The Final 5%

Malia's POV

The screen said ninety-five percent, and I stopped breathing to look at it.

Nineteen hours of watching that bar crawl. I'd sat in front of it through the cold and the dust and the long grey middle of the night, learning its rhythm the way you learn a stranger's cough. One percent every fifty minutes, give or take. Then the last stretch had sped up, and now there was almost nothing left to wait for.

"Jarrah." I didn't turn around. "Come and look."

He was across the chamber with his back against the wall, and his eyes closed, trying to give his ribs an hour to behave. He opened one eye. Then both. He was beside me before I'd finished saying his name, one hand braced on the cabinet, the other pressed to his side.

"Ninety-five," he said quietly.

"Five more."

"Five more." He said it like a man testing a step he didn't trust. "That's the part where something goes wrong. It always is."

"Don't."

"I'm only saying what you're thinking."

He was right, which annoyed me. I put my palm flat on the steel faceplate, the way you'd steady a nervous animal, and that was when I felt it. Warm. Not the gentle warmth of a machine that had been running all night. A real heat, climbing under my hand, like pressing my palm to the side of a kettle.

I took my hand away. The air smelled faintly of hot plastic.

"Jarrah."

"I smell it."

"It's the drive." I was already crouching, searching the side of the cabinet for the small panel where the grey brick sat in its cradle. "It's sitting right against the casing. If the casing's hot..."

He laid two fingers on the metal beside the cradle and snatched them back.

"How hot?"

"Hot enough that Doran would've called it a fire." He swore, low and soft. "The cooling system. It's been on a loop since before I was born. It must have got stuck at the first sign of any real load."

Real load. My father's face came up in my head, absurdly, and I pushed it down. Alastair hadn't done this. Nobody had. Twenty years of dust and one clever machine, doing what it was built to do and cooking itself alive.

That did not make me feel better. It made me feel stupid, as though I'd come this far and could still lose it to a bad pipe.

There was a thermometer on the cabinet that I hadn't noticed. It was an old analogue dial with a red needle and a painted green band, and the needle had already crossed out of the green. As I watched, it ticked another notch.

"What's the limit?" I asked. "Where does the drive give up?"

"I don't know." Jarrah was circling the machine, running his hand along the back. "Marcus said the casing is rated to something stupid. A hundred and twenty, maybe. After that, the board warps. After that, the file's gone."

"And that's... what? Half an hour?"

"Less, if it keeps climbing."

I looked at the percentage. 95. It hadn't moved. I realised I was holding the edge of the cabinet with both hands, and let go.

"Where's the coolant?"

"Behind. There's a service hatch." He pulled a torch off his belt. The beam found a square panel of riveted steel set low into the back, with a stencilled word I couldn't read. "My father had a joke about this thing. He said it was the only member of the family that ran cold."

"It isn't now."

"No."

He worked at the rivets with the butt of his torch. I gripped the other side of the panel, and we pulled together, and it came away with a shriek of rust. A wave of heat rolled out. It hit my face and made my eyes water, and the smell was worse, metallic and sweet.

Behind the hatch lay a tangle of pipes as thick as my forearm, some bound in cloth, some bare. Two stood out. They ran into a junction box with a pair of cast-iron wheels, each as big as a dinner plate, rusted a deep orange. Both wheels were turned all the way to one side.

"Valves," Jarrah said. "They've seized shut. Somebody, some engineer, must have thought it was safer not to let anything flow."

"Can we open them?"

"They'll have to be turned by hand." He ran his sleeve over his forehead. The sweat was already shining on him. "And the pipe on this side is carrying steam."

"Steam."

"From the boiler loop. It's the only way the thing cooled itself, I think. Heat goes out through one line, cold comes in on the other." He looked at the wheels and then at me, and I saw him decide to tell me the truth before I had to ask. "The metal will be hot, Malia. A lot hotter than the casing."

"How hot?"

"I'd rather not find out with my hands."

I took a slow breath. I thought of the way Jarrah had said *no secret* in the candlelight, and how heavily it had landed on me. If this drive burned, Callan's truth wasn't the only thing we'd lose. It was the only place my mother existed on any record at all. Nobody had written her down but a police index. I wasn't going to let a rotten pipe take her twice.

The air tasted like a struck match. Somewhere under the floor, deep in the old stone, a low groan sounded, like the building itself was clearing its throat.

"Then we won't find out with our hands," I said. "Give me your jacket."

We soaked everything we had in the cistern run-off from the corridor, three torn lengths of canvas and both our coats, until they were dripping and cold and heavy as wet sand. It took ten minutes. I counted every one of them against the needle.

