Chapter Eleven
ARIS
Panic has a specific taste. It tastes like copper and cold air.
We're fleeing. Nash wouldn't call it that, he'd call it a "strategic relocation to a defensible position"—but I know fleeing when I feel it.
We broke down the observation post in record time, shoving expensive optics into cases with zero regard for organization, and now we're tearing across the valley floor as the light bleeds out of the sky.
The wolf, the scout, is gone. But the feeling of being watched is heavy enough to weigh down the sleds.
I'm riding behind Nash again, gripping his waist as we drop into the transition zone between the mountains and the frozen wetlands, all hidden ravines and willow thickets whipping past my knees.
"Hold on!" Nash yells over the engine.
"Where are we going?" I shout back, my face pressed against his back to shield it from the wind.
"Riverbed!" he yells. "Open ice! We can make better time, put distance between us and the pack!"
The river will be a highway. Assuming, of course, that it's frozen solid.
We burst out of the trees onto the river ice, and Nash guns the throttle.
For ten minutes, we fly. I keep looking back for gray shapes loping in our wake and find only swirling snow and shadows.
Then I feel it.
A sudden, sickening lurch. The back of the snowmobile drops, the engine screaming as the track loses purchase, and then, crunch.
Nash slams on the brakes, but momentum is against us. The machine skids sideways, tilting dangerously. The sled behind us, the one carrying the heavy Pelican cases, the generator, and the satellite equipment, swings around like a pendulum.
It hits a patch of overflow, water that has seeped up through cracks and frozen into a slushy, treacherous soup, and breaks through the crust.
Before the secondary sled tips fully into the slush, Nash lunges across the lashings, rips the green ammo crate and the small orange emergency tool kit free of the cargo netting, and shoves them onto the firm ice behind us.
The crate skids. The kit bounces. Both clear the hole with maybe a foot to spare.
The sled goes down. The hitch groans, metal screaming against metal.
"Off!" Nash roars. "Get off! Now!"
I scramble off the back, my boots slipping on the ice. Nash jumps clear just as the sinking sled drags the back of the snowmobile toward the dark, slushy hole.
"The hitch!" I scream. "It's pulling the machine in!"
Nash is already moving. He dives for the rear bumper of the snowmobile, grabbing it with both hands and digging his boots into the ice, trying to hold a thousand pounds of machine and gear against the relentless pull of gravity and water.
"Uncouple it!" he grunts, his face turning red with effort. "Aris! The pin! Pull the pin!"
I scramble toward the hitch. The sled is half-submerged in the thick, black water. The heavy cases are already underwater. If that sled goes, my research goes. The generator goes. So does our heat source.
But if I don't uncouple it, the snowmobile goes too. And then we're walking. In wolf country, at night.
I grab the hitch, but there's too much tension. The weight of the sled is pulling the coupling tight against the pin. I yank on it, but it won't budge.
"It's jammed!" I yell, panic rising in my throat.
"Kick it!" Nash shouts. He's slipping. The snowmobile is inching backward, dragging him with it toward the hole. "Aris, you have to cut it loose or we lose the machine!"
My mind races. Physics. It's just physics. Tension, torque, leverage.
If I kick the pin, it won't move. The drag coefficient is too high. I need leverage.
I look around frantically. Nothing but ice and … the shovel. It's strapped to the side of the sinking sled, the handle sticking up just above the surface.
I lunge for it, my hand plunging into the freezing muck. I grab the handle and rip it free.
"Aris!" Nash's voice is strained, desperate.
"Hold on!"
I jam the blade of the shovel between the snowmobile bumper and the sled tongue. I use the bumper as a pivot, throwing my entire body weight onto the handle to pry the weight off the pin.
"Ease up!" I scream at Nash. "Give me an inch of slack!"
"I can't!"
"You have to! On three! Push forward! One! Two! Three!"
Nash roars and shoves the machine forward. It moves maybe half an inch.
It's enough.
I lever the shovel down with everything I have. The pressure releases for a microsecond. I reach down with my other hand—stupid, dangerous, necessary—and rip the pin free.
Clang.
The hitch separates.
The snowmobile, suddenly freed from the anchor, lurches forward. Nash falls face-first onto the ice.
The sled, no longer tethered, tips backward and starts its slide.
