9. Hadley
HADLEY
One second I'm blinking through sleep fog, wrapped in fur and warmth and the phantom memory of Banks's hands on my skin. The next second those hands grab me by the shoulders and throw me off the bed.
I hit the floor hip-first. The impact drives the air from my lungs. Before I can scream, before I can even inhale, his full weight crashes down on top of me, against the rough plank boards. His palm clamps over my mouth. Not gentle. Not careful. Pure function.
"Don't move."
Two words. Growled against my ear so low I feel them more than hear them. His body is a wall of heat and hard muscle pinning me to the floor, and it should feel the same as last night, the same closeness, the same safety, but it doesn't. Every line of him has turned to iron.
The white light sweeps through the shutter cracks again. It passes over us. Moves on. Returns. Holds.
Banks releases my mouth and rolls off me in one fluid motion. I gasp in a breath as he moves through the cabin in the strobing light. No limp. No wince from the wound in his side. Whatever softness existed in this man four hours ago has been sealed behind a door I can hear slamming shut.
He grabs the bucket of snow melt by the woodstove and upends the whole thing straight into the fire.
The stove hisses. Steam erupts in a column so thick it fills the cabin like fog.
The orange glow dies. Every trace of warmth and light snuffs out in an instant, and the cold rushes back in like it's been waiting outside the walls this whole time. Patient. Hungry.
Darkness swallows us.
"Banks, what's happening?"
"Stay on the floor."
He's already at the window. I can't see him. I can only hear the soft scrape of metal as he eases the shutter open a quarter inch. The helicopter's spotlight burns through that tiny gap and throws a blade of white across his face. His jaw is set. His eyes reflect the light back like an animal's.
"Is it rescue?" I whisper it even though I already know the answer. Rescue helicopters are orange and white. Rescue helicopters have markings, identification numbers, emergency services logos. Rescue helicopters announce themselves over loudspeakers.
This helicopter is just noise and light and violence.
"No."
Banks lets the shutter fall closed. The spotlight sweeps past. He crosses back to me in three strides, drops to a knee, and starts pulling gear from his pack in the dark. I hear zippers and buckle clicks and the dull metal clatter of ammunition.
"Private bird," he says. "No markings. No registration numbers. Running dark except for the spot."
My teeth are already chattering. Without the fire, the cabin temperature is plummeting.
I pull one of the heavy furs off the bed and wrap it around my bare shoulders, crouching on the floor with my knees up, making myself as small as possible.
My body remembers last night. The terror in the cave.
The sprint through the whiteout. My muscles have barely begun to recover and now they're clenching all over again, flooding with a fear so sharp I can taste copper on my tongue.
"They have a helicopter? Who are these people?"
Banks doesn't answer. He's doing something with his rifle, his hands moving in practiced sequences I can't follow in the near-dark. Loading. Checking. Preparing.
The rotor noise circles the cabin. The sound shifts pitch as the helicopter banks, makes a wide loop, comes back. The spotlight hits the roof directly above us and the entire ceiling glows. Dust motes swirl in the light like snow falling indoors.
They know we're here. Of course they know. The smoke from the woodstove would have been visible for miles against a clear post-storm sky. I basically lit a signal flare and hung a welcome banner from the chimney.
"This is my fault."
Banks's head snaps toward me. Even in the dark I can feel the weight of those pale eyes.
"I should have thought about the smoke. I should have?—"
"Fire kept us alive." He chambers a round. The sound is final. Absolute. "Don't apologize for living through the night."
The helicopter pulls away. The noise fades to a distant thrum, then grows again.
It's circling wider now, and I picture the pilot radioing coordinates to the men on the ground.
The men who shot at us on the bridge. The men who want whatever was on my phone badly enough to charter private aircraft into the Alaskan backcountry before dawn.
Banks moves to the door. He listens for a long ten seconds. Then he turns back to me.
"Get dressed. Everything you've got. Layer it."
"Where are we going?"
"Away from here."
I scramble for my clothes. They're stiff from drying near the now-dead stove, still damp in places, cold as sheets of ice against my skin.
I pull on the thermal base layer Banks gave me last night.
Then my useless designer fleece. Then his spare tactical jacket, which hangs past my thighs.
