Chapter 18
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The crawler’s engine screamed like a wounded animal.
Jaz ignored the warning lights flashing across her console, ignored the way the chassis shuddered every time they hit a ridge, ignored everything except the narrow passage between the ice walls that rushed towards them at terrifying speed.
Behind her, reflected in the side mirrors, the last pursuit vehicle maintained its relentless pace.
It was smaller than the others and faster, clearly designed for exactly this kind of terrain.
“Left,” Adjar said, his voice cutting calmly through the engine noise. “Sharp left, now.”
She wrenched the controls, feeling the crawler’s treads lose traction for one heart-stopping moment before catching again. The cargo sled behind them swung wide, nearly clipping an ice formation that would have torn it apart.
“How do you know where we’re going?”
“The ice tells me.” His hand was pressed flat against the crawler’s wall, his eyes closed in concentration. “There is a valley ahead. Narrow. Too narrow for that vehicle to follow.”
“And if you’re wrong?”
“Then we will learn something new.”
That’s not reassuring, she thought, but she adjusted their heading anyway. In spite of her knowledge of the terrain, his mysterious connection to the ice was more of an advantage.
The crevasse fields had bought them distance, but not enough.
Four of the six pursuit vehicles had been forced to fall back—too large to navigate the maze of frozen passages—but two had continued the chase.
One of those had been disabled when its driver misjudged a narrow gap and wedged the vehicle hopelessly between two ice walls. But the last one…
The last one was good. Better than good. Its driver seemed to anticipate every turn and every obstacle, matching their desperate flight with almost mechanical precision.
Cyborg? she wondered, but found it difficult to believe. No cyborg she’d ever met was willing to work with GenCon.
“The ravine,” he said. “Two hundred meters.”
She saw it now—a gap in the ice walls so narrow it seemed impossible that anything larger than a person could pass through. The crawler was going to fit with centimeters to spare on either side, but it would be close. Very close.
“You’re sure about this?”
“I am sure of nothing. But I trust the ice.”
“Great. Really inspiring confidence here.”
She aimed for the gap and prayed.
The walls closed around them with shocking suddenness, the ancient ice rising on either side like the jaws of some frozen beast. The crawler’s treads scraped against the sides, sending up sprays of frost and chips of ice.
The cargo sled followed with a shriek of protesting metal, its contents shifting dangerously.
Behind them, the pursuit vehicle hesitated.
Through the rear display, she watched it slow, its driver clearly calculating the risks. The gap was wide enough—barely—but the consequences of miscalculation in a passage like this would be catastrophic.
The vehicle surged forward.
“Persistent bastard,” she muttered.
“Continue through. Do not slow down.”
“Wasn’t planning on it.”
The ravine twisted ahead of them, serpentine and treacherous.
She kept her eyes forward, trusting his directions and trying not to think about what would happen if the passage narrowed further.
The engine’s scream had taken on a new quality—a grinding undertone that suggested systems pushed well past their limits.
“The walls,” he said suddenly. “Look at the walls.”
She risked a glance. The ice on either side was stratified, layers of blue and white compressed over millennia. But there were also dark veins running through the structure, signs of instability where ancient pressure had created fault lines.
“What am I looking at?”
“Weaknesses.” His voice had gone very quiet. “The ice here wants to fall. It has wanted to fall for a very long time.”
She bit her lip, shooting him a quick glance out of the corner of her eye. “Can you—”
“I do not know. The effort before…” He shook his head. “It may be too much, too soon.”
“What happens if you push too hard?”
“I do not know that either.” His eyes met hers in the dim light of the cab. “But I know what happens if I do not try.”
The pursuit vehicle was gaining. Even with the narrow walls and treacherous footing, its driver was managing to close the distance. Another few minutes and they’d be close enough for his weapons to disable them—assuming GenCon wanted them alive enough not to simply destroy everything.
“Do it,” she said.
“You’re willing to take the risk?”
“I would risk anything to keep you safe.” The words came out before she could stop them. “Do it, Adjar. I trust you.”
Surprise and determination flickered across those angular features in rapid succession. Then he closed his eyes and pressed both hands against the crawler’s walls.
