7. Camille
CAMILLE
The train's barely cleared the yard when Evander drops into the seat across from me. He's got no bag, no ticket he'd admit to, and a look that pulls my head straight out of the report open on my lap. I stop pretending to read it.
"So you've officially started following me around Montana," I say. "Should I be flattered or filing a restraining order?"
"Neither. Listen to me." He isn't even winded, though I watched him swing aboard as the train started rolling, credentials still in his hand.
His voice is low and stripped of anything easy.
"Tracks up at road nine this morning. Two vehicles, past the chain, toward the restricted access.
And residue, the kind you don't get from clearing rock. "
Whatever teasing I had left dies. "Say that again, the residue part."
"Refined explosive, recent. Been carried up a closed road and walked it toward the tracks.
" He leans in, forearms on his knees, filling the narrow space between the seats.
"This isn't equipment sabotage anymore. Somebody's staged a problem on the line, and they picked the one afternoon a storm gives them cover. "
I open the laptop before he's finished talking, my hands want a task while my brain catches up. The altered timestamps are still on screen where I left them, and I turn it toward him.
"Then it fits," I say. "Every failure I've confirmed got its inspection record edited after the part was already swapped.
Warren's office signed the orders, somebody's building a case that this line is unsafe, staggering the failures so it reads like slow rot, not one campaign.
" I tap the map under the log. "And every incident hugs the corridor Northstar's been buying into.
Your discovery isn't separate from mine. It's the next move in the same play."
He studies the screen, assembling it as I did, piece to piece. "Manufactured failures to justify closure," he says slowly. "But closure takes months, hearings, appeals, too slow for whoever hauled explosive up that road."
"So they stopped waiting." The cold of it settles into me at once. "They don't want a report recommending closure. They want a catastrophe that closes it for them, a derailment nobody questions. They’re trying to kill everyone before this storm clears."
"That's what I couldn't say this morning." His eyes hold mine, no armor left in them. "I didn't have the residue yet. I told you the line was dangerous. It wasn't the weather I was afraid of."
The train sways through a curve, wheels singing against cold steel, and every mile still between us and the pass shortens in my chest. "We have to reach Leonard," I say. "The conductor can hold at the next maintenance point and pull everyone off before we're near the blast zone."
"That's the plan. That's why I'm here." He doesn't move yet. "Camille, there's something I need to say first, and I've been too careful to say it in three different rooms now."
"We are on a possibly-sabotaged train."
"I'm aware of the timing, it's terrible." Something almost like humor flickers and dies. "I got Gideon's message about that road, and you came to my mind. On this train, somewhere I couldn't reach. I broke about nine traffic laws getting to that platform, and I'd have broken more."
I've been the steady one for years, narrating other people's panic back to them until they can breathe. Right now my own pulse is loud in my ears, and I've got no calm voice for this.
"You could've stayed in Stonehaven," I say. "Radioed ahead. Let the professionals handle it."
"I am the professional. That's the excuse I keep reaching for, and it's stopped being true.
" He shakes his head once. "Boarding wasn't the job.
The job was coordinating from safety and trusting the system.
I got on because I couldn't sit in that town knowing you were riding toward the danger I'd just found. "
The report slides off my lap and I let it. Everything says keep this professional, log his warning, reach the conductor. Everything under that is done being smart about him.
"I'm so tired of waiting for you to decide whether you're allowed to want this," I tell him. "You keep stepping to the edge and backing off. I can't tell if you're being noble or a coward, and I've decided I don't care which."
"Camille…"
"I'm not finished." I lean across the gap between the seats, and his pulse jumps at his throat. "So here's me not waiting." And I kiss him before there’s a chance for me to change my mind.
He goes rigid, caught between whatever wall he's been holding and the thing on the other side of it.
Then the wall just isn't there anymore, his hand comes up to the side of my face, careful and enormous, and he kisses me back like he's been rationing this for days and finally let himself stop counting.
There's nothing tentative in it, whatever he's been swallowing since I arrived comes up all at once, and I meet it, my fingers curling into his jacket to pull him closer.
He pulls back first and rests his forehead against mine, both of us breathing like we chased the train down together. "That was going to be a much more dignified speech," he says.
"It was heading nowhere good. I did us both a favor." I don't release his jacket yet. "For the record, mutual. Extremely. In case the crew room left any doubt."
"It didn't." A rough laugh. "It really didn't."
Reality edges back in, cold and necessary, the pass creeping closer with every turn of the wheels. I force myself to let go and sit up, smoothing the professional back over everything else. There are a lot of people in the cars ahead who have no idea what's waiting.
"Okay," I say. "We are absolutely finishing this conversation. Later. Somewhere nobody is potentially trying to murder us."
"I'll hold you to that." He's already rising, one hand braced on the seatback as the car rocks. "Front of the train. We find Leonard, we get him to stop at the maintenance point, we walk every car back to front and count heads."
We move up the aisle together, and I catalog the passengers as we pass, an older couple sharing a thermos, a young woman with red-brown hair helping a kid find a dropped mitten, workers dozing under their coats.
Real people, not lines on an economic report.
My stomach knots of getting them all clear in time.
We're two cars from the front when Evander stops mid-stride like he's hit glass. His head turns toward the windows, toward the white nothing beyond, and everything goes predator-still.
"Evander?"
"Get down." It isn't loud. It doesn't have to be, the command in it drops my body into a crouch before my mind agrees, and his arm is already sweeping toward the nearest seats. "Now, cover your head."
I don't hear whatever he heard. A second later, I feel it, a deep, wrong thud rolling up through the floor and into my teeth.
Then the world tears sideways. Snow and rock hammer the train in a roar that swallows every other sound, the lights blow out at once, and the car heaves off its rails beneath me.
I'm airborne, weightless, flung across the tilting space with Evander's shout lost in the tumble, and then there's only the crash, the cold, and the dark closing over.