The sky felt too big, as if gravity had been turned off and I might simply drift upward into all that blue. I'd thought I understood what open space meant—I'd seen deserts, oceans, mountain ranges. But this was different. On the horizon, something massive moved.
I froze, breath catching.
Dark shapes that shifted slowly across the white expanse, huge and shaggy and undeniably alive. A sound reached me across the distance, low and resonant. A trumpet call that belonged to a world I'd only seen in museum dioramas.
Mammoths.
Real mammoths. Living, breathing,walking.
Something cracked in my chest—not breaking but shifting. For months I'd felt nothing but a grinding numbness, a weight that made everything seem distant and grey. But standing here, watching creatures I’d only read about move across a landscape that had been gone for millennia, I felt something pierce through.
Not happiness. Not exactly.
Butsomething.
Wonder, maybe. Or terror. Or the dizzying realization that I was so small and so temporary and so impossibly, miraculouslypresentin this exact moment that would never come again.
I'd travelled through time.
I was standing in the Ice Age.
"Ellie." Stephen appeared at my elbow, breath clouding white. "You good?"
"Yeah." The lie came automatically. "Just taking it in."
He studied me for a moment, dark eyes too knowing, then nodded and moved away to check the equipment. I was grateful he didn't push.
I focused on the landscape instead. Clawed prints gouged the frozen mud near our crossing point, each mark easily twice the size of my head, edges still sharp. Bones weathered nearby, massive and yellowed, half-buried in snow. The skeleton of something that would have towered over me.
Twenty-five thousand years ago. We were actually here.
The numbness cracked slightly, letting in a sliver of fear.
Nathan's voice carried across the wind, already absorbed in readings and calculations. "Ley convergence east-northeast. We should make a start, but we'll need to establish base camp within a few hours before we lose the light."
Professional. Efficient. The same tone he’d used the night he’d broken my heart. Megan's response was too quiet to hear, but I caught his laugh—warm and real in a way he hadn't sounded with me.
We walked east, always east, following Nathan's instruments and Stephen's GPS readings that worked on a tiny magical storage system imbedded in the tech replacing the need for satellites. The landscape changed with painful slowness—rolling hills that eventually gave way to rockier ground, sparse trees twisted by wind, frozen streams that cracked and groaned as we crossed them.
Every night we pitched the same modern tents, fired up gas burners that hissed in the dark, choked down freeze-dried meals that tasted like cardboard and chemicals. We huddled in thermalgear that somehow never felt warm enough, took shifts on watch, and pretended we weren't all slowly fraying at the edges.
The supplies went faster than planned. The cold bit deeper than the models predicted. Equipment malfunctioned—batteries dying in hours, electronics glitching, the portable lights flickering and failing one by one. Nathan warned us it would get worse the closer we got to the drain, but that we were still a long distance away. With only one place on earth we could travel back in time, we had known from the start the journey would be a long one, months, if not a year. The exact location of the breach could not be calculated on the other side of the stone circle, Nathan had only been able to work out a general direction once we’d got here, and he grew shorter-tempered each day, snapping at suggestions, retreating into calculations as his instruments fluctuated with the impact of the drain on the magical energy field here. Megan mediated when she could, her voice soothing and reasonable, making me feel petty for the surge of resentment that rose whenever she succeeded in calming him down. She tried to talk to me, to pull me into conversation, but I resisted every attempt. I didn’t know whether she was just trying to ease the tension, or if she felt guilty about stealing my mate, but I didn't care. I stayed quiet. Functional. I did my tasks without complaint and avoided eye contact. Eventually she gave up trying.
At night, I heard them in their tent. Murmured voices, occasional soft laughter, sounds that made my face burn even as I told myself I didn't care anymore. I pulled my sleeping bag over my head and pretended the muffled intimacy didn't hollow me out a little more each time.
The magic that had been loaded into me was barely detectable, but Stephen described it once as feeling like a swallowed weight that shifted when he breathed. Dev said it made him feel powerful, almost invincible.
I felt nothing. As always. Maybe they hadn’t given me as much as the others, but I had no way to know. They'd never tested my capacity—the recruitment had been too rushed, the urgency of the mission overriding protocol. No one seemed concerned.
Maybe I was just imagining it.
Dev and Stephen kept trying to pull me into conversation during meals. They had a gentle persistence that was harder to deflect than direct questions, drawing me in with casual humor and easy warmth that felt like sunlight on my numb skin.
I appreciated it. I did.
But I couldn't quite reach for it the way I wanted to.
The weather worsened gradually, almost imperceptibly. Clouds built earlier each afternoon. Wind picked up at night, howling through our camp until the tent fabric snapped and cracked like gunfire. Animal tracks we'd seen daily—enormous paw prints, hoof marks, drag marks from kills—began to disappear.
