Page 43 of Fated, Allegedly

Water's coming down the flights already, sheeting off the landings. Nash sits on the top step because he has to, and I sit beside him, and we put our heads together in the dark with the whole mountain groaning around us.

"Say it," he says.

"You're doing the last-words thing."

"I'm doing the say-it-while-there's-air thing." He turns his face toward mine. "Six weeks ago I'd have gone down there alone and left you a note. Now I want it said out loud, because it changes how I fight."

So I say it. "I love you. And I'm not saying it because we might die, so don't you dare take it that way." I get hold of his hand, both of mine around it. "I'm saying it because I've decided something and I want a witness. If we come up out of this, I'm not going back to the cabin. I'm not renewing a lease anywhere. I'm coming home with you to that ugly house with the bad wiring and the south room, and I'll argue with your father about the tractor for thirty years."

Nash laughs and it turns into a cough with blood in it.

"That's the worst declaration I've ever heard."

"It's not a declaration, it's a findings statement." I press my forehead to his. "Your turn. Properly."

"I love you. I've loved you since you got out of a truck, and I've chosen you every single day since, and the choosing I'm proud of." His thumb moves over my knuckles. "If I come up that stairwell, I'm going to spend my life being deliberately, aggressively boring with you. Tuesdays in November. Soup. Everything."

"Then let's go break their machine."

Something changes on that step. Not courage exactly. It's more like the difference between carrying something because you're afraid to put it down and carrying it because you've decided what it's for.

Water is running off the dome in sheets and there's a foot of it across the deck, cold enough to steal your breath. The coil is still in its cradle over the ring, still turning, but it's screaming now — a hard uneven whine, and there's frost on one side of the casing and nothing on the other. It's dying and it's still working.

Nobody's left down here. The technicians went up with the line, the shooters have gone for the surface, and there are two body bags nobody had time for.

I find the regulator bank in four minutes, on the north deck, hard-wired into the cradle. And the control room is right beside it, and that's where the last piece of my life falls into place, because I go in for a schematic and I get something else entirely.

The console has an alarm on it: ARCHIVE MIRROR INCOMPLETE — LOCAL NODE — SUBFLOOR.

"Nash. There's something under the floor."

The access panel is beneath the desk, and it's a cable void, and there is a two-drive array bolted into it on its own battery with a legal-hold sticker across the front. Somebody hid it from their own people. Somebody in this company was frightened of somebody else in this company.

I get the laptop out of the dry bag and I put it on a chair in four inches of water and I pull everything across while the roof drips on the keyboard.

It takes six minutes. It's the longest six minutes I've ever spent, and I read the directory while the bar crawls, and what's in it stops the water at my ankles from mattering at all.

"Nash." I can hardly hear myself. "The mirror log has four destinations on it. Four. Stillwater is node one."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning there are three more." I turn the screen so he can see it, and my hand is shaking so badly the picture jumps. "Site two, site three, site four. Different states. And site four has a live intake count on it from eleven days ago, and it's higher than everything Stillwater ever logged in four years."

Nash stands in a foot of rising water with a gash in his side and looks at the screen.

"We didn't find the operation," he says.

"We found the quarry." The download hits ninety-eight percent. "Nash, they were never building a machine down here. They were building the first one."

28

NASH

The download finishes at eleven minutes to six and the man from the gravel pit walks onto the north deck with four of his people behind him.

I know him before Erin does. No dust on his boots even now, in a chamber taking water, and he comes through six inches of it at a working pace like he's crossing a parking lot. He's got a short weapon slung and he doesn't raise it, because he's already counted the room and decided he doesn't need to yet.

"Trent," one of his people calls, over the noise. "Sixteen minutes to stage three."