Chapter 19
nineteen
Pain exploded through Elliot’s shoulder as they crashed into the snow-packed bottom of the crevasse. For one terrifying moment, he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything but feel the shocking cold seeping through his gear and the weight of Rue’s body tangled with his.
He blinked, vision full of shattered blue and green lights, like being underwater with his eyes open. Something warm and wet ran down the side of his face. Blood, probably.
He conducted a quick inventory: Head, bleeding but intact. Ribs, probably bruised but functional. Arms, both present. Legs…one was numb, but he could move it.
He’d had worse.
Rue groaned beside him. “Ow,” she said, which for Rue meant she was probably dying.
He managed a feeble cough and tried to prop himself up. “You okay?”
Rue took a shaky breath and sat up, her silhouette black against the iridescent wall of the crevasse. Her helmet had a crack through the visor, and one glove was missing. Blood streaked her cheek, but it was superficial.
“I’m good,” she said, then frowned at her bare hand. “Why is my glove off?”
He fumbled for his headlamp, clicked it on, and swept the beam around.
They’d landed on a slanted ramp of snow about fifty feet below the surface.
Above them, the storm raged, blowing white powder in horizontal sheets past the hole they’d made in the ice.
Below them, the shelf sloped into darkness—impossible to see how far it dropped.
“Stay still,” he ordered, already moving to check her injuries. “You could be concussed.”
“You’re concussed,” she retorted, though softer, like the energy was draining out of her.
“Fine, we’re both concussed. Stay awake for me.”
She saluted, then squinted up at the surface, now just a circle of swirling white far above. “Think the others made it to the snow cats?”
“Probably.”
“Good. I’ve never lost anyone on one of my expeditions, and I don’t plan to start now.”
He found her glove half-buried in the snow, its fingers frozen into a shape that seemed like she’d been flipping off Death on the way down.
Classic Rue.
He held it out to her.
“Thanks.” She shook the snow out of it, then scowled at the wide tear extending across the palm down to the wrist. “Well, shit. Lotta good that will do me.”
She stuffed the ruined glove into her pocket and pulled her bare hand up inside her sleeve.
He’d done that, he realized. Because she caught him, the rope burned through the glove, and now she was at risk of frostbite.
“You should have let me fall.”
She looked at him like he’d suggested she strip naked and run laps around the station. “Are you insane?”
“You could’ve been killed,” he shot back, harsher than he intended. The words came out raw, scraped from somewhere deep in his chest where fear had taken root and grown thorns.
Rue’s eyes flashed with temper. “So, let me get this straight. Because I could’ve been killed, I was just supposed to watch you die?”
“Yes. You take risks that—” He stopped himself before he could finish the thought. Before he could say something that would cut too deep to take back.
“That what?” Her voice dropped to something dangerously quiet.
The adrenaline was fading, leaving behind the bone-deep ache of impact and something worse—the memory of watching her disappear over the edge, of thinking for one horrible second that he’d lost her.
“Nothing,” he muttered and sat back on his heels. “Forget it.”
She studied his face in the blue-white glow, and he could practically hear the gears turning in her head. Rue had always been too perceptive for his own good.
“We need to get out of here,” he said before she could respond, pushing himself to his feet.
His left knee protested, sending a sharp spike of pain up his thigh, but it held his weight.
He tried his radio, but it was dead. Either the jamming had reached them down here, or the fall had shattered the electronics.
He checked his backup beacon, but the red light just blinked in slow, defeated intervals.
“They’ll find us,” she said, but her tone wasn’t confident. “They have to.”
But even if they did, it wouldn’t matter. No one at Thwaites was trained for technical rescue. Well, except maybe Koos, who had made Antarctica his career. But his help depended on the others getting back to the station and the weather clearing long enough to launch a rescue.
Too many variables. If they waited, they’d freeze.
He looked at the wall above them—shee ice, with maybe two holds in the first five meters. The rest was slick as glass. He shook his head.
“There’s no way up,” he said, tracing the route with his eyes. “Not without proper climbing gear.”
Rue nodded, though her jaw was set in that stubborn way that usually meant she was about to do something reckless. But instead of arguing, she turned to examine the downward slope.
