28. Evander
EVANDER
My body registers that the mountain has stopped moving when I finally set Camille down on solid rock above the redirected slide path, no more thunder rolling up through my boots, no more shriek of snow shearing loose from stone.
Just wind, and the ragged sound of us breathing, and the strange quiet that comes after a huge disaster that’s decided not to kill you.
"You can let go now," Camille says. Her voice is muffled against my shoulder. "I'm on the ground, solid ground, I checked."
"One second..."
"Van. My feet are literally touching…"
"A second," I repeat, and she stops arguing, which tells me she needs it as badly as I do.
Below us, Gideon comes crunching up the incline with Tobias behind him, both are coated white to the shoulders.
Gideon's face is hiding what it usually does when he's been terrified and refuses to admit it, all flat calm laid, but really he’s rattled underneath.
I've been able to read the difference for a long time.
"Passengers?" I ask before he can speak.
"Higher ground held," Gideon says. "Nobody buried. Reyes rebroke his leg when they moved him, and one of the older women's hypothermic, but Leah's got them. None dead." His eyes drift beyond me to the churned valley where the avalanche went instead of where it was aimed. "That was close, boss."
"It was Camille's plan."
"I know whose plan it was." Gideon's mouth twitches. "I'm just saying it was close."
Camille pulls out of my arms at last, straightening her jacket like she's shaking off the last hour along with the snow.
Already her eyes have gone somewhere else, tracking down the slope to the scarred ground where the old blast zone used to lie hidden.
"The slide stripped the original site," she says.
"Van. Look. Everything they buried the first time, it's sitting right there on the surface. "
"Then it stays there for cameras."
"That's the plan." She's moving before she finishes the sentence, and I have to lengthen my stride to keep pace with her down toward the exposed rock, Tobias falling in on her other side.
The mountain has coughed up a graveyard of what they did to us.
Wiring runs in torn black veins across raw stone.
A cracked detonator housing lies half-buried, its serial plate scoured clean and readable.
Farther down, an amplifying rig Clayton's people dragged up the ridge sits crumpled but whole, stamped with a manufacturer's mark that will lead somewhere a subpoena can follow.
"Photograph the serials first," Camille says, crouching, brushing powder off a component with two fingers. "Weather's clearing, which means it'll snow again the second the front passes. I want every number logged before it disappears under fresh cover."
"Where should I point the phone?"
She glances up at me, startled, like she expected an argument about whether she should be down here at all, but I don't give her one. That's a habit I'm trying to retire.
"There," she says, and points, and I photograph.
We work like that for a stretch, her narrating, me and Tobias documenting, Gideon standing sentry with his head tipped toward the wind. It's Gideon who catches it first, the shift in the air, and when he says my name I've already scented what’s happening.
"Rourke's moving," I say.
Clayton is where we left him, wrists zip-tied to a bent stanchion near the ruined control station, or he was. In the chaos of the redirect, he must’ve worked it, and now he's a dark shape lurching downslope into the whiteout with his hands still bound.
"He won't get far in this," Tobias says.
"He gets far to escape and he's a problem." I'm already handing Tobias the phone. "Keep logging."
I go after Clayton fast, and I want to let the lion off its leash entirely, want the simple animal math of a predator and a fleeing man. That would be easy, but it could also cost us the only mouth willing to say Northstar's name in a courtroom.
He hears me coming and tries to run harder, which on a forty-degree slope in loose snow means he falls. I reach him as he's scrambling up, and I take him by the collar and set him back on his feet without particular gentleness.
"Big man," Clayton pants. "Big cat, whatever you are. You should've let me go."
"You'd have frozen in an hour."
"Better than a cage."
"Not my problem which you prefer." I turn him uphill and march him back the same route he ran. He doesn't fight me, he knows the math too. "You'll talk to the sheriff, and you'll talk to the state people, and you'll tell them who paid you."
"And say what about you?"
"Say whatever you want." I keep my voice level, bored almost. "Tell them a man moved a two-ton machine with his hands. See how that reads in a deposition next to your demolition record."
He laughs, low and bitter, but he stops trying to twist away.
I've hauled him back and re-secured him, properly this time, Gideon is double-checking my work without being asked, and the storm has thinned to a gray smear and I hear rotors somewhere beyond the ridgeline. Then I see them: two helicopters banking up the pass, their spotlights raking the snow.
The old reflex rises in me instantly, the one that says manage everything, be everywhere, let no one else carry the weight. I feel Camille watching me tackle the feelings.
"Gideon," I say. "Take the landing coordination. Toby, you and Amy handle the litter carries with their medics. I've got Rourke and the handoff to the sheriff."
Gideon blinks, then nods once, like I've handed him something he's been waiting years to be handed. "On it."
I catch the pride members before the human crews are close to see faces. "Cuts covered, gloves on, nobody demonstrates anything," I tell them quietly. "We're tired volunteers who got lucky. Tonight we're the least remarkable people on this mountain."
Camille appears at my elbow while I'm saying it, snow melting in her dark hair, and she adds, "If anybody asks how the wreckage got moved, the answer is come-alongs and adrenaline.
Not one of you improves on that story." Her calm certainty about protecting my people undoes something in my chest that I don't have words for.
Before the first medic reaches us, I pull her a few steps into the lee of the ruined station, out of the wind and the coming noise.
"When the platform went," I say, "and I couldn't see you under all that snow…"
"I know."
"You don't. I want to say it at least once." I make myself hold her eyes. "That was worse than my father. That was the worst thing I have ever watched."
She reaches up and takes my face in both her cold hands and kisses me, brief and hard, the snow and the helicopters and the zip-tied Clayton all still there and nothing matters.
"You were terrified," she says against my mouth, "and you trusted me anyway. That's what you keep skipping." She steps back as boots crunch toward us. "Now go be forgettable, Coordinator. We've got a corporation to bury."
The state investigators come over the rise, and I straighten, and she gets to work.