The storm came in sideways-rain like nails, wind in low animal sounds-and Reid had already decided he wouldn’t turn around. Not for weather, not for the dark, not for the way the access road tried to throw his truck back up the hill.

He killed the engine at the chain-link gap, the one everyone knew about and no one fixed. His headlights washed the rust clean on the fence for a heartbeat. He stepped out into mud that took his boot like it had been waiting. When the wind swung the gate just so, the broken hinge shrieked, and the sound carried down into the cut like a warning.

Reid pulled his hood up, dug his flashlight from the cab, and said out loud to no one, “Ten minutes.” He meant: I’ll be quick. He meant: I’ll just check the trailer, take pictures of the taped notices, call the lawyer in the morning and give him something that isn’t rumor.

The town said the quarry was already sold. The developer’s name had a logo Reid hated-sleek font, a green leaf to prove they cared. Contracts, rumors, all of it. The lawsuit papers had his name and another one he read fast when the bailiff served him: Mason Hale.

He told himself he didn’t come to see if Mason would be here. He told himself that as he swung the gate shut and started down the switchbacks, his light strobing off wet rock, his feet sliding, his breath steam in the beam.

But when the wind curled and brought up a second beam from below, Reid knew he’d been lying.

Mason’s flashlight lanced the rain, steady and sure. He was on the second bench, hat pulled low, shoulders hunched inside an old brown coat Reid recognized from a hunting season they didn’t talk about anymore. Mason looked up when Reid’s light hit him. They both hesitated, the way dogs do when they’re not sure if they’re supposed to bite.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Mason called. The wind tried to take his voice and couldn’t quite.

“Neither should you,” Reid said, because it was easier than hello.

Mason angled his light away, not to blind him. “Road’s going to wash out. You’ll never get back up if you wait.”

“I’m not staying,” Reid said.

They watched each other for one more beat, then moved in the same direction like they always had when they were younger-parallel until the path forced them to meet. They came together on the second bench where the gravel widened. The conveyor’s shadow cut the rain in ribbons. Behind Mason, the construction trailer crouched, its taped notices buckling at the corners.

“What’s in there?” Reid asked, nodding toward the trailer.

“Paperwork,” Mason said. “Or nothing. Looks like the county stapled the whole office to the walls.”

“Take a picture,” Reid said, and then, because the old habit of telling Mason what to do rose without asking, he added, “Use the flash. It’ll bounce right back at you, otherwise.”

Mason’s mouth twitched. “Thanks, boss.”

They stood close enough now to see each other’s faces. Time had put lines where they were useful: at the eyes, the mouth. Mason had a new scar by his ear, a pale hook that made him look perpetually surprised.

Reid said, “I didn’t sell it to them.”

Mason’s laugh came out without humor. “I didn’t say you did.”

“You thought it.”

“Thinking and saying are different, Reid.”

The rain found the seam between Reid’s collar and his neck. He shivered and resented it. “Why are you here?”

“Same reason as you,” Mason said. “If they’re going to take it, I want to see with my own eyes.”

“They can’t take what isn’t theirs.”

“Tell that to a bank,” Mason said. “Or to a judge who’s late for lunch.”

Reid looked past him at the pool on the quarry floor. The surface shivered under the rain, dark and unhelpful. Years ago, they’d swum there when the air was a kiln and they were dumb enough to race bets they couldn’t pay. Mason had dove from the second ledge and come up with a shout like a victory flag. Reid remembered thinking then that you could love a place the way you love a dog-fiercely, and knowing full well it could turn on you.

Wind pressed hard. The conveyor groaned and then quieted.

“You bring a camera?” Mason asked.

Reid tapped his phone in his back pocket. “You?”

Mason lifted a small Nikon. “Takes better in the dark.”

Lightning stitched the far ridge. The thunder hit like a truck. For a second they both ducked, then grinned in the shared reflex, and the grin felt like an apology flipped on its back.

“You remember when we got fined for not having reflective vests?” Mason said. “County guy said, ‘I’m saving you from yourselves,’ and you told him, ‘Some folks don’t want to be saved.’”

“Yeah,” Reid said. “You laughed so hard you fell off the pallet.”

“And you didn’t help me up,” Mason said, but he was smiling, and it wasn’t a wound anymore.

