Page 58 of Faultline

Rhys steps to the front. He doesn't use the podium. He positions himself beside it, hands at his sides, badge visible on his belt but not emphasized.

He's addressed crowds like this before, delivered information nobody wanted to hear, and his voice when he starts carries the measured steadiness of someone who treats panic as a contagious disease and refuses to be the carrier.

"I asked you here because you deserve to know what's happening in this valley," he says. "Not rumors. Not speculation. Evidence. We've got three presentations tonight, and I’d like to ask that you hold your questions until all three are done." He pauses. "This is going to take a while. Sally brought coffee."

A few people smile. Nobody laughs. Everyone in the hall knows something is coming.

Liam goes first. He walks to the corkboard and pins the territorial survey beside the geological maps.

His voice is low and even, stripped of anything that isn't fact. He doesn't persuade. He reports. The 1947 geological assessment. The lithium formation beneath the ridgeline. The 1974 university study that confirmed and expanded the finding. The suppression of both reports. The phantom foundation that funded the second study and vanished.

The corridor comes next: the three properties purchased through shell companies, forming a continuous strip from the highway to the ridge. His property in the gap. The survey flags on his family's cemetery, GPS-coordinated, driven into the graves with a pneumatic gun.

Nobody speaks. Not the comfortable quiet of people listening politely. The taut stillness of people whose assumptions about their own ground are rearranging beneath them.

"Cascade doesn't want timber," Liam says. "They don't want real estate. They want what's underneath. And my property sits between them and the deposit they're trying to reach."

He steps back. No summary. No appeal. He lays the facts on the table and leaves them there, which is exactly how he does everything.

Rhys goes next. He keeps it short. The pattern of escalation across the past several months: the surveillance positions on Liam's property, the sabotaged equipment, the office break-in at Aurora Covenant. The Anderson fire. The fire at Liam's staging area and equipment shed.

Both deliberately set using engineered containment and multiple ignition points.

"The wildland fire investigator assigned to this district has confirmed that both fires were professional arson," Rhys says. "This isn't vandalism. This is a coordinated campaign, and it's escalating."

Marc is near the back door with his arms folded. His eyes move across the crowd the way Liam's moved across the door, reading faces like a former Army CID investigator reads an interrogation. He's not presenting. He's cataloging.

Then it's my turn. I take my place at the case table. I don't look at Liam. If I look at him, I'll see the man who held the back of my neck in his kitchen and told me he was in.

What I need right now is the advocate who sat across from Rhys at the Ridgeline and laid three names on a table before she knew any of these people by face.

"My name is Rebecca MacIntosh. Most of you know me as Tosh. I run the Aurora Covenant office on the main street, and I've been working with survivors in this region since the Marshal case." I let that settle. The Marshal case still carries weight here. These people lived through it.

"Over the past several months, I've been tracking a connection that ties together everything Liam and Rhys just described."

I walk them through it the way I'd walk a prosecutor through a case brief. Denise Stahl and Cascade Resource Group. The targeting of vulnerable women through publicly accessible court records. The relocation packages designed to look voluntary. Della Pruitt. Nina Ballard. Maryanne Sobol. Three names that land in the hall like stones dropped into still water.

"Every woman who accepted a relocation package from this network gave notice at her job, terminated her lease, and left the area with clean paperwork," I say. "Every one of them stopped contacting me afterward. Their phones went dead. Their forwarding addresses don't exist."

I trace the registration chain. Pacific Basin Resources, Highline Development Group, Meridian Capital: all registered through Whitfield-Crane, the firm that filed every land-purchase LLC in the corridor Liam described. One Anchorage address. One filing pattern.

"The pattern doesn't match trafficking," I say. "Trafficking targets people for their continued exploitation. The value is in the person. This operation targets people for their absence. Every time one of my clients left this region, the property behind her changed hands. The value isn't in where they end up. It's in what they leave behind."

I stop. Every face in the hall is looking back at me, and none of them are blinking.

"I can't prove that every entity in this network is controlled by the same hand. I can prove they share the same legal infrastructure, the same filing agent, the same address. And I can prove that the relocations and the property acquisitions track with one timeline, one geography, one corporate structure."

Rhys lets the silence hold for three beats after I finish. Then he opens the floor.

The first voice belongs to a man I don't know. Older, weather-carved face, sitting near the back in a canvas jacket that's seen more winters than the building. "You're telling me there's lithium under my land?"

"Under all of it," Liam says. "The formation runs under the ridge. How far it extends, we don't know yet. But Cascade does."

"How much is it worth?"

Liam looks at him. "Enough that someone is willing to burn buildings and relocate vulnerable women to get to it."

The man leans back. His hands flatten on his thighs, and the number he's arriving at is one he'll never say out loud.