Chapter 55: The Informant

Marcus looked like he'd aged ten years in three weeks.

He was sitting on the edge of a cot in the facility's clean room because it was the only space available with a flat surface and a door, and Adela was cutting away the bottom of his left trouser leg with the specific focused expression she used when she was looking at something she needed to evaluate before deciding what to say about it. He had a three-week beard. His coat was torn at the left shoulder in a way that hadn't been stitched, just bound. He smelled like cold and woodsmoke and something River's body recognized as *three weeks of hard evasion.*

She stood in the doorway.

He looked up.

"Kid," he said. The word landed different than it used to—three weeks of carrying it somewhere uncomfortable. He cleared his throat immediately—reflexive, involuntary—and looked at Adela's hands instead.

"Marcus," she said.

She came in and sat on the equipment case across from him, close enough to see him properly. He looked at her face and then at her arm—the sling—and then back at her face.

"The arm," he said.

"Healing."

"What happened."

"Rock," she said. "I went off a slope."

He made a sound. Not the sound of someone who believed that was the whole story, but the sound of someone filing it for later. "The column," he said. "You got them here."

"Yes."

"How many."

"Three forty-two."

He exhaled—a long one, shoulders dropping a fraction. Not all of it going, most of it staying. "You should know," he said, "that my—that my being captured—I didn't—"

"I know," she said.

He stopped. Looked at her.

"Cal told me what happened at the river," she said. "You covered the rear to let us get across. I know you didn't—" She stopped. "I know."

He cleared his throat again. Looked at Adela's hands, which had found what she was looking for—a gash along the outside of his left shin, old, healing badly. Adela was cleaning it with the careful expression of someone deciding whether to reopen it. Marcus watched her work with the tolerance of a man who'd had worse.

"The camp records," River said.

He reached inside his coat and produced a waterproof packet, sealed. "Six nights ago. Guard change at oh-two-hundred had a gap that—" He stopped. "Let's say the discipline in that holding element was adequate but not exceptional." He held out the packet. "Everything they had on their position, their communication chain, their ammunition inventory. And—" He paused. "Orders. From Cain. Pre-dated three months."

"Pre-dated."

"Cain's been planning this for three months." He held her gaze. "The orders show the target acquisition. They show what he wanted and in what order and who was authorized to use what methods." He paused. "They show something else. You'll want to read it. Not tonight—tonight you have other problems. But you'll want to read it."

She took the packet.

"The files here," she said. "Ines has files about Cain. The Collapse. His role."

"I know about those files," Marcus said, in the tone of someone confirming rather than learning.

She looked at him.

"How," she said.

He held her gaze with the specific look of someone deciding how much to give her right now. Then: "Because your father talked about them. Before." He paused. "I told you there were things from my past that were complicated. Some of those things—they put me in proximity to people who were involved in what you're now involved in." He paused. "I'll tell you all of it. When this is resolved." He looked at her steadily. "I promise."

She looked at his face. At the man who'd found her at the village's ashes and walked her north for months and known routes and dangers and the kinds of things that people knew when they'd been alive and moving through the world for a long time.

She'd thought he was a simple traveler. She'd known for weeks he wasn't. The knowing and the not-knowing sat side by side still, unresolved, and now was not the time to resolve it.

"Okay," she said. "When this is resolved."

She stood up. Adela looked up at her with an expression that said: *he needs rest and antibiotics and I'm working on both.*

"Let Adela finish," River said. "Then sleep."

"I don't—"

"Sleep," she said. "You're not useful exhausted. You'll be useful tomorrow."

He looked at her for a moment and then seemed to decide she was right, or at least that arguing wasn't worth the calories.

She went back out.

---

Night came fast at this elevation. By five-thirty it was dark enough that the south watch was running on fire-discipline—small watch fires, positioned. Cal was back at the south wall with Bram, working the firing position logistics that had been running in his head since he'd left. She checked on him and then checked on the column and then found Mira.

"Tonight," River said. "Cain said tonight."

"I know," Mira said. She'd been running her board since the advance element arrived and her board now had annotations in four colors. "I've moved the children and the non-combatants to the interior room—the facility walkway, the one Ines's clean room feeds into. Interior walls, no exterior exposure. The combatants are at their positions." She paused. "Bernardo asked to take a gate position."

"His knees—"

"He knows," Mira said. "He asked anyway."

River thought about Bernardo, who had been one of the compound's logistics managers and who had walked three hundred kilometers on failing knees because everyone else was walking and he wasn't going to be the one who didn't.

"Gate position," she said. "Seated if Ramos can rig something."

Mira made a note.

River walked the positions one more time. The south wall was full—thirty rifles, people she'd been with for two weeks, people whose names she knew and whose faces she could read in the dark by now. The gate had its ten. The reserve nine were positioned in the courtyard, capable of reinforcing either side.

Cal found her at the south wall at eight.

"They're moving," he said. Not urgently—the quiet assessment voice. "The camp at the tree line. There's activity that wasn't there an hour ago."

She looked south. The tree line was dark—the Rider camp fires had been lowered, which meant the camp was reducing its visibility, which meant the probing action was coming.

"South wall holds," she said. "Nobody fires until I call it."

She went to the south wall and took a position.

---

They came at ten.

Twenty riders, moving fast up the slope from the tree line. Not a full assault—a probe. They spread wide, covering the full face of the approach, moving to present multiple targets at once and see where the response came from.

River held the call until seventy meters.

"Fire," she said.

Thirty rifles on the south wall, disciplined. The line held—she'd drilled it with Cal yesterday, the specific protocol of controlled fire that stretched ammunition without wasting it. The Rider advance took two casualties at seventy meters and turned at fifty.

