He studied the formation, his head tilted as if listening to something she couldn’t hear. “The ice structure is unstable. The explosion weakened the surrounding layers.” He moved towards the crater’s edge, his clawed feet easily finding purchase on the slick surface. “I can accelerate the natural process.”
“How?”
Instead of answering, he knelt and pressed both palms flat against the ice. For a long moment, nothing happened. Then she felt a vibration beneath her feet, building like a distant earthquake. The sound started low, a groaning, creaking protest from deep within the frozen ground.
The crater walls began to shift.
It happened slowly at first, chunks of ice calving from the edges like a glacier giving birth to icebergs. Then faster, larger pieces tumbling into the darkness below. He remained motionless, his eyes closed, his wings half-spread for balance as the ground shook beneath them.
With a final, thunderous crack, the crater collapsed in on itself. When the ice dust settled, there was nothing left but a rough depression in the surface—the kind of thing that could be explained by natural subsidence, the ordinary settling of ancient ice over buried voids.
“Holy shit,” she breathed.
He rose, shaking frost from his scales. “The ice remembers its shape. I simply reminded it.”
“You can talk to ice?”
“Not talk. Feel. Persuade.” He flexed his fingers, and she noticed they were trembling slightly. “It is… tiring. More tiring than I expected.”
She moved to his side immediately. “Are you okay? Do you need to rest?”
“I need to finish. We can rest when we are away from this place.”
The look in his eyes told her arguing would be pointless.Stubborn dragon.
They moved on to the drilling rig, or what was left of it. They couldn’t hide the actual explosion, but they didn’t need to—there were any number of reasons why it might have exploded and nothing that pointed directly to Adjar.
The explosion had scattered debris across a fifty-meter radius. Twisted metal, shattered components, pieces of equipment she had spent years acquiring and maintaining. Looking at the wreckage, she felt a pang of grief that surprised her with its intensity.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly.
“It’s not your fault.”
“It is exactly my fault. I attacked it.”
“You were disoriented. You’d just woken up from a sleep that lasted longer than human civilization. Anyone would have been a little punchy.” She managed a weak smile. “Besides, I can rebuild. Equipment can be replaced.”
“Can it?”
She looked at him, at the genuine concern on his angular features, and felt something shift in her chest. “Yes, but there are other things that can’t be replaced. You’re what matters now.”
They worked in silence after that, gathering salvageable components and loading them onto the cargo sled. By a small miracle, the portable fuel cells were intact. The core sampling equipment was destroyed beyond repair, but she managed to recover several data storage units that might still be functional.Every piece of surviving technology was something that would make the future easier. Assuming they had a future.
The hardest part was finding and disposing of anything that might indicate Adjar’s presence. His blood had stained the ice near the crater in several places. She used a thermal lance to melt the surface layers, turning the contaminated ice into vapor that dispersed into the thin atmosphere.
“Here,” he called from near the habitat. He’d found one of his scales, shed at some point during his emergence. It glittered silver-white against the snow, beautiful and utterly damning.
“Are there more?”
“I do not know. My kind do not shed often, but between the trauma of awakening and my injuries…” He shook his head. “I cannot be certain.”
They searched in expanding circles, the cold biting deeper with each passing hour. Her fingers grew clumsy inside her gloves, and her toes went numb despite the heating elements in her boots. But she kept searching because every scale they found was another piece of evidence that could doom them.
By the time the pale sun began its descent towards the horizon, they’d recovered seven scales and erased every bloodstain they could find. It wasn’t perfect—with sophisticated enough equipment, GenCon might still detect trace evidence—but it was the best they could do.
“Inside,” he ordered, his voice brooking no argument. “You are shaking.”
She hadn’t noticed, but he was right. Her whole body was trembling, the cold finally overwhelming her body’s ability tocompensate. She let him guide her back to the habitat and seal the airlock behind them. The relief of heated air against her face was almost painful.
