Page 37 of One-Track Pride

I look to the steel under my hand, at the man tied to it, at the pale slope waiting above us with a charge counting itself down toward zero. She's right that I couldn't have reached it alone, because I only know one move, and it's always to put my own body between my people and the worst thing coming. Bringing the den down would be that same move dressed up as sacrifice. She saw it before I finished saying it.

"Okay, we do it your way. The mountain stays standing."

"Good. Because we're out of time to discuss it anyway."

As if the ridge heard her, a thin electronic shriek splits the air from the locked charge higher up the slope, the warning tone, the last honest thing that machine will ever tell us. Ninety seconds, if Tobias called it right. Maybe less. Clayton hears it too, and the grin finally slides off him.

"You should run," he says, quieter now.

"That's the plan." I haul the tie loose and drag him up by his good arm, because leaving him staked to a machine that's about to be hit by a redirected avalanche isn't an execution I'm willing to sign my name to. "You're coming down with me. You're going to sit in a warm room and tell everything to people with badges and recorders."

"Why?" He stumbles as I push him ahead toward the fixed line. "I'd have buried you."

"I know. That's the difference between us, and I'm done explaining it." I key the radio as I move. "Camille, I've got him. Everyone off the release path, now. What’s your position?"

"Final gate, west platform, wrapping the last override." Her breath saws through the channel. "Sixty seconds. Van, when this snow moves, it moves fast. Wherever you are when I call it, you stop and you brace. Promise me."

"I promise." I shove Clayton down behind the anchor of the amplifier frame and put my body between him and the slope, my eyes climbing toward the platform where I can just make out her silhouette against the raw sky. "Turn the mountain, Camille. I've got everything down here. You just turn it."

"Turning it now."

27

CAMILLE

The old control bank is a wall of iron levers the railway bolted here decades ago to shed snow on its own schedule. Clayton's crew ran their modern detonators straight into it, too lazy to build their own, and that laziness is the only gift I'm going to get today. Their kill switch and my override share the same guts.

"Releasing the west field," I say into the radio, and throw the first lever. The counterweight drops with a shriek of unhappy steel. Below and west of me a slab of snow the size of a parking lot peels off the mountain and starts to move, a low white roar I feel through my boots. "Gideon, center amplifier. Talk to me."

"Dragged it twenty feet downhill," he answers, calm as a man reading a grocery list. "It's not aiming anything at anybody now."

"Tobias?"

"Second detonator's dead, east amplifier's off the line." A crackle. "Cam, the clouds are gone. Those helicopters keep coming, they're gonna be right over this slope."

"Then we're faster than the helicopters." I split my eyes between the panel and the grease-pencil release map bolted to the housing, tracking the moving snow against lines somebody drew forty years ago. Each gate has to open in sequence, nudging the mass a few more degrees off the wreck. Second gate goes clean. The third jams, and I put my shoulder into the lever until the pin gives and it slams home. "Van, your amplifiers?"

"Last one's frozen into the frame." Under his words comes the grind of machinery no human arm should shift. "It's fighting me. Twenty seconds."

The fourth gate won't move at all. The manual override for it sits out on the release platform, a rusted deck hung directly over the slope I'm redirecting. The second I climb up onto it, I understand my whole problem. If my sequence is off by a hair, the snow I'm steering comes straight up underneath me.

"Camille." His voice sharpens like he can see me, and maybe he can, from wherever he's braced below. "Get off that platform. You're standing right over the release."

"I know exactly where I'm standing." I lock both hands on the frozen override wheel and haul. "It's the only spot the override reaches. Finish your amplifier. Do not come up here, Van, if you leave that machine in place the whole redirect fails and every one of these people dies for nothing."

"I am not watching that snow come up under you."

"You're not watching. You're trusting me." The wheel gives a quarter turn, then locks. I brace a boot against the housing and try again. "You promised me. Neither gets to jump ahead of the other. That runs both directions, the bravest thing you can do right now is hold your position and let me do mine."

The radio goes silent, and I've never heard a harder quiet, him pinning himself in place by sheer will while everything in him howls to climb. Then, low and rough: "Turn your gate. Mine's clear, go."

The wheel breaks loose immediately and spins free, and the fourth gate drops open in the exact second the locked charge detonates high on the ridge.

The blast is a white concussion that empties the air. I lose sound, sight, everything but light and flying snow. Then the mountain answers, a wall of snowpack thundering out of the blast zone, hunting for the wreck the way it was engineered to. It hits my channel, the open gates, and it bends. A hundred thousand tons of it swings west along the path I carved, away from the pass, roaring down into the empty valley instead of onto the train.

I get exactly one breath of relief before the platform under me lets go. The shockwave and the passing edge of the slide rip the deck apart. Bolts shear, and the floor drops out from under me. I grab for the frame and my glove closes on nothing, and then I'm going down with the wreckage into the churn.

Something huge slams into me from the side, not snow. Him, Evander hits me the instant before the deck folds, one arm crushing around my ribs, hauling me sideways off the collapsing platform and into the anchored shelf of rock beyond it. He puts his own back to the debris and wraps himself around me while the mountain tears past, snow and splintered timber and broken steel close so that I feel the wind of it. He doesn't let go, not through the worst of it, not until the roar finally starts to fall away and the ground under us stops trying to move.