In what must have been record time, she helped Ford stow their stuff on the sleds and knocked back a couple of the fat bombs she’d put together at base—bite-size packs of butter and granola—glad to have something to eat in a hurry.
Strapping into the harness, she found those first few trudging steps held echoes of a weekend triple shift. Chafing in unexpected places, general aches and sharp, lancing pains. She’d deal with them later. Distance was what they needed now.
The initial push was like poking at a bruise over and over again or opening up a blister. Which was probably happening. All over her body.
Ignore it. Work through it.All it took was one hard press, the wind at her back—then another. Then another. The repeatedswish-scrapeof her skis felt as useless as treading water. Were they even moving?
Despite the blazing sun, she shivered. She had caught Ford’s jitters, convinced that her movements and protective wear muffled the thrum of an engine. Maybe they were being watched even now.
She turned to the side. Blank white nothing. Emptiness. Everywhere.
Swish-scrape. Swish-scrape. Swish-scrape.
Ford had his compass rigged out in front of him on a chest harness, ensuring that he never lost sight of their direction. And in this wide-open white-and-blue landscape, where dips and crags didn’t appear until she was right on them, where she could spin in circles for hours without spotting a single abnormality,hewashercompass.
Swish-scrape. Swish-scrape. Swish-scrape.
With a jarring crunch, her ski jammed into a depression in the snow and she just barely kept herself from falling.
Better simmer down.She took a couple calming breaths, focused on the man in front of her, and took off again.
Unaware, Ford just plowed on, tall and unperturbed, making it look so easy. Straight as an arrow, his pace steady, his direction unerring. How the hell was he so unbothered by everything when she could barely see straight, barely push her leaden limbs on? Fueled by hot resentment, she mumbled a dark “jerk” and felt immediately guilty.
He was a good person. A good man, leading her to safety. A man who’d held her in the night and made her feel…
“Oh hell,” she said this time, because being dependent on anyone rankled. But liking him rankled even more. And then, because it felt stupidly good to just say it aloud, she whispered it on repeat over and over again until the words lost their meaning.
Her eyes stayed focused so hard on his tall, red-and-black form that she didn’t notice the change in the light until they stopped for lunch.
“Whoa.” She blinked at what looked like a low fog bank up ahead, where sky and ground blended into one big soup.
Something pressed into her hand—a bottle of warm water. “Take this.” Fingers as useless as sausages, she lowered her neck gaiter and shot him a quick smile of thanks before cupping the bottle in both palms and drinking. Wow, that felt good going down. After a few long swigs, she handed it back and pulled out a couple bags of food, handed him one, and ate.
Numbly, she stared at the sweeping mass before them, light tendrils curling toward them in inviting wisps that were lovely from a distance. Closer to the ground, it was opaque and ominous as a swirling vortex into hell. “That just appeared out of nowhere.”
Her eyes moved to Ford, who stood, head cocked. “Yep. Coming in fast.” He wasn’t looking at the storm.
Feeling heavy and slow, her movements off, somehow she followed the direction of his gaze and stiffened. “You hear the plane again?”
“Not exactly.”
“What do you mean?”
He shook his head, and though she couldn’t see his eyes through his dark goggles, the tension was obvious in every line of his body. “Can’t explain it.”
The prickle at her neck turned to goose bumps so painful she had to rub her arms to get them down. “Okay. Well. At least the cloud cover’s good, right? For us, I mean?”
“Yeah. It would definitely ground ’em.”
Right. It would ground the flight. But what would it do to them, down here in the thick of it? Back at the station, it was against regulations to evengo outsidein some storms. Was this a Condition 1 or a Condition 2 storm approaching? She turned, wondering if Ford could tell, and stopped.
Though every inch of his face was covered, something about the way he stood told her that his next words would be bad—very bad.
“What is it?”
He pointed at the sky, where it took her a while to spot a tiny red dot, no bigger than a sunspot on an old photo. “They’re coming.”
“That’s bananas.” Whoever was in that plane was out of their mind. Couldn’t they see what they were flying into?
