Page 98 of Rooster's Remorse
Amara nods once and moves back down the line.
At 2:11 a flashlight comes around the pole barn.
At 2:12 Doom takes him.
I don't see how, and I don't want to.
The hatch is a steel plate set into the ground with a keypad and a bolt.
I know the code. I've known it two years, because a man punched it in front of me one night when he thought I was too far gone to see.
I've remembered those four numbers across a desert, a border and months in Marie Kincaid's spare room.
I crouch down and punch it in.
The lock lets go with a heavy sound I’ve heard from the other side of it more times than I can count.
Hands take the hatch and lift, and the smell comes up out of the ground and hits me in the face.
Wet concrete and bleach, and under it, people.
Nine years comes up out of that hole in one breath.
My ears roar. The yard tips sideways and I lock my knees against it, and Finn's hand closes hard around my arm.
"Mila." His voice comes from very far off. "Mila, look at me."
"I'm here." I take his hand off my arm and hold it a second before I let go. "I'm going first."
"Let me?—"
"They don't know your voice." I'm already swinging a leg onto the ladder. "They know mine."
Concrete corridor, seven feet wide, a bulb in a cage every twelve feet.
Twelve doors, steel, with a slide bolt on the outside of each one at waist height.
Waist height, because it's easy for a man in a hurry.
I've never seen it before.
Nine years I heard this hallway and I have never once laid eyes on it.
It's so much smaller than what I built in my head.
That's what stops me two steps off the ladder.
This whole world, this cathedral I've been living inside since I was twenty-two, is a hallway you could walk end to end in twelve seconds.
Behind me the club comes down the ladder, boots hitting concrete one after another.
"Lights," Amara says, low, at my shoulder. "Doors. Go."
I go to the eighth door on the left.
I don't decide to.
My body takes me there and my hand's on the bolt before I've thought about it.
