“What’d you hear?”
“Don’t know. But it was something.”
“Close?”
“Hard to tell in the tunnels.” He stalked carefully around clear stalactites—or stalagmites, or whatever these structures were called.
Leo didn’t think she’d ever felt so small. Elias was fast, keeping pace with his dog, who looked for all the world like she was about to embark on an easy stroll at the dog park.
In flashes, she was again struck by the eerie beauty of the place.
Frozen, as if by God’s hand, only God wasn’t some bearded white dude up in heaven. He—they, it—was these endless, jaw-dropping, swirling layers of ice. Millions of tons of it, soaring up with such absolute majesty, such surreal extravagance that it literally took her breath away. Or maybe that was the cold, gusting in from outside.
“Think it was a person?”
He stared at her.
“What you heard, back there. Was it a person? People?”
“Yes.” His voice held a grim sort of certainty. At a narrow fissure in the ice wall, he stopped and looked down at her, his eyes glittering hard in the strange light. “Gotta move fast, make sure they don’t catch up to us.” He leaned in and even through the ski mask, his breath heated her cheek. “Not gonna be easy with what’s out there.”
“The storm that bad?”
He shook his head before shoving their packs out through the tight opening. “Worse.”
Chapter 13
She followed close behind, her breath snatched straight from her mouth when she emerged into an icy, wind-blown wilderness like nothing she’d ever experienced. And she’d been to Antarctica.
Snow and ice pelted everything. Yesterday’s brown-and-green-flecked landscape was coated in white, washed with the angry, tumultuous gray of a storm that wasn’t close to letting up.
She reached for her bag. When he didn’t immediately release it, she moved in. “We get separated, I’ll need my gear.” Maybe they should have split the fire kit in two. Or maybe they’d just need to stick together.
“Sure you can handle it?”
“Yes,” she lied.
There was no shift in his expression when he handed the thing over, no change to features that were already mysterious behind all that hair, not to mention the screen of ice and snow separating them, but she felt his hesitation.
Without wasting words, she hefted the bag onto her shoulder, nodded once, and blindly followed him into the thick of the storm.
Five minutes in, Leo was already reevaluating her physical fitness. No, more than that, she was reevaluating her entire life. Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape training, also known as SERE, had nothing on this. And she’d suffered back then. But this, trudging through more than a foot of hard-crusted snow, without snowshoes, the wind slicing through her, precipitation making visibility essentially nil, was the hardest thing she’d ever done. And she was somewhat protected in Elias’s wake, his bulk serving as a windbreak for her. She had no idea how he plowed on, but he did. Unerringly.
It wasn’t even light yet. How could he tell where they were? Much less where they were headed?
At some point, they grabbed hands—no way of knowing who reached first, but it helped balance her as they plowed a path forward.
She turned, squinting through the nasty precipitation at the clear tracks they’d left. A path their pursuers couldn’t fail to follow.
They walked forever, her hands and feet not even feeling like parts of her body after a while.
When she listed to one side, he scooped his arm beneath her shoulders, her armpits. Leaning in, he said something in her ear. She couldn’t hear it, didn’t know what words he’d used, but the heat of his breath against her face melted her a little.
“Hold on,” he said, setting her to lean against a wall that turned out to be a tree. He disappeared, muttering unintelligibly.
Alone, she felt the fear that his presence had staved off. And cold. God, it was freezing out here. Her teeth chattered, slapping together with a constant, wooden rhythm. She slid down the trunk to the cold earth, put her head to her knees, wrapped her arms around them, and waited.
Hands grabbed her. She couldn’t say if they were his or someone else’s.