They fell back to the tree line in ninety seconds.

The wall held. River counted her side: one person with a graze wound, arm, non-critical. Adela was already moving.

She stood at the wall and watched the tree line and felt the specific alertness that combat produced—the sharpened edges of everything, the way her mind ran faster and clearer.

"They were looking for weak spots," Cal said beside her. "Where the fire came from, how concentrated, whether there were gaps."

"Did they find any."

"Not tonight." He paused. "The east wall—Ramos's reinforcement. Nobody approached it."

"They might not know about it," River said.

"Or they do and they're saving it," he said.

She breathed. "Double the east watch. Tonight."

"Already done," he said.

She went back to her position and held it through the watch change at midnight and then at two and then the sky went the specific dark of three in the morning that was as dark as it was going to get, and at four the east watch called.

---

The call was wrong.

Not wrong in the sense of incorrect—wrong in the sense of late. The east watch call came from Jak, who was on his first night watch and was young enough that his voice still had the specific quality of someone reading from a script he hadn't quite memorized.

"Movement at the east perimeter," Jak said. "Two people."

River went to the east wall.

Bram was already there. He'd been there before the call, which meant he'd seen something and was assessing before he called it up. He turned when River arrived and his face was—not alarmed. The controlled look of someone who has processed bad news and is managing the delivery.

"The two people are inside," he said.

She went still.

"One of them is Gabe Portillo," he said. "From the column. He came out of the west outbuilding carrying something—I followed him here. The other one isn't from our group." He paused. "The other one came over the east perimeter wall." He paused again. "From outside."

The east wall. The cliff face approach, theoretically impossible. Theoretically.

"Where are they," River said.

"East edge of the courtyard," Bram said. "The section of wall that—"

"That Ramos reinforced," River said.

"Yes."

The wall Ramos had reinforced because Cal had identified the seam. The wall that only five people had known about: River, Cal, Ramos, and the two people Ramos had used to assist. She'd told nobody else. She'd been deliberate about that.

"Where's Gabe now," she said.

"I have him," Bram said. And he did—she looked past him and Gabe Portillo was sitting against the east outbuilding wall with the specific posture of someone who understood they'd been found.

Gabe was fifty-one years old. He'd been at the compound for four years before the Riders had taken it. He'd volunteered for construction work yesterday because, he'd told Mira, he'd been a contractor before the Collapse and the work felt useful. Mira had assigned him to Ramos.

He'd been on Ramos's wall team.

River walked over. Crouched in front of him.

He looked at her with the face of a man who wasn't trying to run the math anymore—the look of someone past the point where calculation was available to them.

"My wife," he said. "She's in Rider territory. Three months ago they took her—we got separated in the valley. They—" He stopped. "They found me here. Sent a message through the camp. If I passed them information about the Station—the defenses, the weak points—she'd be released." He looked at his hands. "Three months."

River looked at him.

"The seam in the east wall," she said.

"Yes."

"What else."

"The rifle count. The firing positions. The—" He stopped. "The baseline extraction. That there was—that you'd done it."

She held very still.

The Riders now knew the baseline was complete. Cain knew. Which meant his calculus had changed—the reason to keep negotiating, to keep the window open, was to secure the completed baseline. If they couldn't negotiate in and he knew the baseline was done—

"Where is the Rider contact now," River said to Bram.

"Took the east wall exit after the handoff," Bram said. "Headed back to the camp. I didn't chase—I needed to secure Gabe."

She looked at Gabe. At his hands. At the face of a man who'd done something that was going to cost people she was responsible for because someone else had taken someone he loved.

She breathed.

"Your wife's name," she said.

"Lia," he said. "Lia Portillo."

She stood up. Looked at Bram. "Hold him. He stays in the facility—clean room, the inner one. Not under violence, not restrained. He doesn't go anywhere." She paused. "Don't hurt him."

Bram nodded.

She went to find Cal.

---

She woke him from a short sleep with two words: "East wall."

He was up in two seconds. She told him walking—the seam, the contact, what Cain now knew.

Cal listened without breaking stride. He was already running the new math.

"The east wall seam," he said. "Even reinforced—if they come at it with tools and a team who knows exactly where to pressure—"

"How long."

"Twenty minutes," he said. "If they know where. Ramos's reinforcement was good but it wasn't—it wasn't built for a targeted assault."

"We have until morning," River said. "Whatever Cain's planning, he won't move in the dark on a cliff face approach he's never tested." She paused. "Can we reinforce the seam more."

"Not substantially in—" He checked the sky. "Three hours."

"What can we do in three hours."

"We can add mass," he said. "Equipment, materials, bracing. Make it harder to breach without making it structurally stronger." He paused. "Ramos would need to assess."

"Wake him," she said.

She went back to the south wall while Cal went to wake Ramos.

The tree line was quiet. Cain's camp was quiet. The south approach showed nothing moving.

River stood at the wall and looked south and thought: Cain knows the baseline is done. He knows the east wall has a seam. He knows our rifle count.

Tomorrow morning he wasn't going to send a messenger.

She watched the tree line and thought about what she had: forty-nine rifles, three hours of darkness, a man in the east clean room whose wife was somewhere in Rider territory, and Marcus Webb asleep in the facility with a waterproof packet of Rider camp records pressed against his chest.

She breathed.

Then she went to find Mira, because the morning needed a plan and plans were things you made now so you weren't making them in the middle of the action.

The east wall held through the night.

She wouldn't find out until dawn how Cain intended to change that.