The trailer door resisted, then gave with a rubbery pop. The notices inside wore dates and stamps and signatures, water-wrinkled to a blur: GRADING PERMIT EXTENDED, EQUIPMENT MOVE IN, SAFETY BRIEF-WED 0600. There was a map thumb-tacked over a corkboard, colored lines for utilities, a bold X for staging. At the bottom corner, taped sideways, a photocopy of a schedule: a list of machines, each handwritten in a contractor’s cramped block letters. It meant little and everything.

Mason took pictures. Reid reached across him and held the top edge of a notice still so the camera wouldn’t catch it mid-flutter. The old teamwork slid into place with almost no sound.

“What happened to your ear?” Reid asked without looking at him.

“Fence post and a bad decision,” Mason said. “What happened to your pride?”

“It’s under the truck seat with the jumper cables.”

They didn’t say the other things yet. Not the check that bounced and the week Reid didn’t speak and the way Mason’s testimony had felt like sand under a door. Not the day the backhoe rolled and both of them ran toward the noise and only one of them kept running.

The wind came in a new direction-as if it had decided on them-whistled through the trailer like a throat. A warning. They only half heard it until the sound that followed wasn’t weather.

It was the conveyor above them muttering first, then barking as a cross-brace shifted. The sling of rubber belt sagged. Mason’s head snapped up, and Reid had just enough time to think move when the whole middle span gave a single tired sigh and dropped.

It didn’t fall clean-it slid, stuttered, bounced off the second bench and skidded toward them like an old dog that had finally remembered how to die. Mason shoved Reid sideways, Reid grabbed Mason’s coat, and they both tumbled out of the trailer door as the belt and its lattice came down, smearing mud and rock.

The world went white, then black, then full of small, close things: grit in his mouth, the taste of iron, Mason’s elbow in Reid’s ribs, the wind now a voice inside the steel.

When the noise settled into sound again, Reid realized he couldn’t move his right leg. Not the good way. The lattice had pinned him mid-thigh, not bone-crushing but bone-arguing, a pinch that promised worse if he fought. Mason lay half over him, swearing in a voice that tried to be quiet and failed. He rolled and winced and put a hand to his own shin.

“You with me?” Mason said.

“Yeah,” Reid said, breath thinner than he liked. “You?”

“Been better. Been worse.” Mason pressed his palm to the lattice and hissed. “Hot.”

“It’s just your hand.”

“No,” Mason said. “Metal’s hot. Lightning must’ve kissed it.”

They tried the obvious things. Pushing. Levering. Reid braced on his elbows and shoved at the cross-bar while Mason jammed his shoulder under and lifted until veins sketched themselves at his temple. The lattice thought about moving and then decided it liked where it was.

“Okay,” Mason said, panting. “Okay. New plan.”

“Wait,” Reid said. He reached back with his free hand, yanked at the strap of his belt, and fed the leather through the lattice to make a loop. “On three, lift, and I’ll pull slack.”

“You counting?” Mason asked.

“You counting?” Reid countered.

They counted together. The first try got them an inch. The second try got them groans they pretended were jokes. The third try got them a quiet both of them respected because it had throbbing in it.

“Don’t be a hero,” Mason said finally, softer. “It’s just us.”

“I’m not,” Reid said.

They lay back against the wet ground, breath syncing the way it used to on hot asphalt in July when there was more work than workers and a clock that didn’t stop. The rain quieted to a steady whisper. Lightning walked farther away.

Mason said, “I didn’t sell it. Not the way people say.”

“I know,” Reid said.

Mason turned his head. “Do you?”

“You came down here in a storm to take pictures that won’t save anything,” Reid said. “That’s not a man who took a check and smiled.”

Mason nodded. “I should’ve told you when the bank called me first. I should’ve told you when the second letter came and I didn’t show you because shame’s got a way of folding paper in half.”

“I should’ve asked before I went on the radio and made it sound like you’d burned the place down,” Reid said. “I was… I don’t know. Mad at the universe and you were closest.”

Mason laughed once, the kind that shakes and then steadies. “We were good at being close. Good and bad.”

Wind did something kinder, or maybe they had. The storm held them but not like a fist anymore. Somewhere below, water found a new path and rushed it.

“You think they’ll come looking?” Reid asked.

“Who’s ‘they’?” Mason said. “Lydia will start calling you when you miss breakfast, I guess. Mrs. Kline watches the road like it owes her money. Somebody will notice. Or the crew in the morning.”

“What crew?” Reid asked, like a man who knew and wanted Mason to say it.

Mason nodded at the trailer with his chin. “Paper says six.”

