Page 30 of One-Track Pride

"That's it," I say quietly. "That's the whole conspiracy, handed to us. Warren manufactured the failures, Clayton placed the derailment charge. Both of them answer to Conrad Vey the VP of Northstar. A jury doesn't need me to reconstruct a single fracture surface now. They just need to hear two conspirators arguing about who's more guilty."

"Then that recording matters as much as this does," Evander says. "If we stop the avalanche and lose the tape, Northstar buries it under a stack of lawyers and they’ll walk free."

"Which is why it's going somewhere safe before anything else blows up." I zip the little recorder into the inside pocket over my heart and pat it once, the closest thing to a promise I can make it. "If I don't make it off this ridge, that pocket does. You get it to Owen. Understood?"

He doesn't argue the premise, and I love him a little more for the restraint it must cost. "Understood. And you're making it off this ridge, so I'll be giving it to Owen myself with you standing next to me."

"Okay." I start climbing again. "Now come on. He said something before the recording that's still bothering me."

"The survey site."

"Yes." So he caught it too. "Warren said Vey never planned on the train coming down with me still aboard, fine, that's panic. But earlier, before I hit record, Clayton told him to 'keep west charges clear of the line.' Why would a demolition crew care about the boundary of an old geological survey?"

When I turn, Evander’s face has changed, gone carefully blank the opposite of calm.

"Say the coordinates to me," he says.

I recite them; numbers stick to me like faces stick to other people. Evander closes his eyes, and he overlays them onto a map only he can see, one drawn in scent-trails and childhood summers and generations of guarded ground.

"That's not near the ridge charges," he says at last, very low. "That's the eastern shoulder of the mountain. The old survey crew Conrad's people ran, years ago, they stopped almost exactly there. My family made them stop, that line marks the closest anyone ever got to the den before tonight."

A cold sensation goes through me, and I pull the geological records I've carried through this entire nightmare out of my jacket and angle my lamp across the pages, hunting the section I only half-registered before, when I still thought this was a story about minerals.

"There," I breathe, finding it. "Look. The later reports Northstar filed for their mining permits, they reference sealed subterranean chambers, then scrub the detail two revisions later. Somebody cleaned these up. The rare-earth deposit is real, but it's not the only thing they found down there, and it's not the only thing they're hiding."

"Camille." Evander's voice has dropped to almost nothing. "What are you telling me?"

I force myself to say it, because he deserves that from me and because dancing around it would be a lie. "I'm telling you the mineral deposit might be the cover story, not the motive. What those early surveyors saw near your family's land. I don't know how much of it they understood, but Northstar has spent years and a train full of people trying to get legal access to that side, and part of what's under it is the thing you've spent your whole life keeping the world from seeing."

He doesn't move at all. Then his hand comes up and presses flat on the cold rock wall beside us, as if he needs to feel the weight of the whole mountain to steady himself under it. When he speaks, the fear in him isn't the sharp, clawing thing I saw when the tunnel came down. It's older, deeper. The kind you inherit.

"If they dig where that survey stopped, they don't find ore," he says. "They find chambers no human hand carved. They find remains, they find proof that something lives in these mountains that shouldn't exist." His eyes lift to mine. "It was never only Stonehaven I was protecting. Every pride, everywhere, stays safe because nobody has ever had a reason to search. Northstar would be the reason."

I take his hand off the wall and hold it in both of mine, grit and all. "Then we deal with what they know after we make sure there's still a mountain standing for them to dig into. One catastrophe at a time, Shaw. We stop the avalanche, we get the recording to Owen, and then you and I sit down and figure out exactly how much Conrad actually understands about what he's chasing."

"You say that like it's simple."

"I say it like it's a sequence. Simple's a different word." I squeeze his fingers once and let go, because armed men are still somewhere above us and grief can wait its turn. "You're allowed to be terrified about the den. I'd think less of you if you weren't. But you don't get to carry it alone anymore, remember? You made me a promise."

That earns me the ghost of a smile, there and gone. "I remember."

"And I'll make you repeat it if I have to." I turn back to the climb, the recording warm against me, the mountain vast and armed and waiting above us. "Right now, though, we've got a countdown. Stay close, I want you where I can reach you when this gets loud."

His footsteps fall in behind mine, steady as a second heartbeat. "Always," he says. And we climb.

22

EVANDER

The corridor dead-ends in an old signal room the railway walled off, and since we entered the mountain the world goes quiet. Clayton's men have pulled back to regroup above us. Toby's voice comes through our radio broken and far, working his way toward a route onto the ridge. Below us, Gideon is still moving the vulnerable survivors uphill. None of those pieces will be in position for a few hours, and with the ridge unstable in darkness, neither side can make its final move yet. Since yesterday afternoon, this is when we first get to have a real pause from the chaos.

Camille sets the lamp on an overturned crate and lowers herself onto a coil of dead cable. She's shaking, just slightly, the fine tremor that comes after adrenaline burns down and leaves you standing in the ash of it.

"Sit," she says, patting the cable beside her. "You've been running on scraps of sleep for two days. Even lions run out of energy."

"I'm fine."

"You're swaying, Shaw. Sit down before you fall down and dent the mountain."