27. Erin
ERIN
"On three," I tell them, and my voice doesn't sound like anything I recognize. "Wyatt drops the compressor. Nash, you turn on three. Not on my word after, on the number itself."
Wyatt gets his fist around the breaker handle. Nash sets his boots against the pipe support and puts his hands over mine on the wheel, and there's blood on the rim inside a second, and I decide not to look at where it's coming from.
"One. Two. Three."
The breaker slams. Nash hauls, the stem cracks free of its seat with a shriek, and after that it's fourteen revolutions of a man taking himself apart at four hundred and eighty feet under a lake.
I'm on the wheel with him. I'm adding almost nothing and I don't let go, because the alternative is standing there watching.
Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen, and the stem bottoms out hard. The resistor bank overhead starts to sing — a rising note with nothing musical anywhere in it. The pipework begins knocking like somebody swinging a hammer down the whole length of every line in the room. Then it stops.
Not builds, not bangs. Stops. The note falls away, the knocking settles, and a green indicator on the panel beside Wyatt's hand blinks twice and goes solid.
"No." I'm at the panel before I've finished thinking it. "No, no, no—"
"Erin." Nash is bent over the valve with both arms braced on it. "Talk."
"It caught." I read the mimic and my fist urges to be put through it.
"The quench started and something caught it.
There's a secondary regulator bank picking up the dump, and it's not in this room, and it's not on my drawings.
" I slam the heel of my hand against the panel.
"It's on the machine. They put the backup on nine-forty, in the chamber, because of course they did — you don't leave your last protection eighty feet away from the thing it protects. "
Wyatt's face has gone slack. "So we did all that for nothing."
"We did all that for most of it. The coil's hurt. It's running degraded and it can't take another one." I bring up the sequence and the number on the right of the screen turns my stomach over. "Stage three in thirty-one minutes."
Nash straightens up off the valve and I finally look at him properly, which I have been avoiding for eleven minutes. He is gray.
"Then we go back down," he says.
"You can't."
"I can do it once."
"Nash—" My voice cracks in half and I let it. "You climbed eighty feet of riser to get here. That's eight flights and four hundred yards each direction, in water, with people shooting."
"Nobody's shooting anymore. They've pulled for the surface; the mountain's making noises they don't like.
" He puts his hand on my jaw and leaves it there, and his palm is freezing.
"Erin. There's a regulator bank on that deck and there's exactly one person in this mountain who can identify it, and it isn't me and it isn't Wyatt.
So I'm not offering to go instead of you.
I'm telling you I'm coming with you, and you're going to let me, because I've spent six weeks learning to let you. "
Wyatt says, from the door, "I'll hold the gallery and the hatch. Somebody has to, and it's the one thing my leg will let me do."
We take a minute at the head of the stairwell, because there's a good chance we don't get another one.
Water's coming down the flights already, sheeting off the landings. Nash sits on the top step because he has to, and I sit beside him, and we put our heads together in the dark with the whole mountain groaning around us.
"Say it," he says.
"You're doing the last-words thing."
"I'm doing the say-it-while-there's-air thing." He turns his face toward mine. "Six weeks ago I'd have gone down there alone and left you a note. Now I want it said out loud, because it changes how I fight."
So I say it. "I love you. And I'm not saying it because we might die, so don't you dare take it that way.
" I get hold of his hand, both of mine around it.
"I'm saying it because I've decided something and I want a witness.
If we come up out of this, I'm not going back to the cabin.
I'm not renewing a lease anywhere. I'm coming home with you to that ugly house with the bad wiring and the south room, and I'll argue with your father about the tractor for thirty years. "
Nash laughs and it turns into a cough with blood in it.
"That's the worst declaration I've ever heard."
"It's not a declaration, it's a findings statement." I press my forehead to his. "Your turn. Properly."
"I love you. I've loved you since you got out of a truck, and I've chosen you every single day since, and the choosing I'm proud of.
" His thumb moves over my knuckles. "If I come up that stairwell, I'm going to spend my life being deliberately, aggressively boring with you.
Tuesdays in November. Soup. Everything."
"Then let's go break their machine."
Something changes on that step. Not courage exactly. It's more like the difference between carrying something because you're afraid to put it down and carrying it because you've decided what it's for.
Water is running off the dome in sheets and there's a foot of it across the deck, cold enough to steal your breath.
The coil is still in its cradle over the ring, still turning, but it's screaming now — a hard uneven whine, and there's frost on one side of the casing and nothing on the other. It's dying and it's still working.
Nobody's left down here. The technicians went up with the line, the shooters have gone for the surface, and there are two body bags nobody had time for.
I find the regulator bank in four minutes, on the north deck, hard-wired into the cradle. And the control room is right beside it, and that's where the last piece of my life falls into place, because I go in for a schematic and I get something else entirely.
The console has an alarm on it: ARCHIVE MIRROR INCOMPLETE — LOCAL NODE — SUBFLOOR.
"Nash. There's something under the floor."
The access panel is beneath the desk, and it's a cable void, and there is a two-drive array bolted into it on its own battery with a legal-hold sticker across the front. Somebody hid it from their own people. Somebody in this company was frightened of somebody else in this company.
I get the laptop out of the dry bag and I put it on a chair in four inches of water and I pull everything across while the roof drips on the keyboard.
It takes six minutes. It's the longest six minutes I've ever spent, and I read the directory while the bar crawls, and what's in it stops the water at my ankles from mattering at all.
"Nash." I can hardly hear myself. "The mirror log has four destinations on it. Four. Stillwater is node one."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning there are three more." I turn the screen so he can see it, and my hand is shaking so badly the picture jumps.
"Site two, site three, site four. Different states.
And site four has a live intake count on it from eleven days ago, and it's higher than everything Stillwater ever logged in four years. "
Nash stands in a foot of rising water with a gash in his side and looks at the screen.
"We didn't find the operation," he says.
"We found the quarry." The download hits ninety-eight percent. "Nash, they were never building a machine down here. They were building the first one."