20. Evander
EVANDER
I'm already three strides toward the collapse before Toby gets both hands into my jacket and hauls back with everything his lion has.
"No. No, Van, stop." His boots skid across the rubble, but he doesn't let go. "You force that pile, you bring the rest of the ceiling down. On you, on her, on whatever's holding the upper snowpack from letting go early. Think."
The lion doesn't want to think. The lion wants to dig until the mountain gives Camille back, and it's roaring loud that my own name sounds far away. I stand there shaking with the effort of not moving.
"She's on the other side of that," I manage. "Alone, with his men walking toward her."
"I heard the same radio you did." Toby steps forward, forcing me to look at his face instead of the stone.
"And I know exactly one thing that gets her killed faster than those contractors, cousin.
It's you, panicking, doing the loud obvious thing while the smart thing sits right ahead.
You taught me that. On the Beckman rescue. Remember? Slow is fast."
My father used to say the same words. Toby knows that. He's not fighting fair, and I love him for it.
"Slow is fast," I echo, forcing my breathing down out of my throat.
The gold recedes enough for me to see the tunnel clearly again.
Old timber, and a ventilation grate high on the left wall, painted the same tired gray as everything else the railway abandoned.
Air moving across it, faint but steady. "There.
The vent, it parallels the main passage.
If it stays intact past the cave-in, it comes out somewhere near her side. "
"Now that is the man I follow." Toby's grin is thin and real. "Go. I'll stay and finish what we started, those blasting caps aren't going to pull themselves, and somebody needs to keep this end from waking up."
I hesitate, and the hesitation is the old sickness, the one that says every dangerous job is mine to carry. "You'll be alone down here with live charges."
"I've been alone with worse. Your girl's got gunmen. Do the math and quit hovering." He shoves a shoulder against mine, half affection, half order. "Trust me to do my job. That's the whole lesson, isn't it?"
It's the exact lesson I've been failing my entire adult life. I grip the back of his neck once, hard, the pride's old gesture for I see you, I'm counting on you, and then I wrench the vent grate off the wall and fold myself into the dark.
The shaft is barely wide enough for my shoulders. In lion form I'd never fit; half-shifted, with the joints loosened and the muscle re-strung, I pour through it like water finding a crack. The radio crackles against me.
"Evander." Camille's voice, low and even, pitched so it won't carry. "I've moved about forty feet closer to the ridge access. There's a junction ahead where the corridor splits. I can hear at least two of them past it."
"Keep talking," I breathe into the mic. "You're doing exactly right. I'm in the ventilation run, moving parallel to you. Tell me what you see."
"Old signal relays. A control room, I think, there's a steel door standing half open on my left." A pause, then, quieter: "Van, I want you to know I'm not standing here waiting to be rescued. I've already got a wrench and a very unfriendly plan if they come through first."
That startles a rough sound out of me, not quite a laugh. "God, I know you do. That's not why I'm coming."
"Then why?"
"Because you asked me to." The shaft bends; I follow it by feel and scent, her trace threading through the stale air like a line pulled taut. "You've spent your whole life not asking. Do you have any idea what it does to me that you finally did?"
Her breath crackles over the radio, unsteady for the first time. "Don't make me cry in a bomb tunnel, Shaw. I'll never forgive you."
"Wouldn't dream of it. Keep moving. Left of the control room, is there a low grate at floor level?"
A scrape, a shuffle. "Yes. Rusted. Warm air coming off it."
"That's me. Thirty feet. Stay near it."
Then her voice drops out of the soft register entirely. "Van. They've seen the door. They're coming. Two of them, moving fast…"
I stop being careful. The last stretch of shaft I take at a speed the vent was never built to survive, and the grate at the end doesn't so much open as leave.
I come out of the wall into a low concrete room full of dead signal equipment, and I let the shift finish on the way.
Bone lengthens, and the world drops into scent and heat and the frantic drum of Camille's pulse.
Two men in unmarked winter gear are crowding through the half-open door, rifles up, one of them already swinging his barrel toward the woman backed against the relay bank with a pipe wrench raised in both hands.
I hit the first one before he understands the room has a fourth occupant.
It's fast and ugly and I keep it that way on purpose.
A blow to the wrist sends his rifle skidding.
A second sends him into the wall. The second man gets one wild shot into the ceiling, concrete dust, a whine of ricochet, before Camille steps inside his guard with the fearlessness that terrifies me and cracks the wrench across his forearm.
The rifle drops. I put him down beside his friend and stand over both, chest heaving, the gold still riding high in my vision.
Camille kicks one weapon clear, scoops the other, and only then does she glance at me.
"Hi," she says, breathless. "Nice entrance."
I shift back between one breath and the next, and she crosses the room and throws herself into me before my knees have quite remembered how to be human.
I catch her, and her mouth finds mine and it's fierce and graceless and tastes like grit and relief, her fingers in my collar, my arms locking her against me hard that a smaller person would complain.
"You came," she says against my lips.
"You asked." I press my forehead to hers. "Try and stop me next time."
"Later." She pulls back, already scanning, already the engineer again.
"Celebrate properly after we keep the mountain from turning us into a geological event.
Right now, these two." She nudges one of the downed contractors with her boot.
He's out coldm his radio, though, is very much alive, hissing on his belt.
I crouch and pull it free. A voice comes through almost at once, flat and unhurried, and my whole spine goes cold recognizing it.
"—team two, report. Rourke wants the ridge array hot before the front breaks. We are not missing this window."
Camille meets my eyes. "Clayton's running it himself," she murmurs. "From up top. And he's got a deadline, the storm."
"Which means so do we." I kill the radio's transmit before either man's silence gives us away, but I keep it. It's a window straight into their timing now.
She's already turned to the far wall, where a bank of yellowed schematics hangs behind cracked glass. Her lamp climbs them, and I watch the exhaustion burn off her face, replaced by the thing I've come to trust more than my own claws.
"Van. Look." Her finger traces a faded diagram of the old mitigation system.
"This whole ridge was built to shed snow deliberately.
The control lines don't just fire charges.
They decide which face the snow comes off of.
I don't know yet if I can steer an explosion this big.
" She turns, eyes bright and hard. "But it's the first thing all night that isn't 'disarm six bombs by hand and pray. '"
Every instinct I own wants to tell her the ridge is too exposed, the plan too thin, the risk mine to carry alone. I swallow it all, and instead I pick up the second rifle, sling it, and step toward the corridor that climbs toward Clayton and the open sky.
"Then show me," I say. "Lead. I'm behind you."
She blinks, like she expected the old argument and found the door where the wall used to be. Then she almost smiles, and heads up the grade.