“Feet?”
“Fine.”
“Tell me the moment that changes.”
“I will.” She glanced up at him. In the torchlight his broad face was all sharp planes and deep-set shadow, and his blue eyes never stopped moving—scanning the terrain and reading the ground. And watching her. Always watching her. Out here, that watchfulness felt like a rope thrown into dark water. “Njkall. Thank you. For letting me come.”
“Don’t thank me yet.” But something eased at the corner of his mouth. “Thank me when we’re all warm and whole.”
Even though they’d avoided the ridge, the slope grew steeper and the footing worse, with loose scree hidden beneath the snow, shifting treacherously with each step. Twice she stumbled, and both times his hand shot out to steady her before she’d evenbegun to fall. In this place that wanted to kill her, his strength was simply a fact she could lean on.
Then Rjmar raised a fist. The whole party froze.
“Tracks,” he said quietly, crouching at the base of a great tumbled field of shattered stone. He brushed snow away with one massive clawed hand. “Small. Fresh. Wrong shape for a Hothian.”
Her breath caught. She pushed forward, ignoring the warning noise Njkall made in his throat, and dropped to her knees beside the print.
A boot. An offworld boot, the tread narrow and shallow, half-filled with fresh powder. And in front of it, a second print. Then a third, staggering and uneven, the stride of someone exhausted and stumbling.
“That’s her,” she whispered. “That’s Tess.”
She lifted her head and looked at the rockslide.
It rose before them like a frozen wave—an enormous slope of broken stone where the mountain had sheared away and buried whatever lay beneath. But something about it wasn’t natural. Amid the tumbled grey rock, she caught the dull gleam of metal. A corner of something. An edge too straight, too deliberate for any mountain to have made.
“Is that the lab?” she asked.
His jaw tightened. “What’s left of it. The slide covered most of it, and what remains isn’t safe. The ground shifts. There are hollows underneath, and no way to know where they are until you’re falling into them.”
“I’ve been here before,” Rjmar said, staring up at the slide.
Njkall looked at him sharply. “Why?”
“No particular reason. You can drill me when a human isn’t freezing to death,” the older male added before he could say anything.
“There.” Doren’s voice, sharp and certain. He pointed to a dark cleft between two enormous slabs of stone, halfway up the slide. “Movement. Something small, tucked in the shadow.”
She followed his finger, and her heart lurched.
A shape curled tight in the gap between the rocks, barely visible, wrapped in the thin ocean-planet clothes that would never, ever be enough against this cold. Even from here she could see the shivering—the violent, whole-body shudder of a person freezing to death.
“Tess,” she breathed. And then, louder, “Tess!”
The shape jerked. A pale face turned towards them, and even at this distance she saw the animal panic on her face—the same look Tess had worn the day they found her, the day she’d swung a metal bar at Njkall’s head.
Tess scrambled backwards, deeper into the cleft.
“No—no, wait!” She tried to surge forward, but Njkall’s hand closed around her arm.
“Warriors stay back,” he ordered the rest of the party. “Every one of you. She sees six warriors coming, she runs, and if she runs into a hollow we lose her.” His grip on Polly’s arm gentled. “Only you. But I’m behind you. Twenty paces. Close enough to reachyou. You do not go faster than I can follow. You test every step. Do you understand?”
“Yes.” Her mouth had gone dry.
“Say it back to me.”
“Test every step. Don’t go faster than you can follow.” She met his eyes. “I’ve got this, Njkall.”
For one terrible moment she thought he’d say no after all—that the fear in his face would win. Then he released her arm.
