Page 38 of One-Track Pride

When the shaking quits, I'm pressed against his chest with his heart pounding into me hard. My own hands won't stop trembling.

"You climbed," I get out.

"I cleared the amplifier first." His voice is shredded, his mouth against my hair. "It was down. I did my job, Camille. Then I came and did the other one." His arms tighten like he's checking I'm still whole. "Don't ask me to hear that platform go and stay put. That's the one promise I'll break every single time."

I twist in his hold until I can see his face, gold still draining out of his eyes, alive, snow melting in his hair. "You caught me after I finished the work," I tell him, and my voice cracks straight down the middle. "That's not throwing yourself away. That's the part I'll allow."

He huffs something that isn't quite a laugh, forehead on mine, we are just breathing on that ledge above a pass. Below us the train is still there, the valley to the west is filling with the snow that was meant to kill everyone.

Then I see it, past his shoulder, in the raw ground the slide scoured bare around the old blast site. My stomach drops all over again, not from fear this time.

"Van." My fingers tighten in his jacket. "Look what it uncovered."

28

EVANDER

My body registers that the mountain has stopped moving when I finally set Camille down on solid rock above the redirected slide path, no more thunder rolling up through my boots, no more shriek of snow shearing loose from stone. Just wind, and the ragged sound of us breathing, and the strange quiet that comes after a huge disaster that’s decided not to kill you.

"You can let go now," Camille says. Her voice is muffled against my shoulder. "I'm on the ground, solid ground, I checked."

"One second..."

"Van. My feet are literally touching…"

"A second," I repeat, and she stops arguing, which tells me she needs it as badly as I do.

Below us, Gideon comes crunching up the incline with Tobias behind him, both are coated white to the shoulders. Gideon's face is hiding what it usually does when he's been terrified and refuses to admit it, all flat calm laid, but really he’s rattled underneath. I've been able to read the difference for a long time.

"Passengers?" I ask before he can speak.

"Higher ground held," Gideon says. "Nobody buried. Reyes rebroke his leg when they moved him, and one of the older women's hypothermic, but Leah's got them. None dead." His eyes drift beyond me to the churned valley where the avalanche went instead of where it was aimed. "That was close, boss."

"It was Camille's plan."

"I know whose plan it was." Gideon's mouth twitches. "I'm just saying it was close."

Camille pulls out of my arms at last, straightening her jacket like she's shaking off the last hour along with the snow. Already her eyes have gone somewhere else, tracking down the slope to the scarred ground where the old blast zone used to lie hidden. "The slide stripped the original site," she says. "Van. Look. Everything they buried the first time, it's sitting right there on the surface."

"Then it stays there for cameras."

"That's the plan." She's moving before she finishes the sentence, and I have to lengthen my stride to keep pace with her down toward the exposed rock, Tobias falling in on her other side.

The mountain has coughed up a graveyard of what they did to us. Wiring runs in torn black veins across raw stone. A cracked detonator housing lies half-buried, its serial plate scoured clean and readable. Farther down, an amplifying rig Clayton's people dragged up the ridge sits crumpled but whole, stamped with a manufacturer's mark that will lead somewhere a subpoena can follow.

"Photograph the serials first," Camille says, crouching, brushing powder off a component with two fingers. "Weather's clearing, which means it'll snow again the second the front passes. I want every number logged before it disappears under fresh cover."

"Where should I point the phone?"

She glances up at me, startled, like she expected an argument about whether she should be down here at all, but I don't give her one. That's a habit I'm trying to retire.

"There," she says, and points, and I photograph.

We work like that for a stretch, her narrating, me and Tobias documenting, Gideon standing sentry with his head tipped toward the wind. It's Gideon who catches it first, the shift in the air, and when he says my name I've already scented what’s happening.

"Rourke's moving," I say.

Clayton is where we left him, wrists zip-tied to a bent stanchion near the ruined control station, or he was. In the chaos of the redirect, he must’ve worked it, and now he's a dark shape lurching downslope into the whiteout with his hands still bound.