirty people behind this junction."
"There's four hundred miles of country behind her, and your Beta's already paid for the door." He shoves me toward the stope with his shoulder, hard. "You're not the best thing in this tunnel anymore, Hanson. You're the best thing up that ladder. Go be it."
I look at him. I look back down the drift at the last of the line moving through the stope. Every instinct I have is screaming at me to hold this ground, and the entire lesson of the last six weeks is that the instinct is wrong.
"Junction's yours," I say. "Give me nine minutes and then come out. That's an order, and I want you to disobey the first half of it, not the second."
"Understood, Alpha."
Eight flights of plant stairs. Four hundred yards of drift with my flank refusing to cooperate. A rotten raise ladder taken three rungs at a time, then eighty feet of riser tube with water running down the inside walls of it.
I climb the last of that tube on hands that keep slipping and a body that has begun submitting formal complaints. Somewhere below me the mountain is making a sound it wasn't making an hour ago — a deep uneven grinding, rock adjusting to a hole in itself.
The heat-rejection gallery is a foundry.
Every pipe in the room is hot. The pumps are screaming at full load, the air tastes of glycol, and there's a haze standing at head height.
Wyatt's at the compressor panel with a wrench in his fist and murder in his face.
Erin's on the valve with her boots braced against a pipe support and both hands white on the wheel, hauling at it with everything she has, which is not enough and never was going to be.
She sees me come off the ladder and her whole face breaks open.
"Nash—"
"Fourteen turns." I get my hands on the wheel beside hers. My blood's all over the rim of it inside a second. "Wyatt, hand on the compressor breaker. Erin — count me in."