Page 2 of One-Track Pride

"Fine," I echo. "Make yourself useful. Hold this." I hand him the coupling. He takes it like it weighs nothing, turns it in the fading light, and I catch him running his thumb over the same ground-down lip I found, unprompted, in exactly the right place.

"Here," he says. "This is where they thinned it."

I stare at him. "How'd you know to look there?"

"You just showed me." A shrug rolls through those shoulders. "I pay attention. It's most of the job."

Snow is collecting on his hair now, on the scar, on the shoulders of a jacket built for this and nothing else. I realize I've been looking a half-second too long and drag my attention back to the fracture, annoyed at myself, more annoyed at him for being competent, because that’s so much harder to dismiss than arrogant.

"I'm expanding the scope," I tell him, photographing the break from three angles while I still have the light. "Not just this coupling. Every failure in the last four months, every maintenance order, every timestamp. If somebody's manufacturing accidents, there's a pattern, and patterns leave records."

"You'll have Stonehaven's emergency logs by tonight."

"You're awfully eager to help an investigation that could close you down."

"I'm eager to help one that finds the truth." He hands the coupling back, and our gloved fingers overlap for the length of the exchange, longer than the physics of it require. "The truth keeps us open. I'm betting on you being good enough to get there."

"Don't." I bag the evidence and zip it. "Don't bet on me giving you the answer you want. I'll give you the right one. Sometimes those aren't the same."

"I know the difference." He says it quietly, and I believe him, which unsettles me more than if he'd argued.

The wall of white reaches the far end of the yard. He was right about the forty minutes; I've got maybe ten. I gather my kit and let him walk me back toward the trucks, and I tell myself the only reason I'm glad he's there is the ice. I'm already fairly sure that's a lie.

2

EVANDER

The emergency-services building sits two blocks off the main drag, a squat brick box that smells like scorched coffee no matter how many windows we pry open in the cold. I've got six months of incident reports pinned across the briefing wall before Gideon and Amy finish stamping the snow off their boots.

"You dragged us out on a Sunday for pushpins," Amy says. She spins a chair around and drops into it, arms folded over the back. "Please tell me there's a point buried in the pushpins."

"Look at where they are, not what they are." I tap the map, one red pin at a time. "Coupling failure here, signal fault here, switch assembly, two weeks back, here. Every regional report calls them separate, weather, fatigue, bad luck. Spread the year out, though, and they aren't scattered. They're circling us."

Gideon moves close to the wall and studies it, quiet and patient, thinking instead of just listening. "Northern line runs three hundred miles," he says. "These all sit inside forty of Stonehaven."

"Thirty-eight. I measured."

"Course you did." Amy leans forward. "So the railway's rotting in our backyard specifically. Could be coincidence. Old steel, hard winters, we catch the worst of both."

"Could be. I don't think it is."

The yard sits right under the east windows, a grid of frozen sidings and the long gray spine of the maintenance shed. The engineer's down there again, Dyer, crouched over the coupling she pulled yesterday, camera in one hand, ignoring the fact that it's twelve degrees and falling. She's been at it since before the pot finished brewing.

Amy tracks my eyes and grins, slow and wicked. "Huh."

"Don't."

"I said nothing."

"You made a face."

"I make plenty of faces. This one's about you checking that window every ninety seconds like the glass owes you money."

"She's an outside investigator whose report decides whether this town keeps its railway. I'd be a lousy coordinator if I weren't watching what she does with it."

Gideon doesn't even turn around. "You're watching her. Not the report."

"Both of you can leave."