Chapter 20 - The Iron Descent
The blizzard raged with blinding ferocity, freezing the breath in our lungs, but the crimson light of the burning cabin served as a grim beacon, driving us forward through the drifts.
We broke through the tree line onto the concrete platform of the old tramway station. The rusted steel cables stretched out into the black abyss of the valley below, disappearing into the swirling snow. Clamped to the main cable was the maintenance cage—a heavy, steel-mesh box designed to carry workers and equipment up and down the mountain face.
It operated on a counterweight gravity brake. Thomas Vance had maintained it personally until his final illness, using it to inspect the timber stands.
I threw Maisie inside the steel cage, shoved the ledger into my coat, and grabbed the rusted iron release lever mounted to the station stanchion.
Behind us, flashlight beams cut through the pine trees. Gunfire cracked through the storm, bullets whipping through the pine needles above our heads.
"Stop them!" Rebecca’s voice screamed from the darkness of the woods. "Do not let that child leave this mountain!"
The release lever was frozen solid. I braced both feet against the platform, grabbed the iron bar with both hands, and pulled with every ounce of strength remaining in my body.
With a grinding screech of metal that screamed against the wind, the rusted counterweight released.
The steel cage lurched forward. I barely managed to throw myself through the open mesh door before the platform vanished behind us.
The cage plunged down the steel cable into the void, accelerating through the darkness with a terrifying, rhythmic clanking. The wind roared through the wire mesh, howling like a banshee as the mountain face dropped away beneath our feet. Behind us, the burning cabin on Blackwood Ridge shrank into a tiny orange ember in the blizzard, a dying monument to the Vance family’s reign of deceit.
Maisie buried her head in my chest, sobbing uncontrollably, her arms wrapped around my waist. I held her with everything I had, whispering promises against her cold hair, staring into the descending gloom as the cable carried us toward the river valley below.
Twenty minutes later, the cage slammed into the heavy spring buffers of the lower terminal at the edge of the abandoned freight rail yard in the valley.
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We were alive. But it was already 4:30 in the morning.
The Union Depository in Boston opened its primary trust vaults at 6:00 AM. And Julian Cross was already there.