That's when I see the gray case. The field case, the one holding the tranquilizing darts and three months of collection vials, tears loose from the cargo netting and skids across the tilting deck toward the water.
I'm moving before I finish deciding to move.
I throw myself flat, lunge across the ice, and hook two fingers through the handle. I sling the case behind me toward solid footing, and it spins away across the surface, safe. I have half a second to feel like I've won before the shelf drops out from under my knees.
The river takes me to the waist.
The cold hits like a full-body electric shock. My lungs seize and pull in air I didn't ask for, one huge involuntary gasp, the same reflex I've read about in every cold-water immersion study, and the only reason I'm not breathing river is that my face stayed above the surface.
"Nash!" My voice comes out wrong, high and thin, squeezed flat by the clamp of cold around my ribs.
The current finds my legs. It's a steady, patient drag, hauling my boots downstream and under the shelf, where the ice becomes a ceiling.
My fingers claw at the edge and slide off.
They're clumsy already, slowing already, and I know the numbers because the numbers are my job.
I have ten seconds of useful grip, maybe fifteen, and then my hands stop being hands.
I make myself think past the screaming in my nerves. Vertical bodies get pulled under. Horizontal bodies float.
I kick hard with both legs, driving myself flat against the current until I'm lying on the water instead of hanging in it.
My elbows go wide onto the shelf, forearms pressing down, spreading the load across the ice the way you'd spread weight anywhere it might break.
It's load per square inch, and physics doesn't care that I'm terrified.
The shovel is still lying where I dropped it. I drag it across the lip of the hole with one forearm and shove it crosswise, a brace that won't crumble under me.
"Aris!" Nash hits the ice beside me on his belly, arms spread, and his hand closes around the shoulder strap of my parka. His face is six inches from mine, and his eyes are the steadiest thing on this river. "I've got you. Don't climb. You'll break the edge."
"Kick," I gasp. The word costs me half a breath. "On three. I kick, you pull."
"On three," he repeats. "One. Two. Three."
I kick like the water is trying to take me. He hauls back on the strap with his whole body, boots scraping for purchase, and the shovel takes my weight for the one second the edge needs to hold. Then I'm sliding out of the water on my stomach, over the brace, onto ice that holds me.
"Roll," Nash orders. "Don't stand. Roll."
I roll. The ice stays solid under my back, my shoulder, my back again, until his hands stop me and we're both ten feet from the hole, tangled together, breathing in ragged white bursts.
Behind us, the sled slips silently and completely under. I watch it go: the generator, the extra fuel, the backup tents. Gone.
But the snowmobile is safe, and the samples with it. Nash is safe.
I try to say so, and my jaw refuses to cooperate. My teeth slam together hard enough to hurt. Below the waist there's no pain at all, only a distant report that my legs still exist.
Nash gets an arm under me and hauls me upright. My legs hold, barely, wobbling like the bones have gone soft.
"Talk to me," he says. His hands move fast over my shoulders, my ribs, my hips, checking. "Did your head go under?"
"No." The shaking chops the word in half. "Waist. Airway's clear. I went horizontal."
"You went horizontal." He looks at the shovel still lying across the lip of the hole, then back at me. "You braced the hole. You ran your own rescue while I was still crossing the ice."
"Physics," I manage between spasms of my jaw. "Give me a lever long enough."
He lets out a sound that's half-laugh, half-sob, and pulls me into a hug so tight it cracks my back. It's a combat hug, the hug you give someone when you've both just cheated death, and he allows it exactly two seconds before he's all business.
"You crazy, brilliant scientist," he mutters into my hair. "You saved the machine and the samples. Now stay alive long enough to gloat about it."
I cling to him, shaking harder as the adrenaline drains out. "We lost the sled. The generator …"
"We have the machine, and we have the primary sled with the food and the sleeping bags," he says, already steering me toward the snowmobile. "Inventory later. You have wet layers freezing to your skin and a core temperature dropping by the minute. Tree line. Fire. Now."
"The wolves," I remind him.
"Screw the wolves," Nash says, swinging onto the machine and pulling me up behind him. "Hypothermia will kill you faster than any wolf. We're camping. Now."
We drive another mile down the river, finding a high bank with a dense stand of spruce that offers protection. We don't talk. We just move.
