Garrett turned away sharply. He had known Harland from years earlier and remembered a man who could turn an ordinary disagreement into a record of imagined injuries. Garrett had disliked him without thinking him capable of something so elaborate. The possibility left him angry, but underneath the anger was a kind of shame. The people in that hall had been gathering on the same date for decades, certain the familiar building could not surprise them. Familiarity had become the thing that concealed the threat.
At the east wall, another group had reached the ground. Mara marked them off. Fifty-one members were outside. Twelve remained inside with Ronan, Mara, Cutter, Garrett, and Eli moving among them. The count included every club member only once, so the boy was kept separate on the list. This was Mara's insistence, not because he mattered less, but because the roster was meant to account for the people who had arrived for the gathering.
Then one of the men who had gone outside came back through the window opening with a message. The creek beside the road had risen over the culvert, and the fire engines were still several miles away. Volunteers outside had moved the evacuees uphill toward a sheltered stand of trees, but the weather was becoming rough enough that people were stumbling in the mud. The rescue had succeeded in one way and become harder in another.
"Do we stop until the rain eases?" Garrett asked.
"No," Ronan answered. "We keep moving."
The older man with the bad knee had already reached the safe area. Two more people needed assistance, one because of a sprained ankle and another because he became dizzy while standing near the window. They were moved forward carefully, with more time given to each than to the younger members. Cutter remained at the frame, a steady pair of hands between the room and the storm.
Eli found himself standing near Mara as she checked the plans one final time. She was still studying the hidden route, trying to understand why someone would tamper with a corridor they could have simply sealed. The answer came to her in a slow, uncomfortable sequence.
"The corridor might be bait," she said.
"Because it's on the plans?" Eli asked.
"Because it's an obvious secondary exit once somebody finds the old drawings. An attacker doesn't have to guess what people will do if the main exits fail. They only have to understand which option looks most attractive."
Eli remembered the new conduit and the gray box pulsing in the darkness. He thought about the metallic sound that had just traveled beneath the floor and about the old access shaft at the north end of the passage. He could not know the exact purpose of the modification, but the idea was frighteningly simple: a hidden route that looked like rescue could be another place where people were endangered.
Mara folded the plans. "We aren't using it. Nobody goes near it. That's settled."
Eli nodded. "It's a trap inside the trap."
"That's what we're treating it as until somebody qualified proves otherwise."