Dead Territory

Ortiz returned carrying a route diagram and the expression of someone counting exits in a burning building. She shut the carriage door behind her.

“Our external radio is down. Cab can hear me on the train channel, but dispatch isn’t answering them either.”

“Can you stop?” Mara asked.

“Not safely here. Avalanche sheds, then a single track through Crow Pass. There’s an emergency platform at Rook Junction in forty minutes.”

Lena made a small, involuntary sound.

Ortiz turned to her. “What?”

“Rook belongs to Northline. It closed to passengers last year.”

“It still has a heated station room and a service road.”

“And no public cameras,” Lena said.

Ortiz studied her. Beyond the connecting door, Calder’s silhouette passed across the frosted glass.

“Let’s have this conversation somewhere else,” the conductor said.

Mara refused to leave Daniel unattended. Ortiz fetched a traveling father named Ben Aster from the next carriage, and Mara showed him how to watch Daniel’s breathing without giving him food or drink. Ben’s daughter, Poppy, solemnly offered her rabbit-shaped pillow.

Daniel’s head rested more comfortably on it than on Mara’s rolled coat.

In the linen compartment behind the buffet, Lena finally explained. Northline maintained avalanche galleries along the route. She had audited sensor records after a maintenance crew’s truck was buried in an October slide. The company had blamed a freak storm.

“The closure alarms had been disabled,” she said. “Not broken. Disabled. They needed the line open to meet a freight contract.”

Mara remembered the news photographs: a yellow truck nearly hidden by white rubble, three helmets lined up on a wall.

“My brother was on that crew,” Lena said. “They told me he shouldn’t have stopped under the slope.”

Ortiz folded her route diagram once, carefully.

“The key?” Mara asked.

“A station locker in Dunmere. The maintenance recorder is inside. Original relay data, with the physical seal. I copied the files too, but their lawyers can call those altered.”

“Who knows where it is?”

“Daniel. He was the electrician who helped me remove it.”

A loudspeaker clicked above them.

“Passengers are advised that an unscheduled safety stop will be made at Rook Junction.”

It was Calder’s voice, calm and welcoming.

Ortiz reached for her radio, but no longer looked surprised.