Page 36 of Fated, Allegedly

"Before we walk through tomorrow one more time," I say, "there's something you should hear from me directly. Erin Lawson stays in this valley. Not as a biologist, not as a guest we're tolerating because she's useful. She's my future mate, and she'll be a permanent voice in this pack's business, and I'd rather you knew it tonight than worked it out from how I behave."

Loon River stares at her, then at me, and his mouth goes crooked.

"Hanson, I'd worked it out from how you already behave."

Marrow Creek's Alpha stands up. She's lost her ground, her cousin, and a settlement her family held for two centuries, and she crosses the fire and takes Erin's hand in both of hers.

"Bracken and Marrow Creek both," she says. "Whatever your Alpha's asking, we've already agreed to it. Welcome."

Hazel, behind me, makes a small sound and pretends it's the smoke. We finish the plan at one a.m. with many people committed and every timing written down.

Then Wyatt appears. "It changed again," he gasps. "The beat underneath, Nash, it stepped up twice in the last hour and it hasn't come back down. And there's light on the water again. Not three seconds this time. It's been going on for eleven minutes."

Erin's already moving toward the maps, and she's doing arithmetic out loud as she goes.

"That's not another ramp test," she says. "They've started the final commissioning sequence. They're getting ready to draw."

23

ERIN

The raise is burned, so we go in the one direction they never armored: from the water.

I worked it out off the mechanical schedule. Tons of cooling has to reject its heat somewhere, and a discharge structure needs servicing, which means a dry riser, which means a hatch that a human being can open. On the 1957 survey sheet there's a dredge crib, marked derelict. On last month's aerial it has a new deck.

Caleb runs us out at three in the morning with the outboard tilted and two paddles. Nash goes up the crib ladder first, then me, the Marrow Creek member, then Wyatt.

The hatch is padlocked with a Master No. 3, nine figures of installation and somebody bought a hardware-store padlock. Wyatt takes it off with the bolt cutter in seconds and looks devastated that it wasn't harder.

Below the hatch there's a dry riser, eighty feet of ladder in a concrete tube, and then a gallery.

It's not a laboratory, it's a plant room, painted floor, yellow-guarded pipework as thick as my waist, a bank of pumps on inertia bases, and the space is cold, echoing and smelling of glycol. It's an unmanned space with a control panel and a fire door.

"Two-forty level," I whisper. "This is the heat rejection gallery. Everything they do down there ends up in here as warm water."

Nash puts his hand on a pipe. "It's cold."

"It's cold because the cooling loop isn't circulating yet." I follow the run with my light. "When they do, this room will be the loudest place in the county."

The drawings are exactly where drawings always are, which is the single most useful fact of my professional life. There's a plan chest against the wall, four drawers, with a laminated index taped to the top. No card reader. No encryption. Nobody has ever bothered to secure a plan chest in the history of engineering.

I pull the sheets and lay them down and Nash holds two lights while Wyatt watches the entrance.

The first is what I came for: a general arrangement section, drawn to scale, one sheet, the installation from the tunnel to the bottom. Surface, drift, lab level, shaft. And at the base, the extraction chamber with the coil cradle in it, and beneath that the anomaly in outline, hatched, labeled source horizon.

The chamber isn't beside the water or under the shore. It's under the middle. The section line runs right through the deepest water in the basin, and the roof of that chamber has Stillwater sitting on top of it.

"That's under the drop-off," Nash says. "That's where my father used to take me for lake trout."

"That's under everything."

The second sheet is worse and I nearly miss it, because it's filed as a services drawing and looks boring. It's regional, somebody's plotted the deep fracture network, and the fractures aren't decoration, they're flagged as conductive, with flow arrows and transmissivity values. I sit back on my heels and my ears start ringing.

"Nash. The nine anomalies aren't nine."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning they're connected. Look. Every one of these polygons sits on the same fracture system, and it's transmissive along its whole length. Bracken, Loon River, the drowned timber, Marrow Creek." I trace it with a shaking finger. "It's one body. One thing, and it is the largest opening into it. You're not nine communities living over nine sources. You're one community living over one, and you never knew because you've spent years not talking to each other."