Page 33 of One-Track Pride

A pause on the line. Then, quiet: "But a lion does."

"Yep." I hate that I need him for the dangerous part. I say it anyway, because pretending otherwise would be the old me, the one who'd rather do everything alone and call it strength. "You need to be on the amplifiers, Van. "

"Done. I'll take all three mounts and the…"

"No." The word lands flat and fast. "You will not take all three. You take the two heaviest. Toby's route puts him past the third on his way to the trigger, he peels it on the way. Gideon backs him. You are not carrying this whole ridge on your spine because you're scared of what happens if you don't."

The silence stretches, and I expect him to fight me.

"You're right," he says instead. "Gideon…" and I hear him key over to another channel, delegating, splitting the weight three ways, doing the single hardest thing I've ever asked of him. When he comes back to me his voice is changed, rough. "There. It's shared. Are you happy?"

"Deliriously. It's very attractive when you let other people help. Do more of that."

"After this," he says, "I'm taking you somewhere with no explosives. No derailed trains. No armed contractors within a hundred miles. A door that locks and stays locked."

"Bold of you to assume I'm done being difficult once we're horizontal and unbombed."

"Camille." I can hear him grinning now, right through the storm. "I would be devastated if you stopped being difficult. Difficult is my favorite thing you do."

"Flatterer." I flip open the control housing and start rewiring release priorities, fingers steady even as my heart hammers. "Get to your mounts. And Van—when I say the western field is going, you move whether or not you've finished. I am not opening this gate with you still standing under a live slope to save two seconds of steel."

"Understood."

"Say it like you mean it."

"I mean it. If you drop the west, I clear the mounts, finished or not." A beat. "I heard the reluctance in my own voice that time. So did you."

"I did. You get one, consider it spent." I almost laugh. Somehow, wiring a controlled avalanche in a freezing steel box with a countdown running, I've never felt more like a team.

Gideon's voice breaks over the channel, steadier than any of us. "Passengers are up. The whole vulnerable group's on the high shelf, blankets and bodies, out of any slide path we've mapped. They're as safe as this mountain lets anyone be." A pause. "But the storm's breaking faster than we thought, visibility's opening. Once Clayton can see downslope, he'll know rescue's coming, and he won't wait for a window. He'll blow it early and run."

Which changes everything. I straighten, staring out the frosted port at the pale expanse below. My timeline just went from soon to now.

"Then we don't give him the chance to pick his moment," I say. "We make him react to ours. If I release the western field first, his team sees their own system moving snow they didn't authorize. They panic. They either fire early into a mountain that's already shifting under them, which plays into the redirect, or they scramble to figure out what broke, and every second they spend confused is a second you three need on the mounts."

"You're going to spook a demolition crew into detonating," Evander says slowly. "On purpose."

"I'm going to take the trigger out of his hands and put it in mine. He wanted control of this mountain. He doesn't get to have it anymore." I settle my palm over the primary release lever, cold biting through my glove, the whole weight of the pass balanced on a hinge older than I am. "Are you on your mounts?"

"Reaching the first now." Wind roars behind his words. "Toby?"

"Almost to the trigger. Gideon's on the third mount."

"Then here's your warning,." My pulse is a drum, but my voice comes out level, the voice I use crawling under railcars nobody thinks are safe. "In ten seconds I'm releasing the western field, the mountain is going to move. Don't be where it's moving."

"Camille." Evander, one last time, quieter than the storm. "Come back to me off this ridge."

"That's the plan, Shaw. Both, home. Now clear the mounts."

I throw the release. Far out across the western face, with a sound like the world tearing a bedsheet, the snow lets go. A whole field of it peels off the rock and thunders down into the empty valley, a white avalanche I chose, running exactly where I aimed it. The station shudders under my boots. Every gauge on the wall swings hard as the mountain redistributes a hundred thousand tons of itself.

Then the radio I lifted off Clayton's contractor comes alive, and I hear it work.

"—the hell was that? Nobody fired, nobody fired. Rourke, the west field just went and it wasn't ours⁠—"

"Check the panel." Clayton's voice, and the flat calm has a crack running through it. "Somebody's in the control station. Somebody's on our system."

"That's impossible, the tunnel collapsed, they can't…"