11. Camille
CAMILLE
Icrouch over the gutted housing with my flashlight clamped between my teeth and sort the wreckage into piles.
Salvageable, missing. The missing pile grows fast, someone pulled the transmit module clean out before the crash, and without it this radio is a very expensive space heater that doesn't even heat.
"Tell me it's fixable," Evander says from the doorway. He's filling most of it, snow melting off his shoulders, watching me work with an attention that would flatter me if I had room left over to be flattered.
"It's not fixable. Not from here. They didn't just break it. They removed the part that would've let us call out, then broke everything around it so a casual look reads as crash damage. It's tidy, I hate how tidy it is."
"So nobody outside the pass knows we're alive."
"Nobody outside the pass is certain there's anyone left to rescue.
Northstar's counting on that." I stand and roll the ache out of my shoulder, the one that took the wall when the car went over.
"A rescue that doesn't know it's needed doesn't get dispatched.
The storm buys them a day, maybe two, and by then whatever they've planned is finished. "
He's quiet, I've started reading his silences. It's a bad habit for someone who's supposed to keep this professional.
"There's another radio," he says finally. "Old railway emergency station, back through the pass. Maybe four miles, backup transmitter, independent power, built before your company decided everything should share one fragile circuit."
I know the station he means before he finishes describing it. "Grade separation shelter, mile marker something-forties. It's on my infrastructure survey. I flagged it as decommissioned."
"Decommissioned isn't demolished. The bones are still there."
"The bones being there doesn't mean the radio works.
" I'm already picturing it, though, the schematic unfolding behind my eyes.
Old isolated station, hardened against exactly this kind of weather, powered off a bank nobody would've bothered to strip.
"If the battery bank survived and the antenna didn't come down in the last decade, I could probably bring it back. Probably."
"Then I go." He says it like it's settled, like he's checked a box and moved on, and every muscle I have goes rigid.
"You go."
"Four miles through a whiteout, on terrain that's actively trying to kill people.
I know the ground, you don't." He pulls his gloves tighter, already leaving in his head.
"You stay here, keep the passengers stable, keep the ones who can walk from wandering off and freezing.
I'll reach the station and raise Stonehaven. "
I let him finish. I've learned that much, let the martyr get the whole speech out, because interrupting just makes him repeat it. Then I fold my arms and give him the flat stare I usually save for maintenance supervisors who've decided I won't notice the missing pages.
"That's a beautiful plan," I say. "It has one flaw. When you get to that station and find a thirty-year-old radio with a dead power supply and a corroded antenna coupler, what exactly are you going to do about it? Growl at it?"
His jaw sets. "I'll figure it out."
"You'll figure it out." I don't bother hiding the disbelief. "Evander. You can bench-press a train car. That is a genuinely useful skill and it does absolutely nothing for a fried transmit stage. That's the only job on this mountain that's mine and not yours."
"And if the ground opens up under you out there, I can't dig that fast." His voice drops, rough.
"I've pulled people out of that pass. I've also failed to, I know exactly what it looks like when the mountain wins, and I'm not walking you into that so you can solder a wire I could learn to solder myself. "
"You couldn't, though. Not in time." I step closer, because backing up has never once won me an argument with any man, especially this one.
"Do you want me safe, or do you want those passengers saved?
Because you don't get both by going alone.
You get a dead radio and a very safe engineer sitting uselessly in a wrecked train while people die of exposure a mile away. "
I watch it land, watch the war of it move across his face, the protector and the coordinator finally forced to stand in the same room and argue.
"That's not fair," he says.
"It's completely fair. It's just not comfortable.
" I soften, a little, because I'm not trying to win so much as get us both out the door alive.
"You're used to being the whole rescue. The strength, the knowledge, the plan, all in one person, but this one needs two.
Your legs and my hands. I can't get there without you and you can't fix it without me.
That's not me being reckless, that's just the obvious. "
He exhales, long and defeated, and I know I've got him.
"You do what I say on the ice, no arguments, no independent field trips."
"On the ice, yes. On the radio, you do what I say." I stick out a gloved hand. "Deal?"
He glances at my hand like it's a trick, then wraps his around it. His grip is careful, deliberately gentle, and I feel the leashed strength under it and think about the roof of the train car folding like foil.
"Deal," he says. "I hate this."
"I heard the reluctance. I'm choosing to be flattered by it."
We're gathering what we can carry, flares, the flashlight, a spool of wire I pry from a dead panel, when the whole car groans. Not the wind, the structure itself, a low shriek of metal deciding gravity has a better idea. A voice cries out two compartments down, thin and panicked.
I'm moving toward the exit, the forward vestibule has sagged worse since I last checked it, the ceiling bowed low over three passengers who couldn't get themselves clear.
The emergency release for the jammed door is buried under a folded seat, and the gap I'd have to reach it through is exactly wide enough for someone my size and no one Evander's.
"Camille." He's caught up, reading the same geometry I am and hating it more. "Don't."
"The mechanism's right there. I release it, they walk out, we all leave together." I'm already dropping to my belly. "Brace the ceiling, give me sixty seconds."
"You get thirty. Then I'm pulling you out whether it's done or not."
I crawl into the gap, the metal is cold that it bites through my jacket, and above me I hear him take the weight, hear the structure stop complaining as something impossible holds it up. My fingers find the release lever, frozen, stubborn. I brace and haul, and it gives a millimeter, then sticks.
"Talk to me," he grinds out.
"It's rusted, working it." I throw my shoulder into it. The lever grinds free and the door pops its jam with a bang, and the three passengers scramble upright, out, gone toward the rear. "Done! I'm clear, I'm coming…"
The ceiling drops early. I feel his hand close around my ankle and I'm airborne, dragged backward on the floor as the vestibule folds in on the exact space I occupied a half-second ago.
The crash is loud, then it's just the wind and my own heartbeat slamming and Evander crouched over me, both hands hard on my shoulders, his eyes flooded gold and wild.
"What is wrong with you?" It rips out of him, not controlled, not commanding, just raw. "You saw it sagging. You knew, and you crawled under it anyway."
"They'd have died in there." I'm shaking, I notice distantly, adrenaline burning through me. "You'd have done the same thing. You'd have done it faster and told me to stand back while you did."
"That's different…"
"It is not!" I shove up onto my elbows so we're level, so he can't loom this away. "You throw yourself under every collapsing thing and call it duty. I do it once and it's a character flaw? Pick one, Evander. We don't get separate rules."
He stops. The gold flickers, holds, slowly starts to bleed back to brown. We're both breathing like we ran here, and I feel the heat off him again.
"I was scared," he admits, quiet now, wrecked. "Watching that come down. I didn't have a plan for you not being under it."
"I know." My voice cracks. "I was scared for you two cars back, holding a ceiling up with your spine. So we're even, and we still have four miles to walk."
He hauls me to my feet, keeps my hand, doesn't let go. We turn toward the door, toward the storm, and go.