Page 47 of Faultline

"What did she have?"

I carry the folders to the porch and set them on the railing between us. The space is narrow. She doesn't move back to give me room, and the flannel brushes my forearm when I lean past her. My body logs the contact and files it next to every other piece of her I'm collecting without permission.

"The answer."

Tosh picks up the first folder. She opens it, scans the header, turns to the geological assessment. Her eyes move through the data like mine move through timber stands, reading the structure before the details, mapping the shape of what she's holding before she commits to the specifics.

She reaches the cross-section diagram. The circled notation. Lithium-bearing mineral formation. Significant concentration.

Her head comes up. "Lithium."

"A lithium formation that runs under the entire ridge. Confirmed in 1947. Confirmed again in 1974. Buried both times by people who didn't want it found until the price was right."

"The price is right now." She opens the second folder. The university research. The phantom foundation. The suppressed publication. She reads faster than I do, turning pages with the precision of someone who builds cases from documents like I build structures from timber. "The corridor. The shell companies. Whitfield-Crane's managing partner with his background in federal mineral rights. This is what they're buying here." She closes the folder and looks at me. "You know, when I moved to this town, I thought the biggest threat would be bears and boredom. Not a billion-dollar lithium find and a corporation willing to commit arson for it."

"You're disappointed?"

"I'm recalibrating." The corner of her mouth lifts, and the humor in it is sharp enough to draw blood. "I was building a case against a corporate land grab. Turns out I'm building a case against a resource war. Slight adjustment."

"My property is the gap in the corridor. The lithium runs under the ridge, and my land sits between Cascade and the access they need to reach it."

She looks up from the documents. Her expression isn't surprise. It's focus. Cold, locked-in, the look she gets when scattered pieces snap into a shape she can use.

"The cemetery," she says.

I nod. "The survey flags weren't intimidation. They were geological markers. The 1947 map puts the cemetery directly above the formation. Cascade wasn't mapping property lines when they drove those flags into the graves. They were mapping what's below them."

Tosh sets the folder down and grips the porch railing with both hands. Her knuckles go white against the weathered wood, and the stillness that settles over her is the kind I've only seen in people who've processed the worst of what other people are capable of and just found a new floor.

"They knew," she says. "Before the first offer. Before Ziegler, the shell companies, the recruiters. Before they started moving my clients out of the region like chess pieces being cleared from the board. They knew all of it."

"Someone knew in 1974. Someone funded that study, buried the results, and sat on them." I look at the folders on the railing. "Whether that's Cascade or somebody Cascade acquired the data from, I can't tell you yet."

"And now they're willing to burn houses for it."

"They're willing to do more than burn houses." I take the folders from the railing. "Agnes said the last company that tried this filed mining claims and the homesteading families pushed back hard enough to make them withdraw."

I hold the folders against my chest. The paper is fragile. The information on it isn't.

"Cascade learned from that. They're not filing claims. They're acquiring the land outright, mineral rights included. By the time anyone figures out what's underneath, they'll own every surface parcel between the highway and the ridge, and the only thing standing in their way will be five hundred acres of Stoddard timber sitting over the lithium they're trying to reach."

Tosh's grip on the railing loosens. She turns to face me fully.

"We need Rhys," she says. "And Harlow. And every document I've pulled on the shell company network, cross-referenced against these survey maps."

"I know."

"Do you know what a lithium find this size attracts?" She pushes off the railing, closing the distance between us to the width of a folder. "Federal agencies. Congressional committees. Mining lobbyists with budgets bigger than this town's entire tax base. Rhys is a good sheriff. He's also one man with a badge and a jurisdiction that someone in Washington is going to decide is negotiable."

"You're saying we're outgunned."

"I'm saying the gun just got a lot bigger." Her head tilts, eyes narrowing. The bruise at her collarbone catches the light, and my eyes track it before I can stop them. She notices. She always notices. "Stop staring at my neck and call Rhys."

"I wasn't staring."

"You were cataloging. You do it every time you think I'm not paying attention." She takes her coffee off the railing and walks past me toward the door, close enough that I catch the warmth coming off her skin through the flannel.

My flannel. On her body. In the middle of a conversation about billion-dollar lithium and corporate arson, what I'm thinking about is that collar against her throat and how easy it would be to close my hand around it and pull her back against me.