195 I walked into our anniversary party with a man my husband had never met. He laughed in front of everyone and asked, / Chapter 37 / 86

Chapter 37 - The Void at Palmer Divide

The crimson dot of the laser danced upon the bridge of Jonah’s nose, reflecting faintly against the frosted glass of the cab windshield. Overhead, the rhythmic, deafening thwack of the Black Hawk’s rotor blades beat down upon the steel roof like sledgehammers on sheet metal.

"Kill the throttle, Nina," Jonah murmured, his voice impossibly calm despite the lethal beam painting his skin. His left hand never left the brass reverser; his right remained poised over the sander valve. "Do not give them an excuse to pull that trigger."

"The bridge is gone, Jonah!" I shouted through the roar of the diesel engine and the rattling window frames. My eyes tore between the yawning chasm of the canyon ahead and the flickering monitor where Marcus stood smirking behind my mother’s fragile form. "And Marcus has my mother. If we stop, he forces her signature and executes her. If we don’t stop, we plunge five hundred feet into the gorge!"

The loudspeaker from the chopper crackled again, distorted by wind shear and static: *"Five seconds to compliance, Engine 101. Disengage primary power or lethal fire will be authorized."*

"The rails aren't gone," Jonah said suddenly. His gray eyes narrowed, tracking the beam of our forward twin headlights cutting into the blizzard. "Look at the alignment markers, Nina. That’s a false optical bypass! Croft's maintenance crew didn't pull the tracks—they threw the shunting switch onto the lower military spur! The trestle has a dual deck!"

My breath caught. My father’s blueprints—the schematics etched into my memory from the long nights studying the Sovereign Rail lines. During the Cold War, the Palmer Divide gorge had been fortified with a subterranean low-clearance track designed to withstand aerial bombardment, running forty feet beneath the main civil trestle. The main span had been opened like a drawbridge, leaving an empty chasm to frighten any runaway train into an emergency stop, but the lower grade was an active bypass.

"Can Engine 101 take that grade at sixty miles an hour?" I demanded, my hands finding the emergency sanders.

"Only if we hit the spring-switch before the bird cuts our air," Jonah said. He turned his head toward me, the laser sliding harmlessly across his cheekbone and hitting the steel bulkhead behind him. In that split second of blinding danger, his hand found the nape of my neck, pulling me toward him until his forehead touched mine. "Hold on to the bulkhead brake, Nina. Trust the iron."

He seized the heavy steel throttle lever and slammed it forward into Notch Eight.

Engine 101 roared. The four thousand horsepower turbodiesel engine spat fire from its twin exhaust stacks, surging forward with a violent shudder that tossed our caboose and Car 49 behind us.

Above, the sniper in the Black Hawk realized our intent a second too late. Muzzle flashes erupted from the side door, heavy anti-materiel rounds punching clean through the locomotive’s roof plating, showering the cab in sparks, shattered insulation, and screaming shrapnel.

"Get down!" Jonah roared, throwing his entire body over mine as we crashed to the diamond-plate floor.

The locomotive hit the switchpoints. With an apocalyptic screech of grinding iron, Engine 101 plunged off the main high line and dropped down the sheer, terrifying incline into the dark mouth of the lower gorge tunnel. The Black Hawk swept harmlessly over the empty upper gap, caught in the blinding updraft of the snow canyon, its rotor wash unable to follow our descent into the granite throat of the divide.

The darkness swallowed us whole. The violent swaying threw Jonah against me, his heavy chest rising and falling against my ribs, his arms locked around me like forged steel bands. For three agonizing seconds, we were in free-fall down the six-percent subterranean grade, the scent of crushed ozone and burning brake fluid filling the cab.

Then the iron bit into the lower span. The train leveled with a bone-crushing jolt.

Jonah lifted his head, his face smeared with grease and a thin streak of blood where a shard of plexiglass had grazed his brow. He didn't pull away. His hand cupped my jaw, his thumb wiping a speck of soot from my lip, his breathing ragged.

"You're whole?" he whispered, searching my eyes with a fierce, possessive intensity.

"I'm whole," I breathed, my chest heaving. "Now let's get my mother."

On the dashboard console, Marcus’s smug face froze on the screen as the signal scrambled through the granite tunnel, but his voice managed to crackle through the radio one last time before dying into white noise: