Page 14 of One-Track Pride

"You seem to keep waiting for me to run," she says, quieter now. "Ever since the train. You brace every time I look at you too long."

"Everyone runs eventually. My life is built on the certainty of it." The truth comes easier up here, where the wind will carry it off before anyone else hears. "Every choice I've ever made, every door I kept shut, it was all so nobody got close to become a risk to the pride. That mountain, this secret, keeping people at arm's length. All one long habit."

"And it's exhausted you." She takes my jaw in her cold hand and makes me see her. "You've got it backward, Evander. Trusting me doesn't hand your responsibility back to you lighter. You still carry your people tomorrow, same as yesterday. It just means you don't have to lie to the person holding the far end of the load. That's all it changes. It's not less weight, it's fewer masks."

It lands somewhere I've kept sealed since I was in my twenties, since we lowered my father into ground he died protecting. I've convinced myself that shouldering everything alone was the same thing as leadership. She's just set the two side by side and shown me the seam between them.

"You're unnervingly good at this," I manage. "Finding the exact spot that gives."

"It's what I do. Come on."

We climb down with the fragment buttoned into her jacket, and for four hundred yards I believe we've won something real, that we have the proof, the motive taking shape, and each other. The passengers are stable behind us, and Amy has them moving. For the length of that walk I'm almost a man who thinks the worst is behind him.

Then we reach the emergency car, and Camille's flashlight finds the transmitter housing peeled open like a tin can, its guts torn out and scattered across the canted floor.

"No." She's already down on her knees in the wreckage, sorting the pieces, and I watch the hope drain out of her shoulders as she works. "This wasn't the crash. Look at the cuts, clean, deliberate. They killed the radio before the explosion. Somebody didn't want us calling out even if we survived."

"Amy's here."

"Amy's here because she came looking. That doesn't mean she can reach anyone beyond the pass. If the ridge repeater's still down, her radios are trapped in the same dead zone we are."

I look toward the wreck, toward the evac sleds moving through the snow.

"So Stonehaven knows something happened?"

"Maybe, but nobody outside this mountain knows we found a bomb. They don't know this was deliberate, and right now we have no way to tell them."

She looks down at the ruined transmitter.

"That's what whoever did this was counting on."

11

CAMILLE

Icrouch over the gutted housing with my flashlight clamped between my teeth and sort the wreckage into piles. Salvageable, missing. The missing pile grows fast, someone pulled the transmit module clean out before the crash, and without it this radio is a very expensive space heater that doesn't even heat.

"Tell me it's fixable," Evander says from the doorway. He's filling most of it, snow melting off his shoulders, watching me work with an attention that would flatter me if I had room left over to be flattered.

"It's not fixable. Not from here. They didn't just break it. They removed the part that would've let us call out, then broke everything around it so a casual look reads as crash damage. It's tidy, I hate how tidy it is."

"So nobody outside the pass knows we're alive."

"Nobody outside the pass is certain there's anyone left to rescue. Northstar's counting on that." I stand and roll the ache out of my shoulder, the one that took the wall when the car went over. "A rescue that doesn't know it's needed doesn't get dispatched. The storm buys them a day, maybe two, and by then whatever they've planned is finished."

He's quiet, I've started reading his silences. It's a bad habit for someone who's supposed to keep this professional.

"There's another radio," he says finally. "Old railway emergency station, back through the pass. Maybe four miles, backup transmitter, independent power, built before your company decided everything should share one fragile circuit."

I know the station he means before he finishes describing it. "Grade separation shelter, mile marker something-forties. It's on my infrastructure survey. I flagged it as decommissioned."

"Decommissioned isn't demolished. The bones are still there."

"The bones being there doesn't mean the radio works." I'm already picturing it, though, the schematic unfolding behind my eyes. Old isolated station, hardened against exactly this kind of weather, powered off a bank nobody would've bothered to strip. "If the battery bank survived and the antenna didn't come down in the last decade, I could probably bring it back. Probably."

"Then I go." He says it like it's settled, like he's checked a box and moved on, and every muscle I have goes rigid.

"You go."