Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Ihave to keep Jaz safe.
The thought drove Adjar from the warmth of the bunk before daybreak, despite every instinct screaming to stay wrapped around her.
She had finally fallen asleep, worn out and smiling, but he had no intention of sleeping while danger was so close.
He moved silently through the habitat as the environmental systems hummed their mechanical song.
Outside, the wind had settled into an eerie stillness—the kind of quiet that preceded change.
He didn’t like it.
He finished the preparations they’d begun the day before, working by the habitat’s dim night lights. There were supply caches to organize, equipment to secure, contingencies to consider. His hands moved automatically while his mind churned through possibilities.
Her intention to seek assistance from the cyborg rangers sat uneasily in his chest. Asking for help went against every instinct he possessed. Worse, asking other males for help protecting his mate felt like an admission of inadequacy.
You are inadequate, a cold voice whispered in his mind. You do not know this world. Its rules. Its weapons. Its dangers. Your strength means nothing against enemies you cannot see.
He forced the thought aside, concentrating on the task at hand. Pride was a luxury he could not afford. If these rangers could provide sanctuary for her—protection he could not guarantee on his own—then he would swallow his pride and accept their assistance.
Anything for her.
The communication screen caught his attention as he moved through the habitat.
The screen remained dark and silent, but he found himself staring at it nonetheless.
Somewhere beyond the ice, enemies were moving.
Planning. The message they had received made their intentions clear enough—GenCon would come whether Jaz agreed or not. The only question was when.
He pressed his palm against the habitat wall, reaching out with senses that had no human equivalent.
The ice spoke to him in whispers and groans, telling stories of pressure and temperature, of ancient movements and recent disturbances.
Through those vibrations, he could feel the land spreading out in all directions—a vast frozen expanse that had once been something else entirely.
He pushed deeper, searching, and—
There.
Movement. Distant but approaching. Multiple sources, heavier than anything natural, traveling in formation.
His blood ran cold.
“Jaz.”
He was at the bunk in three strides, his hand gentle but insistent on her shoulder. “Jaz, wake up.”
She stirred, amber eyes blinking open with confusion that rapidly sharpened into alertness. Years of living alone in a hostile environment had trained her well—she went from sleep to full consciousness in the space of a heartbeat.
“What is it?”
“They are coming. Now.”
No need to specify who. Understanding flooded her features, followed immediately by fear—not for herself, he noted, but the same fear she had expressed last night. Fear for him.
“How long?”
“I cannot be certain. The vibrations are difficult to interpret at this distance.” He pulled her upright, already gathering her clothes from where they’d been discarded the night before. “Perhaps an hour. Perhaps less.”
“Shit. So much for forty-eight hours.” She was moving before the words finished leaving her mouth, quickly pulling on the thermal layers. “The snow crawler. We need to—”
“I have already prepared it.”
She paused, looking at him with something like wonder. “You’ve been awake this whole time?”
“I could not sleep. My mate required protection.”
For a moment, her expression softened. Then the urgency returned and she was all business, jamming her feet into her boots and reaching for her outer layers. “Right. Okay. We stick to the plan. Southwest to the ranger station. If we push hard, we can be there by nightfall.”
“And if they follow?”
“We make sure they can’t.”
They moved through the habitat like a well-choreographed machine, two people who had somehow learned to anticipate each other’s movements in the space of just a few days. She gathered the last of the essential supplies while he performed a final check on the cargo sled’s connections.
The snow crawler was a squat, ungainly vehicle, but its treads were wide and its engine powerful, and she had assured him it could handle the polar terrain.
They would have to trust that she was right.
“Ready?” she asked, her hand hovering over the door controls.
He took one last look around the habitat—this small dome that had become unexpectedly precious.
Not for itself, but for what it represented.
Here, he had awakened to a new world. Here, he had found his mate.
Here, he had begun to understand that even after so much loss, there might still be a future worth fighting for.
“I am ready.”
The cold bit straight through to the bone. Even with his natural resistance to temperature extremes, he felt the brutal bite of the polar air. It must have been exponentially worse for her, despite her layers of thermal protection. But she didn’t hesitate, quickly climbing into the crawler’s cab.
