Page 32 of One-Track Pride

"Promise me something," she says.

"Anything that isn't sending you away."

"Close." I feel her smile against my forearm. "Promise me we won’t act all hero out there. No unilateral sacrifices, you don't throw yourself on the charge and call it love. I won’t either. Whatever we do next, we decide it together, and we both come home."

The old reflex fights me hard. Everything I am wants to leave myself an exit, the noble one, the door marked I'll take this so she doesn't have to.

"I promise," I say.

She goes still against me. "You hesitated."

"I did."

"I heard it, Shaw. You get exactly one. Next time I'm holding you to it."

"I know you are." I press a kiss to the back of her neck, and I mean the promise more the second time for having flinched at it. "That's why I said it slow. So it would stick."

At some point we sleep. Not deeply, and definitely not for long, but when I open my eyes again the black outside the blocked signal-room vent has begun to thin toward gray.

The radio crackles to life against the crate. Toby, clearer now, breathless. "Van. I've got a way onto the upper ridge. Ventilation stack topside comes out above the control station. And Gideon's got the last of the vulnerable ones on the high shelf. Passengers are as safe as they're getting." A pause. "Which means it's just Clayton and the ridge charges left. You two decent, or should I keep talking to fill the silence?"

Camille snorts and reaches for her jacket. "We're decent, Toby."

"Tragic," he says. "Move fast, storm's thinning."

We dress in the small cold light, gather the recording and the maps and the two contractors' rifles, and I take her hand before we go. Not to lead her. Just to hold it.

"Together," I say.

"Together," she answers. And we climb toward the last of it, side by side.

23

CAMILLE

Dawn is breaking as the ventilation stack spits us out onto the ridge, and the cold hits like a slap after hours in the mountain's belly. Wind screams across the open face, dragging snow sideways in ribbons, but the storm has thinned enough that I can finally see what we're up against. The old avalanche-control station hunches at the lip of the pass, a squat steel box crusted white, its catwalk railings bent from weather. Below it, the whole upper snowfield glows a sick pale blue in what little light there is. Somewhere under that beautiful, murderous slab, Clayton's charges wait.

Evander and Toby peel off to scout his positions. I climb into the station alone, and the second the door groans shut behind me, the wind drops to a muffled howl and I can think.

The interior is a museum of another era: analog gauges, hand-cranked release levers, a wall of snow-load maps gone amber with age. I pull my lamp close and start reading the mountain the way I read a broken coupling, not what it is now, but what it was built to do, and what someone twisted it into doing instead.

The radio crackles. "Talk to me, engineer." Evander, low and close. "What are we looking at?"

"Genius, honestly. Evil genius, but genius." I trace the modified control lines with a gloved finger. "This system was designed to shed unstable snow on purpose. Fire a small charge, drop a controlled slab before it can build into a killer, always aimed away from the tracks. Clayton didn't build a new weapon. He inverted the old one. Every amplifier he's set is angled to throw the blast force toward the wreck instead of away from it."

"Can you turn it back around?"

"Not by turning it back. There's not enough time to reverse six angles by hand." I chew the inside of my cheek, staring at the load map until the answer surfaces. "But I don't have to. I redirect it. I release a different section first—this western field here, unstable and empty, nothing under it but rock and an abandoned valley. If I drop that a few seconds ahead of Clayton's detonation, the whole snowpack shifts its center of mass. The main slide follows the new low point. It goes west, away from the train, away from everyone."

Toby's voice cuts in, breathless from climbing. "You want to start an avalanche to stop an avalanche."

"I want to start the right avalanche to steer the wrong one. Yes."

"I love her," Toby announces to no one. "Van, I've decided. We're keeping her."

"Focus," Evander says, but I can hear the smile buried under it.

I lay it out clean, because a plan with this little margin has to be understood by everyone holding a piece of it. "Three things have to happen almost at once. One, I manually alter the control system in here to release the western field. Two, Toby disables the secondary trigger so Clayton can't just re-fire the sequence and undo us. Three, somebody has to physically drag the blast amplifiers off their mounts before detonation, because if they're still angled at the wreck when the main charge blows, redirection won't be enough. Those mounts are steel, frozen solid, bolted into rock. No human moves them in the time we have."