Chapter 4 #2
"Every damn second." Dev stared into the fire, smile fading slightly.
"But that's why I'm here. So he gets to grow up.
So she gets to watch him become whatever he wants to be.
" He shook himself, brightness returning.
"Besides, I've got stupid high magical capacity.
Practically a battery. Would've been selfish to stay home. "
Stephen stretched his legs toward the flames, nearly knocking over his cup. "Meanwhile, I'm just here because I have decent capacity and a complete lack of self-preservation instinct."
"That's not true," I said. "You're one of the best field researchers in the program."
"Aw, she does like me." He grinned at me, boyish and warm. "And hey, if we make it back, I'm finally going to ask out that guy in the quantum lab. Been chickening out for months, but nothing says romance like potential extinction."
Dev raised his cup in salute. "To questionable life choices and worse timing."
They both looked at me expectantly.
I forced a smile and lifted my own cup. "To getting home."
The coffee had gone lukewarm, but I drank it anyway.
"So," Stephen said carefully, "your capacity never got tested, right?"
I tensed. "No time. They rushed my recruitment."
"That's insane." Dev frowned. "They should've—"
"It's fine." I cut him off, keeping my voice even. "I'm managing the load okay."
A sound drifted from Nathan and Megan's tent — unmistakable, breathy, rhythmic. A moan that Megan didn't even try to muffle.
Dev's jaw tightened. Stephen suddenly found the bottom of his mug fascinating.
I stared at the fire and willed my face not to change as the pain inside, once a dull throb like a bruise, pressed too hard, and I swallowed against the taste of copper that rose in the back of my throat.
"Right," Dev said flatly. "That's... lovely."
"Thin tents," Stephen muttered.
"Thin everything out here." Dev set his mug down with a deliberate clink. "You'd think two scientists would understand basic acoustics."
I should have laughed. Should have joined in, turned it into a joke, let their warmth carry me past it the way they kept trying to do.
Instead I sat there with my hands wrapped around my cooling coffee and felt the careful numbness I'd rebuilt over the past two weeks crack along familiar fault lines.
I stared into the fire and willed myself to be stone.
To be ice. To be anything other than what I was—a woman sitting ten meters from the man who'd rejected her, listening to him make love to someone else while two near-strangers tried not to notice her humiliation.
It wasn't jealousy. Not exactly. Jealousy implied I still wanted him, and I wasn't sure I did.
What I wanted was to stop hearing evidence that I'd been replaceable, and the proof of it played on repeat every single night through canvas walls.
“So, what’s the deal with you and Nathan?” asked Stephen suddenly.
I froze. “What?”
"You and Nathan. There's clearly something there. The way you two avoid each other is, like, aggressively deliberate. And just now, when they—" He gestured vaguely toward the tent. "You looked like someone had stabbed you."
"Stephen." Dev's voice was quiet, but the warmth had drained out of it entirely. "Drop it."
"What? I'm just asking. We're stuck out here for months, possibly longer. If there's team dynamics we should know about—"
"Drop it." Dev's voice had lost its easy warmth. There was something harder underneath, something protective, and when I glanced at him, he wasn't looking at Stephen. He was looking at me.
At my hands, which were shaking around the mug.
At my face, which I knew—despite every effort—had gone white.
"Mate," Dev said, softer now but no less firm. "Read the room."
Stephen's mouth opened, then closed. He looked at me properly, and whatever he saw made the colour drain from his own face. "Shit. Ellie, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to—"
"It's fine." My voice came out steadier than I expected. Flat and smooth, like water over deep ice. "It's ancient history."
The lie sat between us, obvious and ugly. Another moan drifted from the tent and Stephen jumped up.
"More coffee?" he asked brightly, already reaching for the pot.
"Sure," I said, grateful the subject had been changed.
Dev gave me a quick smile across the fire, and I managed a small one back.
The noise from the tent dropped, and then the wind picked up, whistling through the rocks above us, carrying something else with it.
A sound that raised every hair on my arms.
Howling. Deep and resonant and impossibly distant, echoing across the steppe.
We all froze.
"Wolves?" I whispered.
"Yeah." Dev's voice had gone flat. "Big ones. Dire wolves, probably. They were common in this period."
The howls rose and fell, layered over each other in an eerie chorus. Something in the sound made my stomach drop.
Stephen laughed shakily. "Well, that's not ominous at all."
"They're miles away," Dev said, but he'd shifted closer to the fire. "And they don't usually approach camps with fire. We'll be fine."
I wrapped my arms around myself, suddenly aware of how small we were. How exposed. How utterly unprepared for this world despite all our planning and equipment and modern arrogance.
