Chapter 23
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“Njkall. Stop.” Polly grabbed the edge of his cold-weather cloak. “She won’t have gone that way.”
He halted at once, and the warriors behind him stilled like a single breathing thing.
The torchlight threw jagged shadows across the snow, and beyond the small circle of orange glow, the mountains pressed in, vast and dark and endless.
Her heart hammered against her ribs, but her voice came out steady. Steadier than she felt.
“How do you know?” he asked. No challenge in it. Just the question.
“Because there’s a high ridge that way.” She pointed.
Her mittened hand shook from the effort of thinking past the terror clawing at the edges of her mind.
“Tess hates heights. She won’t climb towards open air if she can help it.
She’d tuck herself in somewhere enclosed. Somewhere where she can’t be seen.”
He studied her for a heartbeat. Then he nodded and turned to Rjmar.
“We go east. Towards the slide.”
The warriors adjusted without a word, and she felt an odd surge of warmth despite the killing cold. They listened to me. They believed me. She wasn’t a burden being dragged along. She was here for a reason, and the reason mattered.
She kept close to Njkall’s side, exactly as she’d promised.
Her boots crunched through the crust of frozen snow, and each breath scraped raw against her throat.
The heat-stone in her pocket pulsed a small, steady warmth against her hip, and she pressed her hand over it like a talisman.
Fingers—can I feel my fingers? She flexed them. Yes. Still there. Still working.
“Talk to me,” he murmured, low enough that only she could hear. “How are your hands?”
“Fine. Cold, but fine. I can feel them.”
“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 even begun 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 reach you. 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.
“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.