Chapter 58: Home At Last
They lost the road forty minutes in.
The cut forked, and the left branch died in a stand of young pine, and the right branch was a rain channel pretending to be a track. The lead vehicle came back down it in reverse, slowly, with the driver’s arm hooked over the seat and his neck twisted around, because there had been nothing ahead of him wide enough to turn in.
It was then that Uthed got out.
Whether he only wanted away from the freezing cold, or actually had a solution in mind, was something that stayed with him. He walked up the fork on foot in his sandals with his sword under his arm and was gone a few minutes. The engines idled. Somebody in the second vehicle wound a window down and wound it straight back up again. Nobody said the obvious thing, which was that a man in sandals had just walked off into the trees to find them a road.
When he came back his trousers were wet to the knee and his sandals were carrying half the hillside. He pointed left.
"Water is running that way, I assume it leads up to the lake, which is our destination right?"
While not everyone was sure about his ideas, nobody had anything better. So they went left.
Twenty minutes later the birch was across the track, root plate standing in the air taller than the vehicles, the underside of it still holding a wheel of wet earth and stones that dropped one at a time while they looked at it. There was no going around it. The ground fell away on both sides into bracken and it kept falling for a long way down.
They eventually came out onto tarmac at ten past seven with the light going orange behind them.
It was a farm road, badly surfaced, running west, with grass up the middle of it in places. It became a better road. That road met the lake road. And the lake road ran down through the long stand of trees that screened the whole property from everything, the trunks going past the windows in a slow flicker, and when the trees opened up, the water was there.
Lake Merrin at dusk was flat and silver, with the far shore already gone dark and the house standing on the near one with its porch out over the water and nobody in it. No lights. No neighbours. Not a single thing on the surface but the last of the sky lying on it.
Nobody in the vehicles said anything for a moment.
Theo was still on the floor where he had been for the last hour. The seizure had let go of Sesan somewhere in the last ten minutes and she was breathing in the loose, ruined way of a person who has been through the machine, her eyes half open and seeing nothing much, her hair stuck flat to her cheek and her jaw. Her hands had stopped closing on his sleeve. That was the part he kept checking.
He got his arms under her, one behind the knees and one behind the shoulders, and carried her up the steps of a house he owned.
Nischov came out of the van shouting for a power point before his feet had properly hit the gravel. Estea came off the ramp of the second vehicle in her chair, alone, under her own hands, the wheels grinding on the loose stone, and stopped at the bottom of the steps and looked at the water for three full seconds before she went in.
And on the porch, Aide Lance Frost stood with his tie loose and his suit ruined and watched a twenty-one-year-old carry a woman through the front door of his own house, and felt something he did not have a word ready for.
***
Down in the sublevel the air was cool and completely dead, and every sound the six of them made was eaten by the walls before it got anywhere. No echo came back off the concrete. A boot scuffed and the scuff simply ended.
Nischov had chosen the far corner, away from the stairs, and had been standing in it for an hour saying things like "left, left, no, my left" to a boy carrying four hundred kilos of Vaunhold engineering. The boy had gone grey around the mouth. He carried it anyway, in short shuffling steps, setting it down twice on the way and picking it back up without being asked.
When the array finally came down onto its feet and the interlock lamp cycled amber and then green and stayed green, the doctor put both hands flat on the housing and leaned on it and did not move for a while. His shoulders came up around his ears. The lamp went on being green under his fingers.
"Doctor."
"Give me a moment, Theo."
"Take two."
Nischov gave a short laugh that came out badly.
They got Thall down last, on the gurney, four of them carrying and Nischov walking beside her with a hand on the rail the whole way. It was slow work on the stairs.
They took the turn at the bottom in half-steps, calling the count to each other, and one of the wheels touched the wall and everyone stopped as though the building had fallen in. Then they went on. They put her in the corner of a reinforced room and the array came up to full field with a low sound that sat under the floor rather than in the air, and the monitor found its slow green rhythm again, exactly as it had been in the hospital, as though nothing at all had happened to her that day.
Which was the entire point.
Theo stood at the foot of the bed with his hands hanging and looked at his wife sleeping through the worst afternoon of her life. Her hands were cold. He had checked them at the top of the stairs and he checked them again now, and they were exactly as cold as they always were, which meant nothing had changed, which was the good news.