Page 28 of One-Track Pride

For once, I don't try to outthink it alone. I claw the radio off my belt and key it with a shaking hand.

"Evander. It's Camille. I'm at the ventilation junction, upper side, moving to the ridge access on my own. There are men ahead." My voice doesn't crack. That surprises me. "I'm not doing this without you. I need you to come find me. Please."

A crackle. Then, steady as bedrock: "I'm already coming. Keep talking. I'll follow your voice."

I find, absurdly, that I'm smiling with gunmen ahead because asking him to come has cost me nothing, and it's made me twice as strong.

20

EVANDER

I'm already three strides toward the collapse before Toby gets both hands into my jacket and hauls back with everything his lion has.

"No. No, Van, stop." His boots skid across the rubble, but he doesn't let go. "You force that pile, you bring the rest of the ceiling down. On you, on her, on whatever's holding the upper snowpack from letting go early. Think."

The lion doesn't want to think. The lion wants to dig until the mountain gives Camille back, and it's roaring loud that my own name sounds far away. I stand there shaking with the effort of not moving.

"She's on the other side of that," I manage. "Alone, with his men walking toward her."

"I heard the same radio you did." Toby steps forward, forcing me to look at his face instead of the stone. "And I know exactly one thing that gets her killed faster than those contractors, cousin. It's you, panicking, doing the loud obvious thing while the smart thing sits right ahead. You taught me that. On the Beckman rescue. Remember? Slow is fast."

My father used to say the same words. Toby knows that. He's not fighting fair, and I love him for it.

"Slow is fast," I echo, forcing my breathing down out of my throat. The gold recedes enough for me to see the tunnel clearly again. Old timber, and a ventilation grate high on the left wall, painted the same tired gray as everything else the railway abandoned. Air moving across it, faint but steady. "There. The vent, it parallels the main passage. If it stays intact past the cave-in, it comes out somewhere near her side."

"Now that is the man I follow." Toby's grin is thin and real. "Go. I'll stay and finish what we started, those blasting caps aren't going to pull themselves, and somebody needs to keep this end from waking up."

I hesitate, and the hesitation is the old sickness, the one that says every dangerous job is mine to carry. "You'll be alone down here with live charges."

"I've been alone with worse. Your girl's got gunmen. Do the math and quit hovering." He shoves a shoulder against mine, half affection, half order. "Trust me to do my job. That's the whole lesson, isn't it?"

It's the exact lesson I've been failing my entire adult life. I grip the back of his neck once, hard, the pride's old gesture for I see you, I'm counting on you, and then I wrench the vent grate off the wall and fold myself into the dark.

The shaft is barely wide enough for my shoulders. In lion form I'd never fit; half-shifted, with the joints loosened and the muscle re-strung, I pour through it like water finding a crack. The radio crackles against me.

"Evander." Camille's voice, low and even, pitched so it won't carry. "I've moved about forty feet closer to the ridge access. There's a junction ahead where the corridor splits. I can hear at least two of them past it."

"Keep talking," I breathe into the mic. "You're doing exactly right. I'm in the ventilation run, moving parallel to you. Tell me what you see."

"Old signal relays. A control room, I think, there's a steel door standing half open on my left." A pause, then, quieter: "Van, I want you to know I'm not standing here waiting to be rescued. I've already got a wrench and a very unfriendly plan if they come through first."

That startles a rough sound out of me, not quite a laugh. "God, I know you do. That's not why I'm coming."

"Then why?"

"Because you asked me to." The shaft bends; I follow it by feel and scent, her trace threading through the stale air like a line pulled taut. "You've spent your whole life not asking. Do you have any idea what it does to me that you finally did?"

Her breath crackles over the radio, unsteady for the first time. "Don't make me cry in a bomb tunnel, Shaw. I'll never forgive you."

"Wouldn't dream of it. Keep moving. Left of the control room, is there a low grate at floor level?"

A scrape, a shuffle. "Yes. Rusted. Warm air coming off it."

"That's me. Thirty feet. Stay near it."

Then her voice drops out of the soft register entirely. "Van. They've seen the door. They're coming. Two of them, moving fast…"

I stop being careful. The last stretch of shaft I take at a speed the vent was never built to survive, and the grate at the end doesn't so much open as leave. I come out of the wall into a low concrete room full of dead signal equipment, and I let the shift finish on the way. Bone lengthens, and the world drops into scent and heat and the frantic drum of Camille's pulse. Two men in unmarked winter gear are crowding through the half-open door, rifles up, one of them already swinging his barrel toward the woman backed against the relay bank with a pipe wrench raised in both hands.