Chapter 10
Ruin
The shelf comes up out of the plain like a table somebody left.
You ride forty miles of flat and then the ground does something it hasn't done since the Gulf — it rises, forty meters of pale rock in a long low step running east to west further than you can see, and on top of it there's grass.
Actual grass. Not the grey stuff. Green, in August, because there's water in the rock and the rock holds it.
Del got off the buggy and stood there and didn't say anything for a full minute.
"Well?"
"Give me a second, I'm having a professional experience."
"You had one of those in the container."
"This one's bigger."
She worked for eleven hours and I have never been so useless in my life.
Around noon she found the valve station and made a noise I've only heard from her twice.
"Emmett."
"What."
"Come here and look at this and tell me I'm not inventing it."
It was a wellhead cover, or something like one — a steel plate a meter across, bolted, with a raised boss in the middle and lettering cast into it that had survived eighty years because nobody had ever come out here to steal it.
"HARTWELL TRUNK — SPUR 4."
"That's the line."
"That's the station," she said. "That's a pig trap, which means this line was pigged, which means it was maintained, which means somebody closed it down properly instead of walking away from it, which means—"
"There's a valve."
"There's a valve, and if there's a valve there's a chance the whole thing's been sitting full of nitrogen since the twenties like a jar of preserves."
"Can you test it?"
"Not with a rock hammer and a sonde." She sat back on her heels. "I can test whether the bolts turn. That's a stupid test. It's the stupidest test in the whole of engineering and it's also the only one I've got, and it correlates with about nine things I actually care about."
We turned the bolts.
They turned.
She sat down on the plate and put both hands over her mouth and did not say anything for about forty seconds, and I stood there in eight hundred acres of grass and let her have it.
Auger samples every four hundred meters. Rock hammer on the exposed face. A thing with a resistivity meter that involved four spikes and a great deal of swearing in three languages. She ate one meal, standing.
I held things. I got told which trowel. I carried the case and I watched her go along that limestone face with her hand flat on it like she was reading something.
At six in the evening she sat down on a rock and put her head in her hands, and I felt the whole bottom go out of the day.
"Del."
"It's good," she said, into her palms.
"What?"
"It's good, Emmett." She looked up and her face was doing something complicated.
"It's very good. Karst limestone over a competent bed.
No compaction — there's nothing left to compact, it finished being squeezed about ninety million years ago.
Forty meters above the highest surge on record with a further eleven of freeboard before you're even discussing it.
There's a perched aquifer in the joint system, which means water, which means you don't have to truck it—"
"The line?"
"That's the part I couldn't confirm and now I can.
" She pointed. "It's there. Twelve-inch, welded, buried at a meter and a half, and it comes up at a valve station eight hundred meters east. It's dead because the pumps went, not because the pipe went.
Ruin, this is not a site. This is the only site, and it's been sitting here for eighty years being ignored because everyone who ever looked at it was looking for oil and there isn't any. "
"Say the number."
"What number?"
"Bishop's going to ask me for a number."
She wiped her face with the back of her wrist and left a smear of limestone dust across her cheekbone, which I did not fix, because I know myself.
"Two hundred years," she said. "Conservative. And that's not because the ground gets worse in two hundred years. That's because that's as far as I'll defend a model in public."
We slept out on the shelf that night with no bedroll between us and eight hundred acres of grass, and I did not sleep at all.
I lay there and did the thing I'd been refusing to do since the wall.
Twelve thousand liters. Six hundred and forty-one people.
A refinery that weighs what a refinery weighs and a vault door that weighs more than the school it belongs to.
Four hundred and eleven separate objects that would have to be lifted, hauled, and put down again in an order nobody had worked out yet.
Del rolled over at about three.
"You're awake."
"I'm inventorying."
"Stop."
"I can't."
"Emmett." She propped up on an elbow. "You want the professional opinion? It's going to take a year and it's going to be the worst year of everybody's life and about four families will go to Hartwell instead and you will take that personally and you shouldn't."
"That's reassuring."
"It's accurate. You've asked me for accurate every single time and you've never once thanked me for it."
I lay there under a sky with nothing under it.
"Thank you," I said.
She didn't answer for so long that I thought she'd gone back to sleep.
"Log notes that," she said.
