Page 60 of Faultline

Carl gets to his feet from the back row. His voice fills the hall, calibrated to reach the back wall of a gymnasium whether he's running a fundraiser or putting out a fire.

"I've responded to two arsons in as many months," he says. "Both professional. Both targeted at holdouts. My crew is running on volunteer hours and donated fuel, and the next fire is going to be worse than the last two because that's what escalation means." He looks at Rhys. "What do you need from us?"

"Documentation," Rhys says. "Every contact with Cascade representatives. Every offer. Every visit. Dates, names, business cards. The more individual accounts we can connect to the corporate pattern Tosh has mapped, the stronger the case becomes when it reaches a federal desk."

People start talking. Not to Rhys or to me. To each other. Low conversations between neighbors who walked in carrying separate suspicions and are now fitting them together for the first time.

A woman near the front pulls a business card from her purse and hands it to Rhys. A man two rows back begins writing dates on the meeting notice Carl printed.

This is the part they don't teach you in advocacy training. The part where individual experiences stop being isolated and start becoming proof. A business card here. A date there. A conversation with a recruiter that felt wrong at the time and feels worse now.

Hank walks to my table. He doesn't say anything. He sets a survey notice on the case materials, the same kind Roy Prescott brought to Rhys months ago. A boundary survey from a company with "mineral" in the name and an Anchorage address. He nods once and walks back to his seat.

The meeting breaks apart slowly, the way ice breaks on a river. Not all at once. In sections, shifting and grinding against each other before the current takes them.

Some people leave immediately. Others stay. They gather inside or outside in the cold, talking in small groups that form and dissolve and re-form around different anchors. Sally’s coffee, hot and strong, is served without ceremony.

Agnes sits on the bench near the door with Christian Fielding's wife, watching the parking lot empty and fill and empty again.

A kid has fallen asleep on the bench inside, curled under a coat that isn't his, mouth open, dead to the world.

His mother is six feet away, talking to another woman in the careful voice of someone who is frightened and trying not to show it.

Carl leans against the railing next to Rhys. "At this rate, my insurance premiums are going to be higher than my pension." Too loud, aimed at the back row. The people nearby laugh harder than the joke deserves because the alternative is standing in the cold and thinking about what they just heard.

This is what Cascade is trying to buy. The conversations after the meeting. The thermos making rounds without anyone asking whose it is. The kid asleep on the bench. The laughter that breaks the tension because someone has to break it and Carl always volunteers.

Cascade looked at this town and saw an obstacle between their survey stakes and their mineral rights. A population to thin. A resistance to exhaust.

Maybe this is what they miscalculated. The rancher who won't sell the dirt his wife is buried under. The fire chief who turns fear into a joke because his people need to breathe.

Liam finds me at the railing. He doesn't say anything. He settles beside me, close enough that his arm presses against mine, and looks out at the gravel lot where Whitewater Junction is deciding what it is.

Not unanimously. Not without argument. Not without the anger of a man who took money he needed from a company he's now learning he shouldn't have trusted. Not without Sally Calloway's sharp, practical fury at discovering that the pragmatic option she'd been defending came with a cost nobody disclosed.

But the people who stayed aren't pretending anymore that they're each dealing with Cascade alone. Whatever comes next, they're facing it with the same information. Dozens of isolated suspicions are now one visible pattern, and that's a problem Cascade didn't budget for.

"That could have gone worse," Liam says.

"That could have gone a lot of ways." I lean into his arm. "Sally's going to corner me at the Ridgeline tomorrow and demand answers I don't have yet."

"Sally corners everybody at the Ridgeline. It's her secondary profession."

"You're not helping."

"I'm not trying to help. I'm telling you she'll respect you more for not flinching." His voice drops half a register. "You didn't flinch."

"I considered it. Briefly."

"No, you didn't."

He's right. I didn't.

The cold is settling into the valley, and the porch light catches the frost forming on the railing. "The ones who left angry are the ones I'm worried about. Cascade will know about this meeting by tomorrow."

"Cascade will know by tonight."

I look up at him. His jaw is set, his eyes on the tree line.