Page 46 of Faultline

"Buried. The same way the 1947 survey was buried. Someone has been sitting on this information for decades, waiting for the right market conditions to make extraction worth the cost."

Agnes folds her hands on the table.

"The right market conditions arrived. Lithium is no longer a specialty mineral for ceramics and pharmaceuticals. It's the foundation of every battery in every device and every vehicle that the modern world runs on. And Cascade knows exactly where to dig."

I look at the cross-section diagram. My grandfather's property is marked on the survey map, the boundaries drawn in ink that's faded to brown. The lithium runs directly beneath the ridge, beneath the old-growth spruce, beneath the meadow where I dropped the twelve-point bull, beneath the cemetery where three generations of Stoddards are buried under wooden crosses my father carved by hand.

Cascade drove survey flags into those graves. GPS-coordinated. Pneumatic gun. They weren't mapping the dead. They were mapping the lithium beneath them.

The cold anger is back. Not the heat that gets people killed but the other kind, the one that locks into the space behind my sternum and goes quiet and patient and absolutely fucking certain. My hands flatten on the worktable hard enough that the wood creaks under my palms. Agnes watches my hands and doesn't flinch.

"The cemetery. The corridor. The people they've been pushing out." My voice is level. Everything underneath it isn't. "All of it leads back to what's under this mountain."

"And they'll keep pushing." Agnes meets my eyes, steady as bedrock. "Last time, the homesteaders pushed back and the mining company withdrew. This time, they're not filing claims and waiting for objections. They're using fire."

I gather the documents. Agnes lets me. She watches me stack the folders with the care I'd give evidence, which is what they are now, and she doesn't ask me to return them.

"Your grandfather would have wanted you to have those," she says. "He fought harder than anyone to keep that company out of this valley."

"Agnes." I stop at the base of the stairs. "How long have you known about the lithium?"

"Since Walter brought those files home from the borough office in the early eighties." She picks up her coffee cup from the worktable and holds it in both hands. "For forty-some years, it didn't matter. Nobody was coming for the lithium. The market wasn't there, and the records were buried deep enough that I figured they'd stay buried."

She pauses.

"When Cascade showed up, I thought it was timber. Land speculation. It wasn't until they started buying subsurface rights and assembling that corridor that I recognized the pattern. Same shape as the old mining claims. Same stretch of ridge."

Her gaze sharpens.

"I'm old, Liam. Not slow. But I needed someone asking the right questions before I started handing out answers that could get people hurt."

"My father never asked."

"Your father loved the forest, and that was enough for him. He didn't need to know what was underneath it." Her eyes hold on me, reading whatever she finds there. "You're not your father."

"No," I say. "I'm not."

"Your father would have protected the trees. You'll protect the town." She says it with the finality of a delivered verdict, and the verdict isn't negotiable. "Take those to Rhys. Then bring your girl to see me. I have questions for her too."

My jaw locks. The word lands in a place I haven't given Agnes permission to touch, and the reflex to deny it runs headlong into the heavier truth that denial is a luxury I stopped being able to afford the first night she slept in my bed instead of the guest room.

"If Cascade finds out what she is to me, they'll use her to get to the land."

Agnes holds my gaze for a long moment. The assessment is older than I am and sharper than anything I've earned.

"Then you'd better make sure they don't find out from you," she says. She turns back to the filing cabinet and closes the drawer. Conversation over. Not one syllable more than she intended.

I climb the stairs. The morning light through the kitchen window is sharp after the cellar's single bulb, and I stand for a moment in the hallway letting my eyes adjust. The photograph of the 1902 survey party watches from the wall. Men standing in a clearing with tools in their hands, claiming ground they'd defend with a charter and a lawsuit and a stubbornness that bred true across every generation since.

The mountain belongs to those who protect it.

The drive back to the cabin is fast. I take the switchbacks at speed because the documents on the seat beside me have the weight of a detonation, and the fuse has been burning since 1947.

Tosh is on the porch when I pull in. She's leaning against the post with a coffee in one hand and her phone in the other, wearing my flannel again, the one she took from the hook days ago and hasn't given back. The sleeves are rolled past her wrists and the collar sits wide enough to show the hollow of her throat, the edge of her collarbone, the fading bruise from my mouth that she hasn't bothered to cover.

The way she straightens when the truck comes into view says she's been watching the access road since I left.

She reads my face before I'm out of the cab. She's good at that. Better than anyone I've met, and I've met people whose job it was to read faces under pressure.