Page 4 of One-Track Pride

"Then I'm coming."

She halts. "Why."

"Because that road hasn't seen a plow since Thursday, the grade glazes over by noon, and if you slide off it alone, I'm the one scraping you out of a ravine."

"Uh-huh." She shoulders her bag. "Real reason, or are you just incapable of letting anyone do a single thing without you looming over them?"

"Both," I say.

It jolts a laugh out of her, quick and unwilling, gone before it lands, but I catch it, and the lion catches it, and heaven help me, I already want to earn the next one. She heads for the door shaking her head, and I stand in the cooling office convincing myself I'm riding along tomorrow because the road is dangerous. It is, but it's just not the reason, and I know myself too well to pretend otherwise.

3

CAMILLE

Evander drives the emergency truck like the black ice is a rumor he's decided not to believe. I keep bracing for the back end to break loose on the grade, and it never does, because every small correction he makes happens a half-second before I'd have thought to make it.

"You could ease off," I tell him. "The switch assembly isn't going anywhere. Neither am I, unless we roll into a ravine."

"We're not rolling into anything."

"Confident."

"Experienced. I've driven this stretch in worse than this." He feathers the wheel through a curve without so much as glancing down. "You learn where the road will let you go and where it won't."

"That's not a skill, that's optimism with a steering wheel. You're doing close to forty on a surface rated for maybe twelve."

"Thirty-four. And the road's better than its rating." He shoots me a sideways look. "You always narrate other people's driving, or am I getting special treatment?"

"Only the drivers who worry me."

"Didn't figure anything worried you."

"Bad driving and unsupported conclusions. Short list, but I'm firm on both."

He laughs, a low, surprised sound, like it caught him off guard on its way out. I file it away without meaning to, then remind myself I'm here for a fractured switch, not to catalog how the intimidating local sounds when he stops guarding his face.

The assembly sits where the spur peels off the main line, a squat iron mechanism hooded under a crust of gray snow. I crouch, sweep the housing clear, and get to work with the cold gnawing through both pairs of gloves. Evander settles onto his heels across from me, quiet, watching my hands rather than crowding them. I'll give him that much, most people hover.

"Walk me through it," he says.

"Give me a second to actually see it first."

I lift the protective housing, the panel nobody should ever open outside a scheduled service window, and there, bright, and fine scoring runs along the throw rod, the metal scraped clean where a tool bit down and dragged. Not the dull crumbling edge of fatigue, this is a cut.

"Somebody was in here," I say, keeping my voice flat. "See the shine on that rod? That's fresh tooling. You don't get that from cold or wear. You get it from a person with a pry bar and a reason."

"So I was right."

"You were lucky. There's a difference, and I'm not writing 'lucky' in a federal report." I photograph the scoring from three angles, then a fourth with a scale marker beside it. "This is one component, one. It tells me somebody touched this switch. It doesn't tell me they touched the coupling, or the signal box, or any of the rest. I don't build a pattern off a single data point."

"You already believe it's a pattern."

"Believing and proving are two different jobs. I only get paid for one."

He doesn't argue, which I notice, because most people in his position would. Instead he rises and drifts along the rail with his head tilted, reading the snow like it's printed with something only he can make out. I'm still bagging a metal shaving when he goes still at a spot ten yards off.

"Camille, come see this."