The Dodge had no insulation beneath the rubber mats. Lily had known that since Utica, when the heater core leaked antifreeze across her shins, but she had never felt the iron breathe until now.
She threw her shoulder into the passenger door. The latch caught with a heavy, ungreased clatter that made the back of her neck prickle. Cold air rushed into the cab through the rusted cab corners, carrying the scent of charred spruce and wet zinc.
Barnes did not turn his head. His right hand remained on the wheel, broad and steady, but his left shoulder dipped low. The black metal of his left arm slid beneath the split vinyl bench, grazing the transmission hump.
"Don't put your heels down," he said.
Lily hovered with her split boot cocked on its heel. "What?"
"The soles. Keep the rubber flat. Don't touch the floor bolts."
The sound was below the threshold of an engine. It was an oscillation, low and heavy, rattling through the floorboards like water churning behind a closed sluice gate. It didn't rise from the leaf springs or the differential. It came up through the four tires, traveling through the steel cords into the rims, vibrating into the rusted frame. It tasted of sulfur and old battery acid.
Barnes’s flesh fingers found the edge of the rubber matting and peeled it back. Underneath, the transmission tunnel was crusted with red primer and road scale. In the dim light of the cab, the bare sheet metal wasn't gray. It had taken on a faint, greasy shimmer, like an oily puddle under a streetlamp.
"What is that?" she whispered.
"Ground loop," Barnes said. His voice was flat. "They didn't just drop an aerial on the ridge. They ran a counterpoise under the pasture."
"A what?"
"Copper braid. Buried six inches down in the shale. It turns the whole basin into a dish." His metal fingers pressed against the steel hump. The contact produced a faint, sharp tick, like a needle skipping on a vinyl groove. "They're charging it from the substation in Forestport."
"Forestport is fifteen miles out."
"High-voltage line runs along the rail corridor. All you need is an open relay and thirty gallons of transformer oil." Barnes pulled his hand back. He didn't look at his palm, but Lily saw the dull silver plating where the paint had scraped away at the knuckles. "They're drawing down the grid to see what rings."
Lily tucked her elbows against her ribs, her knuckles buried in her coat pockets. In the torn hem of her coat, the brass pressure cap had begun to warm.
It wasn't body heat. The metal was growing uncomfortably hot, pressing through the coarse lining of her pocket like a fresh coin fished out of boiling water. It smelled of burnt flux. She squeezed her fingers into fists, terrified that if she shifted, the thimble would clink against the door frame.
"We have to start it," she said.
"If I turn the starter, the coil arcs," Barnes said. "The fuel in the carburetor will detonate before the plugs fire. We’d be sitting in a stove."
"Then we walk."
"Look out your glass."
Lily turned.
The logging road they had used to climb into the hollow was forty yards behind them, skirting the edge of the limestone ledge where the culvert used to drain. It was gone. The bank had sloughed into the gully, not with the rough crumble of wet mud, but in three clean, semicircular bites, as if a hot spade had sliced through butter. The exposed dirt didn't show roots or gravel. It was black, smooth, and steaming faintly in the sub-freezing air.
Beyond the cut, the hemlocks were no longer swaying with the wind. The lower branches remained bent downward, pinned toward the frozen earth by a heavy, uniform pressure. Between the dark trunks, two hundred yards into the timber, something was blinking.
It was not a lantern. It was a pale, rhythmic pulse of amber light, small as a pilot flame, repeating at three-second intervals. It was moving parallel to the creek bed.
"That's not state troopers," Lily said. Her voice caught on the dry roof of her mouth.
"No," Barnes agreed.
"They have vehicles in there?"
"Tracked," he said, reaching behind the seat without shifting his weight. His hand returned with a heavy green canvas scabbard. He drew the Springfield bolt-action with a single, soundless drag. "Light reconnaissance. BMD-1, or whatever scrap they managed to crate out of Montreal before the snow set in."
Lily stared at the rifle. It looked ridiculous against the vast, smoking ruin of the mountain—a piece of oiled walnut and blued steel meant for deer hunters in the Adirondacks. "You said Miller bought surplus diesel."
"Miller bought whatever was left on the docks when the Baltic fleet docked in Halifax," Barnes muttered. He worked the bolt, sliding a single cartridge into the chamber with a precise, greased click that died against the wool of his collar. "He wasn't selling transit papers to farm boys, Lily. He was clearing customs for an intercept team."
"To find what?"
Barnes paused. For a second, his jaw tightened, the shrapnel scar along his cheek pulling the flesh into a tight, white knot. "To find whatever was on the other end of the line you held open in Syracuse."
A cold drop of sweat ran down Lily's spine. "I told you. It was Rome."
"The Rome annex doesn't use Cyrillic squawk codes," Barnes said.
He leaned across the bench. His wool coat smelled of woodsmoke, lard, and the bitter mineral tang that rose from his left arm whenever the temperature dropped below freezing. He didn't touch her, but his eyes dropped to her right hand, where she kept it jammed into her coat pocket.
"Take it out," he said.
"What?"
"The pocket, Lily."
"I don't have anything—"
"You took three paces to the left of the culvert while I was checking the tire," he said, his voice dropping into that terrifying, gentle monotone. "You bent down. You didn't check your boot, and you didn't pick up gravel. Your coat hangs two inches lower on the starboard seam."
Lily didn't move. Her heart hammered against her ribs like a bird caught in a chimney.
"Give it to me," Barnes said.
"It was in the dirt," she whispered, her chin lifting. "It belonged to my uncle's pump."
"Your uncle didn't buy brass from the Tula arsenal."
Lily swallowed. The heat against her hip was becoming intolerable; the hem of the wool was beginning to give off a faint, singed odor. Slowly, keeping her fingers curled so he wouldn't see the blackened, branching veins creeping toward her wrist, she drew her hand from the torn lining.
