“Sit, Angel.” He reached for her, but she stood and staggered just out of reach, noticing vaguely that she was wearing just her base layer. “There’s nothing we can—”
“No, wait. Listen. They talked aboutyou. Sampson said… Crap. What did he say?” She put a hand to her suddenly aching head. “Boy, he waspissedthat you weren’t around.”
“Why?” He stood.
“They wereyours.” She tilted her head back to meet his intelligent blue eyes. “They must have been. Those metal tubes, the uh, core thingies? You kept some in the supply arch?” Heart racing, she swayed and put out a hand to steady herself. It landed on his hot, heavy forearm. It took her a good three seconds to refocus.
“Ice cores. Yes.”
“That’s what they were after.” A slow smile curled her lips as she felt something other than a sick dread. “But there’s a chance they didn’t get them.”
* * *
“Youwhat?”
“I took them back.” She looked excited. Not quite smiling, but satisfied, like a runner who’d just beaten out the competition in a close race.
“The cores?” He pulled on a shirt, racing to catch up with her.
“Yes.” She stepped into her boots.
“Where are you going?”
She blinked. “To get them.” Might as well tack an eye-roll and aduhonto the end of that.
“Stay here. I’ll go.”
He did get the eye-roll then, which sped his pulse up. Dammit, the woman was a loose cannon.
She was already sliding into her coat, so he went to the door and opened it.
“Where are they?” He grabbed his flashlight and baseball bat—because whatever was going on here was dangerous as hell even if he was fairly certain the people responsible were long gone—and led the way toward the arch. Even the way he walked had changed, he noted with detached interest. No more stomping across the ice, head in the clouds. As if the years had been stripped away, his situational awareness was back online, his muscles loose and ready, buzzing with that almost electric tension he associated with being outside the wire.
“Under one of the food supply shelves. The rice.” He couldn’t see her face behind her glasses and gaiter, but something like worry had threaded its way into her voice. Which was good. Caution was good.
Wait, was she limping?
He opened his mouth to ask, but she spoke first. “Must be something pretty special in those tubes, huh?”
Well,hethought they were special, but the normal ash or trapped air bubbles that got him riled up wouldn’t send anyone else into—
He paused, an idea spinning brightly in his brain. Those samples he’d pulled a few weeks ago. They’d contained a different sort of finding.
Suddenly, he had an idea of what Sampson and his team were after.
They arrived at the still-open door to the arch, which sent him into hypervigilance. “Stay here.”
“I’ll come.” Breathing hard, she went on. “No way am I staying here alone.”
He stared at her gloved hand clenching his arm, wondering if she felt the same thing—a memory from last night—the Skua’s Nest was worlds away now. Something a lot like shame washed over him before he shoved it far, far down.
This wasn’t the time for such pointless emotion.
After a few steps, she broke the silence. “I don’tthinkthey saw me.”
“What?” He turned to look at her. She was nothing but a darker shade of black.
“I mean, if they saw me replacing them, then your ice tubes are gone, right?”
