“I’m thirty-one. How old are you?” The entire conversation had an odd edge confined in such close quarters yet yelling to be heard through the hard-pellet sound of ice to nylon.
“Thirty-eight.” He tapped her foot through the bag. “Muscular or skin?”
“Huh?” It took her a second to realize he’d gone back to her injury. “Oh. Little of both.”
He nodded and turned to rifle through the first aid kit. “Your nose okay? Fingers? Toes?”
“Um…”My butt’s bruised—not to mention my ego—from all the times I bit it out there.“Legs are sore, but I can handle that. Just muscular.” She leaned forward and indicated the place at her waist where her harness had rubbed her raw. “Chafed here.”
“Okay. Let’s see ’em.”
She stilled. “See what?”
“Your feet, for starters.”
Her head had barely begun to shake from side to side when he stopped her with a flat look. “Fine. Here.” She shouldn’t have been disappointed when he handed her a pack of ointment and bandages. Especially not after protesting his attentions. But she couldn’t help it.
“Check ’em, rub ’em, and wrap ’em. You don’t want an infection in this cold.” His eyes slanted to hers, a translucent, unimpressed blue. “Did mine already. Can’t afford a delay.”
“Right.” Feeling chastised, she grabbed the package and ducked her head into the big sleeping bag. It wasn’t easy to peel off her socks and fix up her raw feet in the tight space, but she managed. And thank God, because the damage was worse than she’d realized. Not quite blistered, but close. Just applying moleskin and bandages hurt. She couldn’t imagine how walking would be.
With her feet bandaged, she grabbed her belongings and followed Ford out onto the ice.
Outside, the clouds had lifted, but the wind tore at them, worse than yesterday. It tried to yank the tent from her hands, worked her hair out from under her hat, made packing up the sleds into a contact sport. As unpredictable as a sea of currents, it whirled one way, then another, in an ever-changing waltz that made her head spin.
They awkwardly strapped up and buckled into their skis, and Ford took off, as impervious to the gale’s harassment as he was to everything. He’d run until his battery ran out. No hesitation or intimidation for the Ice Man. No worrying if he’d make it.
She wished—
To hell with that. She hadn’t come this far to stand aroundwishingfor things.
“You wanna play?” she whispered into the next taunting blast, too annoyed to feel silly or embarrassed.
This was about survival. About putting one foot in front of the other, sucking air into heaving lungs, stealing what little oxygen the atmosphere gave up, and spitting it back out again. The sound of her own breathing in the relative quiet of the ski mask reminded her of her own inexorability. Her own strength, dammit.
Nose running, eyes streaming, lungs working harder than they ever had, she leaned into the wind, forging her own path, the way Ford did, with every step. “Let’s play.”
Bent almost double, half-blind, single-minded, and hardly blinking for fear of losing him, she followed her companion’s tall red form straight into the coldest depths of hell.
Chapter 23
Coop spent another day leading them through hell, trudging on while the wind stripped them of humidity and humanity, serenading them with its harsh, atonal requiem.Theirrequiem, if they weren’t careful.
He was a realist. This continent had killed and it would kill again. It was the idea of who would be killed here that did him in. He could handle the idea of his own mortality. It was Angel Smith’s that perturbed him. She was too vital and full of life to die.
Or at least she had been before this fiasco started.
Now he surreptitiously eyed her as she ate. Her movements were heavy, exhausted, despondent. How could they not be when skiing ten miles out there required the energy of twice the distance? Three times? They weren’t skiing so much as pushing against a constantly compressing wall. Stuck in a trash compacter, like in one of theStar Warsmovies.
One of the old ones, from a time when he actually watched films.
His eyes slid to the side again. What kind of movies did she like? Thrillers? No. He couldn’t see that. But he could picture her getting into those family food movies where you came out craving hugs and homemade Italian pasta.
“What do you watch?”
She blinked, owlish and blank. “Hm?”
“You like movies?”