“Then we go down.” She pointed her headlamp into the darkness. “Ice caves form networks. There’s probably another way out.”
“Probably,” he echoed. There was that word again—the one Rue used when she was guessing but didn’t want to admit it.
He checked his watch. The temperature was dropping fast, and they had maybe four hours before hypothermia became a serious concern. Less, considering Rue was missing a glove and he had a tear in his coat from the fall.
“Okay,” he agreed, because they had no better options. “But we stick together. No heroics.”
Rue shot him a look that was pure challenge. “When have I ever been heroic?”
“Jumping after me was pretty heroic.”
“That wasn’t heroism. That was—” She stopped, looking away. “That was instinct.”
Something warm unfurled in his chest despite the cold. He didn’t push it.
They gathered what remained of their gear. His ice axe had survived the fall, but Rue’s was nowhere to be found. They had one working headlamp between them, a single canteen of water, and a few energy bars. Not much to survive on, but it would have to do.
“Ready?” he asked.
Rue nodded, her face set with determination. “Lead the way, Wilde.”
He started down the slope, testing each step before committing his weight. The ice beneath the snow was slick, treacherous. One misstep and they’d slide straight into whatever waited below.
As they descended, the walls of the crevasse narrowed, forcing them to edge sideways through tight passages. The temperature dropped with each meter, the air growing stale and heavy with minerals.
“Look,” Rue whispered, pointing to the wall beside them.
Elliot aimed his light where she indicated. Black filaments, like the ones they’d seen in the samples, threaded through the ice in intricate patterns. They seemed to pulse faintly in the beam of his headlamp, though he told himself it was just a trick of the light.
“They’re everywhere,” he murmured.
Rue reached out with her bare hand, but he caught her wrist before she could touch the wall.
“Don’t,” he said. “We don’t know what these things are.”
She pulled away but nodded, tucking her exposed hand into her armpit for warmth. “Dr. Keene would lose his mind down here. It’s like the whole glacier is infested with them.”
Infested. The word sent a chill down Elliot’s spine that had nothing to do with the temperature.
They continued down.
The tunnel widened suddenly, opening into a chamber that echoed with the sound of dripping water.
Elliot swept his headlamp across the space, revealing a cathedral of ice—walls that soared upward until they disappeared into darkness, and formations that hung from the ceiling like frozen chandeliers.
The beauty would have been breathtaking if he wasn’t so focused on survival.
“This is incredible,” Rue whispered beside him, her voice muffled by her face covering.
“It’s a dead end.” The chamber had only one entrance—the passage they’d just navigated. “We need to go back, find another route.”
Rue shook her head, already moving toward the far wall. “There’s always a way out. Nature doesn’t build boxes.”
He wanted to argue, to pull her back and force her to be practical, but exhaustion weighed on him.
His shoulder throbbed where he’d landed on it, and the cut on his forehead had stopped bleeding but left a sticky trail down his temple.
He followed her instead, boots crunching on the crystalline floor.
“Here,” she said, crouching near the base of the wall. She pointed to a narrow fissure, barely visible behind a column of ice. “Feel that?”
Elliot knelt beside her, wincing as his knee protested. A faint current of air brushed his face, warmer than the frigid stillness of the chamber. “Air flow.”
“Which means there’s another opening somewhere.” Rue’s grin flashed in the beam of his headlamp, quick and fierce. “Told you.”
The fissure was tight—too tight for him to squeeze through with his pack on. He hesitated, calculating angles and risks.
“I can fit,” Rue said, already shrugging out of her pack.
“No.” He caught her hand. “We stick together, remember?”
“I’m just going to check if it opens up on the other side. Two minutes, tops.”
Before he could stop her, she was on her stomach, wriggling into the narrow gap like a snake. Her boots disappeared from view, leaving him alone in the blue-white glow of his headlamp.
“Rue!” he called after her, frustration and fear tangling in his chest. If she got stuck, how would he pull her out? There were so many instances of cavers who had gotten stuck in such spaces, dying from exposure or suffocation while their companions tried in vain to free them. “Dammit, Rue!”