Page 41 of Fated, Allegedly

They close it. It takes ninety seconds. Two of the three come back. My father comes on the handheld at twenty to five and it's the second-worst conversation of my life.

"Nash. Pull back. There are forty out and the rest can run the last section on their own."

"They can't. Half of them can't run at all."

"Then they run slower with you alive." His voice does something I've never heard from it. "I held a line at the outlet in eighty-one because I believed the pack couldn't survive me stepping off it. Four of them died coming back for me. Four, son. Don't make my mistake."

"Dad, this junction holds as long as somebody's standing in it. That's not pride, it's arithmetic."

"Then let it be somebody else's arithmetic."

"There isn't anybody else yet."

He goes quiet. When he comes back his voice is flat and steady. "Understood. Your mother's got the receiving station at the pipe. Bring them to her."

They drag Caleb past me on a sheet of plywood at quarter to five and he swears at the Kettering boy the entire distance.

Then he gets hold of my leg. His grip is still ridiculous and his hand is cold and his eyes won't quite focus.

"Don't do the thing," he says.

"What thing?"

"The one where you stay." He's gray around the mouth. "Isla's twelve weeks. I haven't told anybody. I'm telling you now so you've got it in your head when you start being noble in about ten minutes."

My hand goes over his and I hold on hard enough to hurt us both.

"Get up the pipe, Cal."

"Say you heard me."

"I heard you."

Erin comes on the handheld at three minutes to five and the whole night reorganizes itself around her voice.

"Nash. I'm in the gallery. Wyatt's with me." She's shouting over machinery and there's water in the background. "The chilled water isolation is a twelve-inch gate valve on the resistor bank supply and it's hand-wheel operated and I cannot turn it. Both hands, full weight, and it hasn't moved a degree."

"How many turns?"

"Fourteen! And it has to be inside four seconds of the compressor going down or the protection catches it and we've wasted the only attempt we get!"

"Wyatt takes the valve, you take the compressor."

There's grunting, then Wyatt, wrecked and furious with himself. "I can't, Nash. Not with the calf. I can't brace against anything. I've tried it three times."

I look up the drift. There's another rush coming — I can hear the boots settle into position. There are maybe thirty people still behind me in this tunnel.

There's also a valve eighty feet above my head and twenty-two minutes on Erin's clock, and there is exactly one person in this mountain who can turn fourteen revolutions of a seized gate valve in four seconds.

The older Marrow Creek wolf shifts back to say it, which costs him time he can't spare.

"Go on, then."

"There's thirty people behind this junction."

"There's four hundred miles of country behind her, and your Beta's already paid for the door." He shoves me toward the stope with his shoulder, hard. "You're not the best thing in this tunnel anymore, Hanson. You're the best thing up that ladder. Go be it."

I look at him. I look back down the drift at the last of the line moving through the stope. Every instinct I have is screaming at me to hold this ground, and the entire lesson of the last six weeks is that the instinct is wrong.