19. Camille
CAMILLE
Around the bend the passage opens into a chamber the railway must have used as a staging vault a century ago.
Bare rock walls sweat with cold, the heavy trunk cable I've been tracking climbs a bracket toward the ceiling, then splits into a fan of thinner lines running off toward the ridge above us.
I crouch and follow the branches with my lamp, counting, and the number turns my stomach to stone.
"Van, this is worse than the first one," I say.
"The train that came down on us was one charge, one slope, one release.
This is a network. They've seeded the whole upper snowfield.
Six release points, minimum. If all of these fire together, they don't bury the wreck.
They bury that, the pass, and anybody within a quarter mile of it. "
Evander eases up beside me, keeping his voice low. "Then we find the master and we kill it."
"That's what I need you to hear." I stand, sweeping the beam across the junction where the branches converge.
"There's no single master. Look at the wiring, each release point has its own initiator and its own independent trigger.
It's built so that cutting one does nothing to the others.
Somebody who understood exactly how we'd try to stop this designed it to survive us finding it. "
Toby lets out a slow breath behind us. "So we can't just snip the wire and go home."
"We can't snip anything. Every one of these is a separate problem, and we don't have the hours it would take to solve six of them by hand.
" I put my palm flat against the freezing rock, thinking, letting the panic pass through instead of settling.
"There's another way to beat a system like this.
You stop trying to disarm it, you take control of where the energy goes. "
"Meaning what?" Evander asks.
"Meaning I don't care if it fires, as long as I decide which direction the mountain falls when it does. But I need the control station to do that, and it isn't here."
That's when I hear it, the scrape of a boot on stone that isn't one of ours, coming from the black mouth of a side passage I hadn't clocked. Evander's head snaps toward before mine, his eyes already gone molten gold in the lamplight.
"Down," he breathes, and pushes me sideways behind the cable bracket as the first shot cracks off the wall where my skull had been.
Everything fractures into noise. Two more rounds spark against rock, Evander is a wall of motion, herding me back with his body, and Toby drops flat with a curse. I don't freeze, freezing gets people killed.
"The reinforced bay, left, twenty feet!" I grab a fistful of Evander's jacket and haul, because I've already found our cover. "The old blast vault. Concrete lining, steel door. Their rounds can't punch it."
We move as one, Toby lays down the little cover we have, an emptied contractor's radio hurled hard to make a man flinch, and we spill through the vault opening as bullets chew the frame. Inside, the walls are two feet of concretes.
"Cute," Toby pants, back against the wall. "We're safe in a bunker with no exit while they finish arming a bomb the size of a stadium. Great plan, Cam."
"It buys us thirty seconds. Use them." I'm already scanning. There has to be a second way out; the railway never built a vault without a service run.
A voice slides in from the chamber, unhurried, almost bored. "You've been very busy in my tunnel."
I have no idea who it is. He doesn't shout
"You're the engineer," he goes on. "Dyer. I’m Clayton Rourke.
I read your file, meticulous. Which means you've already worked out you can't disarm the array.
" A pause, deliberate. "So here's where we are.
I don't need to come in there after you.
I only need you contained for another few minutes while my people finish the ridge. "
Evander's growl vibrates through the floor, so low it lives in my sternum more than my ears. I put my hand on his chest before the lion decides the door is a suggestion.
"Don't," I whisper. "That's what he wants. You charge out, he drops you, and I'm alone in a concrete box."
"He's placing them right now," Evander grinds out. "I can smell the primer."
"I know. So we stop giving him the thirty seconds.
" I've found it, a low steel hatch near the floor, painted the same gray as the wall, a maintenance crawlway the drawings labeled as ventilation egress.
I wrench the lever. Rust screams, then gives.
"Here. This runs under the main passage toward ridge access.
He thinks he's sealed us in. He sealed us into the one route he can't watch. "
Clayton must catch the sound. There's a shift in his voice, the first hairline crack in all that calm.
"Rourke," Evander says suddenly, loud, deliberate, throwing the name across the chamber like a stone.
"That's you, isn't it. Ex-demolition. You dropped a passenger train with people on it to move a property line. "
"I moved an obstacle," Clayton answers. "Same as tonight."
"You're going to want to remember my voice."
I don't like the promise buried in that. I like even less what Clayton does with it, because instead of answering, he stops talking, and the silence tells me he's done waiting.
"He's triggering the collapse," I breathe. It's in the pattern; a man like that doesn't keep three targets cornered when he can seal the tunnel and walk away. "Toby, the hatch, get ready…"
The blast is small and surgical, nothing like the mountain-killers wired overhead.
It's set to bring down the passage ceiling around the vault, a demolition man's neat little door-slam.
Evander sees it land the instant before it fires.
He doesn't dive for cover. He turns and drives both hands into my shoulders, throwing me bodily through the open crawlway as the world comes down.
"Toby, with me, back!" he roars, and then rock and dust and a wall of pressure swallow everything.
I hit the crawlway floor hard and keep sliding, driven by the blast at my heels. Behind me the hatch mouth fills with fractured stone in half a second, sealing me off from both of them. The roar goes on and on, then chokes into a dense, ringing silence packed with grit.
"Evander!" I twist around and claw back toward the collapse. The opening is gone, a solid face of shattered rock where the vault used to connect. "Van! Van, answer me!"
Nothing. Then, muffled, impossibly far through the fill: a cough. A voice I would know buried under an entire range. "Camille. I'm here. Toby's with me. You through clean?"
"I'm through. I'm alone up here, you enormous idiot, why didn't you come with me?"
"Because there wasn't room for all three, and you were closest to the hatch." Even choked with dust, the answer is maddeningly steady. "Listen to me. Move to the far end, the ridge. Don't wait on us. I'll find another way around."
The rest is swallowed by settling rock. He's cut off, and I'm alone on the upper side with a hatch that no longer leads anywhere, and I start searching for a way out.
Boots ring on stone somewhere ahead in the dark. Clayton's men, working down toward me from the ridge side.
For once, I don't try to outthink it alone. I claw the radio off my belt and key it with a shaking hand.
"Evander. It's Camille. I'm at the ventilation junction, upper side, moving to the ridge access on my own. There are men ahead." My voice doesn't crack. That surprises me. "I'm not doing this without you. I need you to come find me. Please."
A crackle. Then, steady as bedrock: "I'm already coming. Keep talking. I'll follow your voice."
I find, absurdly, that I'm smiling with gunmen ahead because asking him to come has cost me nothing, and it's made me twice as strong.