They know we need to go, and quickly, but Chrys isn’t used to this.
She stands, Kissu moving with a low growl, and I know she won’t go back to sleep while we’re gone.
“Come on.” I hold my hand out to her, and she lets me take her to the living area and sit her down on the couch.
I’m not satisfied until she’s wrapped in blankets, Kissu curled next to her with his enormous head in her lap.
“Don’t go anywhere.”
She smiles up at me. “I don’t plan on leaving.”
The ‘ever’ is unspoken.
“We’ve done this hundreds of times before,” I assure her. “We’ll head out, deal with them, and then come straight back.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
I kiss her and then hurry through the back hall and all the way downstairs.
They’ve already pulled out my gear and prepped my bike. All I have to do is pull it on, throw my leg over, and follow them out into the Zone.
The ice is like sharp metal on the line of skin between my sleeve and glove.
Without the geothermal heating the others have, our outpost is barely warmer than it is outside.
But with Chrys in residence, the difference between inside and out borders on unpleasant. I know the temperature shift is there, even if I can’t feel it the way she would.
But that discomfort isn’t the temperature’s fault, it’s leaving her.
We fly across the Zone, our bikes throwing long plumes of snow behind us, reaching the perimeter trigger in less than ten minutes. From there…
I hop off my bike, boots crunching in the hard-packed snow, and I swing my gun around, looking for their tracks. But the flurries have covered over any trace.
Four sensors are down. Snapped. One of them bloody.
“One of them might be injured.”
“Better for us that way,” Arc says. “Spread out. The faster we find them, the quicker we can get back to her.”
He doesn’t need to tell us twice.
Risk hurries off to my right and Arc barely looks back at me when he heads for the ridge.
I watch them both, waiting for a monster to fling itself from the snow as their feet cross over, but nothing disturbs the blue blanket except for their boot prints.
Switching my helmet’s overlay screen to a topographical scan of this part of the Zone, I scan the span of snow between them… and I see what I hoped not to find.
The Zone is riddled with ravines. Old scars from lava flows long since diverted, or from ice cutting deep through the rock.
I prefer when they’re still full of ice.
As soon as I reach this one, I know it’s going to be myleastfavorite kind.
The small scar in the otherwise smooth landscape is dark. When I drop into it, pinging the others with my location, the dark walls force my visor to adjust to the lesser light.
An ever-widening split between rock and ice, the walls rising higher and the ice darkening the further I go.
