Page 29 of One-Track Pride

I hit the first one before he understands the room has a fourth occupant. It's fast and ugly and I keep it that way on purpose. A blow to the wrist sends his rifle skidding. A second sends him into the wall. The second man gets one wild shot into the ceiling, concrete dust, a whine of ricochet, before Camille steps inside his guard with the fearlessness that terrifies me and cracks the wrench across his forearm. The rifle drops. I put him down beside his friend and stand over both, chest heaving, the gold still riding high in my vision.

Camille kicks one weapon clear, scoops the other, and only then does she glance at me.

"Hi," she says, breathless. "Nice entrance."

I shift back between one breath and the next, and she crosses the room and throws herself into me before my knees have quite remembered how to be human. I catch her, and her mouth finds mine and it's fierce and graceless and tastes like grit and relief, her fingers in my collar, my arms locking her against me hard that a smaller person would complain.

"You came," she says against my lips.

"You asked." I press my forehead to hers. "Try and stop me next time."

"Later." She pulls back, already scanning, already the engineer again. "Celebrate properly after we keep the mountain from turning us into a geological event. Right now, these two." She nudges one of the downed contractors with her boot. He's out coldm his radio, though, is very much alive, hissing on his belt.

I crouch and pull it free. A voice comes through almost at once, flat and unhurried, and my whole spine goes cold recognizing it.

"—team two, report. Rourke wants the ridge array hot before the front breaks. We are not missing this window."

Camille meets my eyes. "Clayton's running it himself," she murmurs. "From up top. And he's got a deadline, the storm."

"Which means so do we." I kill the radio's transmit before either man's silence gives us away, but I keep it. It's a window straight into their timing now.

She's already turned to the far wall, where a bank of yellowed schematics hangs behind cracked glass. Her lamp climbs them, and I watch the exhaustion burn off her face, replaced by the thing I've come to trust more than my own claws.

"Van. Look." Her finger traces a faded diagram of the old mitigation system. "This whole ridge was built to shed snow deliberately. The control lines don't just fire charges. They decide which face the snow comes off of. I don't know yet if I can steer an explosion this big." She turns, eyes bright and hard. "But it's the first thing all night that isn't 'disarm six bombs by hand and pray.'"

Every instinct I own wants to tell her the ridge is too exposed, the plan too thin, the risk mine to carry alone. I swallow it all, and instead I pick up the second rifle, sling it, and step toward the corridor that climbs toward Clayton and the open sky.

"Then show me," I say. "Lead. I'm behind you."

She blinks, like she expected the old argument and found the door where the wall used to be. Then she almost smiles, and heads up the grade.

21

CAMILLE

The corridor climbs in a series of switchbacks the railway blasted through solid rock many years ago. Evander stays behind me the whole way, close so that his warmth cuts the cold at my back, and every time I glance over my shoulder he's watching my footing instead of racing ahead. The contractor's radio rides in my free hand, hissing its steady wash of dead air. Then it wakes up.

"—Pike, confirm you're seeing the same thing I am." Clayton's voice, clipped and low. "Somebody triggered a bleed on the west face system. That's not weather. That's a hand on the controls."

I lift the radio so Evander can hear. A second voice answers, thinner, threaded with static and with something I recognize immediately: the whine of someone that’s convinced himself he isn't a coward.

"It's the engineer." Warren Pike. "It has to be Dyer. I told Vey she was too good for this. I told him, you don't hand a sabotage job to somebody who reads a failure like a book and then act surprised when she reads yours."

"You picked her," Clayton says. "You told Conrad she'd rubber-stamp the closure and walk away."

"I told him she'd find deterioration because that's what we designed for her to find. Nobody planned on the train coming down while she was still on the mountain."

I go very still. Beside me, Evander has gone quiet, his eyes fixed on the little speaker as if he could reach through it and close a hand around Warren's throat.

"Are you recording this?" he breathes.

I've already thumbed the second contractor radio into record and pressed the two together, speaker to mic. "Every word," I whisper. "Keep him talking, you miserable little man. Keep going."

Warren obliges, because frightened men can't stop explaining themselves. "I'm not going down for a derailment. I falsified inspections, that's a fine and a firing. It is not thirty-one counts of attempted murder. That was your charge, Rourke. Yours and Vey's."

"You logged the maintenance windows we used to place it," Clayton answers, bored. "You're as deep as anyone. Now shut up and tell me if the west bleed changes our timing."

I lower the radio and meet Evander's eyes. In the lamplight they've cooled from gold back to that warm amber I've started thinking of as his, the color he wears when the lion is listening instead of straining at the leash.