I pull her closer. “They will not take you. Or me. We would rather die. Together.”
She responds by leaning her head against my chest inside the furs. “I love you, Nator’ax. Just so you know.”
“I love you too,” I tell her. “Whatever happens, in the end we’ll be free.”
We stand in silence for a while as the sun climbs higher, giving off no heat that I can sense.
“I love your heat,” Riley finally says. “I could just stand like this all day. But we should get going.”
We separate our furs and walk on. I look back once in a while, but still there are no Gar search parties coming. They would be easy to spot in the new snow. And so are we, of course.
Riley can’t walk fast, and it takes us until sunset to reach the glacier. Here, on the slippery ice, no snow has fallen. Likely, the wind has blown it right off.
“No saucer,” Riley says as we approach the site, and I can hear her disappointment in the flatness of her voice. “I hope it’s still under the ice.”
I shield my eyes to look. “The hole is still there, at least.”
We reach it and stare down into the opening the saucer melted. And the saucer is still there, only as far under the surface as I am tall. But that distance is all ice—frozen solid, clear, but with a slight blue tinge to it.
I tap my chin. “I saw it drop much further than that. It must have risen again, then stopped right where it is now.”
“And the water it melted froze on top of it,” Riley says. “Maybe we can hack our way down there.”
I examine the head of my spear. The Gar tribe didn’t do much iron-smithing, and that shows. “We can try, at least. I think it will take us many days.”
She glances back toward the Gar village. “It can take as long as it has to. We must get away. Can I start?”
I hand her the spear, and she walks to the middle of the frozen hole and looks down through the ice. “This will wake him up, at least.” Then she brings the spear down hard. Small shards of ice fly.
“It’s hard ice,” she comments as she keeps hacking. “But I don’t know how much the spear can take.”
I nod. “Not much. It’s not steel, just ordinary iron. It can shatter, too. But keep going. I’ll be right back.”
I wander off and locate the one food pack I placed in the shallow crack, and to my surprise, it’s still where I left it. “This will help a bit,” I say when I return. “There’s no frit, but there’s firewood. And we know where to get more of it. Let’s make a fire in the middle of the hole. Perhaps it will help melt the ice.”
Riley keeps hacking. “Wait until this hole is bigger and deeper. The fire will work better then.”
I hide a smile, charmed by her determination. “The Gar tribe don’t like walking at night. There’s no sign of them yet. It’s around midday we can expect them, if they start to walk early in the morning. They won’t be here today.”
Riley hacks faster, as if encouraged by that. “Good.” She drops to her knees to scoop ice slush out of the hole, then tips it into her mouth. “Clean water.”
I let her continue for a little while before I offer to take over.
“Okay,” she says in her alien way, and wipes sweat from her brow despite the cold. “We might get through tomorrow.”
She’s made a hole about a hand’s width deep, but it has taken considerable time. I can’t go much harder, because if the spearhead breaks, then the only thing we have left to make the hole is Riley’s small knife.
“We should make a hut,” I say as I hack the spear down into the ice. “We can’t do this all night. But our furs can be the outer covering.”
“There’s no need for that,” Riley says, and points to the side of the glacier, where the storm has left huge, strangely shaped heaps of snow. “That will be our hut.”
“The snow?” I ask, puzzled. “Won’t that be cold?”
“It’ll be nice,” she says with such confidence that I almost believe her. “You haven’t seen snow before, but I have. Many times. And I know what we can do with it. We’ll start when the underside of the sun almost touches the mountains.”
I shrug. She seems very sure of herself. “Very well. Open that food pack and eat something, if it’s not all frozen.”
I keep hacking until the hole is deep enough that I can just about touch the bottom when I reach my whole arm down. “About one third down,” I estimate. “We’ll start early tomorrow. Now let’s think. The Gar tribe will almost certainly be here tomorrow around noon, to look for us.”
