Page 25 of One-Track Pride

"Okay. We split it." I turn the map so Gideon can see. "You and Amy start moving the vulnerable passengers now, slow and careful, toward the rock shelf Evander flagged east of the wreck. It's the only ground that’s high and will survive a slide. You don't wait for us, you don't come after us. Your entire job is keeping those people breathing."

Gideon nods once, already calculating.

"Evander, Tobias, and I will go and stop this. We find where they've placed the charges and figure out whether we're disarming them or redirecting them." I glance at Evander, daring him to argue. "Three, your senses, Tobias' hands, my head. That's the team that works."

Evander's fists uncurl slowly. I can see the struggle in him, the instinct clawing to shove me somewhere padded and locked, colliding with everything the last few days taught him. When he finally speaks, it costs him.

"Gideon, take the east shelf. Don't split your people, don't send anyone back." He exhales. "We handle the rest."

It isn't surrender. It's trust, and I know precisely how much of it he's never given anyone. Gideon knows too, because his eyebrows climb before he masters his face and disappears back into the storm to gather Amy.

Then it's just us and the maps and the countdown neither of us can see but both of us feel.

"You're going to be impossible to keep up with in there," Evander says.

"You have four legs when you want them. You'll manage." I start rolling the drawings, tucking them into my jacket against my ribs. "Tobias meets us where?"

"The corridor mouth." Evander catches my wrist, gentle, turning me back to face him. "Camille. In there, if I tell you to move, you move. Not because I'm ordering you, because I might hear the click of a trigger a half-second before you do."

press my palm flat to his chest, over the steady hammer of his heart. "If I tell you a relay's live, you don't touch it, no matter how much your lion wants to solve it by hitting something."

His mouth tugs up despite everything. "You've met me."

"I have, it's why I'm spelling it out."

There's a warning already forming on his lips, some careful instruction about staying behind him at the collapse. I've heard enough of his warnings to write the book. So I rise up and kiss him, quick and fierce, stealing the caution right out of his mouth before he can say it. When I pull back, his eyes have gone gold at the edges, the lion pushing close.

"We're both coming out of that mountain," I tell him.

"We are." His voice roughens. "I have plans for you that don't involve explosives."

"Then let's go make sure you keep them."

18

EVANDER

The corridor mouth is a black seam in the rock, half-swallowed by snowdrift. Tobias waits there with a coil of climbing rope over one shoulder and that easy grin nowhere in sight. He hands me a headlamp without a word, then jerks his chin toward the dark.

"Fresh boot marks going in," he murmurs. "Heavy soles, they didn't bother hiding them, so they think nobody's coming up behind."

"Good, let them keep thinking it." I clip the lamp to my helmet and turn to Camille. "Stay on the wall side. Any pool of standing water, you assume it's live wire until she tells you otherwise."

"She has a name," Camille says, ducking under a fallen crossbeam. "And she's read more schematics than you both combined. Move."

Toby's grin flickers back to life before he swallows it. I take point anyway, every instinct I own insists on being the body between her and whatever waits ahead, and for once I don't fight the instinct. I fold it into something useful instead.

We go in single file. The tunnel smells of iron and old grease and the cold mineral breath of deep stone. Water ticks somewhere out of sight. My night vision peels the darkness back further than the lamps reach, and I catch the men long before Camille could, three heartbeats maybe two hundred yards up the grade, slow and methodical, the unmistakable clink of hardware being set.

"Three ahead," I say low. "Working, not watching. And there's a fourth scent underneath. Diesel, cordite, something sour." My throat tightens around the memory. "It's the same trace I found above the wreck. Same crew that dropped the mountain on that train."

Camille stops beside a rusted junction box bolted to the wall. She's not listening to me anymore; she's reading. Her gloved fingers hover over a run of bright new cable stapled along an ancient conduit, so clean against the corrosion that it might as well be signed.

"They didn't bring their own detonation network," she breathes. "Look at this. They spliced into the old avalanche-control lines. This conduit is original railway infrastructure—it used to fire mitigation charges to knock loose snow down in a controlled slide before it could build up and threaten the pass."

"So the bones of the murder weapon were already in the wall."

"Exactly. They just woke it up." She traces the cable uphill with the beam. "This isn't one bomb, Van. It's a chain. They're running charges to multiple release points off a single spine. Cut it in the wrong spot and I could fire the whole sequence myself."