Chapter 18
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Mila
The tunnel smells like wet clay and old diesel, and I count my steps because counting is what I do.
Eight hundred and forty-one from the door on Alejandro's property to the ladder on the other side.
A mile of packed earth under a border that means nothing down here, strung with a work light every hundred feet.
Amara's ahead of me. Finn's behind me. Fourteen people moving north in the dark and not one of them talking.
At the ladder there's a man in a barn who says three words to Amara in Spanish and hands up a set of keys.
Then we're in Arizona.
Arizona.
I come up out of that hole into cold air, creosote, and a sky with too many stars in it.
My legs go loose under me. Finn's hand comes flat between my shoulder blades, not pulling, just there, and I get my feet under me again.
"Okay?" He keeps his voice down near my ear.
"Yeah." I make it true. "Yeah. Let's go."
Two hundred miles takes four hours because we drive like insurance salesmen.
Three vehicles, spaced, clean plates, everybody at sixty-five.
Damon's in the lead truck with Cobra and Kade.
Amara's driving the second with me in the passenger seat, Finn and Doom in the back.
Razor's got the third.
The radio's off. The heater's on. Amara doesn't try to talk to me and I love her for it.
Eventually, we come off the highway onto a county road, and I sit up so fast the belt catches me.
"Turn's coming." I put my hand on the dash. "Two miles. There's a cattle guard and a mailbox with no name on it."
Amara glances over at me. "You've never seen this road."
"I heard it." My hands have gone cold in my lap and I fold them together to stop it. "Every truck that came in went over that cattle guard. You learn what one sounds like from under the ground."
She doesn't reply to me. Her jaw works once and she puts her eyes back on the road.
We don't take the turn.
We go past it, four more miles, and pull off behind a stand of mesquite where the Vegas trucks are already waiting with their lights off and their people standing in the dark.
The creek bed's dry, the way it is ten months out of the year, and it's deeper than the satellite made it look.
Eight feet of sand and gravel cut down through the desert, running northwest to southeast.
Finn was right. There's no fence. You can't fence a creek that floods.
We go up it single file with our boots in soft sand and the banks over our heads, sixteen people moving without a sound, and nobody watches this creek, because to them the creek is nothing.
I know when we're behind the property before anybody signals it.
The ground changes under my boots.
The sand goes hard-packed.
And there's a smell coming over that bank, diesel and something sour underneath it, and every hair on my body stands up at once.
Two hundred yards up that slope is the place.
Finn moves in beside me.
He doesn't say anything.
He presses two fingers to the back of my hand where nobody can see it, and takes them away.
Amara comes down the line and crouches next to me.
"Wes." She keeps it under her breath. "Tell me about him again."
"Ten past two, and again at four." My voice comes out steady and I have no idea how. "He walks the fence line east to west. He stops at the pole barn and smokes one cigarette. Then he checks both bunker hatches by hand."
"And the others?"
"They sit in the house and watch television." I hold her eyes in the dark. "He's the only one who does it right. If we get Wes wrong, we lose everything."
Amara nods once and moves back down the line.
At 2:11 a flashlight comes around the pole barn.
At 2:12 Doom takes him.
I don't see how, and I don't want to.
The hatch is a steel plate set into the ground with a keypad and a bolt.
I know the code. I've known it two years, because a man punched it in front of me one night when he thought I was too far gone to see.
I've remembered those four numbers across a desert, a border and months in Marie Kincaid's spare room.
I crouch down and punch it in.
The lock lets go with a heavy sound I’ve heard from the other side of it more times than I can count.
Hands take the hatch and lift, and the smell comes up out of the ground and hits me in the face.
Wet concrete and bleach, and under it, people.
Nine years comes up out of that hole in one breath.
My ears roar. The yard tips sideways and I lock my knees against it, and Finn's hand closes hard around my arm.
"Mila." His voice comes from very far off. "Mila, look at me."
"I'm here." I take his hand off my arm and hold it a second before I let go. "I'm going first."
"Let me—"
"They don't know your voice." I'm already swinging a leg onto the ladder. "They know mine."
Concrete corridor, seven feet wide, a bulb in a cage every twelve feet.
Twelve doors, steel, with a slide bolt on the outside of each one at waist height.
Waist height, because it's easy for a man in a hurry.
I've never seen it before.
Nine years I heard this hallway and I have never once laid eyes on it.
