Chapter 31
Chapter Thirty-One
She got to Logan somehow across the canting floor, hauling herself along the wall against the drag of the water, and she had a fist in his collar and her other arm hooked hard around Rosa's, and the three of them were moving up the tilting pavement toward a mouth she could no longer see and could only aim herself at from memory.
"Up," she said, or thought she said, close to Logan's ear. "You have to give me your legs. I can't carry all of you. Give me what you've got."
He gave her what he had. She felt him find the pavement with his boots and push, once and then again, each push costing him more than the last, and she took the rest of his weight against her shoulder and did not let herself think about the wet warmth spreading against her side where his packing had let go.
The passage found them before she found it.
The floor steepened into the throat of black rock they'd come down through, and the water was running down it now in a fast cold sheet, against them the whole way, and Elena went up it on the balls of her feet with one hand out on the wall and Logan's collar wound tight in the other and Rosa's arm locked through hers, feeling for each step in the dark.
Behind and below them the chamber went on tearing itself apart. She did not look back at it. There was nothing to see in that dark, and nothing back there worth turning her head for.
"Keep talking," she said to Rosa. "I need to hear where you are."
"I'm here. I'm right here, I've got you, keep going, keep—" Rosa's voice broke and reformed and kept coming, a rope of sound in the dark, and Elena went up it hand over hand.
Once the whole throat of the passage flexed around them, the rock itself moving like something alive, and a piece of it came down behind them close enough that she felt the wind of it on the backs of her legs and the water it threw up soaked her to the waist. She did not stop.
Stopping was the only thing left that could kill them, and so she did not do it.
And then there was a change in the air. It was not light, not yet, but the dark ahead had a different quality to it than the dark behind, a thinness, a smell of wet green and diesel and the ordinary open night, and she went toward it with the last of everything she had and dragged the two of them with her.
They came out of the mountain onto the muddy shelf above the trucks, and fell, all three of them together, into the mud and the rain and the enormous merciful ordinariness of open air.
Below them one truck was already gone down the track, its taillights swinging away through the trees.
Arturo's pale shape was nowhere she could see.
The mountain behind them coughed once more, deep and final, and then a long slow settling groan went through it, and then it was only rain.
Logan lay half across her, breathing in short wet catches, but breathing.
"Still here," he managed.
"Still here," Elena said.
Rosa was on her knees in the mud with both hands still pressed flat over the front of her jacket, over the camera, and she was laughing and crying at the same time in the way she had done as a child when a thing had frightened her past the far side of fear.
"Ellie." She got a hand free and grabbed Elena's face with it, mud and all. "Ellie. It recorded. All of it. Every word. It's on here. The fault, the company, the name, her saying the name — I have it, I have all of it, it's on here?—"
"I know," Elena said. She put her own hand over her sister's, over the camera, over the only copy of the truth left on the mountain. "I know. We got it out."
Volkov did not come out of the mountain.
The last thing Elena had seen before the dark took everything, in the final guttering half-second of the last lantern, was the floor of the basin opening at the foot of the dais, a black seam splitting the drowned pavement where the water ran fastest, and the woman standing over her machine with her hands on the rim and her feet already in it, refusing to the last instant to step down off the thing she had spent her whole life certain she could operate.
The vent took her without any drama in it at all, and closed over her, and the mountain kept its own counsel about where she went.
Elena sat in the mud in the rain with her sister's face in her hands and her oldest friend breathing against her side, and looked at the black shape of the mountain against the barely lighter sky, and did not go back to look for anyone.