Chapter 39
Ice Wall
We were going to die out here if we didn't move faster.
"Stay close," I shouted.
Zo came up on my left, shoulders hunched over.
Behind us, the troll kept its own pace, each step punching clean through the frozen crust and into the dirt.
The sound I'd been hearing since we left the cave wasn't low anymore.
It was a roar. Something massive was moving through the storm from the north.
"We need to move faster!"
I'd thought the Long Dark was the worst this place could throw at us.
I was an idiot. The wind hit in waves, each one harder than the last, shoving me sideways, trying to fold me in half.
Frozen rain turned to sleet. Sleet turned chunks of ice that cracked against my head and shoulders hard enough to leave welts through the armor.
"Fish! I can't see you!" Zo cried out.
I stopped and turned; she was three feet behind me. Her face was white, her blue hair frozen stiff.
"Grab my shoulder."
She did.
"Don't let go."
Her grip tightened. That was answer enough.
I pushed the worms down through my legs, letting them spread under my boots and test the ground. Ice and rock and frozen mud, my worms mapped it all, bracing against the worst patches.
The roar from the north swelled. I looked back over my shoulder; the troll was there behind us, Sadie still on its back. She'd given up shielding her face and had both arms wrapped around the troll's head.
And then the wind hit from the side. Then from behind. Then head-on.
The storm was circling us. Tightening. Boxing us in like a living thing that had decided we were the problem.
I squinted north through stinging eyes, and my stomach dropped—a shape sat on the horizon, darker than the storm itself.
A wall. Not rock, not cloud. Just nothing, rolling across the tundra and swallowing everything it touched.
The ground ahead of it was there. The ground behind it wasn't.
Zo kept pace at my side without complaint. She was eating the wind's force, turning it into fuel, burning it off just to stay upright.
Wind and ice and a darkness rushed toward us, and the noise it made was not weather. It was the sound of the world tearing at itself apart.
"Over there." Mabel extended from my collar and pointed with her whole body, rigid as a bone needle aimed at something ahead of us. "That rock face is climbable. Probably. I refuse to die in a field."
I saw it, a steep cliff face. If we could get up high enough, above the worst of the ground-level wind, we might survive the wall passing over us.
Maybe.
We hit the base of the ridge just as the storm wall caught us. The wind slammed into my back like a truck, sending me face-first into stone. Zo grabbed my arm and pulled me upright before I could fully fall, her fingers iron around my bicep.
"Climb!"
The ridge rose above us, coated in a skin of black ice. I grabbed the first handhold I could find and pulled myself up. My hands went numb the instant they touched the rock, but the worms flooded in, heating them from the inside.
The wind tried to peel me off. I slipped, one hand torn free, one leg kicking at air, the world spinning sideways. For a bad half-second, I hung there by one arm and one foot, the storm pulling at my back. Worms punched out through my palms and drove into the stone. I dragged myself up.
Zo had already reached a ledge ten feet above me. She'd braced herself against the wall, feet planted, one arm reaching down.
"Move your ass, Fish!"
I pulled myself up another foot. Then another. My shoulders burned. The muscles in my forearms were cramping, threatening to lock up, and I fed the worms into them to keep them firing.
The wind reversed. It came from below—straight up the rock face—and for one weightless second, my feet left the stone, and my body lifted.
Nothing holding me but frozen air and the worms' grip.
Then it reversed again and slammed me chest-first into the ridge hard enough to empty my lungs in a single grunt.
I hung there breathless. Stars in my vision. The worms in my hands were all that kept me on the wall.
"Fish!"
Zo's voice. Close. I looked up; her hand was right there, reaching.
I grabbed for it. The wind hit me again from the side. My grip broke. My feet kicked loose. I dropped.
Worms shot from both forearms and stabbed into the rock, driving deep, and I jerked to a stop so hard my shoulders nearly dislocated. I hung there in open air, the storm screaming past me, my body swinging like a pendulum.
Hand over hand. The worms retracted and drove in again, higher up. Retracted. Drove in. Each movement cost more than the last. I couldn't feel my hands anymore—just the worms inside them, working, doing the job for me.
Zo's hand closed around my wrist. She yanked hard, and I came over the lip of the ledge on my stomach, gasping, every muscle in my body shaking.
"You good?" she shouted over the wind.
I nodded.
The troll reached the ledge a few seconds later, pulling itself up while Sadie clung to its back with her arms and legs locked tight.
She slid off and sat down next to me without a word.
Her face was cut in several places from the ice, thin lines of red running down her cheeks, and she just stared out into the white storm beyond the ledge.
Zo dropped down with her back against the rock wall. Her face was pale, her lips blue-grey, and frost had formed on her eyelashes. Her hands were shaking. But she was smiling.
"We actually made it," she said.