The Black Box Bride

Chapter 20: The Climb

The storm broke at dawn the way a fever breaks — all at once, leaving the mountain rinsed and glittering and impossibly clear. Gideon stood on the cabin porch and watched the sun strike the debris field below, and thought about tool marks on a fuel panel in a blizzard, and about a woman who'd almost let him kiss her and then walked into the dark like it was her natural element.

"You're brooding," Skye said behind him. "It's distracting."

"I'm strategizing."

"You're brooding." She handed him a thermos. "Drink. We climb in twenty minutes."

The jackscrew's impact crater was a half-mile above the main field, up a scree slope that punished every step. Skye set a brutal pace, and Gideon — who ran five miles before board meetings — kept up out of sheer refusal to be the weak link. Kit stayed at the airstrip with the plane, working the fuel system with the watchman standing guard. Imogen and the team worked the lower field, cataloguing.

Halfway up, the slope gave way under Skye's boot — a slide of loose scree that carried her sideways three feet before she caught herself on a pine root. Gideon grabbed her pack, hauling back, and they ended up braced together against the slope, breathing hard, his arm around her waist.

"I'm fine," she said.

"You're welcome."

She looked at him — and for a second the mountain and the inquiry and the dead all fell away, and they were just two people on a hillside, too close, breathing the same cold air. Then she pulled free, very deliberately, and kept climbing.

The air thinned as they climbed, sharp with pine and snowmelt, and below them the debris field shrank to a scar, then a scratch, then nothing. Gideon thought about how small it looked from up here — how the mountain had swallowed ninety-six lives and barely marked the ground. Skye didn't look down. She never looked down. She only looked forward, toward the crater, toward the next thing the dead were trying to tell her.

Halfway up, Skye stopped dead.

"What?" Gideon asked, breathing hard.

She was staring at a gouge in the rock — fresh, the stone underneath still pale where something heavy had scraped it. "This wasn't here fourteen months ago. This is new. Somebody dragged something up this slope. Recently."

"In a storm?"

"Before the storm." She crouched, studying the gouge, running her fingers along the pale scar. "See the striations? Metal on rock. Heavy — whatever it was, it weighed real weight. And look —" She pointed at a series of smaller marks alongside. "Somebody braced here. Boots. They hauled it up by hand."

"Kit said somebody was digging at the crater while we were at the cabin." Gideon looked up the slope toward the crater, suddenly cold despite the climb. "Somebody came up here in the dark, in the wind, to do something to our evidence."

"Or take something from it."

She looked at him, and he saw the calculation run behind her eyes. "Move."

They climbed the last hundred yards at a run, scree sliding under their boots. The crater was a shallow bowl of churned earth and new grass, unremarkable to anyone who couldn't read it. But Skye read it — she walked the rim slowly, eyes down, and Gideon could see her cataloguing: the disturbed patch here, the fresh-turned earth there, the place where someone had knelt and dug with a folding shovel.

"Here." She dropped to her knees and began working the rim with her hands, sifting, probing. "They dug here. Then they filled it back in. Sloppy — in a hurry."

Gideon, who had learned by now, did the same on the opposite side without being asked. His fingers ached with cold. The earth was half-frozen. And then —

His fingers closed on something hard and wrong in the soft earth — a length of threaded steel, six inches, corroded but unmistakable. He held it up, and Skye went white.

"That's a jackscrew thread section," she breathed. "From the horizontal stabilizer assembly." She took it with both hands, turning it in the light. "The threads — Gideon. Look."

He looked. The threads were filed — the same deliberate, coated filing as the jackscrew in the hangar. But this piece had never been in the recovery inventory. The first team had missed it entirely.

"There's a second one," Skye whispered. "The sabotage was redundant. Two filed components. If the first hadn't failed, the second would have."

Gideon felt the mountain tilt under him. "That's not just murder. That's —"

"Professional," she finished. "This is a man who doesn't leave things to chance. He filed two components, fourteen months ago, in the dark, inside a maintenance hangar — and nobody saw him." She turned the steel over once more, and froze.

"What?"

"Part number." Her voice had gone flat. "This is stamped. Every jackscrew assembly has a serial that matches the airframe." She held it up to the light, reading. Then she looked at him, and her face was the color of the snow. "Gideon. This serial doesn't match Flight 217's aircraft."

The wind moved through the pines. Somewhere below, Imogen laughed at something, bright and unaware.

"If it's not from our plane," Gideon said slowly, "then where—"

"Somebody planted it." Skye stood, the steel clenched in her fist. "Somebody came up this mountain in a storm, dug at this crater, and planted a filed component from a different aircraft." Her eyes blazed. "Why would you plant evidence of sabotage at a sabotage site?"

Gideon understood before she finished. "To control the story. To make sure we find what they want us to find — and stop looking for what they don't."

"Or," Skye said, very quietly, "to tell us this has happened before."

She held up the steel. The stamped serial caught the sun.

"Think about it," she said. "A saboteur with a signature — filed threads, coated, redundant. That's not a man who improvised. That's a man with a method. And a method means practice." She looked down the slope, toward the airstrip, toward the trees where the boot prints had vanished. "Somebody's done this to another plane, Gideon. And I don't think it crashed."

"Then where is it?"

"That's the question." She bagged the steel with hands that were almost steady. "And I think somebody just tried to make sure we never ask it."