Ben Dover's Arc

Chapter 78 of 150

Ben pulled the crate across the wash. Eileen waited on the flat rock with her lynx at her heel. She did not smile. She did not wave twice. She just watched him come, the way she used to watch him climb down from the barn roof when they were children. He reached her. She took the second cord without a word and leaned into it. The crate moved faster with two. "North road is dead," Eileen said. "They have men at every ford. East is worse." "Then where?" "I don't know yet." Ben stopped. Millie sat up on the crate. The pines were four hundred paces off. Past them, nothing he could name. "You brought me out here without a hole to crawl into?" "I brought you out here alive," Eileen said. "That was the first job." She pulled again. He pulled with her. They dragged the crate into the shade of the first pines and set it down. Eileen crouched by the roots and drew a square in the dirt with a stick. "There's a man," she said. "Vault-cracker. Grandfather built a box a hundred years back that no one has opened. This one's spent three years on it. He owns the deed. He owes nobody." "Name." "Jack Pott." Ben had heard the name twice in ten years, both times spoken low. "He won't take the crate." "He will if we don't tell him what's in it. He needs a reason to be somewhere else while his cousins ask him questions about the vault. A locked crate in his cellar is a reason. He gets a story. We get walls no one has cracked in a hundred years." "How far?" "Two days. There's a carter who owes me. He'll take us at dusk if I ride ahead now and pay him before the herbalist's price finds his door." Ben looked at the crate. He looked at Millie. He looked at his sister for the first time in the light. "Go," he said. Eileen stood. She pulled a folded paper from her coat and pressed it into his hand. A crude map. A creek, a broken fence, a mark shaped like a keyhole. "Be at the fence by dusk," she said. "If I'm not there, don't wait past dark." "Eileen." She stopped. "If he says no?" "He won't say no to me." She whistled once. The lynx rose. "He said no to me once. He learned." She went east through the trees at a run. The lynx cut ahead of her and was gone. Ben sat down beside the crate. Millie handed him the water skin. For the first time since the shrine burned, he had a name on the map past the wash. Not a shelter. A door with a lock behind it, and someone who did nothing but open locks. He folded the paper and put it in his shirt. Two days to the fence. He picked up the cord.