Page 21 of Fated, Allegedly

"There are shipping manifests in here for a hauler out of Deerlick. Nine consignments since November, all outbound, all listed as drill core, geological, non-hazardous." I tap the dates. "Now here's the thing. Rock doesn't need this. Every single one of these consignments has a temperature-controlled trailer, a two-hour maximum dwell time, and a live-load requirement, and four of them are signed for by someone with a veterinary credential number in the receiver field."

Owen leans in. "They're moving them out as rock samples."

"And look at the dates." I run the pencil down the column. "My merchant colony fails just after this one. The Loon River wolves stop transmitting after this one. Ninth of May, that's three days ago, the drowned timber family."

Hazel puts her hand flat on the table.

"Every consignment," she says, "has a gap in the world beside it."

"Nine consignments. Nine polygons on their map." I lean back. "They're not sampling a region. They're working through a list. And whoever's giving them the list has been ahead of us since before I got here."

14

NASH

We go in at the vent, because it's the only one of the three points nobody's guarding. Erin worked the tide of it for two days, air moving out means positive pressure means an active face somewhere below, and positive pressure means the pipe is exhaust, not intake, and exhaust means nobody stands in it. She sold that argument to my father with a hand-drawn diagram and won.

The pipe runs through rock and drops us into a cross-cut nobody's used since the Kestrel worked. Old timber. Rail spikes in the floor. Erin goes ahead with the light because she can read the ground I can't, calling it out as she goes.

"Bootprints stop here. That's a survey nail, recent, galvanized. Look at the wall." She holds the light flat so it rakes. "That's a smooth-wall blast. That's modern. They came up into the old workings from below and stopped short of the connection."

"Why stop?"

"Because completing it makes a second entrance, and that is a second thing to guard." She's beaming, which is a strange face to see six hundred feet under a lake. "They left us a back door and they don't know they did."

We get further in, and we hear the machinery. It isn't a pump, it's low and continuous with a beat under it, and the stone is warm to the touch. There's that strong brine smell, and Erin gets thirty photographs, a temperature series, and a sample of the water weeping from the wall, and she does it all with her hands shaking and her voice perfectly level into the recorder.

Then a light comes down the drift behind us. We get out through a stope that isn't on any map, up a raise with a rotten ladder, and into the alders on the wrong side of the ridge with two hours of dark left and men working the ground between us and the boat. We hear voices in the distance, and I hold her wrist and shift into wolf form, throwing her on my back to head to the shack, my grandfather's, four miles up the Cutter drainage, and nobody's used it since the eighties. She grips my fur tightly, as I race us away from being caught.

I get the stove going while Erin peels off soaked layers behind me. There's a wool blanket that smells like a hundred years, half a bottle of somebody's terrible whiskey, and a bunk built for a smaller generation.

"Caleb knows where we are?"

"He'll have the boat off the water by now. He'll come at first light." I feed the stove. "We're here till then."

She sits down on the floor beside it with the blanket around her shoulders and her hair loose and dripping. I hand her the whiskey, and she drinks some, coughs, and hands it back with the expression of somebody who's been personally insulted.

"That's paint stripper."

"It's my grandfather's."

"Then your grandfather was a hard man."

We sit there while the shack warms up. Outside the drainage is running loud with the last of the high-country melt.

"I keep doing the math," she says eventually. "If they'd come down that drift ten minutes earlier."

"I know."

"And I keep landing on a thing I don't like." She glances over the blanket. "There's a possibility over the next month where one of us doesn't come out, and I'm being extremely careful and reasonable, and taking my time, and building a proper plan. I told you I wanted to decide slowly. I meant it. I still do." Her voice goes rough. "But slow assumes there's a later, and I'm sitting in a shack with a bullet-scarred wolf listening to a creek and I'm not sure there is a later."

"Erin…"

"Let me finish. I need you to hear the logic or I'll doubt myself. It isn't the bond. That's the thing I had to work out. If it were, I'd want the you that turns up ten seconds early and takes half my pack and fixes everything. I don't. I want the one who stood in a doorway and let me teach kids about data sheets. I want you handing me the keys to the truck when every instinct you had was screaming. Fate would have picked the first man. I picked the second."

I've been holding a piece of kindling. I put it down.

"Say what you want," I tell her.