Tasha followed him to the back of the little concrete-walled utility room. “FYI, I’ve explored every inch of this place, and I haven’t found anything remotely like an escape hatch.”
He motioned to the metal shelving unit that held a tool kit and other maintenance supplies. The wall behind it had a small, cast-iron door—like an entrance to an old-time coal room—just big enough for a man of his size to squeeze through.
“That?” Tash asked as he started clearing off the shelves to make them easier to move. “No, it’s barely even a closet. It’s only about four inches deep.”
“You already opened it?” he asked.
“Well, yeah,” she said. “One of the times you were out checking for messages. I wanted to make sure it wasn’t a secret passageway to Narnia.”
“So you moved this shelf?” he asked. “All by yourself?”
“Yup,” she told him, already starting to help him clear the shelves, carrying a pile of rags to the work counter over by the gun locker. “It’s not that heavy once it’s empty, and it seemed pretty obvious to me that either that little door led to nowhere, or the shelf was in front of it for a capital-R Reason. Like it contained a stash of jewels or burner cell phones or the recipe to the Queen’s Secret Sauce. But it was empty. Although you should definitely look, in case I’m wrong and it’s got—I don’t know—some kind of false back...?”
“I hope it does.” Thomas nodded as he lugged a heavy tool kit across the room. “A door like that, yet the interior’s only four inches deep...? God, I hope it’s the hatch. If it’s not, we’ll have to spend the next few hours banging on the walls.”
“Ooh, fun,” she said, grabbing an armload of umbrellas. “Oh, wait, no, you meant actually banging, as in knocking and listening for a covered-up door. Boo.”
Thomas shot her a look. “Now you’re just being evil.”
“I don’t get why we need to leave the pod if the power goes out. We have flashlights and plenty of candles. And yeah, the toilet situation will get unhappy, although we can schedule a few pressure flushes.” She held up the ancient metal bucket she was moving across the room. “I bet we have at least a couple of buckets of gin.”
She was right about that. The pressure from a bucket of water—or gin—would force the contents of the toilet down the sewage pipe. But...
“Toilet’s the least of my worries,” Thomas told her. “See, if the power goes out, that means the hostiles found the underground power lines. And yeah, that might be due to luck, but it most likely means they’ve dug into public records and found the construction plans for the shelter. And once they have that info, it’s over for us. They’ll know about the escape hatch—and at the least they’ll set up guards at that exit. At worst, they’ll try to use it to breach the shelter. Of course, they won’t really need to do that, because if they have the plans, they can mess with the ventilation system and force us out—or just plain suffocate us, if their goal is to kill you—us.”
“No, you were right the first time.” As Tasha turned to look at him, all sense of play and teasing was gone from her face. “You’re just the bodyguard—I’m the one they’re after. Without me, this all goes away.”
“That may have been true at the start,” he said. “But not anymore. They now know better than to keep me alive. So don’t be thinking—”
“I don’t want you to die because of me,” she said. “I mean, I don’t want you to die, period, but—”
“I have no intention of dying anytime soon.”
“Said everyone, always,” Tasha pointed out, “even those who were moments from their unintentional death.” She took a deep breath. “If this is an escape hatch, I want you to use it. Without me.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Tasha could tell from the expression on Thomas’s face that he’d misunderstood her. He thought she was making some kind of weird, selfless sacrifice.
“I mean that you should use it to go get help,” she explained. “Without me slowing you down. You know, you go find a phone. In town. While I wait. Here. For you to come back and save me. I’m not insane.”
Thomas smiled briefly at that. “I know.”
“I think you’re still learning that,” she countered, stepping forward to help him move the shelf before he waved her back.
“I got this. Just...” Give him space.
She did as he swung one end of the metal shelving unit away from the wall that held the funny little cast-iron door.
“If you really believed I’m not insane,” Tasha said, “you wouldn’t have made that face.”
The belt of his robe had become loosened, and Thomas refastened it as he made another face at her. “What face?”
“The face you made,” she said. “The uh-oh face.”
“I’m... pretty sure that’s just my face.”
“Then you must be thinking uh-oh a lot when you’re with me.”
He laughed at that. “That is not entirely incorrect.”
“I think you thought I was offering to... What? Surrender myself to the goon squad out there, in a selflessly dramatic If only one of us can live let it be you-type deal? And yeah, okay, gun to my head, I will definitely beg for your life: I’ll go willingly if you spare him, you know, because I would go willingly if they... but I wouldn’t... I mean, that’s absolute final-option thinking. That’s plan Z-squared.”
Thomas nodded as he opened the little door, crouching down to look inside. “Good to know.”
“And I know I’ve been loudly repetitive about you not English Patient-ing me,” Tash told him, leaning in over his shoulder to get another look at the weird half-closet as he ran his hands across and around its narrow little dull-metal insides, “and the idea of you leaving me here alone scares me. Badly. But if there really is an escape hatch, we need to use it to escape in a way that actually allows us to escape this entire situation. Not just get out of here, but then get caught a mile down the mountain. So I have to grit my teeth and let you save us. And I’m pretty sure that means me waiting here while you do things that’ll be much harder for you to do successfully if you’re dragging me down a mountainside in the freezing cold.”
He glanced at her as he straightened up and moved across the room to jam his feet into his pair of too-small doctored boots that he’d set neatly beneath his still-drying raincoat. “I’m not going to English Patient you.”
Except that was more of those best intentions they’d been discussing earlier. It was exactly what the actual English patient—Ralph Fiennes’s character—had promised before leaving Kristin Scott Thomas’s character to die alone in a cave, in the dark, while he went to get help. He was certain he’d return and save her, and yet...
Tash must’ve been giving Thomas her own version of an uh-oh face, because he laughed a little then added, “I appreciate your courage and your willingness to stay here, I really do. But we’ve gone past the point of no return in terms of that option. We’re working with a different scenario now. They know where you are, Tash, and I’m not leaving you in a position of undeniable vulnerability. If they cut the air to the pod...? Nah, there’s no viable plan B if you’re alone when that happens. When we go, we’re going together.”