Page 71 of Faultline

The bridge.

The red marker on Harlow's map. The cluster of GPS stops that Tosh and I stared at on the porch. Harlow's voice, flat and certain: Cut the bridge and Whitewater Junction becomes an island.

"I'm heading down," I tell Carl. "The culverts at the south approach need checking. If they ice up during the storm, we'll have a flooding problem when this breaks."

"In this weather?"

"That's when things fail. When nobody's watching."

Carl doesn't argue. He's known me long enough. "I'll monitor the channel."

Tosh looks up from her laptop when I pull on my coat and boots. She reads me the way she reads a deposition, pulling the information she needs from what I'm doing instead of waiting for what I'll say.

"The bridge?"

"Culvert check. The ice buildup will cause problems if it isn't cleared before the storm peaks."

"You're checking the bridge."

She says it without inflection, and the precision of it pins me where I stand.

She heard Carl's radio call. She's been listening to every frequency in this cabin since the briefing at Harlow's office, filing what she hears alongside evidence. She knows exactly why I'm going, and the culverts are the reason I'll give anyone who asks.

"I'm checking the bridge," I say.

"I'm coming with you."

"The road's bad."

"Good thing you've got a truck with four-wheel drive and a woman who's survived worse than a snowstorm." She's already closing the laptop. "If you find something on that bridge, I'm documenting it. Photos, timestamps, condition before anyone touches it. You're going to need that record."

The argument builds in my jaw before it reaches my mouth. Stay here. Lock the door. Stay inside the perimeter I've spent weeks reinforcing specifically because the alternative is her on a road that Cascade has been mapping.

She watches it happen. Watches the argument form, watches me weigh it, watches me lose. The corner of her mouth lifts by a fraction. Not a smile. The edge of one, sharp enough to cut.

She's right. She's been right about everything since she traced the first shell company. The part of me that wants to keep her inside the perimeter, behind the gate, wrapped in my flannel where the only thing that can touch her is me. That part lost the moment she proved she's the thing Cascade failed to account for.

I don't like it. She can tell I don't like it. She's already pulling on her boots.

The truck fishtails twice on the switchbacks before the tires catch. The new gate is buried under a drift at the bottom, and I have to shovel the approach before I can swing it open. The steel is cold enough to burn through my gloves.

The main road is worse. Someone cleared it before dawn, but the storm has already reclaimed the surface in sheets of compacted snow and black ice. The truck crawls, the tires biting and slipping in a rhythm that keeps my hands tight on the wheel.

Tosh has her phone against the passenger window, photographing the road conditions and the timestamp on the dash screen. Building a record. She does this without being asked, without announcement, with the assumption that evidence matters even before anyone knows what it's evidence of.

Her knee is braced against the center console for balance. Every time the truck lurches, her thigh presses against my forearm on the gear lever. She doesn't move it. I don't move mine.

Last night my hands were on those thighs and her back was flat against my kitchen table. The proximity registers somewhere below my ribs where the tactical focus can't reach.

The bridge appears through the snow at the bottom of the valley where the road makes its final curve toward the highway. From this distance, through the blizzard, it looks the way it's always looked. A single steel and concrete span crossing Whitewater Creek. The only road to the highway, to Palmer, to Anchorage, to the rest of Alaska that doesn't know this town exists unless someone needs to find it.

Rhys's grandfather helped pour those foundations before Alaska became a state. Teenagers still jump off the south railing every July. Someone carved initials into the iron decades ago, and the heart they drew has rusted but held its shape.

The borough road crew is already on the bridge. A man in a hi-vis vest is shoveling the near approach. A second worker is further out, running a salt spreader along the center of the deck. A sand truck is rolling in from the far side.

A pickup is parked at the near abutment with its hazards flashing, and an older man I recognize as Pete Calloway is standing beside it, talking into a cell phone while the wind tears at his coat. Pete is Sally's husband. His nephew Danny works the borough crew, and Pete drives him to the early jobs when the weather gets ugly.

I pull the truck onto the shoulder and kill the engine. Tosh stays in the cab with her phone raised. I step out into the storm.