The howls faded gradually, swallowed by wind and distance, and eventually we all retired to our tents.
Despite the wind outside, it wasn’t long before I fell asleep.
The physical activity of walking for miles each day and setting up and taking down camps was enough to at least ensure I slept well every night.
Tonight though, I awoke after only a couple of hours.
Something felt wrong. The air had changed, pressure dropping so fast my ears popped.
Wind screamed around the tent, whipping the fabric so hard I thought it might tear free of its stakes.
Rain hammered down in sheets, mixed with sleet that rattled like bullets.
The temperature had plummeted.
I fought my way out of my sleeping bag, heart racing, and fumbled for my boots and jacket. Through the tent wall, I heard shouting—Nathan yelling orders, someone else screaming about the equipment. Dev, I thought.
I shoved my way out outside into chaos.
Visibility was almost zero, rain and sleet driving horizontal in the wind. The fire had drowned to smoking embers. Tents whipped and shuddered, one already half-collapsed. Our carefully organized supplies scattered across the ground, lighter items tumbling away into the dark.
The river.
The river was roaring, a sound like freight trains, like the world ending.
"Ellie!" Dev appeared out of the storm, limping badly, face twisted with pain. "Help me secure the—"
The ground beneath us shifted, suddenly slick and unstable.
Mud. The riverbank was dissolving into mud.
I grabbed Dev's arm, trying to pull him back toward higher ground, but he was twice my size and favouring one leg. My boots skidded and I struggled to find purchase.
"Stephen!" Dev shouted into the storm. "Where's Stephen?"
A figure moved near the collapsing equipment tent—Stephen, wrestling with a supply pack, trying to drag it free of the rising water. The river had jumped its banks. Water surged through our camp, dark and fast and merciless, carrying debris and rocks.
"Stephen, hurry up!" Nathan snapped, fighting his way through the deluge. "We need that—"
The ground gave way beneath Stephen's feet.
One second he was there, solid and real. The next, he was in the water, arms flailing, face shocked white in the lightning flash. Megan screamed.
"No!" Dev lunged forward trying to grab Stephen’s hand as he was swept past us.
He was a big man, strong, but the river didn't care about strength.
It cared about physics, about mass and velocity and the simple, brutal mathematics of water moving faster than a human body could resist. I grabbed for his jacket and caught it with both hands.
I dug my heels into the mud, trying to brace us as Dev leaned out to grab our friend, but it was like trying to anchor a boulder.
Dev was already waist-deep in the surge, and was being dragged forward, dragging me with him, my boots carving trenches in the dissolving mud.
The water hit my shins, shockingly cold, and the force of it nearly buckled my knees.
I wrapped my arms around Dev's torso and pulled, pulled, felt my shoulders scream in protest.
I could see nothing. The water was black, churning, full of debris—branches, rocks, chunks of sod torn from the bank.
Lightning split the sky and for one frozen instant I saw Stephen's face, pale and terrified.
He was ten meters downstream already, tumbling in the black water like a ragdoll, his headtorch strobing wildly as he spun.
I could see his mouth opening and closing, but the roar of the river swallowed everything.
Then darkness swallowed him again.
"Stephen!" I screamed, but the wind tore his name away.
Dev turned, his face a mask of pain.
“He’s gone!” he shouted through the wind. “Ellie, we have to move, now!”
I nodded, turning back towards what remained of our camp.
Dev set his strong hands on my waist, guiding me forward through the water.
I saw it a fraction of a second before it hit us—a tree branch—no, an entire trunk, ripped from somewhere upstream, rolling and pitching in the current like it weighed nothing.
The branch struck Dev's left leg just below the knee with a sound I will never forget.
A wet, dense crack that cut through even the roar of the storm.
Dev screamed—a raw, animal sound that vibrated through his entire body and into mine where I was still clinging to him.
His weight shifted catastrophically, his leg buckling at an angle that legs weren't supposed to bend, his full weight hit me at once, two hundred and twenty pounds of muscle and bone and borrowed magic, and I couldn't hold him.
We went down together.
The branch spun on, catching my right thigh as it passed.
Pain detonated—white-hot, immediate, so sharp it stole my breath.
I felt fabric tear, felt skin tear, felt the warm rush of blood that was instantly cold in the freezing water.
The water surged over us, black and freezing, filling my mouth with grit and the taste of iron.
I choked, spat, got my head above the surface by pure animal instinct.
Then Dev was dragging me back to my feet, his weight on his good leg as he half dragged half pushed me up onto the slick mud at the edge of the torrent.
He hauled himself up behind me as I gasped for air, and collapsed on the muddy bank, his eyes rolling back in his head as he passed out from the pain.