Chapter 8 #2
She was, and I've had a year to sit with this, the most honest person who came to Bastion that month, and she was still going to take everything we had.
The club split at noon.
Not a shouting split. Worse — a quiet one, the kind where men stop being in rooms at the same time.
Pike's crew wanted to fortify: raise the wall, dredge the channel, dig in.
Cash's half wanted a barge and a heading.
And in between, about two hundred people who wanted somebody to tell them a true thing.
So I stood on the table and said it.
"The doctor's right."
That's all. Four words, and the yard made a sound I'd never heard it make.
"The ground's going down and the water's coming up and the wall makes it worse the taller we build it.
That's not her opinion, it's arithmetic, and I've been standing on a seawall not looking at a nail scratch for six years because my father told me not to think about it and I was glad to be told.
" My voice was doing something I didn't authorize.
"Bastion doesn't drown. I said that over his grave.
I meant it as a promise about a wall. It isn't. It never was.
It's a promise about people, and a promise about people means you move them. "
Silence.
Then Pike's brother said, "Move where?"
And a piece of four-inch carbon steel pipe with a leather wrap came sliding down the length of the table and off the end and hit the concrete at my feet, and the sound it made went all the way around the yard.
Nobody picked it up. Not for a long time.
I did, eventually. You always do.
Cash got to me before anyone else could.
"Who threw it?"
"Doesn't matter."
"It matters to me, I have to sit next to whoever—"
"It was Pike's brother and it doesn't matter." I turned the pipe over in my hands. Somebody's grandmother wrapped that leather and nobody alive knows who. "He didn't throw it at me. He threw it at the table. That's a different thing and it's the only reason I'm still holding it."
"That's a fine distinction for a man with a bruise."
"I don't have a bruise."
"You've got one on your face, brother, it's just on the inside." He put his hands in his pockets. "So what now?"
"Now nothing. They sit with it. You can't rush a town."
"And if they vote you out?"
"Then you get the pipe," I said, "and you move them, which is what you'd have done three years ago anyway."
Cash looked at me a long moment.
"That's the meanest thing you've ever said to me."
"Why?"
"Because you meant it as a compliment," he said, and walked off across the yard, and did not whistle.
She was gone by four.
Container nine, door that sticks. Bunk stripped and folded like a woman who'd been raised right. Case gone. Laptop gone. The staff gauge gone off the wall bracket where she'd hung it.
The buggy was gone too, which meant Ruiz had fixed the panel, which meant Ruiz had known, which meant I was going to have a conversation with Ruiz.
There was a note on the pillow.
Emmett —
Bishop asked the only question that matters and I've been in your town for twelve days without an answer. That's not a survey, that's a houseguest.
I'm going north to the shelf. Eighty-mile marker, then up the old pipeline right-of-way. If it's good ground I'll have a number in nine days. If it isn't I'll keep going until there is one, because your club can't vote on a place that doesn't exist yet and Faulk is buying every place that does.
Three things, in order of importance.
1. This is not me leaving. I want that stated flatly because I know what you'll do with the silence.
2. Tobias took both folders. The one marked don't use has the sites in it — every candidate I've ever looked at north of the fault. Assume Cortland has that list. Assume they're ahead of me.
3. I have never in my life had a reason to hurry that wasn't professional.
Don't come after me. You'll come after me. At least bring the good lamp.
— D.
Cash found me standing in the doorway of an empty container with a piece of paper.
Before that I found Ruiz, and Ruiz found out what it is to be nineteen.
"You fixed her panel."
"...Yes."
"When?"
"Yesterday afternoon."
"And you didn't tell me."
"She asked me not to!" He'd gone the color of a sheet. "Ruin, she asked me not to and she's — she's her, and I thought—"
"Say the rest of it."
He looked at his boots.
"I thought if I told you, you'd stop her," he said. "And I thought somebody should go find us somewhere to live."
I stood there in the mud with a note in my hand, having in one week put one nineteen-year-old's brother in a vault for exactly that reasoning, and I understood with total clarity that I was running a town in which every single young person had independently concluded that the adults were not going to solve this.
"Ruiz."
"Yeah."
"Next time, tell me," I said. "Then help her anyway. But tell me."
"That's allowed?"
"It's the whole job," I said.
"Ruin."
"What."
"Fuel the bike," he said, and was already running.
Cash was in the shop doorway when I came through, and he'd already heard, because he always has.
"So — and I ask this as your VP and not your friend — you've got a split club, a Cortland delegation at the gate, and a kid in the vault. That's three fires."
"I know."
"You going anyway?"
I read the note again.
At least bring the good lamp.
"You know what she did at the bottom of that page?" I folded it into my jacket. "She told me not to come, and then she told me what to bring."
Cash stepped out of the doorway.
"Take the north track past the flats," he said. "Pike says the middle one's washed out, and Pike is right about water, which we have apparently all decided to admit this week." He clapped my shoulder once. "Bring her back. I'll hold the room and I intend to be insufferable about it afterward."
"You're insufferable regardless."
"Yes," said Cash. "But this time I'll have earned it."