The Black Box Bride

Chapter 18: Stormbound

The storm hit the mountain like a door slamming.

Gideon watched it come from the ranger station's porch — a black wall rolling over the ridge, eating the debris field yard by yard, and he thought, with the detachment of a man watching his stock price fall, that they were about to be stranded. Kit confirmed it from the airstrip radio before the radio died: windshear, whiteout, no flights until it passed. Twenty-four to forty-eight hours.

"Everybody inside," Kit said, herding the team like a sheepdog. "Generator, lanterns, ration the heat. Welcome to the mountain."

The ranger cabin was one room with a stone fireplace, bunks along the walls, and a table scarred by decades of field teams. Imogen claimed a bunk and fell asleep mid-sentence. The two panel staffers played cards by lantern light, betting matchsticks with the intensity of men defusing bombs. Kit took the radio corner, coaxing static out of the dying bands.

Which left Gideon and Skye by the fire, with one lantern between them and the storm screaming at the windows.

She'd been quiet since the dispatch log. Not the furious quiet — the other one. The grief quiet. She sat with her knees drawn up, Mara's wings turning over and over in her fingers, and stared into the flames.

"My father built this airline with a crop duster and a loan," Gideon said. He hadn't planned to say it. The storm and the fire and the hour conspired. "He died when I was twenty-four. Heart attack, in his office, over the freight contracts. Cyrus stepped in — the grieving uncle, the steady hand. I was grateful. I let him have freight. I let him have everything I didn't want to look at."

Skye didn't look up. "You keep confessing to me like I'm a priest."

"You're the only person in my life who isn't paid to agree with me."

That got a look — brief, unwilling. "Keep talking, Slate. You're almost interesting."

He smiled, and it hurt a little. "I buried things too, Skye. Not bodies. Paper. An internal audit memo, two years ago — freight anomalies, my uncle's division. I signed off on burying it because the IPO—" He stopped. "No. Because I was a coward. Because looking at it meant looking at him."

The fire popped. Somewhere in the bunks, Imogen murmured in her sleep.

"Why are you telling me this?" Skye asked.

"Because you're going to find the memo anyway. You find everything." He leaned forward, elbows on knees. "I'd rather you heard it from me before you read it in a discovery dump."

She studied him — the controlled face, the tired eyes, the man who'd carried her pack without asking. "Is there anything else you're going to make me find?"

"Probably." Honesty felt like falling. "I'm a man with a talent for not looking, Skye. You're curing me of it. It's unpleasant."

"Good." But her voice had softened. "Unpleasant is where the truth lives."

The lantern guttered. In the dimming light her face was all planes and shadows, and he was suddenly, acutely aware of how close she sat — close enough that he could see the soot still under her fingernails from the debris field, the faint scar through her left eyebrow, the way her mouth softened when she wasn't bracing for a fight.

"Skye—"

The cabin door blew open.

Wind and snow exploded into the room, killing the lantern, and Kit was shouting, and for a blind moment Gideon moved on instinct — across the space between them, his body between Skye and the door, his arm around her shoulders, hauling her back from the blast. The door slammed. The team wrestled it shut and barred it. The lantern was relit, guttering.

And Gideon realized he was still holding her.

She looked up at him, snow melting in her hair, breath quick — and the storm and the fire and the hour conspired again, because he was going to kiss her. He could see her see it coming. Her eyes dropped to his mouth. His thumb moved, once, against her shoulder.

One of the card players cleared his throat. Loudly.

They sprang apart like teenagers. Skye crossed to the fire with great dignity and poked it unnecessarily. Gideon sat down and tried to look like a man who hadn't just nearly kissed the lead investigator in front of witnesses.

"Kit to base," the radio crackled, loud in the sudden quiet. "Kit to base — we've got a problem."

Kit was staring at the radio, face white.

"What problem?" Skye demanded, all business again — but her ears were red.

Kit looked up. "The charter company just filed a second flight plan. Somebody's trying to get a plane off this mountain tonight — in this storm." He swallowed. "The pilot of record is listed as R. Cross."

The room went silent except for the storm.

"R. Cross," Skye repeated. "The ghost from the manifest. The duffel with no owner." She looked at Gideon. "He was never a no-show tourist. He was here the whole time."

"Doing what?" Imogen asked, sitting up, suddenly awake.

"Watching us," Skye said. "Learning what we've found." She crossed to the radio corner and stared at the dead bands. "And now he's leaving. In a storm that should kill him."

"Unless he knows something about the weather we don't," Kit said grimly. "Or unless staying is more dangerous than flying."

Gideon looked at the barred door, at the snow screaming past the shutters. "He's running," he said. "The question is what he's running from — us, or the man who sent him."

Skye met his eyes across the lantern light, and the almost-kiss was gone, replaced by something colder and more familiar.

"We find out at dawn," she said. "Nobody sleeps. We inventory everything — every sample, every photo, every file. If he's been watching us, I want to know what he saw."

The lantern light threw their shadows huge against the cabin walls, and for a moment nobody moved at all.

But as the team moved, Gideon caught her arm — gently, briefly.

"Skye. The manifest ghost, the planted evidence, the fuel line —" He stopped. "Be careful who you trust up here. Besides me."

"Besides you?" She raised an eyebrow.

"I'm the only one whose secrets you've already found." He let go. "Everyone else still has theirs."