It's so much smaller than what I built in my head.
That's what stops me two steps off the ladder.
This whole world, this cathedral I've been living inside since I was twenty-two, is a hallway you could walk end to end in twelve seconds.
Behind me the club comes down the ladder, boots hitting concrete one after another.
"Lights," Amara says, low, at my shoulder. "Doors. Go."
I go to the eighth door on the left.
I don't decide to.
My body takes me there and my hand's on the bolt before I've thought about it.
I'm standing in front of a piece of steel I have never seen in my life and I know exactly which one it is, because I counted it from the inside a thousand times.
I put my knuckles against it and knock twice.
The hallway goes dead silent behind me. Fourteen armed people, standing still, because a woman is knocking on a door.
Nothing comes back.
I knock again and my hand's shaking so hard the second one lands wrong, too soft, and I press my forehead flat against the cold steel and make myself do it right.
Two.
And from the other side, one knock.
She's alive.
My legs go out from under me and I catch myself on the door with both hands.
I get my mouth down close to the seam of it and I say it in Spanish, the way I said it eight months ago with blood running down my back and ninety seconds to live.
"Volví." My voice cracks in half on it. "Te lo dije. Volví."
I came back. I told you I would. I came back.
I throw the bolt and pull the door open.
She's maybe nineteen years old.
That takes the wind out of me, because I never knew.
I knew a hand on a wall. I knew a knock.
I built an entire person out of two knocks a night for two years, and here she is.
She's standing with her back to the far wall in a room seven feet by nine, a girl the size of a child, her hair cut off close to her scalp.
And she's got her fists up.
Two years down here and she's still got her fists up.
"Soy yo." I stay in the doorway and I don't move toward her. "Camila. Soy la de la pared. La que tocaba."
It's me. Camila. I'm the one from the wall. The one who knocked.
She doesn't move. Her eyes go past my shoulder to the men in the corridor, and the fear comes off her like heat off a road.
"They're mine." I switch to English and back to Spanish because my head isn't working right. "They're with me. Nobody in this hallway is going to put a hand on you. Not one of them. I brought them here to open the doors."
Her mouth moves. Nothing comes out of it.
"You knocked back." I hold onto the doorframe. "Every night. Even the nights you could barely lift your arm. You always knocked back."
Her face breaks apart.
She comes across that room and hits me hard enough to put us both into the doorframe, both arms around my neck, her whole body shaking against mine.
She says something into my shoulder I can't understand, because they aren't words, they're just sound.
I hold on to a girl I've never seen before in my life like she came out of my own body.
"Te tengo." I get it out into her shorn hair. "I've got you. We're going up that ladder and there's a truck at the top of it, and you are never coming back down here."
Behind me the doors are opening.
I hear them going one after another down that corridor, bolt after bolt, and I hear the sounds the women make when they see the light change.
I can't turn around. There's a nineteen-year-old attached to my neck and I'm not letting go first.
Lashes takes her from me at the ladder.
It's the only reason I let go. Because it's Lashes. Because it's a woman.
Lashes gets down on both knees on that concrete floor in front of a girl who won't come within arm's reach of a man.
"Hi." She keeps her hands where the girl can see them. "My name's Lashes. I was in a place like this too, at a time." She tips her head toward the ladder. "You want to hold my hand, or you want me to walk in front of you? Either one's fine. Your call."
The girl looks at her a long moment.
Then she takes her hand.
I stand in that corridor and watch it happen and I have to press the heel of my palm into my sternum to keep air moving.
Then I turn around and count.
Ten women in the corridor.
Ten.
"Twelve rooms." I hear it come out of my own mouth. "Second on the right floods. That's eleven. There should be eleven."
"Mila." Amara's at the far end of the hall and she isn't moving. "Come here."
The sixth door on the left is open, and there's a girl standing in it who is not the girl who was in it.
She's fifteen. Maybe fourteen. She's got a blanket around her shoulders and a face that hasn't finished being a child's face.
She's looking at me the way you look at something that might be about to hurt you.
I stop in the doorway.
"Where—" It comes out wrong and I start over. "Where's the woman who was in this room?"
The girl doesn't answer.
"She was maybe thirty." My hands have started moving and I make them stop. "Dark hair. She used to cry, and then she stopped. This room. She was in this room."
The girl's chin trembles once.