25. Camille
CAMILLE
Tobias' comes over the radio and it's worse than I hoped. "Nine minutes on the locked charge. Give or take. The countdown's mechanical, so it's honest, but honest means it won't wait for us to be ready."
Nine minutes. I have the schematic spread across my knee, the old avalanche-control diagram crosshatched with the modifications Clayton's people bolted onto it, and I see it all at once instead of one panic at a time.
Three exposed control gates stand between the snowpack and where it wants to go.
Every one has to be open before the charge lands, or the redirect fails and the slope buries the wreck exactly the way Northstar drew it up.
"Okay," I say. "We split it. Tobias, you're closest to the east gate, take it. Gideon, you're already low on the amplifier line, so you take center. I've got the west gate. Evander, the machines. You're the one who can shift the blast amplifiers in time, so that's yours and that's all yours."
"The west gate's the one hanging over open slope." Evander says.
"It is."
"Then I'm taking the west gate and you take the amplifiers."
"With what, Van, my winning personality?
Those things weigh more than the locomotive.
" I pin the radio between my shoulder and my jaw and start repacking my kit, because we do not have the seconds for this.
"You cannot lift steel with your teeth from three ridges over.
You're the muscle, I'm the gate. We each do the thing only we can do.
That's not me being reckless, that's me being an engineer. "
A longer silence. I see his jaw doing the thing his jaw does. Then: "Say the route you're taking. So I know where you are the whole time."
"Across the upper bench, down the fixed line to the release platform. I'll be exposed for maybe forty seconds crossing the bench." I zip the kit shut. "And before you volunteer to hold my hand across it, you promised me that neither gets to make a martyr call. I'm holding the receipt."
He exhales, ragged, and when he speaks again the fight has drained out of it and left only the fear it was standing on. "Go. I trust the map. Camille, I trust you. Move."
That's the thing that gets me, more than anything else. Not that he agrees. That he means it.
The bench is a knife of packed snow with nothing on the downhill side but air and the pale churn of the pass far below.
The storm has thinned to something almost gentle, the whiteout breaking into ragged blue gaps overhead, and I hate it.
Clearing sky means Clayton's people can see what we're doing.
Clearing sky brings the helicopters everyone's been praying for might finally come, and if they come before this charge is redirected, they'll fly straight into it.
I clip onto the fixed line and cross with the wind shoving at my back like it has opinions.
"Talk to me," Evander says in my ear.
"Crossing, halfway. Your girlfriend has excellent balance, in case that ever comes up."
"Noted for the record." A grunt punches through the transmission, then the shriek of metal dragged over frozen ground. He's at the amplifiers already. "First one's moving. It does not want to."
"Neither do I, most mornings. Push through it."
The release platform waits at the end of the line, a rusted mechanical gate the size of a door laid flat into the slope, its lever arm crusted with forty years of ice.
I get both hands on it and haul. Nothing, so I brace a boot against the housing and haul again, and the mechanism gives a grinding half-inch before it locks solid, the pin corroded into its seat where the old maintenance crews stopped caring decades ago.
"Problem," I say. "Gate's seized. Pin's rusted through."
"How long to free it?"
"Longer than I've got." Three minutes, maybe less.
I drop to my knees and yank open the demolition satchel one of Clayton's men left staged beside the amplifier, the same equipment they meant to bury us with, now the only toolbox on the ridge.
There's a hydraulic spreader in it, the kind used to pry apart wreckage, and I could laugh.
"Correction. They brought me a present. Give me two. "
"You're using their gear."
"I am, feels only right." I seat the spreader jaws against the frozen pin and pump the handle, and the machine bites, and the ice around the seat begins to crack in a spreading white web. "How are the amplifiers?"
"Two down. One left. It's the heavy one.
" His breath is coming hard now, and under it there’s a low register that isn't quite human, the lion right at the surface, doing what no man on this mountain could.
"The men who set this saw me shift. They're watching me move a machine no person moves.
So the secret's already gone up here, might as well be useful. "
"Does that scare you?"
"Everything about the last two days scares me." Steel groans through the radio, then slams, then his voice loosens by a fraction. "That's three. Amplifiers are clear, redirect line's yours now."
The pin shears loose under the spreader with a crack like a rifle.
I toss the tool aside, grab the lever with everything I have, and this time the gate arm swings up through its full arc, the old counterweight dropping, the release channel opening exactly where the diagram promised.
Cold relief floods through me, sharp and clean.
"West gate's open," I say. "Gideon, center. Tobias, east. Where are we?"
"Center's open," Gideon rumbles, unbothered as ever.
"East is…" Tobias grunts, then whoops. "East is open! We're three for three, baby!"
"Do not call me baby while I'm working."
"Copy that. Sorry, habit."
I get back on the fixed line and start hauling myself off the platform, because the last place I want to be standing when nine minutes runs out is directly above the slope I just organized a mountain of snow to slide down.
Overhead, the clouds are peeling back to show a hard washed sky, and east of the pass I hear the first faint chop of rotor blades that means the outside world is finally arriving, at the worst possible moment.
"Everyone off the release line, now," I say. "Move to your fallback positions and get low. When that charge blows, the redirect only works if we're not in it."
"Camille." Evander again, quieter, threaded with something that isn't fear this time. "When this is done, I'm holding you accountable for our future."
"Then you'd better survive to collect." I clip off the line and start running. "Clock's under four minutes. Go."