5. Camille
CAMILLE
The email lands at seven, and I read it twice. Priority storm advisory, passenger service on the northern line suspends after the afternoon departure. My supervisor's note underneath is three words: Get out today.
I don't argue with weather or with the person who signs my expense reports. I grab my boots and reach the depot before the ticket window opens, because one man I need keeps a locomotive engineer's hours, and this is my last morning to catch him.
Leonard Reyes is where I expect him, in the crew room off the platform, feeding quarters into a machine that dispenses something it optimistically calls hot chocolate. Railway cap on even indoors, brim soft with age. He takes one glance at me and snorts.
"You're the safety engineer everybody's been muttering about."
"Camille Dyer. And you're the man who's driven this line longer than I've been alive."
"Thirty-one years next spring." He thumps the machine when it hesitates. "You want something, or just collecting introductions?"
"The maintenance orders that came down before the failures." I sit without being asked; standing over him would put his back up. "You know what your equipment needs. Tell me what it felt like when somebody upstairs started overruling that."
He weighs whether I'm worth the breath, then drops into the chair with a grunt.
"Felt like being told the sky's green. Directives out of the regional office, signed by Warren Pike, telling us to pull parts with years left and swap in replacements nobody requested.
I flagged it twice, got told to mind my throttle and let management manage. "
"Warren Pike approved the swaps personally?"
"His name's on the orders. His hands, I couldn't say." He wraps both palms around the cup. "But I've known Warren twenty years. When somebody that careful starts signing off on nonsense, either he's lost his judgment or he's been handed a reason to pretend he has."
I feel the click of it settling into place, one more piece lining up with the rest. "The parts you were told to pull. Were any of them near the failures I'm looking at?"
"Every one." He says it flat, no drama, and somehow that lands harder than shouting. "Draw a line between the swaps and the breakdowns and you've drawn the same line. I'm old, missy, not blind."
"Camille," I tell him, gently, because he's just handed me the whole thing. "Not missy."
"Camille." He almost smiles. "Get those records. The real log, with the timestamps. Numbers don't get nervous under questioning. People do."
I take his advice straight to the depot's records terminal and pull everything Warren's office has filed.
It takes twenty minutes and half my patience, but there on the screen, inspection entries clustered around each failure, and the timestamps wrong.
Not wildly, just off, a pre-failure inspection logged after the component was already replaced.
An approval dated to a Sunday the office was closed.
Small enough to miss if you weren't the kind of person who lives inside timestamps for a living.
I can't prove who edited these before my train pulls out, but the fingerprints are here, smudged and deliberate, so I copy the whole set to an encrypted drive before anyone thinks to lock me out.
I'm still bent over the terminal when a shadow falls across the screen, so big that it blocks the overhead lights, and I don't have to turn to know.
"You found something," Evander says.
"I found timestamps that lie." I keep scrolling. "Which is my favorite kind of evidence, because paper doesn't panic. What are you doing at the depot at eight in the morning?"
"Searching for you." He pulls out the chair beside me, turns it around, and sits with his forearms braced along the back. "You're taking the afternoon train."
"Yes, orders from above, storm below, four days of analysis to do somewhere with reliable power." I glance over. His face is doing something careful and unhappy. "You've got an opinion. I can see it fighting to get out."
"I don't want you on that train."
I sit back and cross my arms. "We've done this dance, Evander. You decide the mountain's too dangerous, or the road, or now the railway, and you appoint yourself the one who gets to keep me off it. I'm getting really tired of the choreography."
"It's not choreography." His voice stays low, but there's iron underneath it. "The line's been sabotaged. You proved that yourself, this morning, on that screen. And you want to ride it through the pass in the coming storm, when a breakdown is exactly what somebody's been engineering."
"Passenger service runs a full safety protocol the freight failures never touched. I reviewed it." I hold up a hand before he can cut in. "I'm not being reckless, I'm being employed. There's a difference, and I don't need a bodyguard to walk me through it."
"I'm not offering to be your bodyguard."
"Then what are you offering? Because every conversation we have, you plant yourself between me and whatever I'm trying to do, and I can't tell anymore if that's about the danger or about you."
He goes quiet. Not the smooth, deflecting quiet I've watched him use on other people. This is the other kind, the kind where a man decides whether to open a door he usually keeps shut.
"I don't like the idea of you somewhere I can't reach," he says finally. "If that train stops in the pass, there's no road in during a storm. Nobody gets to you, I don't get to you. That's what I don't like, not your competence, the distance."
It lands somewhere I wasn't guarding, and I feel my whole body lose its footing. "You've known me four days."
"I'm aware."
"Then why does where I am matter this much already?"
There's a war behind his eyes, a whole sentence he starts and swallows. He doesn't reach for the true answer. He reaches for a smaller one, and I can tell it costs him even so.
"Because I like you a great deal more than I planned to," he says. "I keep telling myself it was about the investigation, and I've stopped being able to sell it to myself."
The crew room feels suddenly too small and too warm. I've built a career on staying cool while everyone else comes apart, and right now my pulse is doing something undignified.
"Well," I manage. "That makes two people bad at selling it."
His head lifts. "Yeah?"
"Don't look pleased. It's inconvenient and it's mutual, and those two things are at war in me." I hold his eyes. "Last night I caught myself thinking about that diner sidewalk instead of my case notes. Draw your own conclusions."
The space between us goes taut and electric, the same current from the parking lot, only closer, with no snow to blame it on. He leans in a fraction, but I don't lean back.
My phone buzzes against the table, splitting the moment in half. A depot alert: afternoon departure confirmed, 2:14 p.m., boarding one hour prior. I read it out loud, and the words drop the temperature back to something survivable, the excuse we both needed and neither wanted.
"I have to pack," I say, standing before I can second-guess it. "And you have to decide what you actually want to do about this, because a stolen moment in a crew room isn't a plan."
"Camille."
I sling my bag over my shoulder. "I'll see you before the train. Try not to invent a new reason to stop me between now and then."
I walk out before he can answer without looking back, because if I see his face it'll undo me, and I still have a train to catch, and right now that's the only part being sensible.