Chapter 15: The Reactor

"An hour," Brand said. "Then we're an hour behind."

"They went round us on the canal road," Sable said. "Nobody drives a Registry truck past our guns."

"How long is the canal road?"

"Two hours to the reactor. Maybe a bit less in that truck."

"And across the flats?"

Sable grinned. "Ninety minutes if you don't mind losing your teeth."

We were on the flats in ten.

Brand drove the first truck, with Sable and three of the crew.

I drove the second with the old salvage man, the radio, Gran's rifle and a bag of the medic's dry biscuits.

The flats were cracked white mud under a half moon.

The trucks bounced so hard I bit my tongue twice.

"You all right back there?" Brand said over the radio.

"Fine."

"You sound sick."

"I'm pregnant on a washboard. Drive."

The old man laughed so hard he coughed.

The reactor came up out of the dark at midnight.

Two great cooling towers, cracked and black against the stars.

A long low building between them, half its roof gone.

A chain fence round all of it, with a rusted gate hanging open on one hinge.

The outer fence.

I stopped the truck ten feet short of it.

Brand's truck stopped beside mine. He leaned out of his window.

"Not one step," he said.

"Not one."

He looked at me a second longer. Then he drove through the gate with his lights off and was gone.

The old man set up the radio on the hood.

Sable had rigged it with two channels. Ours, and a scanner that caught anything on Registry frequencies within five miles.

I held the tracker screen in my lap.

One green dot. Brand's tag.

It moved slowly round to the north side of the building, toward the cooling tower.

"Service tunnel," Sable's voice said. "Door's rusted. Give me a second."

The Registry channel crackled.

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