My fingers shake so badly I can barely work the zipper.
The helicopter makes another pass. Lower this time. The rotor wash vibrates the floorboards under my feet.
Banks crosses the cabin in the dark, each step deliberate, scanning the floor. He drops to a knee near the back corner, the one farthest from the door, where the planks are warped and discolored. His fingers trace the seam between two boards. He finds what he's looking for and stands.
Then he drives his boot heel straight down.
The crack of splitting wood is obscene in the silence. I flinch so hard my shoulders hit the wall behind me. He stomps again. A third time. The plank snaps clean, edges jagged, revealing a black rectangle of nothing underneath.
He rips the broken board free and tosses it aside. Kicks the next one. It splinters easier. Then a third. The hole is maybe two feet wide now, and the smell that rises from it is wet earth and something older. Root cellar and rot and decades of sealed, stagnant air.
I look at the gap in the floor. The darkness below is total.
"What is that?"
"Tunnel." Banks is pulling a second plank loose with his bare hands, widening the opening. "Old runner's cache. Bootleggers. Fur smugglers. Half the trapper cabins in this range have them."
The helicopter noise swells. It's coming back around. The spotlight hasn't found us again yet but the interval between passes is shrinking. They're tightening the search pattern.
Banks lowers himself through the hole feet-first and drops.
I hear his boots hit packed earth maybe four feet down.
A brief silence. Then the beam of his headlamp clicks on, aimed away from me, illuminating a narrow, dirt-walled passage that extends into solid black.
The tunnel is low. Maybe four feet of clearance.
Timber supports line the walls at uneven intervals, some rotted through, some holding.
Roots thread the ceiling like exposed veins.
His face appears in the opening below me. Gray eyes flat and calm. Blood has soaked through his bandage again. A fresh stain spreading across the thermal fabric at his side. He doesn't acknowledge it.
"Feet first. I'll catch you."
"Banks, you're bleeding?—"
"Now."
I don't argue. I sit on the ledge of the hole and swing my legs into the dark. The cold coming up from below is different from the cabin cold. Denser. The kind that lives in the ground, permanent, like it was never warm down here and never will be. I push off and drop.
His hands catch my waist. Steady. Firm. He sets me down on packed dirt like I weigh nothing, and for a half second his grip stays. Thumbs sliding into the space above my hip bones through all the layers. Then he lets go and the moment is over.
"Move. On your hands and knees. Follow the lamp."
He reaches up through the hole and drags his pack and rifle down after us.
Then he does something I don't expect. He grabs one of the intact floorboards and maneuvers it back across the opening from below, fitting it rough-side down into the gap.
It won't fool anyone who actually enters the cabin and looks, but from a distance, from a helicopter spotlight sweeping through shutter cracks, the floor will read as unbroken.
We start crawling.
The tunnel is worse than the icy cave. The walls squeeze in from both sides.
My shoulders brush packed dirt and rotting timber with every forward reach.
The ground is frozen but somehow still damp, caking under my fingernails, grinding into my palms. I can feel roots dragging across my back through the jacket fabric.
Something cold and wet hits my neck and I bite down on the sound that tries to escape my throat.
Banks is behind me. His headlamp throws my shadow huge and distorted against the tunnel ahead. I can hear his breathing. Controlled. Even. The man has a gun wound in his side and he's army-crawling through a smuggler's tunnel at four in the morning without a single grunt of pain.
I am making plenty of noise for both of us.
My knees scrape over frozen dirt clods. My breathing comes fast and shallow.
Every few feet the tunnel narrows and I have to flatten onto my stomach and pull myself forward with my elbows, and each time my body compresses against the ground my lungs revolt against the reduced space.
"Keep going."
"I'm going. I'm going."
The air changes. I feel it before I see it.
A draft, faint but real, carrying the sharp clean bite of snow and pine.
The tunnel angles upward. My hands hit a tangle of frozen root mesh and I push through it, dirt cascading into my hair, my eyes, my open mouth.
I spit and claw and then cold air slaps my face full force and I'm out.
I drag myself forward on my stomach into deep snow beneath a stand of black spruce so thick their branches interlock above me in a canopy. I roll onto my back, gasping.