The arm loosened. He stepped back from the edge carefully, testing each footfall, doing exactly what he’d made Polly promise to do not five minutes ago and turned to face the warriors.
Six faces stared back at him in the torchlight, and every one of them wore the same look—the leashed panic of men who wanted to act and didn’t know how. Doren stood a little apart, his feline features pale, one hand pressed over his mouth. Even the sarcasm had drained out of him.
“Listen.” He pitched his voice to carry over the wind, calm and certain, the voice that had steadied his clan through storms and famines and losses beyond counting. “Both of them fell together. I saw Polly take Tess’s hand. That means they’re together down there, and two people who are together can keep each otherwarm and keep each other calm. She is not alone. Hold on to that.”
He watched the words land, and watched shoulders drop half an inch. Fear was a fire; the only way to fight it in others was to refuse to feed it in yourself.
“Rjmar. Torch to the edge. I need to see.”
They crept forward together, low and careful, and held the flame out over the pit. The light fell into a ragged throat of broken stone, and below—perhaps four times a man’s height down—he caught the dull straight lines of it. Metal. A corridor. A room. The old buried facility, cracked open like a seed pod, its floor a chaos of collapsed ceiling and fallen rock.
He could see no bodies. He could see no movement.
He could see no blood, either. He clung to that.
“Polly!” he called down, and forced the volume of it steady, not frantic. “Polly, can you hear me?”
The wind answered. Only the wind.
Something in his chest tried to crack open. He pressed it shut.
“Again,” he told himself under his breath, and cupped his hands. “Polly! Tess! If you can hear my voice, make a sound. Any sound. I’m coming for you. Do you hear me? I am coming.”
For three heartbeats—nothing.
Then, filtering up through fractured stone and shattered metal, a faint, muffled sound. Thin and distant, but unmistakably a voice.
He couldn’t make out a word of it. It didn’t matter. It was her. It was her, and she was alive, and the relief hit him so hard his knees nearly buckled where he crouched.
“She’s alive.” He said it aloud, for the warriors, and heard the ripple of it move through them like a held breath released. “They’re alive down there. Now we get them out, and we do it right.”
He rocked back on his heels and made himself look at the whole slope instead of the single black hole that wanted to swallow all his attention. This was the trap fear laid for a male—it narrowed you down to one thing, the wound, the fall, the face you loved, until you couldn’t see the mountain for the crack in it. He’d spent forty winters learning to widen his eyes when everything in him wanted to close them.
“The main entrance.” He pointed downslope, where earlier they’d glimpsed the dull gleam of an old doorframe half-swallowed by the slide. “Doren. You’ve got the sharpest eyes here. Look at it. Tell me what you see.”
Doren blinked, startled to be addressed, then scrambled to obey, shading his eyes against the torch glare. “The frame’s still there, but the rock above it just shifted. When the floor caved, the whole slope above the door settled with it. There’s a crack running up from the lintel. A new crack. The edges are still clean.” He swallowed. “You breathe on that thing, it comes down.”
“Agreed.” He had seen the same. Every clan child of Hothrest learned to read stone before they learned to read words; the mountains were older than any kindness, and they killed the impatient first. “So we don’t touch the door. The obvious way in is the way that buries them deeper. We find another.”
“There isn’t time to find another.” One of the younger warriors, Vosk, took a step forward, his voice tight. “She’s freezing down there, and she’s probably hurt. We should?—”
“We should what?” He didn’t raise his voice. He never had to. He simply turned the full weight of his attention on the young male, and Vosk faltered. “Dig at the door? Bring the whole rock face down on top of her to save five minutes? You want to help her. Good. So do I, more than you can possibly imagine. And the way I help her is by not letting my wanting kill her.”
Vosk dropped his head. “Yes, Clan Leader.”
“Then use the fear to keep you careful.”
He rose, and looked out over the ruined slope with new, cold clarity. “Rjmar. Take Doren and Vosk. Circle the slide—wide and slow, testing everything. That facility was built by offworlders, which means it was built with more than one door. There’s a way in that the slide didn’t seal. Find it. Do not enter alone. Do not force anything. You find it, you mark it, and you come back to me.”
“I may know where there is one,” Rjmar said.
He turned sharply. “May?”
“I told you. I’ve been here before.”
“Doing what?”
Rjmar’s expression didn’t change. “Scavenging.”
