“There will be no dying.” He settled onto the bunk and drew her down beside him, arranging her carefully against his chest. “Not while I am here.”
She should have felt the old familiar panic of being held and restricted and dependent on someone else. Instead, she felt… safe, just as she had when she slept in his arms. The realization was strange enough to make her pause, examining it like an unusual rock formation.
When did I start trusting him this much?
“There’s a thermal blanket,” she said. “In the storage compartment. Second shelf.”
He retrieved it without releasing her entirely, his tail wrapping around her ankle to maintain contact while he stretched across the small space. The gesture was so casually possessive that it made her heart flutter. Then he spread the thermal blanket over them both and unfurled one of his massive wings over them.
“My wings hold warmth,” he explained, wrapping it around her like a living cocoon. “You will be warm now.”
He was right. Encased in his wings and pressed against his chest, with the thermal blanket creating an additional layer of insulation, the cold became a distant thing. She could still hear the storm howling outside and see her breath misting in the air beyond their cocoon, but within it she was warm and safe.
God, when did I become someone who uses that word so easily?
“Tell me about your flight,” she said, partly to distract herself from the intimacy of their position and partly out of genuine curiosity. “What did you see?”
He was quiet for a moment, his chest rising and falling beneath her cheek. “Changes,” he finally said. “The ice is different. Valleys where there were mountains. Flat where there was broken. The land has… shifted.”
“That happens over geological time. Glaciers move, reshape terrain?—”
“I know this. But knowing and seeing—” He made a sound of frustration. “It is difficult. To look at a place you knew and see it strange.”
She understood that, perhaps better than he realized. The first time she’d returned to the place where she’d grown up after everything had changed, she’d felt that same disorienting sense of familiar-unfamiliar.
“What else did you see?”
His wings tightened around her, and the muscles beneath her suddenly tensed.
“Buildings. In the distance. To the east.”
“That must be the trading station. Anything else?”
“Traveling objects. To the southeast.”
“Traveling objects?”
“Like the one beneath the shelter. But larger.”
“Like the snow crawler?” Her heart stuttered. “How big? How many?”
“Six. Several the same. Two much larger.”
No. No, no, no.
She pulled back enough to look at his face, cold dread pooling in her stomach. “How far? How far to the southeast?”
“Difficult to say. The air is different, distances deceive. Perhaps… three days journey on land?”
Too close. Far too close.The polar regions were supposed to be empty. That was the whole point of her claim, and the whole reason she’d chosen this isolated patch of frozen nothing. No neighbors, no competition, no oversight. And definitely no vehicle convoys.
“Did you see any markings? Colors? Anything that might identify?—”
“There was a symbol. On the largest vehicle.” He frowned, trying to remember. “A circle with lines through it. Like… rays of a sun. Or the spokes of a wheel.”
Her blood turned to ice.
GenCon.
