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Chapter 65: The Man in the Glass
They did not leave Derek behind.Ruiz would have wanted it. Tomas Reyes lifted the boy in his big cook's arms without a word, and Leo wrapped the coat round the body, and Imelda stood aside, tall and grave, while the line of the rescued filed past into the water plant to wait. Mara did not move. She stood in front of the open steel door with one hand on the frame and her eyes on the light."It's a trap," she said."I know.""It's the oldest trap in the world. A door standing open at the end of a long stair." Her voice was perfectly flat. "He wrote on the wall. Do not let her sign. He didn't write do not go.""Then we go.""Together.""Together."She almost smiled. She picked up her carbine. Behind them Margot Vale hauled Voss to his feet by the collar with a face like a shut door, and Imelda took his other arm in her long pale fingers, gently, and they went down.The stair was short. Twenty steps, steep and slick, ending in a round white chamber the size of a church. No windows. No fu
Chapter 64: What Derek Carried
The drain went down for a thousand feet, and Lucas did not breathe for most of it.It was not a tunnel so much as a throat. A black pipe, five feet across, running at a steep slant through the rock, with a thin sheet of icy water sliding down the floor. Imelda moved through it on all fours, long limbs folded, her slate back arching under him like a bridge. He lay along her spine with his face in her collar and his arms locked round her ribs. The roof scraped his hair. Every few seconds water slapped him in the mouth."Counting," she murmured once, in her dry rustle. "It helps. I counted bed numbers.""I don't know a number.""Then count the ones you mean to save."He did. He started with a girl with a plait. By the time he reached eleven, the pipe had levelled out and the hum was a roar, and Imelda stopped."There is a grille.""Can you open it?""I am a nurse, Mr. Grey. I open grilles." Slate fingers closed on the bars. Rust shrieked. The grille came away in her hands like a screen d
Chapter 63: Nine Hundred Steps
Mara Quinn counted.It was the only thing she had ever done that always worked. One, two, three, her boots on the wet stone. Four, five, six, the shuttered lantern throwing a thin yellow wedge on the next step down. Behind her, Margot Vale's breath was shallow and steady. In front, Derek Ford was a hunched shape with his hands bound, whispering the landings as they went. Seven hundred. Seven hundred and one.She had counted the steps of a hundred stairs in her life. She had counted heartbeats in a medic's tent. She had counted the faces in a photograph at the bottom of her jacket every night for two years, and every night the number had been eleven."Eight hundred," Derek whispered. "The cold starts here."It did. The air thickened and sweated. The walls ran wet. Somewhere below, thin and constant, a hum rose up the shaft like heat off a stove, and every nerve in her body told her to turn round. She did not. She had walked into rooms like this before, rooms where the only way out went
Chapter 62: The Heron in the White
Dawn found Lucas standing in the white room with a nurse.He had not meant to go in. He had come up from the long night with blood dried on his lip and Wren's drawing folded against his heart, and the room had simply opened the way a door opens for someone who lives in a house. He expected stones, a rifle, a pen. He did not expect a tall pale woman sitting cross legged on the floor with her hands folded, patient as a heron on a bank."Mr. Grey," said Imelda Quill. "I hope I am not intruding."He could not answer. She had not been dead when he took her. She had not been alive in any way anyone would have recognised. But she sat in the soft shadowless light with her narrow head tilted to one side, and her pale grey eyes watched him with a calm, interested warmth that belonged to a person."You can't be here," he said at last. "I can't take living things.""Evidently you can take me." She smiled, a thin careful expression that her new face did not quite know how to hold. "I confess I exp
Chapter 61: What He Asked For
Lucas counted the lights the way Mara counted people.He stood on the platform above the gate with the black phone still warm in his fist, and he did not look away from the north. Three hundred and eleven. They came on slowly in long unbroken ropes, and where they passed, the kneeling dead on the road rose and fell like wheat in a wind. Three miles off. Two and a half. Then they stopped."They're waiting for the moon," Ruiz said. He had come up beside him with his shoulder strapped and his rifle slung one handed. "He said when the moon sets.""I know.""Gate stays shut. Everyone on the wall. That's the plan.""No," Lucas said. "Open it."Ruiz stared at him. "What?""He asked for it. Leave the gate open, he said. He would so like not to knock." Lucas turned the phone over in his hand. "Everything he's built is made for walls. The shells, the armour, the speaker trucks. He has planned for a siege since March. He has never planned for an invitation.""You want to invite him in.""I want
Chapter 60: Tonight
The three of them came out of the infirmary silo together.Lucas heard the vault door go first, a long iron scream, then the grain press splintering like a dropped tray. He was across the yard before he knew he was running. Mara had Lottie by the wrist and was pushing her into Greta's arms. Ruiz hit the ground beside him with a rifle at his shoulder. Behind them the whole camp was waking in a rising tide of lamps and shouting.The welder came out first.Garrick Wynn had been a big man. He was bigger now, a slab of grey slate on two legs, shoulders scraping the doorframe, hands that dragged on the gravel. Behind him, on all fours, loped a thin pale shape that had been a boy of sixteen. It moved like a greyhound. It crossed the first thirty yards in the time it took Lucas to draw breath.The third did not hurry.She stepped out of the dark with her hot water bottle still dangling from one long hand. Imelda Quill, the tower nurse, taller than the doorway now, narrow and pale, her head be
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