She risked a glance. The ice on either side was stratified, layers of blue and white compressed over millennia. But there were also dark veins running through the structure, signs of instability where ancient pressure had created fault lines.
“What am I looking at?”
“Weaknesses.” His voice had gone very quiet. “The ice here wants to fall. It has wanted to fall for a very long time.”
She bit her lip, shooting him a quick glance out of the corner of her eye. “Can you?—”
“I do not know. The effort before…” He shook his head. “It may be too much, too soon.”
“What happens if you push too hard?”
“I do not know that either.” His eyes met hers in the dim light of the cab. “But I know what happens if I do not try.”
The pursuit vehicle was gaining. Even with the narrow walls and treacherous footing, its driver was managing to close the distance. Another few minutes and they’d be close enough for his weapons to disable them—assuming GenCon wanted them alive enough not to simply destroy everything.
“Do it,” she said.
“You’re willing to take the risk?”
“I would risk anything to keep you safe.” The words came out before she could stop them. “Do it, Adjar. I trust you.”
Surprise and determination flickered across those angular features in rapid succession. Then he closed his eyes and pressed both hands against the crawler’s walls.
The sound started low. A groan, deep and resonant, rising from somewhere far above them. She felt it in her bones before she heard it properly—a vibration that spoke of enormous forces finally succumbing to inevitability.
“Faster,” he urged. “Go faster.”
She pushed the engine past its limits, past the red line, past anything the manufacturer had ever intended. The crawler surged forward with a desperate burst of speed, the cargo sled bouncing dangerously behind them.
The groan became a roar.
In the mirrors, she saw the ice walls begin to move. Not falling, not yet, but… leaning. Shifting. The ancient fractures spread like cracks in glass, the dark veins widening into chasms.
The pursuit vehicle’s driver saw it too. The vehicle accelerated, trying to outrun the impending collapse.
Too late.
The first chunk fell like a meteor, smashing into the vehicle with enough force to send tremors through the crawler’s frame. Then another. Then a third. And then the entire wall surrendered to gravity, an avalanche of ice and rock thundering down into the narrow ravine.
She didn’t look back. She couldn’t. All her concentration was fixed on the passage ahead and the gap of open sky that promised escape. The roar of collapsing ice filled the world, drowning out the engine, drowning out everything except the desperate need to move.
They burst out of the valley mouth like a cork from a bottle.
Behind them, the passage filled with ice. Tons upon tons of it, packed so densely that nothing would pass through for decades. The pursuit vehicle was gone, buried under an avalanche that had rewritten the landscape in seconds.
She brought the crawler to a shuddering halt and sat there, her hands trembling on the controls, her heart pounding so hard she could feel it in her throat.
“Adjar?”
No response.
She turned to find him slumped against the seat, his breathing shallow and his silver-white scales almost translucent. His eyes were closed, his expression slack with exhaustion.
“Adjar!”
His eyes opened, slow and unfocused. “We are… safe?”
“We’re safe. You did it.” She reached for him, her hands running over his body, searching for injuries. “You crazy, impossible dragon. You did it.”