He folded his wings tight against his back and squeezed into the nominal passenger space—a space that was not designed for someone of his size, much less someone with wings. The confined quarters pressed against his scales from all directions.
“Sorry about the fit,” she said, her fingers dancing across the control panel. “The crawler’s not really built for passengers.”
“I have endured worse.”
“Have you?”
“I do not remember. But I suspect so.”
The engine coughed to life with a grinding roar, and then they were moving, the treads churning through ice and snow as the habitat fell away behind them. The cargo sled followed obediently, its runners hissing against the frozen surface.
He turned in his seat—no easy feat in the cramped space—and watched their refuge shrink in the distance. Such a small thing to have meant so much.
“Don’t look back,” she said quietly. “It doesn’t help.”
“You should take your own advice.”
A ghost of a smile touched her lips. “When have I ever been good at that?”
They drove in silence for several minutes, the crawler’s engine providing a constant mechanical undertone to the wind that had begun to pick up again. Her eyes were fixed on the terrain ahead, navigating by some combination of instrument readings and instinct that he couldn’t quite follow.
“The ridge,” he said suddenly. “There. We should be able to see them from that position.”
She glanced at him, then at the rocky outcropping jutting from the ice to their left. “You want to watch them arrive?”
“I want to know their numbers. Their equipment. How they move.” He met her gaze. “Know your enemy.”
She hesitated, then nodded and angled the crawler towards the ridge.
They parked in the shadow of the rocks, the outcropping providing cover from multiple angles. He unfolded himself from the cab with a relief he didn’t bother to hide, his wings spreading slightly to shake off the cramped tension.
“Stay behind me,” he murmured, moving towards a gap in the rocks that provided a clear sightline back towards the claim.
“Not a chance. I need to see this too.”
He wanted to argue and insist that she remain protected, but the set of her jaw told him it would be pointless. Stubborn female. He filed the observation away as yet another thing to admire about her.
They climbed the rocks together, finding a perch that offered concealment and visibility in equal measure. He pulled her close against his side, partly for warmth and partly because the urge to have her near was simply too strong to resist.
“There.” She pointed.
In the distance, approaching the tiny dot of her habitat, a convoy of vehicles moved across the ice.
Even from this range, he could count the six separate craft.
Two of them were about the size of the snow crawler, two slightly larger, and two significantly larger, all of them bristling with equipment he couldn’t identify.
They moved in formation, precise and mechanical, like predators stalking prey.
“That’s a lot of equipment,” she said, her voice flat. “They’re not messing around.”
“What manner of equipment are they carrying?”
“Scanners, probably. Deep-ice sensors. Maybe seismic readers.” Her hands clenched into fists at her sides. “The kind of stuff that can detect anomalies from kilometers away. If there’s anything left for them to find…”
“There isn’t.” He kept his voice certain, even as doubt flickered in his own mind. “We were thorough.”
“We were rushed.”
He had no argument for that.
They watched in tense silence as the convoy reached the habitat.
Small figures emerged, barely visible at this distance, and began to fan out in all directions.
Some entered the habitat itself. Others moved towards the collapsed crater and the scattered debris field where the drilling rig had been destroyed.
Beside him, she made a small, wounded sound.
“That was my home,” she whispered. “Five years. Everything I built.”
He said nothing. There were no words that could ease this particular grief. Instead, he pulled her closer, letting his wing curve around her shoulders like a shield against both the cold and the sight below.
“I know it’s just… things.” Her voice cracked slightly. “Equipment and supplies. Nothing that matters, not really. But I—” She stopped, swallowing hard. “I worked so hard. I earned every piece of that claim. And now they’re just… walking through it like they own it.”
“They do not own it. They cannot own what they do not understand.”
“GenCon doesn’t need to understand things. They just need to take them.”
A flash of anger cut through his chest, something old and primal, born from instincts that predated his memory loss.
These creatures below, these enemies who caused his mate such pain…
in another time, he would have descended on them like a storm.
He would have shown them what it meant to threaten a dragon’s territory.
But this was not another time. He was weakened and still healing. And she needed him alive more than she needed him vengeful.
