“Go,” he said. “I’m right here.”
She turned towards the rockslide.
She started up slowly, placing each foot with care, feeling for the shift and give of the stone before she trusted her weight to it. The rocks were slick with ice and treacherous with hidden gaps, and once a slab tilted beneath her and she froze, her breath locked in her chest, until it settled again. Behind her she heard Njkall’s heavier tread, matched precisely to her own, never crowding, but never more than twenty paces back. His presence was a warmth at her spine even here, even now.
“Tess,” she called, quieting her voice the way she would with a frightened animal. “It’s me. It’s just Polly. I’m coming up, okay? Just me.”
The face in the cleft watched her. Wary. Trembling.
“You came out here to get away,” she went on, climbing another careful step. “I know. And everyone else is staying back, see? They’re not coming any closer. It’s just me. I promise.”
“Don’t.” Tess’s voice cracked out, thin and shaking. “Don’t come any closer. You’ll try to take me back.”
“I’m not taking you anywhere.” She stopped, planting her feet, spreading her hands to show them empty. “Tess, look at you. You’re freezing. You’re going to die out here, and I can’t—” Her voice broke, and she let it. “I can’t watch that happen. Not to you.”
“Better than a cage.”
“This isn’t a choice between dying and a cage.” She took another step. Close now. So close. Thirty feet, maybe less. “Baralt found you transport, remember? To Sherae. Warm ocean, no slavers, a whole planet where nobody owns anybody. That’s still real. That’s still yours.” She swallowed. “Whatever you saw in Port Eyeja, whatever scared you, tell me, and we’ll deal with it. Together. But not out here. Not frozen to a rock.”
Tess’s face crumpled. The panic wavered, and beneath it she saw the exhaustion and the terror and the raw desperate hope of someone who wanted, so badly, to believe.
“I saw him,” Tess whispered. “In the port. One of the males from the ship. He was there, Polly. Looking. And I knew… I knew if I stayed, they’d find me, and I’d rather die out here on my own terms than?—”
“You’re not going to die.” She reached out her hand, her voice steady. “And you’re not going to be taken. Not while I’m here. Not while the clan’s here. We protect the people who come to us, Tess. That means you too.” A shaky smile. “Come on. Take my hand. Let’s go home and get warm.”
For a long, held breath, Tess didn’t move.
Then, slowly, she uncurled from the cleft. She reached out a trembling, blue-tinged hand towards Polly’s. Their fingers were inches apart.
The ground gave way.
There was no warning—no crack, no groan of shifting stone. One instant she stood on solid rock, and the next the world simply dropped, the slab beneath her feet collapsing into blackness with a roar of grinding stone. She heard Njkall’s voice erupt behind her, huge and raw, screaming her name. She heard Tess scream too. She grabbed for Tess’s outstretched hand and caught it?—
And then they were falling together, down into the dark, into the buried throat of the old ruined lab, stone and ice and shattered metal raining down around them into a blackness that swallowed the torchlight whole.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“Polly!”
The name tore out of Njkall and vanished into the hole where she’d been standing. He lunged before the last stone had finished falling. He threw himself across the treacherous slope with his hand outstretched, as if he could still catch her, as if she hadn’t already dropped beyond his reach into the black. His boot came down on the crumbling lip of the new pit and the whole edge shuddered under him, stone grinding on stone, another slab tilting towards the dark.
An arm like an iron bar wrapped across his chest and hauled him back.
“No,” Rjmar snarled in his ear. “You go in there like that, you bury her.”
His whole body strained against the hold. Every screaming, animal instinct he possessed demanded that he throw the older warrior off and dive into that hole after his mate. His pulse roared in his skull. His hands had curled into fists that wanted to tear the mountain apart stone by stone.
Then, beneath the roaring, one cold clear thought surfaced.
Rage will not dig her out. Rage will kill her.
He stopped fighting.
He made himself stop, though it cost him more than any wound he’d ever taken, and stood there rigid in Rjmar’s grip while his breath heaved and the loose scree settled and the dust drifted up from the pit like a thin pale ghost. His heart wanted to be a terrified mate, but his people needed him to be a clan leader. He could only be one of those things, and only one of them would bring Polly back into the light.
He chose.
“Let go.” His voice came out low and steady. It didn’t shake. He was faintly amazed that it didn’t shake. “I’m done. Let go, Rjmar.”
