Page 26 of One-Track Pride

Toby crouches near a squat wooden crate shoved against the wall, the lid already pried loose. He lifts a handful of what's inside toward his lamp—blasting caps, a bundle of shock tube, boxes stamped with lot numbers.

"Well, that's tidy of them," he says. "Everything labeled. I'm photographing the serials before I touch a thing."

"Do it," Camille says. "Those numbers are a leash straight back to whoever bought them. If we live through tonight, that crate convicts somebody in a courtroom."

He works his phone out of an inside pocket, shielding the screen with his body so the glow doesn't carry. I keep half my attention on the men up the grade and half on the two of them, and the split is agony. Everything wants to sprint the hundreds of yards and end this the direct way, with teeth and weight and the sound they'd make when they understood too late.

"I could reach them before they finish placing the last charges," I say. "Three men. I'd be on the first one before he cleared his rifle."

Camille's head comes up sharp. "No."

"Camille…"

"No, and here's why, so listen instead of arguing." She swings the beam down to a slim gray box married to the cable, a thin wire looping off it into the dark. "That's a pressure sensor. Tension-triggered. They've laced the line so that if the wire slackens or snaps because a two-hundred-pound lion tackles the guy holding the far end and it closes the circuit. You charge them, you bury us. You bury the passengers, you do their whole job for them and you don't even get to be angry about it afterward, because we'll be under a hundred feet of snow."

The words drop into me like ice water, cooling the animal down a degree. She's right. She's right and I hate it and I'd rather she were wrong.

"Okay," I say, and I make myself mean it. "Your read, your call. What do we do instead?"

Something eases in her, small but real. She heard me choose it, not concede it. "We don't touch the charges. We follow the spine to wherever it all ties together, the primary. There's always a primary. A master trigger they'll want kept somewhere defensible so a nervous contractor can't set it off by accident. We find that, and we own the whole system without disarming a single cap."

Toby pockets his phone and eases the crate lid back down. "Disabled what I safely could," he whispers. "Two caps, pulled clean. The rest are tied into her death-wire, so I left them breathing."

"Good instinct," Camille says. "Don't be a hero on my mountain."

"It's his mountain." Toby tips his head at me. "I'm just labor."

We move again, deeper, the grade steepening under our boots. The tunnel narrows where an old timber support has buckled and dumped a slope of rubble across the passage. There's a gap at the top, barely wide enough. I go through first, then reach back for her, and for a stretch of ten feet we're pressed chest to chest in the choke point, her breath warm against my collarbone, both of us wedged in stone.

"This," Camille murmurs, so quiet only I can catch it, "would be a genuinely excellent situation under different management. No armed men. A door that locks. You, considerably less clothed."

A laugh leaves me, low in my chest. "You're flirting. In a bomb tunnel."

"I'm keeping my heart rate down. You cope your way, I'll cope mine." She braces a boot and shoves through the gap, landing light on the other side. "File the suggestion, though."

"Filed." I drop down beside her. "Retrieving it the second nobody's trying to kill us."

"That's the most romantic thing you've said all day, and one of us blew up a train."

Toby slides through last, muttering something about needing a raise, and then we're stacked in the dark again with the three heartbeats closer now and the cable humming its silent promise along the wall. Camille sweeps her lamp forward. The conduit forks ahead—two lines splitting toward two separate release points, both feeding back to a heavier trunk that vanishes around a bend where the passage widens into a chamber I can't yet see.

"There," she says. "Everything comes home around that corner. That's our primary."

19

CAMILLE

Around the bend the passage opens into a chamber the railway must have used as a staging vault a century ago. Bare rock walls sweat with cold, the heavy trunk cable I've been tracking climbs a bracket toward the ceiling, then splits into a fan of thinner lines running off toward the ridge above us. I crouch and follow the branches with my lamp, counting, and the number turns my stomach to stone.

"Van, this is worse than the first one," I say. "The train that came down on us was one charge, one slope, one release. This is a network. They've seeded the whole upper snowfield. Six release points, minimum. If all of these fire together, they don't bury the wreck. They bury that, the pass, and anybody within a quarter mile of it."

Evander eases up beside me, keeping his voice low. "Then we find the master and we kill it."

"That's what I need you to hear." I stand, sweeping the beam across the junction where the branches converge. "There's no single master. Look at the wiring, each release point has its own initiator and its own independent trigger. It's built so that cutting one does nothing to the others. Somebody who understood exactly how we'd try to stop this designed it to survive us finding it."

Toby lets out a slow breath behind us. "So we can't just snip the wire and go home."

"We can't snip anything. Every one of these is a separate problem, and we don't have the hours it would take to solve six of them by hand." I put my palm flat against the freezing rock, thinking, letting the panic pass through instead of settling. "There's another way to beat a system like this. You stop trying to disarm it, you take control of where the energy goes."