Jarrah wound a strip of canvas around each of my hands without asking, and I let him. He did it with great care, the way he did everything with my hands, checking the wrap with his thumb. I watched his face while he worked. A line had come between his eyebrows that hadn't been there a month ago.

"You don't have to do this," he said. "I can take both."

"One of them will be on the far side. You can't reach both at once."

"Then I'll do one, and you hold the torch."

"Jarrah."

"I mean it." His voice cracked a little. "I can't watch you burn yourself for a file."

"It isn't for a file." The words came out sharper than I meant. I made myself soften them. "It's for Callan. It's for my mother. It's for every night you've gone quiet in a room, and I've pretended not to notice. I didn't come down here to hold the torch."

He stared at me. I saw the argument rise in him and I saw it die. He tied the last knot with an almost angry tug.

"On three," he said.

"We always say three."

"It's a good number."

We knelt on either side of the open hatch. The heat pressed on my face like a hand. My wrapped fingers found the rim of the wheel, and even through the soaked canvas it felt wrong, too alive. I thought, very clearly, I'm going to regret this.

"One," Jarrah said. "Two."

"Three."

The wheel didn't turn.

I threw my whole weight against it, and the rust held like it had been welded. Pain shot up my wrists. Beside me, Jarrah grunted, and I heard something in his side catch, a wet little sound that made my stomach lurch.

"Stop. Your ribs."

"Keep pulling."

"You'll break something."

"Malia, pull."

I pulled. The wheel gave a quarter turn with a crack like a gunshot, and a jet of steam spat from the joint and caught my left hand through the canvas. It was a thin white flash of pain, so sharp and so total that it didn't register as pain at all, only as a wrongness. The wet cloth was already steaming. I heard myself make a sound.

"Let go!" Jarrah's hand was on my wrist. "Let go, let go..."

"No!" I'd never been so stubborn in my life. "It's moving. Don't you dare stop!"

I turned it another quarter. The heat was inside my glove now, a stripe of fire across the back of my hand. My eyes streamed. The valve groaned, turned, groaned, and then something deep in the pipe let go with a sigh, and I felt a pulse of cold run up the line against my knuckles.

"It's open." My voice was gone. "Jarrah, it's open. Do yours."

He was already on the other wheel. I watched him haul it with his shoulders and his teeth, and I saw the burn bloom across his forearm where his sleeve had ridden up. He didn't make a sound. He swung his whole bad side into the last turn, and I heard the second valve crack open, and a long hiss filled the chamber, like the machine was exhaling after being held underwater.

The thermometer needle shivered. Then, very slowly, it began to fall.

We sat there for a long time without speaking.

I leaned my back against the cabinet, my hands in my lap like two things that belonged to someone else, and watched the needle sink toward the green. Jarrah sat opposite, staring at his arm. The skin from his wrist to his elbow was angry red, shiny at the edges, a pattern like spilled paint.

"That's going to blister," I said.

"I know."

"And you let me tell you off for being stubborn."

"You were right." His mouth twisted. "I hate it when you are."

I started laughing. It hurt. I put my wrapped fist against my mouth to stop, and the laugh turned into something wetter, and he moved across the floor, wincing, and sat beside me. He didn't try to hold me. He took my left hand very gently and unwound the canvas, one turn at a time, until my skin lay bare in the torchlight.

"It's not deep," he said, after a moment, and I heard how much he wanted that to be true. "It'll sting for days. But it isn't deep."

"Your arm is worse."

"My arm doesn't matter."

"Yes, it does."

He looked up at me. His face was a mess of soot and sweat and exhaustion, and he'd never looked so completely like himself. Something in my chest shifted, quietly, like a door being unlocked from the inside.

"I should say something," he said. "About how you went at that wheel. About how I've never seen anyone..."

"Then don't." I put my good fingers against his mouth. "Say it when we're out."

"When we're out," he agreed against my fingertips.

I let my head fall onto his shoulder. The heat was draining from the room. The percentage on the screen had started moving again, ninety-five becoming ninety-six, small and stubborn, and I felt a flicker of something I hadn't dared feel in days. It might have been hope. It might just have been alive.

Then I heard the radio.

It was lying on the floor where Marcus had left it for us, a battered handset that had crackled uselessly since the stairwell came down. Now it spat out a burst of static, and a man's voice cut through, breathless and young, one of ours from the sea tunnel.

"...repeat, we have movement at the sea wall. Many men. They've cut the outer gate. They're coming in." A pause full of white noise. Then, flatter, quieter, as if he were speaking into his own hands: "They've brought everything."

Jarrah was on his feet before the voice finished. I watched him grab his jacket from the floor, wince, and set his shoulders anyway. When he looked down at me, I knew, with a clarity that made my burned hand throb, that whatever came down that tunnel was going to arrive before the bar reached a hundred.