Page 42 of Fated, Allegedly

"Junction's yours," I say. "Give me nine minutes and then come out. That's an order, and I want you to disobey the first half of it, not the second."

"Understood, Alpha."

Eight flights of plant stairs. Four hundred yards of drift with my flank refusing to cooperate. A rotten raise ladder taken three rungs at a time, then eighty feet of riser tube with water running down the inside walls of it.

I climb the last of that tube on hands that keep slipping and a body that has begun submitting formal complaints. Somewhere below me the mountain is making a sound it wasn't making an hour ago — a deep uneven grinding, rock adjusting to a hole in itself.

The heat-rejection gallery is a foundry.

Every pipe in the room is hot. The pumps are screaming at full load, the air tastes of glycol, and there's a haze standing at head height. Wyatt's at the compressor panel with a wrench in his fist and murder in his face. Erin's on the valve with her boots braced against a pipe support and both hands white on the wheel, hauling at it with everything she has, which is not enough and never was going to be.

She sees me come off the ladder and her whole face breaks open.

"Nash—"

"Fourteen turns." I get my hands on the wheel beside hers. My blood's all over the rim of it inside a second. "Wyatt, hand on the compressor breaker. Erin — count me in."

27

ERIN

"On three," I tell them, and my voice doesn't sound like anything I recognize. "Wyatt drops the compressor. Nash, you turn on three. Not on my word after, on the number itself."

Wyatt gets his fist around the breaker handle. Nash sets his boots against the pipe support and puts his hands over mine on the wheel, and there's blood on the rim inside a second, and I decide not to look at where it's coming from.

"One. Two. Three."

The breaker slams. Nash hauls, the stem cracks free of its seat with a shriek, and after that it's fourteen revolutions of a man taking himself apart at four hundred and eighty feet under a lake. I'm on the wheel with him. I'm adding almost nothing and I don't let go, because the alternative is standing there watching.

Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen, and the stem bottoms out hard. The resistor bank overhead starts to sing — a rising note with nothing musical anywhere in it. The pipework begins knocking like somebody swinging a hammer down the whole length of every line in the room. Then it stops.

Not builds, not bangs. Stops. The note falls away, the knocking settles, and a green indicator on the panel beside Wyatt's hand blinks twice and goes solid.

"No." I'm at the panel before I've finished thinking it. "No, no, no⁠—"

"Erin." Nash is bent over the valve with both arms braced on it. "Talk."

"It caught." I read the mimic and my fist urges to be put through it. "The quench started and something caught it. There's a secondary regulator bank picking up the dump, and it's not in this room, and it's not on my drawings." I slam the heel of my hand against the panel. "It's on the machine. They put the backup on nine-forty, in the chamber, because of course they did — you don't leave your last protection eighty feet away from the thing it protects."

Wyatt's face has gone slack. "So we did all that for nothing."

"We did all that for most of it. The coil's hurt. It's running degraded and it can't take another one." I bring up the sequence and the number on the right of the screen turns my stomach over. "Stage three in thirty-one minutes."

Nash straightens up off the valve and I finally look at him properly, which I have been avoiding for eleven minutes. He is gray.

"Then we go back down," he says.

"You can't."

"I can do it once."

"Nash—" My voice cracks in half and I let it. "You climbed eighty feet of riser to get here. That's eight flights and four hundred yards each direction, in water, with people shooting."

"Nobody's shooting anymore. They've pulled for the surface; the mountain's making noises they don't like." He puts his hand on my jaw and leaves it there, and his palm is freezing. "Erin. There's a regulator bank on that deck and there's exactly one person in this mountain who can identify it, and it isn't me and it isn't Wyatt. So I'm not offering to go instead of you. I'm telling you I'm coming with you, and you're going to let me, because I've spent six weeks learning to let you."

Wyatt says, from the door, "I'll hold the gallery and the hatch. Somebody has to, and it's the one thing my leg will let me do."

We take a minute at the head of the stairwell, because there's a good chance we don't get another one.