They came at eight in the morning.
Two white trucks up the ramp on the eastern end, and Regina Faulk in the lead one, and I stood on the edge of the shelf watching them come and felt something in my chest go extremely quiet.
"She followed us."
"She didn't follow us," Del said. "She got here the same way we did. She's had my list for a week and she's been sitting in your yard reading it, and eventually somebody smart in her outfit did what I did and asked why the hydrologist put a note on the good one."
"That's worse."
"That's much worse, yes."
Faulk got out and looked at eight hundred acres of grass and did not bother to pretend.
"Doctor."
"Ms. Faulk."
"You wrote unable to confirm line integrity, do not rely." She held up a printed sheet, and there it was, my woman's handwriting in somebody else's laser printer. "That cost me four days."
"You're welcome."
"It's also," Faulk said, "the most professionally honest thing I've ever seen anyone do against their own interest, and I want you to know I've noted it.
" She turned to me. "Mr. Vasquez. Cortland is prepared to acquire this parcel this week.
We can then discuss a lease arrangement for the relocated community which I think you'd find—"
"No."
"You haven't heard it."
"I've heard the shape."
Here's the part where it should have gone bad.
There were six of them and two of us. They had trucks and we had a bike and a buggy with a solar panel and four liters of water, and Faulk didn't need to do anything at all except drive back to a county recorder in Hartwell that still functions and put a name on a piece of paper.
And then we heard it.
You hear a single engine on that plain for a long time. You hear forty of them from about the horizon.
They came up the ramp in a column: Cash in front, Bishop beside him, Pike, Marisol on the flatbed with the pump crew, Malachi in a truck with the ledger visibly on his lap, and Doc Ramos, and Ruiz, and behind them a barge tender pulling a trailer with a water tank on it, which as a piece of theater cannot be improved upon.
Cash pulled up in front of me, took his goggles off, and said:
"Before you say anything."
"I wasn't going to—"
"You were going to say something about the vote."
"Cash—"
"We had the vote." He was grinning like a man who'd been waiting ninety miles to do it. "You weren't there. It was a whole thing. Malachi read out procedure for eleven minutes and Pike cried."
"I did not cry," said Pike.
"Pike wept openly."
"There was dust—"
"Ruin." Bishop, off the bike, walking past both of them, stopping in front of me. He looked out at the grass. He looked at the limestone face. He looked at the valve station eight hundred meters east.
"This it?"
"This is it."
Bishop nodded once.
"Then we voted with the tires," he said, which for Bishop is a soliloquy.
I got the rest out of Malachi later, in pieces, because Cash's version has a narrative and Malachi's has minutes.
The vote was Tuesday. Pike moved it, which nobody expected.
He stood up in the chapel and said he'd been thinking about surge coming around the north side for nine years and had never said so, because saying so would have meant leaving, and that he was sixty-one and would rather be wrong in a new place than right in a wet one.
Ruiz's mother seconded.
Tobias Ruiz was brought up out of the vault to hear it, because Mrs. Adeyemi insisted — I'm quoting Malachi quoting her — that you do not sentence a boy for being frightened about a thing and then decide the thing in a room he isn't in.
It went eleven to four with two abstentions, and the four were not the four anybody had predicted.
Then Cash stood up and said, "Right. Everybody who voted yes, get on your bike," and forty people did, at nine at night, and rode ninety miles to stand on a piece of rock they had never seen.
"That's insane," I said.
"It's theater," said Malachi, ruling a line. "I costed it at two hundred and eleven gallons and approved it without being asked, which I have entered as an irregularity against my own name."
Faulk watched forty Dust Saints arrange themselves on a limestone shelf and did not move a muscle.
"This changes the arithmetic somewhat," she said.
"It changes the optics," Del said. "The arithmetic's the part you should be worried about."
"Doctor?"
"You've been buying land north of the fault for four years, and pricing Bastion's contracts down for fourteen months, and telling six hundred people they've got eighteen months.
All of that only works while you're the only one holding the map.
" Del set her case on the hood of the nearest white truck, which I thought was the single boldest act of the entire summer. "So let's not hold it."
"I'm sorry?"
"Publish it. All of it. Now, here, in front of both outfits."
Faulk's eyebrows went up about a millimeter, which from her is a shout.