Chapter 104. She Couldn’t Go Through the Gate With a Question She Hadn’t Asked

Chapter 104: 104. She Couldn’t Go Through the Gate With a Question She Hadn’t Asked

We spent the rest of the day on the rim, lying on our bellies in the heather with Laura’s spyglass, and by the time the light started to go, I knew more about the guards of Site Nine than I knew about my own family.

"Nineteen," Laura said, lowering the glass. "Twenty if you count the one asleep in the supply cart."

"I’d count him," said Holt. "He might wake up."

"Then twenty."

They were all in black armor, the same flat dull black as the knights who had hit us at Greywater Ford, and they moved in a lazy, practiced rotation around the palisade and the wagon yard.

Two more stood at a squat stone building at the foot of the cliff, the old mine office, and didn’t move at all.

Sharon lay beside me with her chin on her fist and her bad shoulder propped on a rolled cloak, and I watched her do the same arithmetic I’d done.

"That’s not enough," she said.

"For what?"

"For a place this size... For a site that’s supposed to be the heart of a conspiracy that took out Greywater and half the northern road."

"I’ve seen smaller depots with more guards." She frowned. "Somebody took the rest of them somewhere else, and I’d really like to know where."

"Don’t answer that yet," said Alicia, from my other side. "We don’t have enough to guess, and a wrong guess is worse than no guess."

"I wasn’t going to guess... I was going to swear."

"Please do it quietly."

That evening, in the ruins of the old well house, with a shuttered lantern and a map scratched in the dirt, we settled the plan.

Garrick drew most of it.

He crouched with a stick in his good hand and sketched the hollow from memory, the palisade first, then the wagon yard, then a long dotted line that crossed the whole east slope and ended in a small square.

"The culvert," he said. "It’s the old drainage tunnel from before the mine opened."

"It carried the runoff from the fields down under the yard and into the lower galleries... We hid in it when we’d broken something."

"It’s about four feet high, and it comes out through a grate inside the lower works, below the part they’ve built up."

"If it hasn’t been welded shut," said Laura.

"Then I’ll feel very stupid."

"You’d be in a tunnel, in the dark, with the rest of us," said Sharon. "You wouldn’t be the only one."

Alicia took the stick and drew a circle in front of the main gate. "Here’s what we’ll do."

"Sharon and Eveline go to the front... They’re loud, they’re fast, and every guard in the hollow is going to be looking at them instead of at the east slope."

"They hit the gate at first light, and they pull everyone toward the front... Then they go in through the main stair and work their way down to the core."

"That’s two people against twenty," Holt said slowly. "I’m not objecting, though... I’m counting."

"I’ll count with you," Eveline said quietly.

She had been sitting at the edge of the circle all evening with her ears flat, and I’d watched her hands twisting in her lap.

"The rest of us go through the culvert," Alicia went on. "Roland, Laura, Garrick, myself, Holt, Wynn, and Dessa."

"We find whatever they’re hiding down there, and we meet them in the middle."

"How’s your shoulder?" I asked Sharon.

She rolled it forward with a wince she didn’t bother to hide. "Stiff... It’ll hold."

"And if it hurts, I’ll just hit them harder."

"That’s a very sound medical approach."

"It’s the only one I’ve ever used."

I laughed, and so did Dessa, and the tension in the circle eased a little. But my stomach had gone tight, and it stayed that way.

Eveline would be with Sharon at the gate, and the Triune Link only reached partners I was already bonded to. I’d feel Alicia and Laura the whole way down.

I wouldn’t feel Eveline at all.

I’d be inside a mountain, in the dark, with no way of knowing whether she was fine or lying on the ground somewhere, and the only thing I could do about it was trust a woman I’d known for a week to keep her safe.

I didn’t say any of that. I put it in my pocket, with the rest of the things I wasn’t going to say, and hoped it wouldn’t be too heavy to carry.

Eveline found me after the meeting, in the cellar of a collapsed house, and she was holding a notebook.

"I need to ask you something," she said. "Before tomorrow... Not after."

"Hm?" I put down the whetstone. "Okay."

"You said you’d explain the curse once the mission was over." Her ears were standing straight up, and she was holding the notebook against her chest like a shield. "I know that’s what we agreed..."

"But I’ve been thinking about it for three days, and I can’t go through that gate with a question I didn’t ask..."

"If I die, or you die, I’d spend the whole afterlife wondering... And I don’t want to count anything while I’m running."

My heart almost stopped hearing her words. Sweat suddenly flowing through my whole body because... I don’t know why... I got scared all of the sudden.

"Please don’t say that... we’ll survive and live for another day to tell our stories." I smiled; well, it was a forceful one.

"Sorry... I shouldn’t say that word... but fine..." She takes a deep breath and then continues. "Can Alicia and Laura be there?"

"If you want them, then that’s fine."

"I do... Not to pressure you or anything, but it’s only for me." She swallowed. "I want to hear it from all of you..."

"Is that all right?"

"Yeah."

It was.

Alicia and Laura came down into the cellar a few minutes later and sat on either side of the lantern.

Sharon, who had a gift for knowing when to leave, announced loudly that she was going to check the perimeter and left us with the air of a woman escaping a funeral.

"What’s going on, Eveline?" Laura asked.

Alicia, though, she didn’t even ask. I can see her face... she fucking knows about what’s going to happen.

Eveline sat across from me with her knees drawn up and her notebook open on her lap.

"I made a list," she said. "It was fourteen questions, and I know that it’s too much to be asked, but I manage to cut it down to nine."

"Nine is good." Laura nodded.

"Oh wait! Hehehe... it’s eight, actually..." She chuckled. "I crossed one out... It was about hats."

I took a breath. I’d done this once before, with Laura, and I’d been a mess.

This time, I didn’t try to be smooth about it or anything.

"I was awakened with an SSS class that nobody’s ever seen," I said. "Everyone in the capital calls it a curse, and some days I think they might be right..."

"It grows through bonds... The more I’m close to a knight who chooses to be close to me, the stronger I get."

"And she gets stronger too... But it has to be voluntary."

"It has to come from trust, and it has to be real... It can’t be forced, and it can’t be faked, and if I tried, it wouldn’t work."

Eveline wrote something down. I tried not to read upside down.

"Alicia and Laura are already part of my life, in that way," I said. "I’m not going to hide that from you, and I’m not going to pretend it’s smaller than it is."

"Okay." Eveline looked up. "First question... Am I... compatible?"

"Yep... The curse told me so the day we met. "I rubbed the back of my neck. "And a few nights ago, I asked it to stop telling me anything about you."

Her pencil stopped. "You asked it to... what?"

"To hide it... the compatibility, the numbers, and all of it." I sighed. "It said it would stay hidden until we’d both decided what we want."

"Why?"

"Because I caught myself checking... You were asleep on my arm, and I opened it and looked. "I made myself keep my eyes on hers. "I didn’t like what that said about me..."

"I don’t want to see a number when I look at you."