Page 74 of Faultline

Below, the wreckage is piling against the creek rocks. Steel beams and shattered concrete settling into the water with groans that carry up through the storm.

Tosh is beside me. I don't remember reaching for her. My hand is on the back of her neck, fingers closed against her skin beneath her hair, gripping hard enough that the contact says everything my voice can't manage.

The hours since I told her I loved her and the seconds when I didn't know if she was still standing collapse into the pressure of my palm against the back of her neck.

Her face is white.

Her phone is still recording. She documented everything. The collapse. The timeline. The evidence that will matter when the investigators arrive, if the investigators can reach us with the only way in or out lying in the creek.

She doesn't pull away from my hand. She doesn't lean into it either. She holds her ground, accepting the contact as fact without letting it rearrange her.

"He was reaching for you," she says. Quiet. Factual. The advocate holding the witness steady because someone has to. "He saw you and he tried to get there."

"I know."

Her jaw tightens. "Then you know you saved the others. Don't make me argue with you about that later."

My hand stays on her neck. She lets it.

The radio in the truck crackles. Carl's voice, urgent. "Liam. Liam, come back. We heard it from town. What happened?"

I take the radio. My hand is steady.

The rest of me is somewhere else, somewhere behind the adrenaline, cataloging the failure pattern, reading the charges in the wreckage the way I used to read them in the field. Precision placement. Calculated force. Supports targeted to bring the middle section down while leaving the abutments intact.

This wasn't destruction. This was surgery.

"The bridge is down," I say into the radio. "Structural failure at the main supports. Signs of explosives." The word sits in the cold air between snowflakes. "We've got a man in the creek. Danny from the road crew. Pete's here."

Carl doesn't respond immediately. When he does, his voice has flattened into something I've only heard from him at fire scenes where the count goes wrong.

"I'll get Rhys."

"Get him. But the bridge is gone, Carl. Nobody's getting to Palmer. Nobody's reaching the troopers. Nobody's getting in or out of this valley until that bridge exists again."

The channel holds dead air.

Carl has lived his whole life in a town connected to the rest of Alaska by a single span of steel and concrete. He's absorbing what it means that the connection just died.

"Whitewater Junction is cut off," I say. "One road in and out, and they just took it."

Pete is kneeling at the edge of what's left of the span, staring down at the creek where his nephew went. One of the road crew workers is beside him, gripping his shoulder, saying nothing, because there's nothing to say when the wreckage is still settling over someone you watched grow up.

Tosh moves toward them. She doesn't hesitate, doesn't soften her posture, doesn't perform sympathy for an audience.

She crouches beside Pete and puts her hand on his arm with a grip that isn't gentle. Steady. Steel applied to the specific task of keeping him upright when his body wants to fold.

The sound Pete makes breaks through the wind like something that will never heal.

She stays with him. Holds the line between grief and collapse. The woman who pinned me with a look across my kitchen and told me to stop building walls is now the only thing between Pete and fractured concrete that could still give way.

I watch her work and what moves through me has nothing to do with tenderness. Cascade targeted her office because she's the threat they can't outmaneuver. Right now, on her knees in the snow beside a grieving man, she's proving exactly why.

I stand at the fractured edge and look at the gap.

My hands are shaking. The fury has been building behind my teeth since I felt the first wrong vibration through the railing, held down by discipline and the demands of a crisis that required function over feeling.

Danny's face. The understanding arriving too late. The lunge.