Page 21 of One-Track Pride

"But I did." I sit back, and something cold slides through me. I flip to the timestamps, the ones I flagged at the depot and never got to finish. "God, look at the sequencing. The failures aren't random even in time. They escalate. Small, then bigger, then bigger. Paced. Like⁠—"

Evander waits, watching my face do whatever it's doing.

"Like a case being built," I finish. "For a regulator. You don't close a rail line on one dramatic failure; a good line survives one bad day. You close it on a pattern. A slow, credible, undeniable pattern of an aging system past saving. Somebody engineered a story, chapter by chapter, and then…" The last piece drops into place, and it's so ugly I have to say it to believe it. "And then they needed a narrator."

"Camille."

"They needed someone credible. Independent, someone with a reputation for not being bought, for refusing to soften findings, for handing corporations answers they hate." My voice has gone strange and flat. "Someone whose signature on a closure recommendation would be bulletproof. Un-appealable, because everyone knows she doesn't bend."

Evander goes very still. "You're describing yourself."

"I'm describing exactly myself." I laugh, and it comes out wrong, jagged. "I wasn't sent here to catch them, Evander. I was the last chapter. I was supposed to walk in after manufactured decay, run my meticulous little inspection, find a railroad that looked genuinely unsafe, and write the report that shut it down for good. My integrity was the whole point. They picked me because I can't be pressured. They needed a witness nobody could accuse of being paid off. They weaponized the one thing I was actually proud of."

Leonard's voice comes from a few feet away, roughened by pain and the splint on his leg. "Knew it wasn't the equipment. Told your predecessor. Told anybody who'd listen." He shifts, wincing. "Warren pulled parts that had years in 'em. Overruled my crews every time. You don't do that unless somebody upstairs wants the numbers to look a certain way."

"You're a good witness, Leonard," I tell him. "You're going to matter."

"Damn right I am." He settles back, satisfied, and shuts his eyes.

Evander hasn't moved. He's staring at me with an expression I'm learning to read, the one where he wants to fix something and knows he can't lift it.

"Don't," I warn him.

"I haven't said anything."

"You're gearing up to tell me it isn't my fault. That I couldn't have known." I shake my head. "Save it. I ran their errand, Evander. I got on that train because a supervisor I've never met needed my name on a piece of paper. People almost died so I could sign it."

"That's true," he says.

I blink. "That's… not what people usually say."

"You told me not to comfort you." A muscle works in his jaw. "So I won't lie and say you weren't used, you were. They studied you and they aimed at you and you came exactly where they wanted." He leans in, and now there's heat under the calm. "But here's what they got catastrophically wrong. They picked you because you follow evidence no matter where it goes. They just assumed it would only ever go where they pointed it."

I stop.

"They needed you incorruptible," he goes on, quieter. "So you'd sign their lie. But incorruptible doesn't stop at the conclusion they wanted, Camille. It kept going, it found the tool marks. It found the timestamps. It found this." He taps the stack. "The exact quality that made you the perfect weapon is the reason you're the last person on earth who'll fire where they aimed. They didn't recruit a witness. They recruited the investigator who buries them."

The cold in me shifts into something else. Not comfort, he was right not to reach for that. Something with an edge to match my own.

"That's almost worse," I say slowly, "for them."

"Considerably worse."

"They spent months creating this." A smile is starting somewhere, thin and mean and entirely genuine. "And they handed it gift-wrapped, timestamped, and signed in Warren's own hand, to the one person constitutionally incapable of ignoring it. They didn't cover their tracks from me. They made the tracks and pointed me straight down them."

"There she is," Evander murmurs.

"They think they've closed a railroad." I gather the pages, square them, hold them like the weapon they've become. "They've actually just documented a conspiracy for me and stranded me on a mountain with nothing to do but read it. That's not a plan. That's a confession with extra steps."

He huffs a low laugh, and the sound loosens me. I set the papers down and look at his enormous, careful man crouched in the wreckage of a train that a corporation blew up to use my own reputation against me. And I feel the anger settle into fuel like it always does when I finally understand a failure completely.

"You know what their real mistake was," I say. "Bigger than picking me."

"Tell me."

"They put me somewhere with you." I reach out and close my hand over his where it rests on the table, whispering. "They needed me isolated, no allies, no local who'd stick their neck out, just a stranger who'd run the numbers and leave. Instead I've got a lion who can smell explosive residue on the wind, a cousin who can rebuild a dead radio, and a whole family of people who run toward the avalanche." My thumb moves over his knuckles. "They aimed a weapon at their own operation and then handed it the exact support it needed to actually go off."

Evander turns his hand under mine so our fingers lock. "I'd feel sorry for them," he says, "if they hadn't tried to bury people to save on land costs."