Sabotaged Pride

1. Camille

CAMILLE

The snow starts before I even find the rail yard, which tells me everything I need to know about the forecast I was handed at the station: optimistic, and wrong.

I skip the hotel, and my bag stays in the rental.

I follow the frontage road until the chain-link fence appears through the flurries, sagging under a decade of freeze and thaw.

The gate hangs open, so I let myself in and go straight for the coupling assembly logged in last week's incident report, boots crunching over ballast that hasn't been cleared since October.

I've been on the ground a few minutes when a truck door slams somewhere behind me.

"You're going to want to head back into town." The voice carries across the yard without the man raising it. "Second front's coming over the pass. Roads close in an hour, maybe less."

I don't turn around. "I've got a flashlight and a thermos. I'll manage."

"That's not really how the pass works."

I turn, he's enormous, is my first thought, and my second thought is that I resent how much the first one registered.

Broad through the shoulders, and his canvas jacket does nothing to disguise it, dark blond hair shoved back off his face by nothing but impatience, a scar riding pale along one temple.

He's got the stance of somebody used to people doing what he says, and I'll refuse to be one of those people.

"You in charge of the weather up here, or just the welcome committee?" I ask.

"Emergency management. Evander Shaw." He stops a few feet off, close enough that I have to tip my chin. "And you're the engineer they sent to decide whether they close us down."

"Camille Dyer. And I'm the engineer here to find out why your equipment keeps dying." I crouch back over the coupling and thumb the fracture. "Nobody's decided anything yet."

"Doesn't matter what you decide if you freeze to death confirming it."

"You always this warm to people the first day, or am I special?"

That earns me half a beat of quiet, and when I glance up he's watching me with an expression I can't read, something between irritation and interest, and I get the feeling he can't understand it either.

"You're looking at the coupling," he says instead. "You already think it's wrong."

"I already know it's wrong." I stand, wiping grit off my glove.

"Report says metal fatigue. Component reached the end of its service life, failed under load, tragic but ordinary.

" I hold the broken face up toward the gray light.

"You see this ridge here, this lip where the metal necks down before it snaps?

Fatigue doesn't do that, fatigue leaves you a beach mark, these little arcs where the crack crept a millimeter a day for two years.

This thing let go all at once. It was helped. "

He steps in close and, to his credit, actually looks. "Helped how."

"That's the interesting question, isn't it.

" I lower the piece. "Somebody thinned it.

Ground it down where nobody inspects, put it back in service, and let the cold finish the job.

Then they filed paperwork blaming the weather, because the weather can't sue anyone.

" I tilt my head. "You knew that already though.

That's why you're out here bothering me instead of home by a fire. "

"I told your predecessor the same thing six weeks ago." His jaw works. "Nobody listened. Everything up here is falling apart on a schedule, and schedules aren't accidents."

"Careful. That's speculation, and I don't run on speculation."

"What do you run on, then?"

"Evidence." I gesture at the yard, the buried switches, the whole tired length of track climbing into the murk. "So I'm going to go get some, and you're going to stop treating me like a tourist who wandered onto the tracks."

I expect him to bristle. Men usually do, especially the large ones. Instead one corner of his mouth ticks up, and it changes his whole rugged face, softens the intimidation into something a great deal more dangerous to my concentration.

"Fine," he says. "But the second front's real, Miss Dyer, whatever else you think of me. When the light goes flat like that…" he nods toward the pass, where the mountains have already vanished into a wall of dirty white "...you've got about forty minutes before you can't see your own hands."

"Then I'll work fast."

"You'll work fast," he repeats, "with me standing here, so that when you go over on the ice somebody's around to peel you off it."

"I don't need a chaperone."

"No," he agrees, easy as anything. "You need somebody who knows the ground. Chaperone's just what you get for free."

I should send him packing. I've done that to plant managers, corporate lawyers, one very persistent state senator. It's a reliable pleasure, watching powerful people discover they can't move me. But there's a storm eating the mountains and a saboteur I can't yet name.

"Fine," I echo. "Make yourself useful. Hold this." I hand him the coupling. He takes it like it weighs nothing, turns it in the fading light, and I catch him running his thumb over the same ground-down lip I found, unprompted, in exactly the right place.

"Here," he says. "This is where they thinned it."

I stare at him. "How'd you know to look there?"

"You just showed me." A shrug rolls through those shoulders. "I pay attention. It's most of the job."

Snow is collecting on his hair now, on the scar, on the shoulders of a jacket built for this and nothing else.

I realize I've been looking a half-second too long and drag my attention back to the fracture, annoyed at myself, more annoyed at him for being competent, because that’s so much harder to dismiss than arrogant.

"I'm expanding the scope," I tell him, photographing the break from three angles while I still have the light.

"Not just this coupling. Every failure in the last four months, every maintenance order, every timestamp.

If somebody's manufacturing accidents, there's a pattern, and patterns leave records. "

"You'll have Stonehaven's emergency logs by tonight."

"You're awfully eager to help an investigation that could close you down."

"I'm eager to help one that finds the truth." He hands the coupling back, and our gloved fingers overlap for the length of the exchange, longer than the physics of it require. "The truth keeps us open. I'm betting on you being good enough to get there."

"Don't." I bag the evidence and zip it. "Don't bet on me giving you the answer you want. I'll give you the right one. Sometimes those aren't the same."

"I know the difference." He says it quietly, and I believe him, which unsettles me more than if he'd argued.

The wall of white reaches the far end of the yard. He was right about the forty minutes; I've got maybe ten. I gather my kit and let him walk me back toward the trucks, and I tell myself the only reason I'm glad he's there is the ice. I'm already fairly sure that's a lie.