The brass thimble lay in her palm.
The four Cyrillic characters stamped into the collar were glowing a dull, cherry red. The notched trident on the crown had turned the color of bruised copper. It sat in her skin without scorching her flesh, though the grease on her lifelines was sizzling faintly, turning into white ash.
Barnes looked at it. He didn't reach for it. His face went through three distinct changes: first, the dull recognition of a man checking a serial number; second, an old, cold revulsion that started behind his eyes and set his teeth; and finally, an absolute, hollow stillness.
"Where did you find the housing?" he asked.
"There wasn't a housing," she said, her teeth chattering. "Just that. In the mud."
"That's not a cap," he said. "It's an anode."
The amber light in the hemlocks blinked again, closer now. A hundred and fifty yards. Through the closed glass of the truck, a sound reached them—the dry, rhythmic clack of steel pins turning over a drive sprocket, muted by the heavy frost.
"They aren't tracking the truck," Barnes said. He looked at her hand, then at the floorboards, where the grease on the transmission tunnel was now forming tiny, vibrating rings like oil in a frying pan. "They're tracking the draw."
"I don't have a battery," she cried, terror finally breaking through her stubbornness. "Look at me, James! I'm five-foot-four and I have sixteen dollars in my shoe. I don't have an engine in my chest!"
"No," Barnes said, his face gray. "You have the lead."
He reached out. With his metal thumb and forefinger, he took the glowing brass thimble from her palm.
The moment his fingers closed on the metal, the Dodge groaned.
A bright, violet spark snapped between the brass and the black plating of his knuckles with the crack of a dry branch. The radio head beneath the dash whined, a high, singing frequency that climbed an octave every second until the glass dial shattered, showering the rubber mat with tiny, green-tinted fragments.
Barnes didn't flinch. He didn't drop the thimble. His left arm stiffened, the plates along his forearm shifting with a series of tiny, pressurized clicks as though internal hydraulics were fighting an invisible load. The black lacquer on his wrist bubbled, then peeled back in thin, gray ribbons.
"Out," he grunted.
"Barnes—"
"Out of the cab. Driver's side. Crawl under the tailgate. Keep your mouth open."
"Why?"
"Because when this grounds, the air is going to leave your lungs."
He shoved her across the bench. Lily tumbled out the driver’s door, landing on her hands and knees in the red slush. The ice water hit her palms like broken glass, but the pain was distant, swallowed by the roar in her ears.
The earth beneath her knuckles was warm.
The mud wasn't freezing anymore. It was softening into a thick, gray paste that smelled of iron filings and vinegar. She scrambled on her elbows toward the rear axle, her split boot catching on the bumper iron.
Above her, the truck seemed to rise on its leaf springs.
Barnes dropped from the cab into the mud beside her. He was holding the Springfield by the barrel in his flesh hand, using it like a walking staff to keep his weight off the frozen slush. In his metal hand, held tight against his hip, the brass anode was no longer glowing red. It was throwing a thin, jagged filament of blue light toward the Dodge’s iron frame, a continuous thread of static that hissed like fat in a skillet.
"Ridge trail," he breathed. His lips were blue. His left collar was smeared with soot where his jacket had scorched against his neck.
"You said the road was gone," she gasped, her hands sinking into the warm clay.
"The logging road is gone," he said. He didn't look back at the truck. "We take the drainage ditch through the limestone. The water in the ditch has salt in it from the road crew. It’ll ground the return."
"And them?" She pointed toward the hemlocks, where the amber pulse had stopped.
In its place, three shadows had separated from the trees. They were low to the ground, broad-shouldered, wearing quilted gray parkas that had no insignia, their faces obscured by dark, bug-eyed filters that hissed with each exhalation. One of them carried a long, fiberglass pole tipped with a three-pronged loop of copper tubing.
They weren't shouting. They moved with the terrifying, practiced leisure of linemen clearing a downed wire after a gale.
"They have twelve minutes before the transformer at Forestport catches fire," Barnes said. He grabbed her collar with his flesh hand, his grip like an iron hook, hauling her upright into the brush. "Move, Lily. Don't look at the light."
They threw themselves into the limestone trench.
The ditch was three feet deep, choked with dead ferns and black water that smelled of shale grease. The cold water closed over Lily's knees, soaking through her wool trousers, but when she looked down at the surface, she saw no reflection of the pale morning sky.
She saw the veins in her wrist.
They were spreading under her skin, black and distinct as ink drawn through water, pulsing with the exact, terrible cadence of the three-second flash from the woods.
Behind them, the Dodge didn't explode.
There was only a dull, hollow *thump*, like a heavy safe dropping into deep snow. A wave of warm, ionized air washed over the lip of the ditch, smelling of toasted rubber and ozone, followed by the sound of every leaf within thirty yards dropping from the hemlocks all at once, hitting the frozen mud with a sound like rain.
Lily lay in the black water, her forehead pressed against the wet limestone, her fingers dug into the roots of a dead cedar. She could not feel her feet. She could not feel her teeth.
Barnes was crouched above her, the rifle balanced across his forearm, his breathing ragged and thin. In his black metal palm, the brass thimble was cold now, dead and gray as an old cinder, but where his flesh wrist met the metal cuff, a thin line of fresh, dark blood was welling up from beneath the skin, running down into the wool of his sleeve like oil from a blown gasket.
He looked down at her. He didn't ask if she was hurt. He didn't tell her to run.
He reached down and touched the inside of her right wrist with his bare flesh thumb, right over the black veins that were humming against her pulse. His thumb was warm, rough with calluses, and shaking.
"Your uncle didn't have a pump house, Lily," he said, and for the first time, his voice sounded entirely tired. "He had a vault."