Walter nodded.
“And then she crawled back through the cavity. In a panic. Intending, I’d hope, to get Lindsay. And maybe that’s when she encountered her killer. Or, alternatively, he caught her back at the fissure.”
Walter nodded.
“I’m thinking that they ended up in the tunnel — because of all the powder she’d acquired. So that’s where I’d say she took her final steps. And then there was a struggle, and she took no more steps.” And who was struggling? Georgia and Mike? Georgia and Krom? Georgia and someone else? Death by fury? Death by passion? Or was it death by cold calculation? “Anyway,” I said, “that’s one theory.”
Walter gave a brief nod. He was looking at the fissure. “She’s been back there for hours.”
Lindsay, not Georgia. An hour at most.
He rose. “I believe they’ve forgotten us. I’m going to go collect that sample.”
I snatched up my pack and followed him through the corridor.
This time, the hidden pocket was different. First time, when Walter and I came, and even the second time with Lindsay, this had seemed like a lost land whistled into existence by the dipper. Now, it was mapped and staked, concrete as a crime scene. Orange tape roped off the hot spring and fissure. People hovered over the great wound and the banks were draped in silver tarps upon which instruments had been laid out, like the fissure was due to undergo surgery.
Lindsay was at the fissure, head to head with Response Team leader Phil Dobie, who was unmistakable due to his beard — notable even among USGS beards for the quartz-white vein that diked through the black.
We took our samples at the hot spring then went to join Lindsay.
“Phil,” Lindsay was saying, “we’re there.” She looked worse than she had earlier, eyes bloodshot, skin drawn, like she’d waved off sleep because there was no time to sleep.
I butted in. “We’re where?”
She collared me, fingers like hot pokers. We were goddamn snuggled right up to the rim. “Cassie saw him.”
Saw who? All I saw now was the fissure.
“You remember my little fumarole?” She didn’t wait for my memory to kick in, she turned back to Phil. “He popped out six months ago and if you’d care to draw a line from here down to the caldera’s south moat, my little fellow is sitting on that line.”
Phil, who is about as low-key as white noise in the network, said, “It’s not out of the question. Moat activity’s at a depth of about ten kilometers so, sure, new surface phenomena could be offset by that much.”
I stiffened. From Phil, this was worry. The fissure’s certainly been worrying enough to spark an event response from the Survey but all on its own, it’s not enough to do the trick. It’s the location that’s raising blood pressure, the idea of a dike reaching out from the caldera’s magma chamber and thumbing up through the crust here, an area thought so placid that the Red Mountain geodimeter station is sampled only once a year. But it was sure being sampled now and I had to wonder if it had measured new deformation of the earth. I asked, “What’s the strain rate now?”
“Up ten parts per million,” Lindsay snapped.
Phil said, “We need the quakes…”
“We’ve got them.”
“You’ve got low-frequency?” I swallowed. Magma’s on the move.
“We do,” Phil said, “but we need them at a little shallower depth.”
“We’ll get them,” she said. “I know this volcano.”
I looked at her in alarm. She was flying by the seat of her pants.
“Maybe,” Phil said thoughtfully, “you’re a little too close, Lindsay.”
“Horseshit.”
Walter cleared his throat. “We all get ahead of ourselves at times. I certainly have, in my work.”
Not that I’d ever seen.
Lindsay shot a red-eyed look at Walter, decades of rivalry and devotion in that look: geology is volcanology, honey.
I felt a charge run from Lindsay to me, her fingers grounded in my neck, and the circuit ran from the fissure to Lindsay, and by chance of touch through me, and back to earth again. It did not loop through Phil or Survey headquarters. It was Lindsay and the volcano, a closed loop. We all leaned toward the fissure, like yearning toward water when standing on a bridge, Phil stroking the quartz in his beard, Lindsay drumming her fingers on my neck, Walter fairly itching to consult, and me, damned if I was going to come unglued.
“My volcano,” Lindsay said, “has extended his reach.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
The mood was ugly at the intersection of Minaret Road and the Bypass.
The rolled-gravel escape route branched off Minaret and disappeared into a forest of Jeffrey pine. Somewhere in there, the trucks and dozers and cats sat idle. Work had stopped because the road crew was here along with the rest of the town.
It was a whipped crowd, sunk deep into parkas. Council members huddled in their own group, not looking any happier than the rest of us. They’ve got their own emergency meeting, so I’ve heard, in three hours.
I couldn’t wait three hours. I had eyes now for only four people:
Phil Dobie, more haggard than he’d looked five hours ago up at the fissure.
Lindsay beside him, hot-eyed, still riding the fever.
Len Carow, babying a cigarette until it flamed.
Krom, on his cell phone, watching Carow.
It’s been forty-eight hours since I sat in Krom’s office and told him about the fissure. He’s moved almost as fast as the Survey. He got Carow into town yesterday and now, right here, he’s got his own Event Response going.
It can’t come too soon.
“Man.” My brother dug his elbow into my arm. “Man, it’s cold.”
Walter, on my other side, said, “Cassie, are you warm enough?”
I said “yes” and my breath condensed like a fumarole. Come on, I thought, before we all freeze, it’s getting later by the minute.
Krom pocketed his cell phone, then tilted his head back. Others, noticing, tilted their heads as well. Carow’s cigarette tipped skyward and Phil’s beard rose and even Lindsay lifted her chin. The movement rippled through the crowd. Walter and Jimbo followed suit and I couldn’t resist if I’d wanted.
We all looked up to a view we’ve seen a million times. The plateau on which the town sits rises to the broad Lakes Basin, which is bordered by a string of peaks.
Why look? Everybody knows what’s up there.
There came the distant rumble of an engine and a big-bellied helicopter rose above the toothy skyline. I didn’t get it. But I couldn’t take my eyes off it.
The chopper came to hover above Red Mountain.
It looked like some kind of rescue attempt.
But it wasn’t. The chopper dipped its nose and came our way, skimming treetops, laying down a smoke trail. As it barreled over our heads, I saw the National Guard insignia on its belly. I covered my ears and turned along with everybody else to follow its path as it shrank into the morning sky.
We were left with smoke in our eyes and the taste of sulfur on our tongues.
“What the shit was that?” said Jimbo.
“A simulation.” My voice shook.
Lindsay obviously thought so too. Phil had to know. Carow surely got it. People lifted fingers, following the smoke trail, tracing the chopper’s route. It began at Red Mountain and paralleled the Lake Mary Road down the three miles to town. It crossed Minaret and then followed the Bypass in its push northeast toward highway 395.