Page 9 of One-Track Pride

He keys the radio. Static answers, thick and useless, the storm chewing the signal to nothing. He tries a second channel, then the emergency band, and gets the same wall of hiss each time, his hand drops.

"Repeater on the ridge is down," he says. "Or jammed. Take your pick."

"Take the worse one." I'm already running the map, the whole northern line laid over the terrain like a wire diagram. "Refined explosive, a closed access road, men who came and went and left something behind. This isn't vandalism anymore, vandalism doesn't need this." I turn back to him. "They're not trying to make the railway look unsafe. They're done with that, now they're setting up to prove it."

"Prove it how?"

"By making it fail." The words taste like metal. "A storm this size grounds every investigator in the state. Anything in the pass reads as weather, a derailment, a slide, a car off an embankment. Nobody questions an accident when the mountain's already killing everyone. They get their catastrophe, their headline, and the snow buries the evidence before the sky clears."

Gideon's jaw works. "The freight line's shut. Nothing's running up there until…"

He stops, because the floor has just dropped out of me and it shows on my face. "The passenger train's still running," I hear how flat my own voice goes. "One final departure. This afternoon. Through the pass."

"Van." Something in his face changes as he watches mine change first. "The engineer, Dyer. She's booked on it."

The cold, total certainty floods me at once. Camille, packing up right now, ticket confirmed, walking into the one place a storm turns murder into bad luck. I told her the line was dangerous an hour ago, but she never heard this, and now she's an hour from boarding.

"Evander." Gideon's voice sharpens, pulling me back. He's watching my hands, and when I look at my knuckles, the nails have thickened toward claw, the change straining without permission. I haven't slipped like this since I was nineteen. "Rein it in.."

I force it down, muscle by muscle, breathing until my hands are just hands again. It costs more than it should.

"You want to tell me that's about a train?" He says it low, not unkind. He's known me long enough, and he's never once let me lie to him cleanly. "I've watched you run a wildfire without blinking. This isn't your coordinator face."

"It's not the time, Gideon."

"It's exactly the time. Your lion's climbing out of your skin over one human on one train, and if you go into that pass with it riding you like this, you'll expose us all before you ever reach her." He steps in close, dropping his voice further. "So I'll ask plain. Is she a witness you're protecting, or is she yours?"

The honest answer's been there for days, and I don't have the minutes left to keep pretending otherwise. "I don't know what she is yet," I tell him. "I know I'm not letting that mountain have her. Whatever that makes me, we argue about it later."

He doesn't push, he just nods, slow, and I catch the worry under the calm, not for the pride, or not only. For me. "Then we don't have later," he says. "Forty minutes to the depot in this. Less if the plow's cleared Pine Street."

I'm already moving toward the truck. "Get to Owen the second the repeater's back. Tell him everything, the tracks, the residue. If I can't stop that train from the platform, somebody outside the pass has to know why it went down."

"And if you make it aboard?"

"I get the conductor to hold at the first maintenance point and pull everyone off before the pass." I wrench the door open. "Her off first."

"Van." He catches the door before I can slam it. "Whatever she is, come back down the mountain. Don't make me tell your mother something awful."

"Plan on it."

I put the truck into gear and take the grade too fast for the ice, trusting instinct to keep the wheels where they belong. The strangers' tracks blur past my window, evidence I don't have time to read anymore, because all that matters now is a platform on the far side of town and a passenger who has no idea the storm isn't what could kill her. The clock on the dash reads 1:31. Boarding opened at 1:14. She could already be aboard, in her seat, watching the snow, thinking about the sidewalk and everything I was too careful to finish saying.

I lean on the throttle and let the town blur. For the first time in longer than I can remember, I stop planning three moves ahead and just drive toward the thing I can't bear to lose.

7

CAMILLE

The train's barely cleared the yard when Evander drops into the seat across from me. He's got no bag, no ticket he'd admit to, and a look that pulls my head straight out of the report open on my lap. I stop pretending to read it.

"So you've officially started following me around Montana," I say. "Should I be flattered or filing a restraining order?"

"Neither. Listen to me." He isn't even winded, though I watched him swing aboard as the train started rolling, credentials still in his hand. His voice is low and stripped of anything easy. "Tracks up at road nine this morning. Two vehicles, past the chain, toward the restricted access. And residue, the kind you don't get from clearing rock."

Whatever teasing I had left dies. "Say that again, the residue part."

"Refined explosive, recent. Been carried up a closed road and walked it toward the tracks." He leans in, forearms on his knees, filling the narrow space between the seats. "This isn't equipment sabotage anymore. Somebody's staged a problem on the line, and they picked the one afternoon a storm gives them cover."