The sound started low. A groan, deep and resonant, rising from somewhere far above them. She felt it in her bones before she heard it properly—a vibration that spoke of enormous forces finally succumbing to inevitability.
“Faster,” he urged. “Go faster.”
She pushed the engine past its limits, past the red line, past anything the manufacturer had ever intended. The crawler surged forward with a desperate burst of speed, the cargo sled bouncing dangerously behind them.
The groan became a roar.
In the mirrors, she saw the ice walls begin to move. Not falling, not yet, but… leaning. Shifting. The ancient fractures spread like cracks in glass, the dark veins widening into chasms.
The pursuit vehicle’s driver saw it too. The vehicle accelerated, trying to outrun the impending collapse.
Too late.
The first chunk fell like a meteor, smashing into the vehicle with enough force to send tremors through the crawler’s frame. Then another. Then a third. And then the entire wall surrendered to gravity, an avalanche of ice and rock thundering down into the narrow ravine.
She didn’t look back. She couldn’t. All her concentration was fixed on the passage ahead and the gap of open sky that promised escape. The roar of collapsing ice filled the world, drowning out the engine, drowning out everything except the desperate need to move.
They burst out of the valley mouth like a cork from a bottle.
Behind them, the passage filled with ice. Tons upon tons of it, packed so densely that nothing would pass through for decades. The pursuit vehicle was gone, buried under an avalanche that had rewritten the landscape in seconds.
She brought the crawler to a shuddering halt and sat there, her hands trembling on the controls, her heart pounding so hard she could feel it in her throat.
“Adjar?”
No response.
She turned to find him slumped against the seat, his breathing shallow and his silver-white scales almost translucent. His eyes were closed, his expression slack with exhaustion.
“Adjar!”
His eyes opened, slow and unfocused. “We are… safe?”
“We’re safe. You did it.” She reached for him, her hands running over his body, searching for injuries. “You crazy, impossible dragon. You did it.”
“I told you…” A weak smile touched his lips. “Trust the ice.”
“We need to get out of here before they send more.”
“Give me… a moment.” He closed his eyes again. “That was more than I have attempted before. My strength returns, but slowly.”
She checked the rear display. Nothing but the wall of collapsed ice, already settling into its new configuration. The pursuing vehicle and its driver were entombed somewhere beneath that frozen mass.
She should feel guilty. A person had just died because of them. But all she felt was relief, fierce and overwhelming. They were trying to take her mate and cage him. Study him like some kind of specimen. Whatever guilt she might feel could wait until they were safe.
“The ranger station,” he murmured. “How far?”
She consulted the navigation display, then checked it again because the numbers didn’t seem right. “About eighty kilometers south. If this thing holds together that long.”
“It will hold.”
“You can see the future now too?”
“No. But I believe in your ability to will it so.”
Despite the terror of the chase and the exhaustion settling into her bones, she laughed.
“Okay,” she said, settling back into the driver’s seat. “Okay. Eighty kilometers. We can do that.”
She put the crawler back into motion, gentler this time, nursing the damaged engine through the open terrain beyond the valley. The polar wilderness stretched behind them, white and endless and, for the moment, empty of pursuit.
He drifted in and out of consciousness beside her, his body demanding rest to recover from the impossible thing he had done. She let him sleep, one hand occasionally reaching out to touch his arm, and reassure herself that he was still there. Still breathing. Still hers.
The thought caught her off guard. When had she started thinking of him that way? When had this strange, impossible creature become someone she couldn’t imagine losing?
Somewhere between the first moment he said my name and the last time he held me, she admitted to herself. Somewhere in the space of days that felt like a lifetime.
The ranger station appeared on the horizon as the sun began its slow descent, the dimming that signaled the shift from day to night.
The structure was small and prefabricated, clearly designed for function rather than comfort.
A supply depot and emergency shelter, maintained by the rangers for situations exactly like this one.
She had never actually been inside, though she knew it existed.
The rangers kept to themselves mostly, patrolling their territories and enforcing the loose laws that governed territorial disputes and emergency protocols.
She’d met the ranger in charge of her territory a few times over the years, but she’d always been slightly unnerved by him, if she was honest.
And now I’m going to ask him for help, she thought grimly. Life really does have a sense of humor.