10. Evander
EVANDER
Camille calls it before we're even far from the wreck. She spends twenty minutes on her knees with a flashlight while I load the last sled, and when she stands, her verdict comes out flat and certain.
"The blast came from above, not below." She sweeps the beam up the slope toward a black shoulder of rock.
"A derailment starts under the wheels. This started over our heads.
See how the debris fans downhill from one point?
Trains don't throw rock uphill, and mountains don't detonate on a schedule.
Somebody put a charge up there and let the snow do the attach. "
"Then that's where we go," I say, and I don't argue about her coming.
The climb takes us above the tree line, where the wind has a freezing temperature. Camille moves ahead with her light, breathing hard, and the animal in me reads the air like it wants to. No hiding it, no shame in it. It's a tool now, the same as her light.
"You're doing it," she says, watching me over her shoulder. "The head-tilt. What are you getting?"
"Diesel where there shouldn't be any. A chemical under it, sharp, manufactured." I turn a slow half-circle and lock onto the thread. "Uphill and east, it runs straight to that overhang."
"So the nose tells you the direction and I tell you the physics." She almost grins, hazel eyes bright with cold and interest instead of suspicion. "We're going to be insufferable together."
We reach the shoulder, and I see the scar before she does, a burn seared into the underside of the rock, snow around it glazed hard from heat that came and went in a heartbeat. She throws an arm across my chest out of instinct, though we both know it wouldn't hold me.
"Don't step past me. Look." She crouches and lifts a twist of bright metal on the end of her pen, turning it.
"Machined casing, directional. You don't buy this and you don't set it by accident.
Somebody stood right here and chose this exact spot, because one shaped charge does what a hundred failed couplings never could. "
"They wanted the mountain to be the weapon," I say. "So the mountain takes the blame."
"And the storm." She bags the fragment with hands that don't shake, which unsettles me more than steadiness has a right to. "A slide in a blizzard is a tragedy nobody questions. A bomb is a headline, they picked tragedy on purpose."
The wind shifts, and the lion catches it before my ears do, a low groan running through the snowpack above us, the sound of something enormous deciding to let go.
I have her against my chest and three strides downhill before her flashlight leaves her hand, a boulder and the slide between us, my arm caged over her head while the roar swallows every other sound.
When it settles she doesn't pull away. She tips her face up, snow in her lashes, and laughs.
"All right," she says. "That one I'll allow. The lion thing has its uses."
"You almost got buried."
"I almost got carried. There's a difference, and it's flattering." Her breath is still fast, her fists still knotted in my jacket. "You did that uphill without so much as a grunt. Do you understand how annoying that is to a woman who prides herself on not needing rescuing?"
A rough laugh scrapes out of me before I catch it, and God, I needed it. I set her down but keep a hand at her waist, and we don’t hurry to end it.
"You seem to keep waiting for me to run," she says, quieter now. "Ever since the train. You brace every time I look at you too long."
"Everyone runs eventually. My life is built on the certainty of it.
" The truth comes easier up here, where the wind will carry it off before anyone else hears.
"Every choice I've ever made, every door I kept shut, it was all so nobody got close to become a risk to the pride.
That mountain, this secret, keeping people at arm's length. All one long habit."
"And it's exhausted you." She takes my jaw in her cold hand and makes me see her.
"You've got it backward, Evander. Trusting me doesn't hand your responsibility back to you lighter.
You still carry your people tomorrow, same as yesterday.
It just means you don't have to lie to the person holding the far end of the load.
That's all it changes. It's not less weight, it's fewer masks. "
It lands somewhere I've kept sealed since I was in my twenties, since we lowered my father into ground he died protecting. I've convinced myself that shouldering everything alone was the same thing as leadership. She's just set the two side by side and shown me the seam between them.
"You're unnervingly good at this," I manage. "Finding the exact spot that gives."
"It's what I do. Come on."
We climb down with the fragment buttoned into her jacket, and for four hundred yards I believe we've won something real, that we have the proof, the motive taking shape, and each other.
The passengers are stable behind us, and Amy has them moving.
For the length of that walk I'm almost a man who thinks the worst is behind him.
Then we reach the emergency car, and Camille's flashlight finds the transmitter housing peeled open like a tin can, its guts torn out and scattered across the canted floor.
"No." She's already down on her knees in the wreckage, sorting the pieces, and I watch the hope drain out of her shoulders as she works. "This wasn't the crash. Look at the cuts, clean, deliberate. They killed the radio before the explosion. Somebody didn't want us calling out even if we survived."
"Amy's here."
"Amy's here because she came looking. That doesn't mean she can reach anyone beyond the pass. If the ridge repeater's still down, her radios are trapped in the same dead zone we are."
I look toward the wreck, toward the evac sleds moving through the snow.
"So Stonehaven knows something happened?"
"Maybe, but nobody outside this mountain knows we found a bomb. They don't know this was deliberate, and right now we have no way to tell them."
She looks down at the ruined transmitter.
"That's what whoever did this was counting on."