“We should go,” he said reluctantly. “The longer we watch, the greater the risk.”
She nodded, but didn’t move. Her eyes remained fixed on the scene below, on the habitat that had been her entire world for half a decade.
“They won’t find anything,” she said, as if trying to convince herself. “You collapsed the crater. We cleaned up the debris. There’s nothing to connect you to…”
She trailed off, her body going rigid beside him. He followed her gaze and felt his own blood freeze.
Below, one of the vehicles had broken formation. It was moving—not towards the habitat or the crater, but away. Away in a very specific direction.
Towards them.
“They know,” she breathed. “How do they know?”
His mind raced through possibilities. Thermal imaging? Vibration sensors? Some technology he couldn’t anticipate? It didn’t matter. What mattered was that their head start had just evaporated.
“The crawler. Now.”
They scrambled down the rocks, any pretense of stealth abandoned in favor of speed. She reached the vehicle first, throwing herself into the driver’s seat and gunning the engine before he had fully folded himself into the cab.
“Hold on,” she warned, and slammed the crawler into gear.
The vehicle lurched forward, treads biting deep into the ice as they accelerated across the frozen waste. Behind them, the pursuing craft grew larger with alarming speed—it was faster than them, he realized. Much faster.
“Your path,” he said urgently. “Is there somewhere we can—”
“The crevasse fields are six kilometers southeast. If we can reach them, the terrain will slow them down.”
“And if we cannot reach them?”
Her jaw tightened. “Then we improvise.”
He turned to watch their pursuers, his mind working frantically. The other vehicles had joined the chase now, all six converging on their position like predators driving their prey towards a killing ground. The ice beneath them was solid, offering no natural obstacles.
But the ice was still ice. And ice was something he understood.
“Slow down.”
She shot him an incredulous look. “Are you insane?”
“Trust me.” He reached out with one hand, pressing it against the crawler’s metal wall, extending his senses down through the vehicle and into the frozen ground below. “Slow down and move to the left. There is a pressure ridge beneath the surface. I can…”
He didn’t finish the sentence. Instead, he closed his eyes and pushed.
It was harder than collapsing the crater—that had been working with its natural instability, merely accelerating an inevitable process. This required directed force. The ice didn’t want to crack here. It was solid and stable, content in its frozen sleep.
He convinced it otherwise.
The sound started as a groan, low and ominous, rising from somewhere deep below. Then came a thunderous crack, spreading outwards from a point precisely behind them. The ice split, a jagged fissure racing across the surface like lightning frozen in time.
The lead pursuit vehicle tried to swerve but it was too late. Its front treads caught the edge of the newly formed crevasse and it pitched forward, sliding into the gap with a screech of tearing metal.
“Holy shit.” Her eyes were wide and shocked. “You can do that?”
“Not often.” He slumped against the seat as exhaustion washed through him. “Not again. Not soon.”
But he’d bought them time. The remaining vehicles were falling back, forced to navigate around the obstacle he’d created. The gap between them widened—meters becoming tens of meters becoming hundreds.
She pushed the crawler to its limits, the engine screaming in protest, the cargo sled bouncing dangerously behind them. The crevasse fields rose ahead like a frozen maze—towers and ridges of ancient ice, sculpted by millennia of wind and pressure into shapes that defied easy passage.
“This is it,” she said, steering them into the labyrinth. “Once we’re in here, most of them can’t follow. Not with those big vehicles.”
“They will follow on foot.”
“Maybe. But we’ll have the advantage.” She flashed him a fierce grin. “I know this terrain. I’ve been mapping it for years. I know every passage, every dead end, and every hiding spot.”
“You are remarkable.”
“I’m also terrified.”
He reached across the cramped space to touch her face, ignoring the strain the movement caused. “The brave are always terrified. You told me that.”
“I think you told me that.”
“Then I was very wise.”
Despite everything, she laughed.
They plunged deeper into the crevasse fields, leaving their pursuers to navigate the obstacles behind them. The ice rose around them like frozen cathedral walls, ancient and indifferent. In its shadows, they were invisible. They were safe.
For now.