Page 45 of Fated, Allegedly

We come out of the stairwell into water at hip height moving fast east, and the whole drift is a culvert now, and there's no swimming against that. So I let it take us. Erin works it out at the same second I do and stops fighting, and we go east at the speed of the water with the roof lights going out behind us one at a time.

The raise is where the current wants to go, because water finds voids. It sluices us into the old workings and I grab the ladder and lose it, and Erin catches the rail and catches me, and for about four feet of that climb she is genuinely the only reason I'm on it.

Eighty feet of riser tube with a waterfall in it. My arms stop working somewhere around sixty. She gets under my shoulder on the last stretch and Wyatt hauls from the top with his bad leg braced against the hatch frame, and the two of them get two hundred and thirty pounds of Alpha out of a pipe by sheer bloody-minded refusal.

We come out onto the crib deck at twenty past six and the sun is up. The reservoir over the drop-off has a slow dark rotation in it two hundred meters across, and as we watch, it drops and then heaves back up in a low gray dome and bursts — air, coming out under two hundred feet of water, all at once. Erin sits down hard on the wet decking with the dry bag against her chest.

"That's the chamber," she says. "That's it going."

Caleb's people bring the boats in. Wyatt's already shouting numbers at somebody on shore. And on the north bank there are two hundred and forty people standing in the first proper light, watching the water where a machine used to be. Erin puts her hand flat on my ruined shoulder and holds it there.

"It's done," Wyatt says, grinning like a lunatic. "Nash — it's actually done."

I look at Erin. She doesn't say anything, because she's already told me what's on those drives, and neither one is going to take this minute away from him.

"Get us to shore," I say.

29

ERIN

Iwork in Hazel's kitchen because it's the only room in the valley with a table nobody's bleeding on.

Nash is forty feet away on Grace's cot with a puncture in his shoulder and two in his ribs, and Grace has stopped telling me he'll be fine and started just handing me tea, and I know she means it. Caleb's stable. The older Marrow brother — the one who took the junction — walked out of that drift under his own power at ten past six with eleven people behind him and then sat down on the shore and cried, which is the only thing anybody's done all morning that made sense to me.

I've got the two hidden drives, a generator, and a laptop with a cracked screen. It takes four hours to get in, and the reason I get in at all is the legal hold sticker, because a legal hold means somebody's counsel has been given a decryption key, and counsel had saved it to a shared folder like counsel always does.

The archive opens at half past eleven, and I read for twenty minutes and then go and stand outside because I can't breathe.

Phase III isn't a research program. It's a business plan. That's the part I keep having to reread. There are financial models in here. There are unit-cost projections and a phased rollout and a slide deck with a Confidential — Board Only footer, and somebody has spent real time making the bar charts consistent.

The product isn't enhanced soldiers. That's the assumption I've been carrying since the first binder and it's wrong, and I've been wrong in the direction of comfort, which is the worst direction to be wrong in.

They aren't trying to improve people. They're trying to make them. The technical summary is written by somebody good and I understand about seventy percent of it. Harvested material from three lineages, combined, doesn't express — I already knew that. What I didn't know is why they kept trying. The answer is on page nine. Exposed to sufficient field density, the combined material does express, and it expresses in a host with no lineage at all. They've done it. There are eleven documented cases and they're in an appendix with subject numbers and outcome codes, and four of the outcomes are stable.

And that's why they needed the coil. Not to power a laboratory. To generate field density on demand, anywhere, in a chamber, at industrial scale — because the natural article only exists in nine places on earth and none of those places belong to them.

Then there's the section on control, and that's where I have to go outside. They built dependency on purpose. The engineered expression doesn't self-sustain. It requires periodic re-exposure, and re-exposure requires access to a facility, and the facility schedule is in the appendix at ninety-day intervals. Every person they make is on a leash they hold.

Roy Harlow's name is on the cover memo. There's a handwritten line under his signature block, dated four years ago. They were never going to let us in. So we build our own, and we own the door.

Nash wakes at two and I tell him, sitting on the floor by the cot with my back against the frame.

"So it's not soldiers," he says.

"It was never soldiers. Soldiers was the cover story they told their own engineers." My voice has gone somewhere flat. "Nash, the wolves and the water folk and Bracken — they weren't harvesting you for what you could do. They were harvesting you for the recipe. Four years of intake to work out a formula, and the formula needs a field, and the field is the only thing they couldn't buy. So they came here and started drilling."

"And the three other sites."

"Are the production floors." I put the laptop where he can see it. "That's what they are. Stillwater was the quarry and the test bench. Sites two through four are where they make people, and site four had a live intake eleven days ago, and the intake column doesn't say specimens. It says candidates."

Nash shuts his eyes. When he opens them he's somewhere I don't want him to be.

"Volunteers," he says.

"Or people who were told a story. There's a recruitment annex, I haven't read it and I don't plan to today."

Owen comes in and stands with his hat in his hands while I read the summary out to the elders, and Hazel writes every word down in a tenth notebook.