Page 44 of One-Track Pride

"I'd bury it somewhere they legally can't dig it back up." I hold his gaze. "I can out-lawyer it. Let me."

The struggle plays out across his face, years of hard-won conviction fighting the evidence. Ruth watches her son with quiet, fierce attention, and then, slowly, he nods, not in defeat, but like something long-clenched has finally opened its grip.

"Photograph it," he says.

Two words I know cost him more than lifting a train. I lift my phone, careful to frame only the corroded green plate against anonymous stone, and the camera flashes once.

Back at Evander's house, I've pulled the registration history. The company stamped into that marker disappeared through three acquisitions and two mergers before its surviving exploration assets landed exactly where I expected them to.

Northstar Meridian.

Better, the acquisition file lists archived geological surveys among the transferred records. Conrad's modern permit applications declare no prior exploratory access to the Shaw property. He didn't simply inherit the old survey. He buried it.

I send Whitfield the corporate chain and the permit discrepancy, stripped of anything that identifies where I found the original marker. It's enough to give her the thread without giving her the den.

32

EVANDER

The first train out of Stonehaven leaves at nine, and I'm standing on the platform, not because I'm sprinting after something that's already pulling away from me, because I want to be. The locomotive gleams under a hard blue sky, repainted, refitted, every coupling and switch along the northern line replaced or rebuilt over the past four months. Camille signed off on most of it herself. She stands beside me now with a travel mug in one hand and an inspector's frown aimed at the undercarriage, because apparently a woman can't retire from suspicion just because the mountain stopped trying to kill her.

"You're doing it again," I tell her.

"Doing what?"

"Staring at the train like it personally owes you money."

She takes a slow sip. "It nearly buried me under half a mountain. We have history."

Amy comes up on my other side wearing her fire captain's coat and a grin that means she's about to enjoy herself. "He's been circling this platform since seven," she informs Camille. "Checked the brake lines twice. Sniffed the whole first carriage."

"I did not sniff the carriage."

"You absolutely sniffed the carriage."

Camille laughs, warm and unbothered, and Amy bumps her shoulder before drifting off to needle Tobias instead. Four months ago I'd have hovered over every inch of this operation, convinced the entire route would collapse if I looked away. Today Gideon has the ridge patrols, Amy runs the station response, and I signed the delegation orders without my chest seizing up about it. Turns out the town survives when I let it. Turns out it does more than survive.

We board as the whistle sounds. I put my hand at the small of Camille's back to guide her up the step, then leave it there once we're inside, and she raises that eyebrow at me.

"Van. There are windows. People can see you being territorial."

"Let them."

"The great emergency coordinator, undone by a train ride."

"Undone by the passenger." I settle into the seat beside her, close enough that our shoulders press together as the carriage rocks forward. "You can file a complaint with the reconstruction office."

"I run the reconstruction office."

"Then I like my odds."

The train climbs into the pass, and the country opens up around us the way it always does here, white peaks folding into deeper white, the river a black thread far below. We pass the section where the avalanche came down. The scar is healing over, snow smoothing what steel and fire tore apart. Camille goes quiet against me, and I don't fill the silence, because some things earn a minute of respect before you keep moving.

"Northstar's people got their arraignment date," she says eventually. "Conrad's lawyers are still trying to spin him as a man who trusted the wrong contractors."

"Will it work?"

"Not with his authorization codes sitting in the acquisition records. And not with Clayton talking." She turns her mug in her hands. "The federal grant cleared last week. Modernization's funded through the whole northern corridor. They're calling it a model program."