24. Evander
EVANDER
The first slide goes exactly where Camille promised.
A shelf of loose snow peels off the west face and slumps into the empty gully below, harmless as a poured drink, a warning shot fired into a valley where nobody is standing.
For half a breath the ridge holds its stunned quiet, and then Clayton's radio scrapes across the wind and I hear him turn this from sabotage into a fight.
"Get up there. Move." He snaps.
Boots start punching through the crust toward the control station where Camille is bent over the mechanism.
Four of them spread wide across the field, rifles coming off their shoulders, and my lion, which has been pacing under my ribs since the tunnel, stops asking permission.
I have argued with the animal all night about when it gets to come out.
Tonight I let it, because these men rode into this pass to kill strangers, and I won’t let them do it.
The shift takes me between one stride and the next, the world dropping into heat and scent and a low red hum.
The nearest contractor never clears his weapon.
I hit him from the flank, drive him into the drift, and I am already moving before he understands he's down.
There's a version of me that would savor this, the chase, the scattering, the small vicious pleasure of running frightened prey to ground.
I feel that version stir and I leave it where it lies.
Two of the others are already bolting for the tree line, and every instinct I own wants to follow, but I don't. Camille needs the ridge cleared, not decorated with bodies, and running men who are running is a waste of the minutes I don't have.
Tobias' voice comes tinny through the radio clipped at my throat, half a shout. "Van, I'm at the secondary! Detonator box, it's… okay, it's ugly, but I can pull the trigger line."
I can't respond with a mouth built for tearing, so I roar once, short, and he laughs like an idiot even now. "Yeah, yeah, understood. Working."
That's when I catch Clayton's scent cutting away from his men, oil and cold steel and something flat and patient underneath, aimed straight at Camille's platform. I break for her across the exposed slope, and I already know I'm too far.
I round the machinery in time to see him grab for her jacket, hauling her off the control gate, and Camille doesn’t freeze the way frightened people usually do.
She goes with the pull instead of against it, twists inside his reach, and swings the long steel adjusting bar she's been using on the gate.
It catches him on the forearm hard, and I hear the crack over the wind.
He grunts, loses his grip, and she's already shoving the mechanism between them, using the frame and the frozen gears like a wall, keeping the iron of the station between her body and his.
"You want to hit me," she says, breathless, backing along the housing, "you're going to have to reach through your own broken arm to do it."
"You have no idea what you're standing on," Clayton tells her, and then I'm there.
I take him off his feet. We go down together into the packed snow, the man is fast and trained, but it does not matter, because I have claws and four hundred pounds of animal that wants his throat.
I have him pinned, jaws open over the pulse hammering in his neck, and the red is roaring so loud I nearly miss her voice.
"Evander. Evander. Don't."
The word lands like a hand on my chest. I hold, straining, the animal furious at the interruption.
"He's worth more breathing," she says, close now, crouched at my vision with the adjusting bar still white-knuckled in her fist. "Kill him and Northstar's a rumor. Keep him and he's a witness who watched them wire this mountain. Van. Look. We need him."
I’d rather not need him. I want it ended under my teeth, but she's right, she's always maddeningly right, and I force myself to ease back.
I drag Clayton up by the collar and shift, hauling him half-conscious against the station frame while my human hands relearn the shape of holding a man that tried to murder us and everyone else.
"There," I say, voice rough coming back into it. "Now stay down, or I let the next fight go the other way."
Clayton spits blood into the snow and grins up at me, red-toothed, unbothered. "You people really don't get it."
"Enlighten me."
"You think this is about a railroad." He coughs, wincing around the arm Camille wrecked. "You think Vey wants track and gravel and a little rare-earth to make his quarter look good. That mountain of yours has secrets older than your paperwork, Shaw. We've had eyes on it a lot longer than you…"
"Tobias," Camille cuts in, sharp, into her own radio. "Where are we?"
"Bad news." His answer stutters through static. "The main charge just kicked into an auto sequence. It's not on a remote anymore, it's on a clock, and I cannot cancel it from here. Cam, I've tried everything. It's going to blow whether Clayton talks or not."
For a heartbeat the whole ridge tilts under me, the survivors below, the slope above, it’s about to come down. I glance at Camille, waiting for her to break the same way I want to.
She doesn't, her eyes have already gone behind the terrain, tracking gates and grades and old release maps only she can see.
"Then we stop trying to disarm it," she says.
"We let it fire and we tell it where to go.
The redirection still works, Van. But not from here, there are three control points along the release line and each has to be open before that charge lands, or the whole slope comes down on the wreck. "
"Tell me where you need everyone," I say. "I'll trust the map."
Surprise moves across her face, then a fierce, quick warmth. She keys the radio. "Gideon, Tobias, count off your positions. We're doing this together and we're doing it fast."
Behind me, sprawled and bleeding and smiling like he's already won, Clayton starts to laugh.