Setting up camp is harder with one sled. We've lost the luxury of the backup tent and the cots. We have the small emergency bivouac tent, barely big enough for two people, and our sleeping bags.
Nash builds a fire, huge, roaring, defiant. He sets it up between the river and the tent, a wall of light against the darkness.
"Everything wet comes off," he orders, standing by the fire. "Coat, fleece, pants, socks. All of it. I'll keep my back turned, but I'm not going to be polite about the timeline."
My pants have frozen into a stiff shell on the ride, and my fingers can't manage the zipper pull.
Nash steps in without being asked and works it loose, and his hands are shaking too, which tells me more about the last ten minutes than anything he's said.
I strip down beside the fire, trading dignity for survival.
My legs are numb from the waist down, the skin pale and waxy.
"Sit," he says, positioning me close to the flames. He digs dry thermals, wool socks, and a spare wool shirt out of his pack and pushes the pile into my arms. "Put these on."
The shirt smells like him, woodsmoke and pine. It swallows me whole, the sleeves hanging past my hands.
Nash wraps my feet in his hands and rubs them, brisk, efficient movements to bring the blood back, then works on my fingers the same way. His hands are rough, warm, gentle.
"You did good, Aris," he says quietly, not looking up. "I couldn't get the pin. It was torqued too tight. I didn't think of the shovel."
"You were busy holding up a snowmobile," I say, wincing as the feeling starts to return to my fingers in painful prickles. "Division of labor."
"No," he says. He stops rubbing and looks at me. "Grace under pressure. That's what that was. Most people would have panicked. You calculated."
"That call was mine," Nash says. He doesn't look up from my hands. "The river. I picked that route. If we'd stayed in the trees, the pack would've caught us but you wouldn't be soaking wet."
"If we'd stayed in the trees, the pack would've caught us and torn us apart," I say. "You made the right call."
"Doesn't feel right."
"Right calls sometimes don't."
He picks up my hand, pressing it between both of his to warm it.
"I underestimated you," he admits. "When you first got here … I thought you were just another academic who'd fold the first time things got real."
"And now?"
"Now I think you're the toughest person I know."
The praise warms me more than the fire. I look at him, at the soot smudge on his cheek, the intensity in his eyes.
"We lost the generator," I say again, the reality starting to sink in. "We can't charge the batteries for the collar release. Or the big camera."
"We have the solar panels in the primary sled," Nash says. "It'll be slower. We'll have to ration power. But we can make it work."
"And the sat phone?" I ask, realizing I haven't seen the case. "Was it in the back sled?"
Nash goes still. He looks toward the sled we managed to save. Then back at me.
"The main unit was in the Pelican case," he says. "On the back sled."
My stomach drops. "So it's at the bottom of the river."
"Yeah."
"Do we have a backup?"
"We have the emergency beacon," he says. "The SPOT device. It sends an SOS with our coordinates. But we can't make calls. We can't check in."
"I can't call the university," I whisper. "I have a check-in scheduled for Friday. If I miss it …"
"If you miss it, they'll worry," Nash says. "But we're alive, Aris. We have food. We have heat. We have the machine. We can still do the job."
Nash moves closer, wrapping a blanket around my shoulders over his shirt. He tucks the edges in, sealing me in warmth.
"Listen to me," he says. "We are going to be fine. We'll ration the batteries. We'll track Waldo. And when we get back to town, you can call the university and tell them you did it all without their precious updates."
He tips his head back, exhausted and almost laughing. "Besides, now nobody can interrupt us."
The words hang in the air, heavy with implication. No phone. No connection to the outside world. Just us, the snow, and the wolves.
"No interruptions," I repeat softly.
Nash holds my gaze for a beat longer, then stands up. "I'm going to check the perimeter. Make sure our gray friend didn't follow us."
He grabs his rifle and walks to the edge of the firelight, staring out into the dark.
I watch him go, pulling his shirt tighter around me. I should be terrified. We've lost gear and communication. We're being hunted.
But as I sit by the fire, wearing Nash's clothes, his warm hands still living in my palms, I know I'm in trouble.
I'm not scared. I'm exhilarated.
And that's a variable I definitely didn't account for in my research proposal.