kind of bastards who killed my best friend. Their force is divided and we outnumber both groups combined.'
'Yes,' Ethan said. 'Let's fight.'
Raven had been looking about. 'There's a better way,' she said quickly. 'Let's just jump into the river.'
The others looked down the face of the dam, as high as a three-story building. 'That's a good drop,' Iris objected.
'And the river's sluggish,' Daniel said. 'We can't swim faster than they can run. They'll just follow us down the valley and we'll lose all our supplies too.' He glanced around, trying to summon some of the tactics he'd once studied on dry, dead pages. They outnumbered their antagonists, yes, but the narrowness of the dam crest made it impossible to flank Rugard's watchdogs and bring their superiority to bear. It was like the narrow defile at Erehwon except here the situation was reversed: it wasn't Tucker holding Rugard off, it was Rugard's men holding them in place until the Warden could arrive with reinforcements. 'Maybe a few of the men could swim downstream and circle back around,' he thought aloud. 'Take them from behind.'
'We don't have time for that,' Raven said. 'Who knows when Rugard might show up? And we didn't come all this way to give away everything, either. Amaya, do you think we could get those spillway gears working?'
'Maybe with that old wheel and the levers. They're rusted, but with enough men pulling…'
'What good will that do?' Ethan asked.
'The catwalk supports are half rotted,' Raven explained hurriedly. 'We lash our supplies onto the decking, use the tools we've picked up to hack at its base, and send the platform over the dam. With any luck it becomes a raft that people can cling to on their way downstream.'
'Meanwhile,' Amaya added excitedly, grasping her idea, 'we open these gates for an instant flood. That pushes us downstream and leaves Rugard's men stranded on either side of the dam. Maybe it buys us enough time to get to the coast and try the transmitter!'
Daniel looked at his two female strategists with wonder. 'Let me get this straight. You want to start our own torrent and jump into it? With our supplies lashed to a rotting catwalk?'
They nodded.
He shrugged. 'Makes sense to me. Ethan?'
He looked down the gearhouse steps. 'We'll have to hold them off while we work. There's some deck gratings down there. Maybe we can pry them up for temporary shields.'
Daniel smiled. 'Okay. Two men behind each shield. Women to chop down the catwalk. The rest of the men down here on those levers.' He began snapping out names, the authority coming naturally to him now, glancing at the blocking convicts at either end of the dam. 'It's time to leave again without saying goodbye.'
The fugitives pried up two of the steel floor gratings on one side of the gearhouse and carried them up the stairs, putting one on each side of the central catwalk. Two men took position behind each grating, spears pointed out. Meanwhile the old tools salvaged from the ruins were rapidly distributed. Some of the women dropped down into the shallow water running over the spillway and cautiously felt their way under the catwalk, holding on to its posts as they moved. Other women carried their packs to the decking of the catwalk overhead, hastily lashing their belongings in place even as their sisters began hacking at the posts beneath them. With each blow, the wooden bridge trembled. Meanwhile the remaining men descended into the gearhouse to pry at the frozen workings of the dam spillway gates.
Rugard's men watched uncertainly. Belatedly, Wrench and Gallo realized that the entire party they were hunting had disappeared as easy targets: some men were crouched behind some kind of metal mesh, others had hidden in the gearhouse, and the last of the women were dropping down to muck about in the spillway underneath the catwalk, almost entirely hidden as they bent over. Something was going on, and it wasn't surrender. The men glanced nervously at each other: none had forgotten the shocking roar and concussion of the bewildering explosion back at Erehwon. Did the transmitter thieves have more witchery up their sleeve? While the convicts had the fugitives pinned, their quarry outnumbered them. Gallo wished Rugard were here, but it would take a couple of days to find and bring him. Maybe they should just back off and trail these troublemakers.
'Send some rocks at them,' he instructed his slingman uncertainly.
The man whirled his weapon over his head and let fly. The stone rocketed along the crest of the dam and banged off the metal grate harmlessly. He flung again, and again. One rock ricocheted into the adjacent reservoir and a third bounced up in the air and fell down on the dam crest behind the bastards crouched with the grate. One of them scampered back, scooped it up, and hurled it back, forcing Gallo's men to duck out of the way.
'You dropped something, you clumsy cretins!' the pitcher yelled. It looked like the bastard they'd already hit with a rock.
'Maybe we should just rush them,' one of the convicts ventured.
'There's too many,' Gallo snapped. 'You want to get pushed off the face of this dam? I say we keep them pinned here until help comes. They're trapped.'
Wrench had arrived at the same conclusion. He'd actually loped forward along the other end of the dam with the intention of jabbing tentatively at the metal grating with his spear, but as soon as he started the fugitives hurled chunks of concrete, the blows sending him scampering back out of the way. If he tried to climb over the gratings they'd stick him like a pig. Well, if he couldn't advance on the dam's crest, neither could they, right? It was a standoff. He hoped.
Still, he was worried about doing nothing and getting the Warden mad at him. He stood watching the frenetic activity at the center of the dam with foul confusion. What the hell were they trying to do?
Suddenly there was a shrill, wailing shriek, so loud and unearthly that the convicts on either side of the structure instinctively jumped. What the devil was that? Excited shouts were coming from the gearhouse. Then there was another shriek, and encouraging yells from the women. The flow of water down the face of the dam began to quicken. The catwalk was beginning to lean out over the dropoff, increasingly precarious.
'Are they trying to commit suicide?' Wrench muttered, his chest sore from a thrown missile. If they lost the transmitter in the river Rugard would hang them all. Damn! He began to realize that things were going horribly wrong.
There was another metallic squeal, the complaint of corroded metal, and then a sudden bang. One of the spillway gates snapped open and a plume of water shot out from the crest of the spillway, carrying two women with it. Screaming, they hit the river below. The catwalk shuddered and, with a creak of its own and a snapping of timbers, it followed the two women off the top of the dam, toppling into the river with a titanic splash. The wood went under for a moment and then floated in a boil of foam, rocking away downstream. Shrieking with a combination of triumph and fear, more women jumped into the growing waterfall and slid down the face of the dam to follow their makeshift raft.
Behind them there were more snaps of metal, a chain reaction of failure, and the spillway gates pried open wider, pushed by the force of the reservoir behind them. The roar of the unleashed flood was growing. Men boiled out of the gearhouse, shouting and waving their arms at their comrades behind the shields. Abruptly the gratings clanged down and the two defenders behind each one ran to the lip of the spillway. 'Jump, jump!' Daniel cried. One by one, they obeyed him.
Wrench and Gallo started to lead their men across the top of the dam.
Raven hesitated at the edge of the spillway, eyes wide with excitement at the growing flood, the transmitter strapped to her belly.
'These are your people, now,' Daniel shouted to her above the growing roar of the water. 'They've decided to put their trust in you. Don't let them down!'
She looked at the heads bobbing downstream, thrashing after the makeshift raft. 'I won't.' Then she leaped.
'Ayyyyyy!' Daniel glanced around. Wrench was charging at him with a wild cry, sword swinging over his head.
It cut empty air where Daniel had been. He'd jumped too.
There was the terrifying irruption of foam below, the endless seconds of free fall, and then the plunge into cold water and the buffeting of current until he could force his way back upward, gasping for air. All he could see was water. He began swimming downstream.
Gallo and Wrench wavered to a stop at the two edges of the spillway, separated from each other by ninety feet of roaring flood. 'Fire, fire!' the two squad leaders screamed. The convicts hurled spears and sticks but the
