bomb.”
Not having any fear might not make me a murderer, but it sure did make me rash.
thirty-eight
I TASKED Pilar with finding me something heavy and metal, and with delicate precision started cataloguing the logic of Fifer’s bomb. The wires disappeared into the air vents in the walls, whatever system they were rigged into inaccessible to me. I wished I had enough leeway to experiment and figure out exactly what all the functions were—when I did X, what Y fell out on D.J. and Checker’s end—but gathering data might have gobbled one or both of our remaining clocks. So I had two simpler goals: set off the whole mess as early as possible and transfer all remaining time to D.J., and somehow introduce a tiny bit of delay so that some of it went before the rest.
Pilar came back from the bunkroom with a heavy metal flashlight. “Will this do?”
“Perfect.” I’d started counting down infallibly in my head, but I checked the two timers to make sure nothing had changed. D.J.’s clock was back above fourteen, ours at 19:28.
If possible, I wanted to give them at least fifteen of those minutes.
I didn’t bother to remind myself the germ of an idea in my head might not even be possible. The flashlight would tell me. I took the heavy metal cylinder from Pilar and began tapping it along the walls of the safe room.
Sound waves echoed back at me, dully telegraphing the solidity of steel and concrete, the oscillations drawing out the perfect, invisible acoustic picture. Pristine and uncracked. No weak points.
I kept going, letting the sound graph out an X-ray of the walls for me. I tapped across first the surveillance room, then into the bunkroom, all the while both timers ticking down in my head.
Nothing. The place was tight as a drum.
If I’d been capable, I might have started feeling nervous.
“What about the ceiling?” Pilar asked.
I looked up. Difficult. First to direct a charge up there, and then to rig ourselves somehow to catapult out. Alone I could have done it, maybe …
I cut off that line of thought before I started questioning the balance of Pilar’s life versus Tabitha’s. “I haven’t tried the floor yet,” I said instead.
Not that I was optimistic. An earthquake safe room would probably be built right against the ground, even if this mansion was fancy enough to support the rare beast of a Southern California basement under other rooms.
But when I struck the floor near the back wall of the bunk room, the thunk of a new acoustic skeleton was the sweetest sound I’d ever heard.
“Here.” I tapped more, listening for the echo through solid and then a blessedly close boundary, sounding across the patch of floor and drawing out the outline in my head. We’d have almost no margin for error. A small slice against the wall—barely big enough for one human to stand on, let alone two—was admitting to some miniscule overlap with empty space below it. Empty space, and a floor telling us it was just unreinforced enough for a shaped charge to bust through, given how everywhere else it sat firmly against unyielding earth.
Of course, I had no idea what was underneath. It might be no more than a vent of a crawl space. If so, we were fucked.
Oh well.
Nine and a half minutes, said D.J.’s clock in my head. We could still give him another ten.
“I need you to do exactly as I say,” I said to Pilar. I didn’t bother telling her the unknown variables still might kill us. Either we’d survive, or she’d die not knowing the difference. “Pull the bottom mattress off the bunks, and push the bed frames away from the wall a few feet.”
While she did that, I scanned my eyes over the rest of the contents of the room. The casings from the broken communications equipment were passable, but some of the metal canisters the emergency rations were in would work even better. I dumped them out and banged the metal hard against the wall to deform it, angles playing out in my head and the theatrical ticking omnipresent in the background.
“What can I do now?” asked Pilar.
“Stand there.” I pointed, then went to the other room and very, very carefully tugged out one of the canisters of explosive material. The wiring would only let it move so far, but I yanked one of the useless radio wires from the tangle, pulled my knife, and spliced the new wire in before slicing through