Reid thought of the schedule he hadn’t read all the way because the letters blurred when the conveyor fell. He thought of orange flags and the way the bank’s app stacked red numbers like badges.

“I thought about pulling the survey stakes,” he admitted. “Stupid. Like it would stop the world for one more day.”

“I came to take the schedule down so you wouldn’t see it,” Mason said, and they both let that set in.

“You still got that flask?” Reid asked.

Mason smiled with half his mouth. “Truck. Under the seat. With the jumper cables.”

They looked at each other, then started to laugh, quietly, like men in church and children under blankets. The laughter wasn’t a fix. It wasn’t even a promise. It was more like a hand on the shoulder in a long line.

“Okay,” Mason said when the laugh had done what it could. “If they come before morning, we’ll holler. If not, we breathe, and when the crew rolls in we make all the noise two fools can make.”

“And when they get us loose,” Reid said, “we go to the judge together. No more letters we fold alone.”

“No more radio,” Mason said. “And… I’m sorry.”

“Me too,” Reid said. The words felt right in his mouth in a way they hadn’t when he rehearsed them alone.

The minutes after apologies are always strange. The world is both lightened and not. They listened to the rain find its patterns. Mason told a story about a job in ’09 when they slept in the truck under a tarp and woke up to a line of deer staring like they were a show. Reid told a story about the summer the high school kids worked for them and thought you could pour concrete without air in it. They traded small, warm things, and the storm listened like a third man who’d finally shut up.

Sometime deep into the night, the rain slackened to mist. Sometime after that, wind gathered in a different pocket of the bowl and walked up behind them, softer now. They dozed in slices. When Reid startled awake the sky was the color of nickel. He didn’t know if an hour or three had passed.

Mason shifted and winced. “You hear that?”

At first Reid thought it was thunder dragging a foot. Then he heard the steadier part, the heart of it: diesel turning over in a way that said the person holding the key knew the machine and liked it.

“Yeah,” he said. He felt something in his chest he hadn’t let himself yet: relief with a sore spot.

“Which way?” Mason asked, squinting up toward the access road. The benches made sight lines tricky. Sound in the quarry didn’t travel honest.

Reid turned his head and tried to separate the noises. There was the water, slick and patient. There was the wind, farther now. There was the engine, growing and flattening as the operator throttled up to test. And there was the short electronic chirp of a backup alarm.

“Over the lip,” Reid said. “On the road.”

Mason breathed out. “I told you someone would-”

“Hey!” Reid shouted, his voice scraping like it had picked up gravel inside it. “Down here!”

“Down here!” Mason took it up, deeper, louder. “Down here!”

The engine throttled down, then up. A new sound joined: the squeal of metal on metal as something heavy found a gear that matched its intention.

A figure moved along the rim-just a suggestion between cloud and rock. Then another. The first one lifted an arm and waved, and Reid’s lungs went soft with gratitude.

“They see us,” he said.

“About time,” Mason breathed. “Hey!” he shouted again. He cupped his hands. “Legs pinned! We’re okay-just pinned!”

The first figure didn’t answer that Reid could hear. It turned, pointed, and then a blade eased into view at the top of the access road: a slab of steel that caught what little light the dawn had to offer. Behind it, the high hood tilted and settled.

Reid’s relief hesitated. That was a lot of machine to bring for a rescue. But maybe they needed to clear the mud. Maybe the crew knew the road was gone in places. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

Mason followed his gaze. “County?” he asked. “Or the developer?”

“Does it matter?” Reid said, because he wanted the answer to be no.

The engine revved, full now, and the blade lifted two fingers off the gravel. The machine’s weight made the bench hum through the lattice into Reid’s bones. The operator looked small in the cab, a shadow inside a rectangle.

Mason said, “They have to see us.”

“We’re right here,” Reid said. He tried to raise his arm. The lattice laughed at him. He laughed back, breathless. “We’re right here!”

The machine eased forward, then angled, the way an old hand lines up for a first cut. The backup alarm chirped twice, then the forward gear caught again with a satisfied clunk. Another figure farther back lifted a bright object that flickered like a flag, then let it drop.

Mason’s voice went lower. “Reid.”

“What?”

“Whose people are they?”

Reid looked from the blade to the trailer with its taped papers, to the orange flags, to the map with the X for staging he had held for Mason’s camera. He thought of six o’clock written in tired block letters. He thought of how sound in a quarry played tricks and how some things were not tricks at all.

He didn’t look at Mason when he said it. He looked at the blade.

“Bulldozer.”