“Somewhere beneath the old Josston Mills complex.”
She squinted at him and reached as though to tweak his nose, but almost put his eye out instead. He grabbed her hand before it could do any damage.
“I think you have six, maybe seven noses.”
He patted her cheek to get her attention. “Do you think you can stay upright?”
“I feel all tippy.” As if to illustrate, she started to keel over. Cade caught her, and again she was totally out. He hoisted her back over his shoulder and set off once more.
Who would have ever guessed that one day he’d be carrying around an unconscious legend of almost two hundred years ago, in the bowels of an old mill complex? Certainly not he. But he’d come a long way from not believing who she said she was, even when the professor had insisted she spoke the truth. His professor, his mentor who was likely sacrificing himself this night.
Cade could not afford to think about the professor or the life he had left behind. He surged through the tunnel, which sloped gently downward on its way to the river. Nothing would ever be the same again. He could not return to the university to resume his studies. If Inspectors were knocking down the doors of the old mill, they would inevitably go in search of the professor’s students for questioning. Cade could not get himself caught—he knew too much.
He slowed when he came to the foundation of the mill across the courtyard. Its turbine must have been salvaged, and the penstock, too, for there was only a gaping hole into the basement above. The scent of old, wet soot mixed with a current of freshening air that circulated from the outlet at the river. Odd light flickered above, and he knew this mill to be a ruin open to the sky. He’d explored the remains of the complex some during daytime hours. The roof and floors had collapsed and only one jagged wall of brick still stood. During his explorations, he’d found soot-blackened manacles still chained to a loom buried beneath a pile of rubble.
The professor should have knocked down the last of the ruins and filled in the foundations. He should have sold off the land, a prime mill location with water rights. But the professor had held on to this one complex, the one that had been ravaged by fire, not so much because of the single remaining building where he could store his collection of artifacts, but because this, all of this, was a monument to his guilt. It forced him to remember. The professor had never said as much, but Cade had been around him enough to know, to pick up on comments and moods. The memory of the fire had driven the professor’s support of the opposition.
Cade stepped over debris that had fallen down the penstock hole—blackened bricks, moldering wood, dead leaves. The floor here was damp, weather had found its way through the ruins to this place. He slipped as he hurried on, but was surefooted enough not to tumble and drop Karigan.
At long last he reached the end of the tunnel, the damp air of the river flowing full on through the arched opening of the outlet. Wavelets slurped at the retaining wall that girded the river bank. Crickets chirped in the distance.
The professor’s boat was actually stored in the tunnel, covered with a tarp. Cade carefully set Karigan and his other burdens down, and pulled the tarp off the boat. It was a very small row boat. He worked quickly, tossing Karigan’s satchel and the staff into it, and pushed it toward the opening. If the river were higher, more level with the tunnel’s outlet, he might have put Karigan in the boat, too, but it was not and he did not wish to risk injuring her from too much jostling.
He worked the boat over the edge, bow first into the water. He held onto a line connected to the bow and watched the boat bob on the surface, relieved it did not sink. He turned to gather up Karigan, but she was sitting and staring back up the tunnel, her hand outstretched.
“Karigan?” Cade asked, keeping his voice low. There was no telling how sound would travel on the river.
“He is saying good-bye,” she said.
Cade flashed the taper into the darkness thinking perhaps the professor had followed them after all. No one was there. She must be experiencing strange visions from the morphia, like when she’d seen his six—or was it seven?—noses. He’d heard morphia could be like that.
“We are going to get into the boat, very carefully,” Cade told her, and he helped her to her feet, draped her arm around his neck, and held her steady.
“Good-bye,” Karigan said, glancing once more down the tunnel.
“Who are you saying good-bye to?”
“My uncle.”
Waves of foreboding coursed through Cade. They stood now on the very edge of the tailrace tunnel’s outlet, and he had to figure out how to get her into the boat without getting them both wet. Karigan started to sag against him and rested her head on his shoulder as she dropped out of consciousness again.
He sighed. “Oh, professor, what have you done?”
The sky lit up reflecting a fiery glow on the river, followed by a thunderous explosion that sent a gust of air and a throaty roar rumbling down the length of the tunnel.
“What in damnation?”
He stood rooted in shock trying to make sense of it, but the roar grew, the wind from the tunnel pushing at his back. He turned, peering down the tunnel with his light, at first uncomprehending. When he registered the wall of water rushing down the tunnel at him, it was already too late to get out of the way.
SWIMMING IN FLAMES
Cade tossed Karigan into the river ahead of him, jumping just as the water slammed into his back.
The cold black river swallowed him. The flow that rushed from the tailrace hammered him beneath the surface. He fought upward in a panic, limbs thrashing against the pounding, lungs aching for air. He hadn’t the strength to break the surface beneath the weight and force of all that water pouring down on top of him.