Page 80 of Faultline

Carl brings Pete and Sally in the volunteer department's brush truck. Pete is upright. That's the most I can say for him. Sally walks beside him with her hand locked around his arm, and her grip says she hasn't let go since Carl brought them together.

Her face is the color of creek stone. Dry. Set. The tears already spent in private, the public version of Sally Calloway requiring the same steel that's run the Ridgeline Café through every crisis this town has weathered.

Hank comes with his wife.

Agnes Croft arrives in the Fielding family's truck, sitting straight-backed in the passenger seat, her white hair braided and her coat buttoned to the collar. She carries a brittle envelope I recognize, the one she pulled from the filing cabinets beneath her house when she showed me the buried geological surveys and the suppressed university research. The town's memory, walking.

Sela pulls a medical kit from the back of Rhys's truck before the engine is off.

Brody Oakes pulls up last in his district truck, alone, and parks at the far end of the meadow, nose pointing downhill. He doesn't join the group immediately. He stands at his tailgate and watches the tree line to the north, his focus locked on the ridge with the stillness of someone who's been reading fire lines long enough to know when the wind is about to turn.

The gathering forms around the open grave without anyone directing it. People stand where they stand. No program. No officiant. Nobody suggests one.

The town's rituals have always belonged more to people like Agnes Croft and the mountain itself than to ceremony, and both are present.

Pete speaks first. He stands at the edge of the grave with Sally's hand still on his arm, and the words he manages are short, broken, delivered in the voice of a man talking through glass.

"Danny was a good kid. He worked hard. He didn't deserve to die on a bridge somebody blew up to prove a point."

Silence. The kind that builds pressure instead of releasing it.

Sally speaks next. The woman who stood in the hardware store months ago defending Cascade's job offers, who argued for pragmatism and investment and roads that don't destroy suspensions. The woman who believed the money might be worth the compromise.

"I told this town to listen to what Cascade was offering." Her voice is steady. The steadiness costs her, and I can see the price in the tendons standing out in her neck. "I was wrong. What they were offering was this." She looks at the grave. "Everything else was packaging."

Agnes steps forward. She doesn't raise her voice. She's never needed to.

The town leans toward her when she speaks, because her memory runs deeper than anyone else's and her words carry the weight of every winter this community has survived.

"The charter says the mountain belongs to those who protect it." She pauses. The envelope is pressed against her side. "My grandmother signed that charter in 1902 because a coal company tried to buy this valley and the families who built it said no. They didn't say no because they hated progress. They said no because they understood that some things can't be sold without losing what makes them worth having."

Her gaze finds me. Direct, specific, carrying the unflinching clarity she brought to the worktable where she laid decades of buried evidence and told me to read it.

"Liam."

I step forward. I'm not built for speeches. My father wasn't either. Stoddards who let the land do their talking and kept their mouths shut when other men were filling the silence with words that didn't cost them anything.

The words I find are the only ones I have.

"This land has been Stoddard land for over a hundred years. My grandfather planted the timber. My father managed it. I've spent my life maintaining what they built because the alternative is letting it die, and I don't know how to do that."

I look at the grave beside my father's cross. Danny, who should be salting a road right now.

"Cascade wants my property because it sits on top of the richest section of a lithium deposit worth more than anything in this valley will ever produce above ground. They've been buying the corridor around me, removing people who might resist, burning out holdouts, and surveilling everyone who refuses to sell. They blew the bridge to cut us off. Danny died because they decided our lives were an acceptable cost."

The silence holds. Every face in the cemetery is turned toward me, and their focus lands on me with a pressure I haven't felt on this land before.

Decision. They're deciding whether to follow, and the decision is already made. I can see it in their posture. Leaning forward. Feet planted.

"My land, my equipment, and every resource I've got are committed to defending this town. Because three generations of Stoddards didn't hold this ground so a corporation could hollow it out underneath us."

I stop talking. I've said more in the last minute than I typically say in a week, and the rawness of it sits behind my teeth like something I swallowed wrong.

Rhys steps in. His voice carries the authority of a third-generation sheriff who has already calculated what comes next and doesn't flinch from the math.

"I've been coordinating with Harlow and the state troopers. What happened to that bridge was a deliberate attack on public infrastructure, and a man is dead. Federal investigators are already on the wreckage. A federal judge has entered a preservation order protecting the site, and the evidence is on a secure server in Anchorage."

He pauses. Looks at every face in the cemetery.