Page 39 of One-Track Pride

"He won't get far in this," Tobias says.

"He gets far to escape and he's a problem." I'm already handing Tobias the phone. "Keep logging."

I go after Clayton fast, and I want to let the lion off its leash entirely, want the simple animal math of a predator and a fleeing man. That would be easy, but it could also cost us the only mouth willing to say Northstar's name in a courtroom.

He hears me coming and tries to run harder, which on a forty-degree slope in loose snow means he falls. I reach him as he's scrambling up, and I take him by the collar and set him back on his feet without particular gentleness.

"Big man," Clayton pants. "Big cat, whatever you are. You should've let me go."

"You'd have frozen in an hour."

"Better than a cage."

"Not my problem which you prefer." I turn him uphill and march him back the same route he ran. He doesn't fight me, he knows the math too. "You'll talk to the sheriff, and you'll talk to the state people, and you'll tell them who paid you."

"And say what about you?"

"Say whatever you want." I keep my voice level, bored almost. "Tell them a man moved a two-ton machine with his hands. See how that reads in a deposition next to your demolition record."

He laughs, low and bitter, but he stops trying to twist away.

I've hauled him back and re-secured him, properly this time, Gideon is double-checking my work without being asked, and the storm has thinned to a gray smear and I hear rotors somewhere beyond the ridgeline. Then I see them: two helicopters banking up the pass, their spotlights raking the snow.

The old reflex rises in me instantly, the one that says manage everything, be everywhere, let no one else carry the weight. I feel Camille watching me tackle the feelings.

"Gideon," I say. "Take the landing coordination. Toby, you and Amy handle the litter carries with their medics. I've got Rourke and the handoff to the sheriff."

Gideon blinks, then nods once, like I've handed him something he's been waiting years to be handed. "On it."

I catch the pride members before the human crews are close to see faces. "Cuts covered, gloves on, nobody demonstrates anything," I tell them quietly. "We're tired volunteers who got lucky. Tonight we're the least remarkable people on this mountain."

Camille appears at my elbow while I'm saying it, snow melting in her dark hair, and she adds, "If anybody asks how the wreckage got moved, the answer is come-alongs and adrenaline. Not one of you improves on that story." Her calm certainty about protecting my people undoes something in my chest that I don't have words for.

Before the first medic reaches us, I pull her a few steps into the lee of the ruined station, out of the wind and the coming noise.

"When the platform went," I say, "and I couldn't see you under all that snow…"

"I know."

"You don't. I want to say it at least once." I make myself hold her eyes. "That was worse than my father. That was the worst thing I have ever watched."

She reaches up and takes my face in both her cold hands and kisses me, brief and hard, the snow and the helicopters and the zip-tied Clayton all still there and nothing matters.

"You were terrified," she says against my mouth, "and you trusted me anyway. That's what you keep skipping." She steps back as boots crunch toward us. "Now go be forgettable, Coordinator. We've got a corporation to bury."

The state investigators come over the rise, and I straighten, and she gets to work.

29

CAMILLE

Three days on this mountain, and now the state investigators set up a command tent below the ridge in the early afternoon before the last helicopter's rotors have fully wound down, and for the better part of two hours, I’m inside it, laying out everything I've been carrying since the derailment. My inspection binder, the photographs of tool marks under the switch housing, the altered timestamps I flagged before I ever boarded that train, the recording pulled off the contractor's radio. A lead field agent named Whitfield keeps making me repeat things, not because she doubts me, but because she's building the same chain I've been building, and she wants to hear it in the order the evidence forces.

"Walk me through the timestamps again," she says, tapping the printout. "You're claiming they were staggered on purpose."

"I'm not claiming it. Look, the intervals." I slide the sheet toward her and trace the column. "Real deterioration clusters, bearings fail together, couplings fail together, because they all wore under the same conditions. These are spaced, eleven days, then nine, then thirteen. People paced the failures to look like a slow decline instead of a campaign."

"A campaign somebody wanted an outside engineer to certify."