Page 36 of One-Track Pride

"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."

26

EVANDER

Ihave Clayton zip-tied to the frame of the amplifier housing, his ruined arm cradled against his chest, and I crouch next to him with maybe three minutes on the clock and no patience left in me for games. Above us the sky has cracked wide open, cold and blue, the rotor sound growing closer down the pass. My lion is still pressed against the inside of my skin, unwilling to fully retreat while this man is breathing, and Clayton sees exactly that in my eyes.

"You said we don't understand why your people want the mountain," I tell him. "You've got until that snowpack lets go to explain it. After that I stop needing you."

"You'd let it bury you before it'd bury me?" He coughs, and there's blood in it, but the grin holds. "That's almost admirable. Stupid, but admirable."

"The mountain. Talk."

"You really think this started with rare earth?" He tips his head back against the steel, studying me like I'm the slow one in the room. "That's the story Vey tells the permit office. Minerals are clean, minerals are boardroom-friendly. You know what the minerals actually are? Cover, a legal reason to put crews back on ground his company already wanted for something else."

"For what?"

"For what your grandfather chased them off of." His voice drops, almost lazy, savoring it. "First survey team Northstar's predecessor sent up here, thirty-some years back, they got into a cavern nobody was supposed to reach. Found claw marks gouged into solid rock higher than any animal should reach. Found remains that didn't match anything in a catalog. Found chambers sealed off by hand, not by geology, and strange biological material. Then they got run off private land and told to forget they'd ever been up here." He wheezes a laugh. "Vey read the old file. He doesn't know what you are, Shaw. But he knows the Shaw family has been sitting on something impossible for a very long time, and he's decided it's worth more than the ore under it."

I keep my face still, but every piece of it lands. The den, the oldest chamber, my grandfather's stories about survey stakes and men with clipboards, told to us as warnings rather than history.

"So the mine was never the point," I say slowly.

"The mine pays for the dig. The dig gets him into the mountain legally. And once he's in…" Clayton shrugs with his good shoulder. "Whatever's down there, he owns the first look. Undiscovered species. Doesn't matter to me. I get paid either way."

Camille's voice comes over my radio, tight and clear. "Van. I heard all of that."

"I know."

"Do you understand what he's actually saying?" There's no fear in it, only that hard, fast engineering focus that means she's already three steps down a road I haven't seen yet. "This isn't Stonehaven anymore. If Northstar digs proof of what your family is, it's not your pride that gets exposed. It's every single one of you. Everywhere."

"I understand." My hand finds the cold edge of the amplifier, and for one ugly second I weigh the thing I swore I wouldn't. "Then maybe the answer is I bring the den down myself. Evacuate the pride, collapse the deepest chambers, leave Vey with rubble and nothing to find."

"No." The word is instant, and sharp enough to cut. "Absolutely not. You don't get to make that call in ninety seconds because Clayton’s rattled you."

"Camille…"

"Listen to me." I can hear her boots on frozen steel, hear her working even as she argues, and it steadies me more than any reassurance could. "That den is four generations of your family. It is the only place on this earth that has ever been fully yours. You want to erase it because Northstar might reach it? That's not protecting the pride, Van. That's grief wearing a strategy. You taught me the difference yourself, whether you meant to or not."

Clayton's watching me lose an argument to a voice on a radio, and something almost like interest crosses his face. "She always talk to you like that?"

"Constantly," I say. "It's why I keep her."

"Damn right it is," Camille mutters. "We seal the mountain with law, not with a cave-in. Evidence, injunctions, the Shaw trust fighting every access claim in court for the next thirty years if it has to. You don't burn the house down to keep a burglar out of it. You lock the door and you make it expensive to break."