17. Camille
CAMILLE
"How many?" I'm already reaching for my jacket, my mind moving faster than my hands.
"Four I could smell clearly. Maybe a fifth hanging back." Evander drags the door shut against the wind. "Heavy packs. Same chemical signature we found above the tracks."
"Demolition, then. Not rifles for finishing off witnesses.
" I zip the jacket to my throat, thinking aloud because it's easier than sitting with the picture forming.
"If they wanted to shoot survivors, they'd come light and fast. They're hauling weight because they intend to bury us.
It's cleaner for them, no bodies to explain, no wreckage to examine.
Just a train that disappeared under a mountain during a storm nobody could reach. "
He goes quiet, watching me get to the same conclusion he already reached out on the ridge. "That's exactly what I thought."
I unfold the railway maps across the workbench, sweeping the evidence photos aside. My finger traces the pass, the wreck, the black contour lines stacking toward the summit.
"They can't come at the upper snowpack from the valley floor.
Too exposed, too steep in this weather, even for professionals.
So they'd want cover." I stop, the line I'm looking for runs like a thin scar through the shading.
"There, old maintenance place. The railway cut it to service the avalanche batteries above the pass.
It's half-collapsed and it isn't on any current map, but if Warren fed them the archived engineering drawings, they'd know. "
Evander leans in until his shoulder brushes mine. "You're saying they walk straight up inside the mountain."
"Yes, and they come out standing next to the exact equipment built to move snow on purpose." My stomach turns over. "That old system was designed to trigger controlled slides away from the line. Repurpose it, and you don't just set charges. You aim them."
"Then we stop them before they reach it."
The certainty in his voice snaps my head up. "We?"
"I’ll get Tobias and Gideon, pretty sure he’ll be about now. You go back to the survivors where Amy can keep you…"
"No. Absolutely not."
His shoulders square, and he folds back into the coordinator, into the man used to a room emptying when he points at the door. "Camille. Four armed men, you don't have claws or bulletproof skin."
"And you don't have a railway engineering license.
" I plant both hands on the bench and hold his gaze so he can't mistake this for panic.
"You can smell them coming, wonderful. What you can't do is stand at that avalanche-control junction and know which relay reroutes the charge and which one drops the whole ridge on our heads.
I can, you need the person who reads the system, not the person who can bench-press it. "
"I need the person I love not bleeding out in a tunnel."
That stops both of us. He didn't plan to say it, not like this, not with strangers climbing toward a train full of sleeping people.
I soften my voice without softening the point. "Then here's the deal we're actually making. You don't get to trade my safety for the passengers'. You already promised me that, and I'm holding you to it. We go together, or we lose arguing about who gets to be brave."
The door bangs open before he can answer. Gideon fills the frame, snow packed into his beard from the climb up from the survivor position, where he's spent the last few hours helping Leah stabilize the injured.
"We've got a problem with the survivors," he says. "Leah's got six who can't be moved fast. Broken pelvis, two spinal precautions, an old man whose heart's already struggling with the cold. If a second slide comes down on this position, they die on the backboards before we clear fifty yards."
"So evacuating everyone isn't the answer. Even if we got the walking wounded to high ground, we'd be abandoning the ones who can't run."
"That's about the size of it." Gideon's dark eyes cut to Evander.
"There’s one coming." Evander says.
"They can’t survive it, someone has to fix the people."
For a beat the shelter holds nothing but wind and the low roar of my own pulse. Then the fog clears and the problem breaks into pieces I can actually hold, the same as any derailment I've ever reconstructed. Two failures happening at once require two responses.
"Okay. We split it." I turn the map so Gideon can see.
"You and Amy start moving the vulnerable passengers now, slow and careful, toward the rock shelf Evander flagged east of the wreck.
It's the only ground that’s high and will survive a slide.
You don't wait for us, you don't come after us.
Your entire job is keeping those people breathing. "
Gideon nods once, already calculating.
"Evander, Tobias, and I will go and stop this. We find where they've placed the charges and figure out whether we're disarming them or redirecting them." I glance at Evander, daring him to argue. "Three, your senses, Tobias' hands, my head. That's the team that works."
Evander's fists uncurl slowly. I can see the struggle in him, the instinct clawing to shove me somewhere padded and locked, colliding with everything the last few days taught him. When he finally speaks, it costs him.
"Gideon, take the east shelf. Don't split your people, don't send anyone back." He exhales. "We handle the rest."
It isn't surrender. It's trust, and I know precisely how much of it he's never given anyone. Gideon knows too, because his eyebrows climb before he masters his face and disappears back into the storm to gather Amy.
Then it's just us and the maps and the countdown neither of us can see but both of us feel.
"You're going to be impossible to keep up with in there," Evander says.
"You have four legs when you want them. You'll manage." I start rolling the drawings, tucking them into my jacket against my ribs. "Tobias meets us where?"
"The corridor mouth." Evander catches my wrist, gentle, turning me back to face him. "Camille. In there, if I tell you to move, you move. Not because I'm ordering you, because I might hear the click of a trigger a half-second before you do."
press my palm flat to his chest, over the steady hammer of his heart. "If I tell you a relay's live, you don't touch it, no matter how much your lion wants to solve it by hitting something."
His mouth tugs up despite everything. "You've met me."
"I have, it's why I'm spelling it out."
There's a warning already forming on his lips, some careful instruction about staying behind him at the collapse.
I've heard enough of his warnings to write the book.
So I rise up and kiss him, quick and fierce, stealing the caution right out of his mouth before he can say it.
When I pull back, his eyes have gone gold at the edges, the lion pushing close.
"We're both coming out of that mountain," I tell him.
"We are." His voice roughens. "I have plans for you that don't involve explosives."
"Then let's go make sure you keep them."