Page 20 of One-Track Pride

I don't read geology, but I read her face. "That's bad."

"That's a fortune. Rare-earth concentration under this ridge that would make a mining executive weep with joy. Neodymium, dysprosium, the stuff that goes in every motor and turbine and missile on the planet. This land isn't worthless to them, it's the single most valuable thing in three counties. They just needed everyone around it to believe it was garbage."

The pieces close together in my chest like a trap springing. "So they wreck the railway. The line dies, the towns die, property collapses. My neighbors sell for pennies because they've got no choice. And the one holdout…"

"Is a family that suddenly can't afford to hold." She nods, slow. "Once you're surrounded by Northstar land, once the tax base is gone and the roads close, they squeeze. Legal challenges, access disputes, they wait you out. Eventually the trust cracks, or a court forces a sale, and they walk straight up onto the den. They don't know what's under there. But they'll dig until they find out."

I never once pictured a threat arriving this way and a patient man in a good coat.

"You can't promise me you'll stop this," I say. "You can't promise to save my whole world, Camille. It's too big and there's too much money behind it."

"No." She doesn't soften it, doesn't lie to me, and God, that's why I trust her. "I can't promise you the ending. Nobody honest could." She takes my gloved hand in both of hers, holds it against the cold. "But I can promise you I will fight for it. Every record, every timestamp, every crooked deed, I will drag it into the light until this is the most expensive murder plot Northstar ever attempted. That I can promise, the fight, not the win."

The wind drops for a breath, and a pocket of sudden quiet hits. In it I hear what she isn't saying, and what she is. She's an outsider who could have walked away, radio fixed, evidence in hand, and let my mountain be my problem. Instead she's crouched in the mouth of my family's oldest secret, promising to bleed for it.

"You keep doing that," I murmur.

"Doing what?"

"Choosing this. Choosing us. Nobody chooses us."

She leans in, but doesn’t kiss me. I stare at her lips considering it, and close the distance kissing her passionately. She pulls back and strokes my cheek.

"We should get back before Tobias comes looking and narrates it," she says.

"He absolutely would." I stand, pull her up with me, keep her hand. "Camille. Whatever's under this mountain, you're the first outsider I've ever wanted to show it to. Not needed to, wanted."

"Then survive the night," she says, "and maybe someday you will."

We turn back toward the station, into the wind, together, no longer a lion guarding his door alone, but two people walking toward the same one.

15

CAMILLE

It's early afternoon when we make it back, and the trek leaves my legs burning, but the wreck coming into view steadies me more than rest would. Tobias has the injured tucked into the least-damaged carriage. Someone's rigged a stove, there's even coffee, of a sort, and I take a cup and carry it to the corner I've claimed as a field office. It’s a folding table someone salvaged, my drive, and the maintenance documents I copied at the depot in the last frantic hours before I boarded.

I spread it all out and start matching pages, it doesn't take long. That's what curdles my stomach, it should. A well-buried crime should make me work for it, and this one just lies down and shows me its belly.

"Warren," I say, mostly to the paper.

Leonard shifts on the cot. "Pike?"

"Yeah." I tap the first sheet. "His signature is on the replacement order for the coupling that failed first, then the switch assembly, then the signal box relay. These are the same replacements you said your crews objected to?"

"Every one of them."

I turn the next page. "And he signed the post-failure inspections too."

Evander crouches beside the table. "So he approved the replacements, then got to inspect the failures afterward."

"Exactly."

Evander crouches beside the table, reading over my shoulder. "That's sloppy. Leaving his name everywhere."

"It's not sloppy, it's confident. He assumed nobody would ever line these up, because the whole point was that the failures looked unrelated. Spread out over four months, blamed on cold and age. No single person was ever supposed to hold all the pieces at once."

"But you did."