The exterior maintenance tunnel smelled of damp slag, transformer oil, and the sour rot of dead weeds caught in culvert grates.
Jonah Price led them away from the hatch Mara had already dogged shut. Gunfire battered the steel behind them. He raised his inspection lamp, found the painted sump arrow and beckoned them into the narrowing conduit.
“Keep moving,” he said. “The floor sensors ended at the hatch. The outer gate is two hundred yards ahead, past the condenser sump.”
Mara Vale adjusted the strap of her canvas receipt satchel across her collarbone. The leather was damp from the mist that had hung over Haven’s delivery yards, and the corners of the copybook pressed against her shoulder.
“How far to the outer culvert gate?” she asked.
“Two hundred yards,” Jonah said. “Past the condenser sump and under the main intake rotors. If the gate wheel is clear, it drops into the drainage ditch behind the old municipal substation. Outside the fence line.”
Behind her, Gideon Pike kept one hand against the rough cinderblock wall, his head turned toward the corridor they had just fled. He carried the iron valve wrench Jonah had thrust into his hand. His shotgun and revolver were still confiscated in Haven’s gate locker. In the dim amber safety light of the service wing, the blue bruise on his jaw from the yard confrontation was dark as a dipped ink rag.
