12. Chapter 12
Crowe
The valley has one road, and I’m lying on frozen rock above it, watching the gate.
Stone posts. A steel barrier between them. A gatehouse with a light on and one man inside it, and I’ve watched him long enough to know he does his job properly. Past the gate, the road climbs through dark ground for miles, and at the top of it there’s a house with lit windows.
She’s in that house. My palms have been pulling toward it since we left the courier’s kitchen, and now that I’m lying here looking at it, the pull sits behind my ribs and doesn’t let up.
Kent is on my left with his chin on his fists. Meyer is on my right, still, watching the gatehouse, gray glinting in his stubble.
“That’s it?” Kent says. “One man and a pole?”
“That’s it.”
“That’s not it.”
“No. It isn’t.”
I get up and walk down to find the rest of it.
The pressure starts a long way out from the gate, off the road, on open ground where there’s nothing to see at all. It builds against my face and my chest with every step, and I keep walking, because I need to know what this thing does before I build a plan against it.
Then I put my hand out and touch it.
It goes through me.
The cuffs in the back of the van she was in burned my hands.
This one hits my chest and comes out through my back.
It’s every rune I’ve ever touched, all firing at once.
My legs fold without asking me. The ground comes up hard, and then I’m lying on frozen dirt a body-length from where I was standing, with no memory of the trip.
I try to get up. My arms shake, buckle, and drop me twice before they hold.
Meyer gets a hand under my shoulder and lifts. I let him. I have never let him do that before.
“How bad?” he says.
“Bad.”
“Worse than the cuffs they had on her?”
“The cuffs took the skin off my hands. This one dropped me where I stood, and for a second or two I couldn’t move anything at all.
” I get my feet under me properly. “A man could stand at that line all year with an army behind him, and it wouldn’t matter.
I don’t think it ever goes down, and nothing’s strong enough to get through it. ”
“Noted,” Meyer says, and steadies me one more time before he takes his hand away.
We walk back up to Kent. My hands shake the whole way there. I tell them to stop, and they keep shaking. I stop telling them.
“So we go over it,” Kent says.
“It’s not a fence. It goes up. Think about what they’re keeping in there. A prisoner with wings. If the top of that valley were open, she’d have been gone the first morning they let her out of a room. She’s still there, so the top is closed.”
“Under it, then. Dig.”
“It goes down the same way it goes up. It’s a closed shape; I could feel it beneath my feet. The only way in is through it.”
“Then we wait for it to fail. Everything fails.”
“I’m pretty sure it’s been running for years without failing. She doesn’t have years. She doesn’t even have weeks…or days.”
Kent looks at me when I say that last part, and I don’t explain it, because I can’t. I just know.
“Then how does anything get in?” he says.
“The gate. The courier told us how it works. There’s a man in that gatehouse with a list. The truck went through because the truck was on the list. So that’s the whole question now.” I look down at the light in the gatehouse. “What else is on the list?”
We watch the gate for a day and a night.
The three of us take it in turns, from within a nearby cave in the day and from the tree line in the night.
A food truck enters in the morning, boxes stacked past the windows.
I hear it working up the grade a full minute before it shows between the trees, and the smell of bread comes off it when it stops at the barrier.
A fuel tanker at midday, diesel thick on the cold air.
A laundry van. And in the evening, a work truck with a generator company’s name on the door and one man in overalls who gets waved up the mountain with a toolbox on his passenger seat.
The gate man’s radio talks twice a day, morning and evening, the same voice both times, short and bored. A check-in. That’s worth knowing too. If he misses one, somebody comes to find out why.
Every time, without exception, the guard comes out of the gatehouse. He checks the plate against the folder. He checks the driver’s documentation, hands it back, then lifts the barrier.
Kent watches the laundry van go through and says something useful. “He never looks at their faces.”
“Say that again.”
“The gate man. He checked that van for a full minute and he never once looked at the driver. Plate, folder, papers, barrier. The van’s on the list. The paperwork’s in order. The man behind the wheel could be anybody.” Kent rolls onto his back. “So the guard checks paperwork, not people.”
He’s right, and it’s the first good news in two days.
“What about the generator man?” Meyer says. “One vehicle, one man, and nobody rides with him. That’s the cleanest option.”
“It’s also the option with a skill attached. If I go in there pretending to be him, my cover’s blown the minute they ask me to fix a generator.”
“Can you fix a generator?”
“I can make one worse.”
“Food truck, then,” Kent says. “Nobody asks the food truck to prove anything. You hand over the boxes, and you leave.”
“Food truck,” I agree. “I think—”
The feeling comes up before I can finish.
Heat.
Her arms fighting against hands. Men’s hands, holding her down, and her body arching against them, and heat pouring off her with nowhere to go—
I’m on one knee in the snow.
