Day 29, continued. 12:49 p.m.
The green one did not charge. It came at us at the same pace everything else in that portal moved at, which was somehow the most frightening thing about it, because it meant it had all the time it needed.
Sixty feet. Then fifty.
And the migration kept going the whole time. That's what I couldn't make my head hold. There was a thing coming to kill us and there was also, still, a slow steady river of knee-high slimes rolling across the floor toward the fourth tunnel, indifferent, like traffic.
"Ren," Tom said. "Ember. Far side. On my word, not before."
"On it."
"North." He was breathing hard and his voice had gone very level. "I'm going to buy you a lane."
"No," I said.
It came out before I'd finished having the thought.
* * *
What I had instead arrived the way these things always arrive for me, which is late and in somebody else's voice.
You think it's for stopping things.
A woman on an overturned crate in a storeroom with a water heater in it, twelve days ago, with her forearms on her good knee.
It's a wall. Everybody in the room has to go around a wall. You don't block a fight. You shape it.
I had been standing in a river hitting the water, same as Tom. Ten minutes of trying to destroy a thing that was not attacking me and did not know I was there and only ever wanted to get past.
They want to get past.
So let them get past. Somewhere I'm not.
"Tom, don't kill anything," I said. "Get behind me and get ready to walk."
"North—"
"Eight seconds. If I'm wrong we do it your way and I'll go first."
* * *
What I did was not clever and it was not new and I'd bet a hundred divers have found it the same way, sideways, in a bad room, with nobody to ask.
I turned the shield.
Not square to them. Angled, hard, maybe thirty degrees off the flow, rim down on the stone and my shoulder into the back of it and my feet set wide, braced for a hit from something I couldn't see yet. Not a wall across the river.
A wedge in it.
The first one came onto the face of it and went left, because left was easier than through. The second one took the same line, because the first one had taken it. The third and the fourth did not even reach me, they'd already started drifting wide, ten feet out, reading the new shape of the floor the way water reads a rock.
I didn't breathe through any of that. I noticed afterward. Six of them, and I held my breath for all six like a kid going past a cemetery.
By the sixth one there was a lane.
It was about four feet wide and it ran from my right hip to the base of the ramp and it was open, and it stayed open, and it stayed open because I was standing there.
"Go," I said.
Tom stared at the lane. Then at me, behind the shield, with my cheek about two inches off the ply.
"Huh," he said.
"Go, Tom."
"I'm going. Give me a second to believe it."
* * *
There is a specific arithmetic to holding a wedge in a moving crowd, and I learned all of it in the next ninety seconds.
The load is not the slimes. The load is that you cannot move. A block is a moment and you get to come down after it. A wedge is a position, and the second you soften, the lane closes, and everything you bought closes with it.
My forearm had been at hour five of a six-hour day before any of this started. Nine and a half pounds on a lever, held out at an angle, with three or four hundred pounds of slow wet weight leaning on it in shifts.
At about forty seconds the burn went to the hum.
At about seventy seconds I lost the feeling in the outside two fingers of my left hand, which was fine, because the enarme was doing the holding and my hand was mostly along for the ride.
At ninety seconds my left knee started to go and I found out that the whole thing was actually being held up by my right leg and the wall of my own stomach, which Coach Reyes told me on Day 3 while I was doing air squats in front of four strangers and being embarrassed about it.
Tom went up the lane at a fast walk. He did not run, because Tom does not run.
I could hear him going. Boots on the wet stone, steady, every step landing flat, the maul knocking once against his leg. A slime came off the edge of the lane toward him and changed its mind against the shape of the floor and went the other way, and he didn't even look down at it. He just kept walking.
My right foot had found a seam in the stone when I turned the shield, and I hadn't moved it since. I wasn't sure I could.
He got to the ramp. He turned around.
"Now you," he said. "Break and come."
* * *
And I couldn't, and it took me a second to work out why, and then it was very simple.
The lane was the shield. There was no version where I stepped out of it and the lane came with me. The moment I turned my shoulder out of that wedge, four feet of open floor became twenty feet of moving slime again, and it would happen in about two seconds, and I would be standing in the middle of it with nothing in front of me.
"Go up," I said.
"Kid—"
"There's no lane without me in it. You know that. You knew it when you said break and come, you just said it anyway."
Tom Guzmán stood at the bottom of that ramp in a chamber sixty feet across with a maul in his hand and did not move for four seconds, working it out, with everything that was worth to a man with two kids sitting right there on his face.
"Ren," he said. "Ember. Now. Far wall, as far as you can throw it."
Ren doesn't talk much inside. She didn't answer him. I heard her boots come down the ramp behind Tom, quick and short, the steps of somebody who has done the math on her own range and doesn't like it, and I kept my shoulder where it was and my eyes on the green light, because there was nothing else I could usefully do with either of them.
* * *
A match head. Ten feet. Eight times before the headache.
She came down off the last turn, which she had been told twice not to do, far enough to reach, and put it out on the green side, low, right in the path of the migration, and eleven or twelve of them changed direction at once and went for it, same as they'd been going for the tunnel, and for about four seconds there was a hole in the river on my right side and the pressure on the shield dropped by half.
And the green one stopped. Turned. Considered a match head.
Four seconds.
"NOW," Ren said.
And I broke the wedge and ran, and that is not a heroic sentence and I'm not going to dress it up. I ran twenty feet on a dead leg with a shield hanging off my arm and I got to the bottom of the ramp and Tom had my collar and was hauling, and we were nine or ten steps up before the thing in the chamber worked out it had been lied to.
* * *
We went up that ramp at the fastest walk of my life, Tom's fist still in my collar, my left leg doing about half of what I asked it to.
I thought about the legal pad. I don't know why then. SHIELD, underlined twice, on my mother's kitchen table, on the worst day of my life, picked because I was slow and didn't want to die. An eighteen-year-old doing the most obvious arithmetic available to him.
We got nineteen steps up.
Then Tom said, "It's coming," in a completely ordinary voice, and I turned around on a slope in a three-hundred-foot tunnel that narrows as it goes, and looked down at a green light climbing toward us at walking pace, and understood that a ramp is a hallway, and a hallway has one way through it, and one way through it is the only place on earth where nine and a half pounds of plywood is worth anything at all.
"Get up the ramp," I said. "I'll be right behind you."
Neither of us believed it. But it was the correct thing to say, and he was already three steps up when he stopped believing it, and that is exactly the amount of time I needed him to take.