Chapter 71: The Underground Tunnel

Rayén's POV

Choose the right throat.

I read it three times, standing in my bedroom with a razor blade across my palm. Then I folded the note into a square so small it hurt my fingers and tucked it into my bra. I slid the blade into my boot, the same boot I'd worn through the harbor, and went to find my husband.

He read it in the linen closet by the light of his phone. His face did not change, and that was how I knew it had hit him.

"She wants us at that table tonight," he said.

"She wants us above ground."

"Yes."

"So the trapdoor is a trap." I kept my voice level. "She knows Osvaldo's key. She knows the market. If we go down the way he told us, she's waiting at the bottom."

"Or he told her himself."

"He cried when he gave it to me."

"People cry at their own betrayals, Rayén. Sometimes loudest of all."

I wanted to argue. Instead I thought of Osvaldo's burn scar, his white mustache, his big hands pressing the key into mine, and a cold little voice in me said, you don't know. You've never known.

"Millaray found another way," Lautaro said. "An old maintenance shaft off the Los Héroes line. Closed in the nineties. Her father's survey shows it running under Alameda and meeting the old riverbed drain past the grate. We'd come in at the far end, behind the water gate."

"Past the grate."

"Where your father's route ends and nobody's watching."

I nodded slowly. It was a good plan. It was also exactly the kind of plan someone makes when they trust no one, and I felt the weight of that settle between us like a third person in the closet.

Dinner lasted ninety minutes and felt like a week.

I wore the ivory silk. My mother kissed both my cheeks and said I looked like a bride again, and I thanked her. She asked Lautaro about his shoulder, his horses, his sister. She poured wine. She watched me over the rim of her glass like a woman waiting for a letter. When Lautaro stood at half past ten and said his wife was unwell and needed rest, she pressed a hand to her chest and said, "Of course, of course," and never once looked away from my hem.

I felt every stitch.

By midnight we were in Millaray's van, wearing black. By one, we stood at the bottom of a rusted ladder in a place no map would show, and the air smelled of wet iron and old cigarettes.

"Down," Lautaro said, and went first.

The shaft was narrower than Millaray had promised. We moved in single file, sometimes upright, sometimes stooped, once crawling on elbows through a pipe so tight my shoulders scraped both sides. Water dripped somewhere ahead of us. My flashlight showed me the back of his jacket and nothing else. The dark didn't feel empty. It felt full, as though it had been waiting.

"Left," he murmured, at a fork.

"The plan says right."

"The plan's wrong. There's a collapse." He paused. "I can smell it."

I frowned. "How do you know this tunnel?"

For a moment there was only the drip of water. Then, very quietly, "I came here once with your father. The other half. Before he took me up."

"You said that already."

"I know."

"But you didn't say you'd walked it twice."

He stopped. In the dim light I watched his shoulders rise and fall. "Rayén. I'm not hiding it from you. I'm just... I don't have a way of saying it that doesn't sound like something worse."

"Try."

"I walked it once the night he died." His voice was low and raw. "He was already bleeding. He wanted me to see where the archive began. He thought if he showed me, I'd keep you away from it."

I stood very still. The beam of my flashlight trembled on the wall.

"And did you?"

"I tried." A short, humorless breath. "You're not easy to keep away from things."

I laughed. I couldn't help it. It came out cracked and surprised, and he turned and looked at me, and the whole shape of his face softened in the gloom.

"There she is," he said.

Halfway through, the ceiling dropped so low that we had to crawl.

He went ahead. I followed. The pipe was cold and slick, and I could hear him breathing through his teeth, the sound he made when the wound pulled. After the third time I reached out and caught his boot.

"Stop."

"I'm fine."

"You're not. Stop for a second."

He stopped. I pushed myself forward until my face was level with his calf, and then his knee, and then I was beside him in the cramped dark with my cheek nearly against his ribs. I could feel the heat of him. I could feel his pulse pounding in the arm beside mine.

"Do you still have it?" he said, so quietly I almost missed it.

"What?"

"The blade."

I hesitated. "In my boot."

"Good."

"Good?"

"I'd rather you had it than not." His breath stirred my hair. "Do you still want to use it?"

The question sat there in the dark. I thought of my mother's note. I thought of the ivory dress, the cold slide of silk, the night I had stood in a white room and held a knife to this man's throat and felt my whole life narrow to one clean line.

"I haven't decided whose throat," I said.

A pause. Then, soft, almost amused, "If it's mine, do it where it counts."

"Lautaro."

"I'm only saying. I'd hate for you to waste the trip."

I turned my face into his sleeve to hide my smile, and felt his hand come up and rest, briefly, on the back of my head. It was the lightest touch. It undid me more than any kiss in the water had.

The tunnel opened without warning.

One moment the pipe, the next an arched stone chamber and the smell of old river. The drain. I knew it at once, the long curve, the dripping bricks, the wet stone at the end that had once frightened me. And there, at the far end, black and round-cornered, a door with a wheel.

The water gate.

I took one step toward it. Lautaro's arm shot out across my chest.

"Wait."

The wheel was turning.

Slowly, without sound, from the inside. The iron groaned. A seam of yellow light cut across the stone floor, and the gate swung open an inch, then a foot, then wide.

A figure stood in the doorway with a lantern on the floor behind him. Lean. Dark hair tied tightly back. A long scar across the left forearm. A pistol held level, steady as a rock, pointed at Lautaro's heart.

"Conco," I breathed.

My brother's eyes found mine. They were red-rimmed and wild, and so much older than I remembered.

"Hello, little sister," he said. His voice cracked on the last word. "Step away from him."

"Conco, no, he's—"

"Rayén." The gun didn't waver. "He lied to you about the night I died."