This one was different. Every flash before this one was her mouth, her teeth, her body against me. This one was her on the floor fighting, and it wasn’t for me, and it wasn’t wanted. It’s gone before I can understand what’s happening.
“Crowe.” Meyer, close, quiet. “You did it again.”
I don’t answer. I don’t need him to point out something I’m trying not to acknowledge.
“That’s twice today.”
“I know how many it is.”
“You went down.”
“I know that too.” I get up. My hands have closed into fists. I open them. “We need to move. Get Kent.”
He doesn’t ask why. He goes and gets Kent.
We build the plan properly, on the hood of the truck, out of sight of the road, because I screwed up the last plan, and I’m not doing that again.
“The supply run is the way in,” I say. “The food truck. Reyes shared that road with it for over a year, and he knew its days the same way he knew his own. Same firm, same truck, twice a week, and the next run is three days out. Here’s how it’s going to work: I take the truck and the driver’s paperwork the night before, at the depot, before it loads.
I drive it up in his place. The plate’s on the list, the paperwork is in order, and the gate man won’t look at me. He lifts the barrier, and I’m through.”
“And us?” Kent says.
“The barrier is the only break in the line. When it lifts for the truck, the road through the gate is open ground for as long as it’s up. You two are on foot in the dark, tight behind the truck, through the gap while it’s open. Then you’re inside with me, and we go up the mountain off the road.”
“How long is the barrier up?”
“I timed it yesterday. Long enough for a truck to roll through slow. For the two of you, moving in the dark at your speed, it’s enough.”
Meyer studies the hood.
“That’s how we get in,” he says. “How do we get out?”
I purse my lips, then tell them, because they’ve earned a straight answer.
“Getting in is a problem I can solve. Getting out is the one I can’t.
The wall works in both directions. The moment anything goes wrong up there—an alarm, a body, a missed radio check—they close that gate, and nothing gets out after that.
Not her, not us. I don’t have a solution for that, and I’m not going to pretend I do. ”
Kent looks at Meyer. Meyer looks at the gate.
“So we’d be locked in a sealed valley with a private army and whoever bought her,” Kent says.
“Yes.”
“With no way out.”
“Yes.”
“Just checking.” He cracks his knuckles. “When do we take the depot?”
Neither of them says anything else about it. I look at the two of them for a moment, and then I look back at the map, because the appropriate thing to do right now is thank them, and I don’t think either of them would know how to handle that.
And then it happens again: Heat, and her voice, and her voice is wrong, slow and slurred. Hands are holding her down again, and this time there’s something being poured—
The map is crumpled in my fist.
I flatten it back out on the hood. Both of them are watching me.
“Change of plan,” I say.
“We just made the plan,” Kent says.
“The run is three days out. We’re not waiting three days. We take the truck tonight, from the yard where it parks, and we go up tonight.”
“On the wrong day.” Meyer’s voice doesn’t change. “The gate man knows the schedule. A food truck on the wrong day is a question.”
“Then I’ll have an answer ready. A missed delivery. A spoiled load being replaced. It only has to hold him for as long as it takes to lift the barrier. He reads paperwork. I’ll give it to him.”
“You said we weren’t doing this again,” Kent says. “Rushing in without a proper plan. You said that at the mine.”
“I did.”
“So what changed? How sure are you that tonight’s the night?”
There’s no answer I can give him. If another man gave me a reason this thin, I wouldn’t take it either. What I have is a feeling sitting behind my ribs, pulling up that mountain harder every hour. I am not going to stand in the snow and describe it to anyone. They’d think I was out of my mind.
“Take the map,” I tell him. “Mark the depot. We leave in ten minutes.”
Kent looks at me. Then he takes the map.
“Ten minutes,” he says. “Their deliveries come from a town a few miles north of here.”
We come down off the mountain in the dark and get back to our vehicle. Meyer drives.
“The driver,” Kent says, from the back. “The real one. What happens to him?”
“Nothing. The truck parks in an open yard overnight and he goes home to his bed. He wakes up tomorrow, walks to the yard, and finds it gone. By the time anyone’s finished shouting at him, we’re up that mountain, or we’re dead, and either way his morning isn’t our problem.”
“What about the order forms?”
“They’ll be in the cab; I’ll just write something up. Delivery firms are all the same. I’ve robbed better-run ones than this.”
“You’re very calm about all this thieving.”
“It’s the job, Kent. You do what you gotta do.”
I sit with the map open on my knees and the route to the depot marked on it, and I go through it line by line, because the work is the only thing that stops me from doing something stupid.
One way in. No way out. Two men on my team and a stolen truck.
The odds are not stacked in my favor. But it doesn’t matter. One way or another, I’m getting her out of there.
And behind my ribs, all the way down the mountain, the pull keeps saying the same thing it’s been saying since the gate, when I felt her panic.
Hurry.