8. Evander
EVANDER
The dark doesn't keep me long. I come back to a world tipped forty degrees off, my shoulder jammed against a window that's become the floor, snow crushed white against the glass an inch from my face.
Sound returns in pieces, the tick of cooling steel, wind howling through a torn seam in the roof, and close by a child crying in a thin, stunned pitch that means the world stopped making sense too fast.
"Camille." I shout. "Answer me. Right now."
"Here." A groan two rows up, half-buried under a coat and a slide of luggage. "I'm here, my leg's pinned."
"Don't pull against it. You'll tear something." I'm already crossing to her, shoving a toppled seat out of my path. "Talk to me, are you bleeding?"
"Bruised, not bleeding. The strut's across my shin, not through it." Even now she's precise about it, cataloging herself the same as she'd catalog a fault. "You're going to say hold still."
"Hold still."
"Called it." She watches my hands close under the bent metal. "Evander, that's structural steel. You need a cutter and about ten minutes. We don't…"
I lift it, no grunt, no heave, none of the careful theater I've performed before. The frame peels up off her leg like a branch off a trail, and the metal screams as it gives.
"That's not…" She stares at my hands, at the bent steel folded back like foil. "People can't do that. You didn't even brace."
"Can you stand? Try the leg."
"Yeah. It holds." She still doesn't move. "Evander…"
"Later." I bring her up by the forearm. "How many did you count coming through the cars?"
The question snaps her back into the woman that runs at problems instead of from them. "Thirty-one, plus crew. The family with the boy is one car up, older couple was right behind us."
"Then here's the split. You take the walking wounded to the rear doors. I take the ones who can't walk." A man's voice carries over the wind from the forward car, hoarse and climbing. I know that pitch, it belongs to somebody watching the exits close. "Hear that? That's my first stop, go."
"You don't hand me orders, Shaw." But she's already snagging a dazed teenager by the sleeve, pointing. "Back of the train. Don't stop, don't grab your bag, just move."
I climb through the ruptured coupling into the next car, and the sight empties my lungs.
The roof's caved on the left, a slab of ceiling and a luggage rack pinning an older man to his seat.
His wife's on her knees beside him, hauling at a weight ten of her couldn't budge.
Water sheets across the floor from a split somewhere below, rising fast.
"Please." She turns on me, wild. "He can't get out, I can't move it, please…"
"Back away and cover his head." I crouch and set my shoulder under the collapsed rack. "Sir, can you hear me?"
"I hear you." The old man's voice is a thread. "My legs won't come, get Barbara out, leave me…"
"Nobody's leaving anybody," I tell him. "Barbara, you pull him the second he's free. Don't wait for me to say it twice."
"I won't, I'm ready." Her hands lock under his arms.
"On three you drag. One. Two."
There's no dose of strength careful enough for this, so I stop holding the door shut.
The lion comes up through me like heat through a wire, spine lengthening, hands widening, claws splitting the tips of my gloves as heat floods my eyes and the wrecked car goes bright and slow.
I plant my boots and I stand, and the roof rises with me until his legs come loose.
"Now, Barbara… now, pull him, I've got the weight!"
"I've got him… I've got you, Walter…" She drags him under the arms across the wet floor, and he slides free, gasping, alive.
"Keep going, rear doors." I hold the ceiling until they're past the coupling, then let it crash into the seat where he was sitting. "Don't look back, just walk."
When I turn, Camille is standing in the ruptured coupling, and I’m not sure how long she's been there. Long enough that her eyes are fixed on a face still burning gold, on hands that haven't finished remembering they're hands.
"Camille." My real voice comes back as I force the change down, the gold guttering, my fingers narrowing. I keep both hands open where she can see them. "I know what you just watched."
"You lifted the roof of a train car." She says it flat, like reading it off a gauge. "With your hands. Your eyes are…" She stops. "Your eyes were gold."
"Yes."
"That's not adrenaline. That's not search-and-rescue training." Her voice climbs a fraction and she hauls it back by force. "I have spent four days building a rational file on you, and you just set it on fire in front of me."
"I know."
"Do not tell me you know. Tell me what you are."
"Not here." I take a slow step, palms still out.
"There are twenty-nine people on this train who don't have the time for us to have this conversation while the floor fills with water.
So I'm asking you for some time. Be the steadiest person on this train.
Then you can ask me anything, and I mean anything, and I'll answer it. No more careful, no more half-truths."
For one endless heartbeat she just stares at me, and I watch a dozen reactions surface and get overruled, one after another, by the engineer who logs the hazard and works the problem anyway. When she speaks, her voice is thin, but it holds.
"When we’re off," she says. "Everything. And if you're lying to me again, monster or not, I will end you myself."
"Deal. Front carriage next… Can you run the passenger evac from here?"
"I've run worse with less." She's already pivoting toward the wounded, spine straightening under a weight I can't carry for her. "You. Old man's wife, Barbara, I need you steering people through the rear doors and counting heads out loud. Everybody else who can stand, follow her voice. Move!"
I go, because she told me to. Her voice rises behind me, calm and iron-hard, herding strangers toward the doors exactly as I asked.
Whatever she decides about me when the clock runs out, she's decided this part first, and out loud: the people come out.
Whoever I am underneath, today we save them together, and I hold onto that as I climb toward the crushed nose of the train and whatever's left of the man driving it.