Chapter 193: It’s On the Map

Nobody moved for a long time after the humming stopped.

Jack went first. He stepped over the log, walked into the clearing and crouched where the janitor had knelt. He picked up a crust between two fingers, looked at it and dropped it again.

Killian stayed at the edge of the trees, scraping at a smear of bark on his cuff that wouldn’t come off.

Blair sat down on the log. Her legs had decided for her.

"Bread," Jack said. "Fat. Cabbage." He stood and dusted off his fingers. "Kitchen scraps."

He came back across the frozen grass and stopped in front of her. In the dark, his eyes were the only color left. He looked at her for a while.

"How sure are you that was her, Ms. Willows?" he said quietly.

"It was her."

"You saw her once. For a few minutes. At eight in the morning, frightened out of your mind."

"And on the stairs."

"In bad light. Holding a mop."

"She said ’dears’ on the stairs. She said it tonight."

"All the women on this campus over fifty call people dear."

Blair opened her mouth and shut it again.

She looked at the empty track where the cart had gone. A woman and four dogs. If she was wrong, there was nothing left. No nurse. No Ivy. Only a made bed and a stamped card that said transferred.

Under the trees.

She lifted her head.

"The old line," she said.

Jack and Killian looked at her.

"What?" Jack questioned.

"Someone said it to me when I asked about Ivy. ’The old line. Under the trees.’" She swallowed. "And not to ask again."

"Who?"

She hesitated one second too long.

"The little man on the chain," Killian said. He had given up on the cuff. "At Silver’s table."

Jack didn’t look at Killian. He kept looking at her.

"You never mentioned it," he said.

"I told you all that Jasper told me."

The silence went on long enough for her to hear her own pulse. Jack let it sit. Then he turned to Killian as if she had answered some other question entirely.

"Your Highness?"

"It’s on the Crown survey maps. I’ve read every volume," he responded. "There was a rail line under these woods before the Rift. The northern spur. They sealed it when the river moved. The maps call it the old line."

"Where does it come up?"

"There’s a gate." Killian turned his head north, into the dark, as if he could see through the trees. "Twenty minutes. Keep up."

He walked off.

He set the pace, and it wasn’t a kind one. Killian kept to the high ground between the roots and stepped over every patch of mud. Jack walked behind Blair. She couldn’t hear him at all, which was kind of scary.

Her shoes rubbed the wrong way on every step.

At a flat stone she stopped, toed one off and fumbled for the other. She wobbled. Her hand shot out and caught the nearest thing, which was Killian’s arm.

He went rigid.

He didn’t pull away, and he didn’t look at her. He stood on the stone with his face turned north and his arm held out stiff as a banister while she hopped and swapped and stamped her heels down.

Through his sleeve he was cool and very solid. The muscle in his forearm tightened under her fingers. She found herself looking at his hand. Long fingers. Then up at his jaw, and the silver lashes lowered against his cheek.

"Finished?" he said.

She let go so fast she nearly fell off the stone. "Thank you."

He didn’t answer. He walked on, and a few steps later he rubbed his forearm once, where her hand had been.

Behind her, Jack said nothing at all.

The ground dropped away into a cutting, a long trench in the hillside choked with dead bracken. Killian slid down the lip without using his hands. Blair looked at the drop: chest high, wet leaves, stones underneath.

Jack’s hands closed on her waist from behind.

He lifted her off the edge as if she weighed nothing and set her on her feet at the bottom. His thumbs pressed into her hips through her coat. He didn’t let go right away. His chest was against her back and his breath stirred the hair by her ear, and her stomach dropped farther than she had.

Then his hands were gone, and he was walking past her down the trench.

Killian stood ten yards ahead, watching. He turned away before she could see his face.

At the end of the cutting, roots hung like a curtain over a stone arch half sunk into the hill. Two rusted rails ran under it into the dark. An iron gate filled the arch from wall to wall, its bars as thick as Blair’s wrist.

Killian stopped in front of it. His tongue flicked out.

"Oil," he said.

Jack went close. He looked at the hinges, then reached through the bars to the inside of the gate, where a bolt as long as his forearm ran into the stone. A padlock hung from it. It was brown with rust everywhere except around the keyhole, where scratches shone bright as new pins.

"Locked from the inside," Jack said.

"Then someone’s in there," Blair said.

"Or someone left the other way."

She pressed her face to the cold bars and looked past them.

The rails sloped down into the tunnel. Thirty yards in, they ran into water. It was black and perfectly still, and it climbed the walls and met the curved roof, filling the tunnel to the top. No edge, no air above it. Just dark water where a tunnel should be.

"The river runs above us," Killian said. "It has been flooded since before I was born."

"Then nobody walks through that," Jack said.

"Then who oiled the gate?"

Nobody answered.

Jack crouched to look at the bolt again. Killian stood with his hands in his coat pockets and his eyes on the water, tasting the air every few seconds.