The Threat
"Define wrong," Callum said.
"Vibration signature's spiking. Same pattern as seven-B's last logged reading before it failed." Priya was already dialing. "I'm calling emergency dispatch, I'm telling them to halt all southbound traffic over column eleven—"
"They won't listen to a junior engineer with no clearance, not after last night. They'll want authorization from someone senior."
"Then who—"
Callum's phone rang before she finished. Naomi.
"Cal, something's wrong with the car." Her voice had none of its usual steadiness. "I went to pick up Junie from your mother's and the brakes just — they didn't respond, I had to use the emergency brake to stop at the corner, and there's a car that's been parked across from your mother's house since this morning, just parked there, nobody getting out—"
"Get Junie inside. Lock the doors. Don't go near the car again, call it in as a mechanical failure to the police, not a threat, you hear me? A mechanical failure."
"Cal, you're scaring me."
"I'm scaring myself," he admitted. "I'll be there in twenty minutes."
"No." Naomi's voice hardened, the ER-nurse voice again, the one that made decisions in emergencies. "You said people are standing on a bridge that's about to do what the last one did. You go stop that. I can lock a door, Cal. Go."
He hung up and looked at Priya, who'd heard enough of it to go pale.
"Someone doesn't want this getting out," she said.
"Or someone wants to make sure it's Halsey's threat, not his confession, that gets remembered." Callum was already moving toward the car. "Call every reporter you trust. Send them Halsey's email, the forged report, all of it, right now, before he has time to explain it away as a leak from a disgruntled employee."
"And column eleven?"
Callum was already pulling up a contact he hadn't dialed in seven years — the transit authority's chief safety officer, a man who'd once trusted his numbers before anyone told him not to.
"Column eleven," he said, "is the only thing that still matters more than my family being safe right now. So we're going to go stand under it and make them stop the trains ourselves if we have to."