2. Evander
EVANDER
The emergency-services building sits two blocks off the main drag, a squat brick box that smells like scorched coffee no matter how many windows we pry open in the cold.
I've got six months of incident reports pinned across the briefing wall before Gideon and Amy finish stamping the snow off their boots.
"You dragged us out on a Sunday for pushpins," Amy says. She spins a chair around and drops into it, arms folded over the back. "Please tell me there's a point buried in the pushpins."
"Look at where they are, not what they are.
" I tap the map, one red pin at a time. "Coupling failure here, signal fault here, switch assembly, two weeks back, here.
Every regional report calls them separate, weather, fatigue, bad luck.
Spread the year out, though, and they aren't scattered. They're circling us."
Gideon moves close to the wall and studies it, quiet and patient, thinking instead of just listening. "Northern line runs three hundred miles," he says. "These all sit inside forty of Stonehaven."
"Thirty-eight. I measured."
"Course you did." Amy leans forward. "So the railway's rotting in our backyard specifically. Could be coincidence. Old steel, hard winters, we catch the worst of both."
"Could be. I don't think it is."
The yard sits right under the east windows, a grid of frozen sidings and the long gray spine of the maintenance shed.
The engineer's down there again, Dyer, crouched over the coupling she pulled yesterday, camera in one hand, ignoring the fact that it's twelve degrees and falling.
She's been at it since before the pot finished brewing.
Amy tracks my eyes and grins, slow and wicked. "Huh."
"Don't."
"I said nothing."
"You made a face."
"I make plenty of faces. This one's about you checking that window every ninety seconds like the glass owes you money."
"She's an outside investigator whose report decides whether this town keeps its railway. I'd be a lousy coordinator if I weren't watching what she does with it."
Gideon doesn't even turn around. "You're watching her. Not the report."
"Both of you can leave."
Amy's laugh cuts off when I move a pin they haven't clocked yet, up where the map goes pale and the contour lines bunch. "One more," I say. "This switch fault. Look what it sits beside."
Her grin dies. She knows exactly what road threads that pass, the old service track climbing toward our mountain, toward the den, toward the one place on this whole map that can never appear in an incident report.
"That's too close," she says, low.
"That's where I keep landing. If somebody's manufacturing these, they're doing it in a shrinking circle, and the circle's pulling toward the worst possible ground. This stopped being about freight the second a fault turned up there."
"Then we take it to Beckett," Gideon says. "Owen's careful, he'll…"
"And tell him what? That the line's being sabotaged toward a mountain we won't let a soul survey? He asks why, and suddenly we're answering questions we can't afford to answer."
"So we sit on it."
"We manage it. Different thing."
"It can’t be sabotage, not when…"
The door opens on a gust of cold, and the three of us go silent at once.
Camille Dyer stands in the frame with snow melting off her shoulders and a folder clamped to her chest. She's caught enough of the last few seconds to know she walked in on something.
Her eyebrow lifts, small and knowing, and I'd resent it more if it weren't aimed straight at the bit of me she has no business reading this fast.
"Don't stop on my account," she says.
"Ms. Dyer." I push up off the desk. "We were debating snow-load on the shed roof. Gripping stuff."
"You were debating something. I heard 'sabotage' through the door." She lets it swing shut behind her. "But sure. Roof."
Amy mouths 'roof’ at me on her way past and hauls Gideon toward the truck bay, the pair of them suddenly remembering urgent business with a fire hose. Traitors, both. Camille sets her folder down and flips it open like she owns the office.
"I came for your response logs," she says. "Every incident your people got called to on the line, eighteen months back." She fans the pages. "Since you've clearly got your own map, though, show me."
I lay the incident sheets beside her request, and she bends over them with a hungry focus I recognize. I wear the same look over a rescue grid. She reads the cluster fast. She doesn't yet read the shape.
"They're grouped," she says.
"Grouped and crawling." I lean in and trace the timeline, the year's early faults spread wide, the recent ones drawn tight. "January, they're way out here. Now they're here. This isn't random. It's walking inward."
She turns her head to argue and we're closer than I'd tracked, her shoulder against my arm, cold still lifting off her jacket, and under it the warm human scent of her my lion has decided, without asking me, is worth committing to memory.
Heat climbs the back of my neck, and my grip on the animal slips a little, gold starting to bleed up behind my eyes, and I put some distance between us before she notices and finds a difference to my eyes that no person has.
"You okay?" she asks.
"Long night. Coffee's here, it's hot if you want it."
"I want the pattern, not the caffeine." She taps the tight knot of pins near the pass.
"This one bothers me more than the rest, and I can't say why yet.
There's nothing up there, no siding, no crossing, no reason for a crew to set foot on it.
But you had it flagged before I came through that door.
How does an emergency coordinator know a dead stretch of mountain that well? "
"Because dead stretches are where people die." I keep it easy. "I've hauled hikers off that pass in whiteouts. You learn every draw and false trail up there or you carry bodies down instead of survivors. Knowing the ground is important."
"Good answer." She holds my eyes. "Also not the whole one. There are three spots on this map you talk about like it was your own kitchen, and two supposedly can't be reached in winter at all."
"People still wander into them."
"Evander."
"Camille. Some of that's family land. I grew up on it. That's the end of the story."
She doesn't buy it, sharp of her, but she can't prove a thing standing in my office, so she lets it go with a small, unsatisfied tilt of her chin that promises she isn't done.
"I'm driving the line tomorrow," she says, packing up the folder. "The switch assembly by the pass. I want the tool marks in daylight."
"Then I'm coming."
She halts. "Why."
"Because that road hasn't seen a plow since Thursday, the grade glazes over by noon, and if you slide off it alone, I'm the one scraping you out of a ravine."
"Uh-huh." She shoulders her bag. "Real reason, or are you just incapable of letting anyone do a single thing without you looming over them?"
"Both," I say.
It jolts a laugh out of her, quick and unwilling, gone before it lands, but I catch it, and the lion catches it, and heaven help me, I already want to earn the next one.
She heads for the door shaking her head, and I stand in the cooling office convincing myself I'm riding along tomorrow because the road is dangerous.
It is, but it's just not the reason, and I know myself too well to pretend otherwise.