"Go to sleep, Caroline."
Begrudgingly, I lie down—but only becauseIwant to, and not because he told me to. The mattress crunches off-puttingly. I pull the wool blanket up to my chin and stare at the rafters as I listen to the wind audition for a horror movie. But it's so freakishly cold that there's no way I'm gonna get any kind of restful sleep.
I grew up in a brownstone with radiators that used to clank all night long like the ghost of Jacob Marley. I thought I hated the racket, but at least they, y'know,functioned.
Here, I get both the noise of the wailing wind andalsothe bone-chilling cold. I keep tossing and turning, shivering and balling up ever tighter in an attempt to coax some blood flow to my extremities. Every time I move, the mattress crunches some more. I sound like a depressed woman eating midnight chips in bed.
As for Afon? Not a peep. Not a shiver, not a rustle, just the silence of a very stubborn man. Either he has achieved somemonk-level mastery over his own thermoregulation, or he's already dead.
Another wave of shivering rolls through me.Crunch crunch crunch.
But little by little, my sense of humor is trickling out of me along with the warmth.
In rushes the cold.
And in rushes thefear.
Am I really going to die here?I wonder. It's not impossible. Just biologically speaking, there is definitely a temperature at which life can no longer continue. I've made that my mantra since Mom and Dad died—just carry on—but what happens when that choice is taken out of my hands by a mountain that's inhospitable to human life?
The longer I'm here, the more the shivering graduates from "annoying" to "involuntary full-body percussion." My teeth are chattering hard enough that I'm legitimately worried about my dental work, and somewhere around the hundredth potato chip crunch of the mattress, I realize I can't feel my toes anymore. Not in the "haha, my foot fell asleep" way, either. More like the "frostbite imminent" kind of way.
"Caroline."
Afon's voice comes out of the dark and scares the living shit out of me.
"I'm f-f-fine," I say before he can even ask the question. I thought the delivery was pretty decent, all things considered, but it would be more a helluva lot more convincing if my jaw weren't doing a drumroll.
There's a rustle of tarp. Then the kerosene lamp flares to low life, and he's standing over me, looking down at whatever sad burrito of misery I've become. He clearly does not like what he sees.
"You're hypothermic."
"That's dramatic, I think. I'm just a bit chilly."
"Your lips are gray."
"That's my natural undertone. I'm a winter, I'll have you know. I got my color analysis done when I went to South Korea in 2019."
He doesn't dignify that, which, like, that's fair. He just stands there for a moment, and then he exhales the same weary burst of air he's been exhaling repeatedly since I arrived to ruin his life.
"Move over."
I squint up at him. "Excuse me?"
"Body heat is the only resource we have that isn't rationed," he explains gruffly. "I'm not asking you to like it. I sure as fuck don't. But I'm asking you to not die of exposure."
"Because you care about me?" I say, half-jokingly and half-hopefully.
"No. Because the ground is frozen too solid to dig a good grave."
Well, that's morbid.
Normally, I'd love nothing more than to continue sniping at him until he lowers his defenses enough to give me the full, unvarnished story I came for. But I'm so cold that all the vocabulary I've ever learned is abandoning me in my moment of need.
"Fine," I say, scooting toward the wall. "But let the record show that I don't like it, either."
"At least we agree on something," he mutters.
"And," I add as he shuffles menacingly closer, "we're instituting protocols."
