27. Camille
CAMILLE
The old control bank is a wall of iron levers the railway bolted here decades ago to shed snow on its own schedule.
Clayton's crew ran their modern detonators straight into it, too lazy to build their own, and that laziness is the only gift I'm going to get today.
Their kill switch and my override share the same guts.
"Releasing the west field," I say into the radio, and throw the first lever.
The counterweight drops with a shriek of unhappy steel.
Below and west of me a slab of snow the size of a parking lot peels off the mountain and starts to move, a low white roar I feel through my boots. "Gideon, center amplifier. Talk to me."
"Dragged it twenty feet downhill," he answers, calm as a man reading a grocery list. "It's not aiming anything at anybody now."
"Tobias?"
"Second detonator's dead, east amplifier's off the line." A crackle. "Cam, the clouds are gone. Those helicopters keep coming, they're gonna be right over this slope."
"Then we're faster than the helicopters.
" I split my eyes between the panel and the grease-pencil release map bolted to the housing, tracking the moving snow against lines somebody drew forty years ago.
Each gate has to open in sequence, nudging the mass a few more degrees off the wreck.
Second gate goes clean. The third jams, and I put my shoulder into the lever until the pin gives and it slams home. "Van, your amplifiers?"
"Last one's frozen into the frame." Under his words comes the grind of machinery no human arm should shift. "It's fighting me. Twenty seconds."
The fourth gate won't move at all. The manual override for it sits out on the release platform, a rusted deck hung directly over the slope I'm redirecting.
The second I climb up onto it, I understand my whole problem.
If my sequence is off by a hair, the snow I'm steering comes straight up underneath me.
"Camille." His voice sharpens like he can see me, and maybe he can, from wherever he's braced below. "Get off that platform. You're standing right over the release."
"I know exactly where I'm standing." I lock both hands on the frozen override wheel and haul. "It's the only spot the override reaches. Finish your amplifier. Do not come up here, Van, if you leave that machine in place the whole redirect fails and every one of these people dies for nothing."
"I am not watching that snow come up under you."
"You're not watching. You're trusting me.
" The wheel gives a quarter turn, then locks.
I brace a boot against the housing and try again.
"You promised me. Neither gets to jump ahead of the other.
That runs both directions, the bravest thing you can do right now is hold your position and let me do mine. "
The radio goes silent, and I've never heard a harder quiet, him pinning himself in place by sheer will while everything in him howls to climb. Then, low and rough: "Turn your gate. Mine's clear, go."
The wheel breaks loose immediately and spins free, and the fourth gate drops open in the exact second the locked charge detonates high on the ridge.
The blast is a white concussion that empties the air.
I lose sound, sight, everything but light and flying snow.
Then the mountain answers, a wall of snowpack thundering out of the blast zone, hunting for the wreck the way it was engineered to.
It hits my channel, the open gates, and it bends.
A hundred thousand tons of it swings west along the path I carved, away from the pass, roaring down into the empty valley instead of onto the train.
I get exactly one breath of relief before the platform under me lets go.
The shockwave and the passing edge of the slide rip the deck apart.
Bolts shear, and the floor drops out from under me.
I grab for the frame and my glove closes on nothing, and then I'm going down with the wreckage into the churn.
Something huge slams into me from the side, not snow.
Him, Evander hits me the instant before the deck folds, one arm crushing around my ribs, hauling me sideways off the collapsing platform and into the anchored shelf of rock beyond it.
He puts his own back to the debris and wraps himself around me while the mountain tears past, snow and splintered timber and broken steel close so that I feel the wind of it.
He doesn't let go, not through the worst of it, not until the roar finally starts to fall away and the ground under us stops trying to move.
When the shaking quits, I'm pressed against his chest with his heart pounding into me hard. My own hands won't stop trembling.
"You climbed," I get out.
"I cleared the amplifier first." His voice is shredded, his mouth against my hair.
"It was down. I did my job, Camille. Then I came and did the other one.
" His arms tighten like he's checking I'm still whole.
"Don't ask me to hear that platform go and stay put.
That's the one promise I'll break every single time. "
I twist in his hold until I can see his face, gold still draining out of his eyes, alive, snow melting in his hair. "You caught me after I finished the work," I tell him, and my voice cracks straight down the middle. "That's not throwing yourself away. That's the part I'll allow."
He huffs something that isn't quite a laugh, forehead on mine, we are just breathing on that ledge above a pass. Below us the train is still there, the valley to the west is filling with the snow that was meant to kill everyone.
Then I see it, past his shoulder, in the raw ground the slide scoured bare around the old blast site. My stomach drops all over again, not from fear this time.
"Van." My fingers tighten in his jacket. "Look what it uncovered."