Page 3 of One-Track Pride

Amy's laugh cuts off when I move a pin they haven't clocked yet, up where the map goes pale and the contour lines bunch. "One more," I say. "This switch fault. Look what it sits beside."

Her grin dies. She knows exactly what road threads that pass, the old service track climbing toward our mountain, toward the den, toward the one place on this whole map that can never appear in an incident report.

"That's too close," she says, low.

"That's where I keep landing. If somebody's manufacturing these, they're doing it in a shrinking circle, and the circle's pulling toward the worst possible ground. This stopped being about freight the second a fault turned up there."

"Then we take it to Beckett," Gideon says. "Owen's careful, he'll…"

"And tell him what? That the line's being sabotaged toward a mountain we won't let a soul survey? He asks why, and suddenly we're answering questions we can't afford to answer."

"So we sit on it."

"We manage it. Different thing."

"It can’t be sabotage, not when…"

The door opens on a gust of cold, and the three of us go silent at once.

Camille Dyer stands in the frame with snow melting off her shoulders and a folder clamped to her chest. She's caught enough of the last few seconds to know she walked in on something. Her eyebrow lifts, small and knowing, and I'd resent it more if it weren't aimed straight at the bit of me she has no business reading this fast.

"Don't stop on my account," she says.

"Ms. Dyer." I push up off the desk. "We were debating snow-load on the shed roof. Gripping stuff."

"You were debating something. I heard 'sabotage' through the door." She lets it swing shut behind her. "But sure. Roof."

Amy mouths 'roof’ at me on her way past and hauls Gideon toward the truck bay, the pair of them suddenly remembering urgent business with a fire hose. Traitors, both. Camille sets her folder down and flips it open like she owns the office.

"I came for your response logs," she says. "Every incident your people got called to on the line, eighteen months back." She fans the pages. "Since you've clearly got your own map, though, show me."

I lay the incident sheets beside her request, and she bends over them with a hungry focus I recognize. I wear the same look over a rescue grid. She reads the cluster fast. She doesn't yet read the shape.

"They're grouped," she says.

"Grouped and crawling." I lean in and trace the timeline, the year's early faults spread wide, the recent ones drawn tight. "January, they're way out here. Now they're here. This isn't random. It's walking inward."

She turns her head to argue and we're closer than I'd tracked, her shoulder against my arm, cold still lifting off her jacket, and under it the warm human scent of her my lion has decided, without asking me, is worth committing to memory. Heat climbs the back of my neck, and my grip on the animal slips a little, gold starting to bleed up behind my eyes, and I put some distance between us before she notices and finds a difference to my eyes that no person has.

"You okay?" she asks.

"Long night. Coffee's here, it's hot if you want it."

"I want the pattern, not the caffeine." She taps the tight knot of pins near the pass. "This one bothers me more than the rest, and I can't say why yet. There's nothing up there, no siding, no crossing, no reason for a crew to set foot on it. But you had it flagged before I came through that door. How does an emergency coordinator know a dead stretch of mountain that well?"

"Because dead stretches are where people die." I keep it easy. "I've hauled hikers off that pass in whiteouts. You learn every draw and false trail up there or you carry bodies down instead of survivors. Knowing the ground is important."

"Good answer." She holds my eyes. "Also not the whole one. There are three spots on this map you talk about like it was your own kitchen, and two supposedly can't be reached in winter at all."

"People still wander into them."

"Evander."

"Camille. Some of that's family land. I grew up on it. That's the end of the story."

She doesn't buy it, sharp of her, but she can't prove a thing standing in my office, so she lets it go with a small, unsatisfied tilt of her chin that promises she isn't done.

"I'm driving the line tomorrow," she says, packing up the folder. "The switch assembly by the pass. I want the tool marks in daylight."