Alastair's Ultimatum

Malia's POV

My father had a way of saying hello that made you feel you'd already forgotten something.

I'd heard it across a dinner table for twenty-two years. Warm, interested, slightly amused. The voice of a man who has never needed to raise his volume. It came out of Marcus's cheap speaker and filled that stone chamber, and I felt every year of it climb the back of my neck.

"Jarrah, I imagine you're sitting down," the recording went on. "You'll want to be. I'm told the floor of the old vault has a sense of humour."

Jarrah's hand closed on my arm. I didn't think he knew he'd done it.

"I won't waste your time. I've never believed in long speeches, and I'm told you haven't the patience for them. So here is what's true. By the time you hear this, three of your supply depots will already be burning. Altona, Geelong, and the cold store at Portland. Not large ones. I chose the ones you wouldn't miss by much. This is a courtesy. A demonstration."

Marcus swore softly. His thumb jabbed at his own handset, and I saw his face change as something came through. He mouthed confirmed to Jarrah, and I felt the floor shift under me, though nothing had moved.

"The port network is next," my father said. "Every berth, every terminal, every warehouse your family has built since the war. I have the keys, Jarrah. I've had them longer than you've had the chair. I can have all of it on fire by dawn, and the men who work there, honest men with children, will be standing in the middle of it. That's not a threat. I find threats vulgar. It's arithmetic."

I had my hand pressed over my mouth. I didn't remember putting it there.

"There's a way to stop it. You hold something that belongs to me. A grey drive, and a token that should never have left the hand of a dead man. Bring both of them to the old customs house at first light. Come alone. Hand them over, and the port goes on breathing. Refuse, and I'll start with the Kessler Street berths, because I'm told your mother used to love them."

His voice softened. It always did, just before he cut.

"And Malia. I know you're listening. You always did stand too close to doors."

I couldn't breathe. It was a small, stupid memory, me at eight, pressed against his study door, and he had known it every time.

"You've chosen a side, sweetheart. I won't pretend I'm not disappointed. But you were always going to. You have your mother's heart, and it's led you into the same sort of trouble."

The recording ended with a click, and then the speaker went to static.

Nobody spoke. The mainframe ticked on in the corner, counting down to the thing my father wanted. 22:41:09. I looked at it, and then I looked at Jarrah, and what I saw made me forget my own fear for a second.

He was calm. That was the horror. He stood with his weight on his good side and his face emptied of everything, the way he looked when a decision had been made so far back that it didn't need him anymore.

"Marcus," he said. "How long is the customs house?"

"Forty minutes in a clear run. Longer, with the grid down."

"Prepare a car. A plain one. No escort."

"Boss..."

"I'm not asking."

"Jarrah." I stepped in front of him. I felt, absurdly, like I was standing in front of a door he'd decided to walk through. "No."

His eyes finally focused on me. "Malia, he'll burn the ports. There are four thousand people working those terminals. If I give him the drive..."

"If you give him the drive, you give him Callan." I heard my own voice, harder than I knew it could be. "You give him whatever my mother's name is attached to. And then you'll be standing alone in an empty building at dawn, and he'll have the drive and the token and you."

"He won't touch you."

"That's not what I'm worried about!"

It rang off the stone. Marcus, tactful for the first time that night, found a reason to look at the ceiling.

I lowered my voice. It cost me. "Listen to me. You promised me no secrets and no door closed. You said I'd hear it first. That I'd be there. And now you want to hand yourself to my father and call it protecting me?"

"It's the only..."

"It isn't. It's the oldest trick he has, and it's yours. The lonely brave thing. Your father did it. You do it every time." My eyes were stinging. "You catch me before I hit the water and you say you won't do the maths. Then you stand here doing the maths without me."

He opened his mouth. I closed it.

"Alastair is my father," I said. "I know how he thinks. I know what he checks twice and what he never checks at all. I know he'll have someone on every approach to that customs house, and I know he'd rather you came in alone, because alone is a version of you he already understands. A pair isn't." I took his face in my hands, the way I had in the cistern, and felt him lean into it before he could stop himself. "Together or not at all. You told me that. Down there. Do you remember?"

"I remember."

"Then say it like you mean it."

The seconds went by. I counted them by the clock on the wall and the numbers on the machine behind him. I thought, wildly, that I was about to lose him to his own kindness.

"Together," Jarrah said at last. It came out low, scraped raw. "God help me. Together."

I kissed him once, fast and hard, and let go.

Marcus returned with a tablet, and the three of us sat on the cold floor while he walked us through what he had. The depots were confirmed. Altona and Geelong were fully alight, Portland smouldering, no casualties yet. Rescue crews were choking on the dark with the grid still down. My father had thought of everything. He always did.

"Four options," I said when Marcus was done. I hadn't known I was going to say it until I did. "Hand it over. We lose the file, the ports go quiet, and he wins slowly."

"No," Jarrah said.

"Fight blind and lose half the ports." I held up a second finger. "Or stall. Make him think we're coming alone, and use the hours until dawn to do the one thing he doesn't expect."

"Which is?"

"Finish what he's afraid of." I pointed at the grey screen in the corner. "He needs the drive and token. But the machine is already decrypting them. If it completes while he's still waiting at the customs house, he's got nothing to hold over us. The contents will be ours, unredacted, in our hands, and I'd bet my life that's why he wants us in the one place where we can't watch it."

Jarrah was looking at me with an expression I'd never quite had pointed my way before. It took me a moment to name it. Respect, I thought, plain and unguarded, and something underneath it that made my face go warm.

"Twenty-two hours," he said.

"Twenty-two hours. We give him nothing until the last of it. We make him sweat."

"And the ports?"

"We protect them the way we can," I said. "Your people already know the terminals better than he does. Marcus, quietly, no broadcast. Move the night crews out of the berths. Tell them it's maintenance."

Marcus was already typing. "Can do. Won't be pretty."

"It doesn't have to be pretty," Jarrah said. He'd stopped looking at the screen. He was looking at me. "It has to be ours."

There it was. Not his, not mine, but ours. I felt it land somewhere I'd kept closed for most of my life, and it didn't hurt at all.

"All right," I said, and my voice finally shook. "All right. Partners."

He pressed his forehead to mine and breathed out, a long, unsteady breath. "Partners."

I think that was the moment I let myself believe it.

I was still leaning into him, my eyes shut, when I heard the first sound. A deep, dull thud from far above us. It wasn't loud. It was almost gentle, the way a door shuts in a faraway part of a big house.

Dust sifted from the ceiling. The walkway shivered once under my boots.

Marcus's head snapped up. "That's not the depot."

A second thud, much closer. The lights on the tablet flickered and died. Somewhere up the gantry, metal started screaming, a thin high whine like a cable coming apart.

"The lift," Jarrah said.

Marcus was already running. I heard his boots hammer along the gantry, and I heard him stop, and I heard what he said, flat and quiet, in the voice of a man who has just seen a thing he can't take back.

"The stairwell's gone. The whole shaft's come down."

Jarrah's hand found mine in the dark. Behind us, the mainframe went on ticking, patient and bright, counting out the hours we had left to live in a place my father had just sealed shut.