Over Freezing Altitudes

by Kate MacLeod

  It was deepest in the center. And hopefully—she bit back a wave of rabid fear on how little concrete data that hope was based on—hopefully less likely to be hiding a rocky protrusion there, farthest from the walls.

  Scout got up and took a few steps back, ignoring the excitement of the dogs, who thought she was coming back to them.

  If she died doing this, they would die too, tied to a wall until they starved or were killed by the assassins out of spite . . .

  No, they would be just as dead if she stayed with them, without Daisy and all the equipment. She had to do this.

  Scout took a deep breath and ran forward, bounding along the road until she reached a steeper part of the curve.

  Then she launched herself up and out as hard as she could.

  For a moment, she felt like she would keep flying up forever. But then her momentum slowed. She reached a hand out as if she could catch hold of one of the clouds above her, or the glimmering flash that might be a ship coming down to dock.

  Then she started to fall.

  She wished she had thought this through more. Should she pull her arms and legs in tightly like a torpedo? Or would that just bury her too deep to climb out again?

  Would she smash like a rotten tomato if she flung her arms and legs out wide to spread out the impact over as much snow as possible?

  She hit bottom before she even had time to decide. Her heels touched down first but slipped out from under her, and she landed on her buttocks.

  Then she was flat on her back, but by that point, she was already sliding over the frozen crust of the snow. She was picking up speed, but even when she managed to lift her head enough to look down at her feet, there was nothing to be seen past the spray of snow she was throwing up into the air.

  If any of the assassins were looking down now, they’d surely see her.

  Had she screamed when she jumped? She didn’t think she had, but her mind was already repressing the memory of that moment.

  She reached the low point between two snow mounds and slipped up to the top of the next one without appreciably slowing down. She tried dragging her mittened hands to slow herself down, but the crust was too thick to punch through, and she could get no purchase.

  Then her feet collided with the remains of the bridge, and she stopped with jarring suddenness.

  Scout sat up and looked around. Where had Daisy been?

  Then she looked up and was relieved to see none of the assassins looking back down at her. But they would have that gun rigged soon enough, and she had to get back up onto the road to retrieve the dogs before they did.

  Scout climbed over the remains of the bridge. She was sure Daisy had been just a little further downhill.

  Then she saw a skitter of snow, a layer of debris from the bridge dancing over the still-frozen crust of the snow mound beneath it. She looked back up the slope until she saw another skitter form, small bits of snow hopping up into the air then sliding down, catching at others.

  She scrambled over to it and started punching through the ice.

  Daisy would have to hear that, at least.

  She kept at it, breaking open the crust with her fist, then crawling a little further along to punch again. If Daisy could swim through the snow, she would find the last bit easier to get through.

  She hoped the shattering of the crust wasn’t as loud above as it was below, echoing along the narrow walls of the ravine.

  A rush of snow slid behind where she sat on one hip, punching ice. It buried her feet and legs up to her knees, and she turned over onto her back to scramble away.

  Then the snow looked like it was boiling up like an angry anthill, wave after wave of ants spilling up and out, only this was all snow.

  Then it erupted, snow exploding everywhere. Scout wiped wet chunks off her goggles and saw Daisy on her hands and knees, breathing in deep gulps of the thin mountain air.

  “Thanks,” she said, her voice a hoarse croak.

  “The pack?” Scout asked.

  Daisy was still breathing hard, but she turned a bit so Scout could see the pack still on her back.

  That was a relief.

  “We have to get back up to the dogs,” Scout said. “The assassins are getting ready to fire a line across. We don’t have any time.”

  Daisy nodded and pushed herself to her feet. Scout ran ahead to lead the way back to where she had jumped. By the time she reached the indent in the snow where she had landed, Daisy had regained her breath.

  “Climb on my back,” Daisy said.

  “Are you sure?” Scout asked. Daisy didn’t look even half recovered from her time under the snow.

  Daisy didn’t speak, just nodded. She turned to face the wall, finding handholds and footholds before Scout had even worked out a way to get up on Daisy’s back. She hopped up, wrapping her legs around Daisy’s waist. It was awkward, draping over the bulky bag, trying to interlock her feet in the heavy boots, and Daisy grunted as she took Scout’s weight.

  But then she started to climb, an insanely fast crawl up the cliffside, hand and foot, hand and foot. Scout resisted the urge to hang on more tightly, aware that her arms were already cutting off Daisy’s breathing. Instead, she just squeezed her eyes shut and waited for the herky-jerky journey to end.

  She gave a little yelp when Daisy was suddenly sprawled out horizontally under her, but she opened her eyes and realized they were once more on the road. Scout climbed off Daisy and crawled forward to quiet her anxious dogs before they could start barking.

  Then there was a loud retort, echoing all around them.

  The gun with the rope. They had fired it.

  Loose bits of snow were dislodging from the mountain over them, raining down in powdery clumps. One the size of a snowball landed on Shadow’s head and he groaned in protest.

  Daisy picked her head up and looked at the three of them.

  “We’ve got to move,” she said and forced herself to her feet.

  Scout didn’t need to be told twice.

  17

  It was easy to make fast time on the road, Scout bounding as high as she dared, the dogs sprinting alongside her. Daisy looked like she was maintaining an easy jog, but she was keeping pace with them without any trouble, and Scout knew if she put on the steam and left them behind, Daisy would probably be in the city by lunchtime.

  The road curved ahead, following a deep groove in the mountainside. Scout followed the path of it ahead of them with her eyes as the groove went from valley to deep but narrow ravine. The path followed the ravine until it ended as if at a wall, a space no wider than Scout could spread her arms.

  Then the path turned and came back the way it had come, back up the ravine but on the far side.

  Scout could see a point where she thought she could simply jump across, saving quite a bit of time by not following the road along the entire curve.

  But that left a long expanse to run down first, meters where the chasm was too wide to jump but the road would be well within weapons’ range. A very long expanse, and they would be completely exposed.

  “They’re too close behind us for this,” Scout said over her shoulder.

  “No other way to go,” Daisy said. “Look, there’s a cave or tunnel or whatever on the other side. We just have to get to it. We’ll have cover there.”

  “We’ll be easy targets up to that point,” Scout said.

  “So will they.”

  Scout didn’t find that comforting. There were six of them. Three for Scout and three for Daisy.

  Even if it was one for Scout and five for Daisy, Scout still felt greatly outmatched.

  The dogs kept charging all the way to the end of the switchback, but Scout jumped across at the first place she was confident she could reach the other side.

  The dogs would catch up. And they were unlikely to be targets. They were only in danger so much as Scout was in danger. She had to get to cover for their sakes as much as her own.

  “Heads up!” Daisy shouted just as Scout lande
d on the far side of the ravine, stumbling forward into the cliff wall and bumping her nose hard enough to bring a metallic taste to the back of her throat. It must be bleeding, but she wasn’t going to unwind the scarf enough to check.

  Daisy had stopped in the middle of the road, firing her gun until their pursuers ducked back behind the cover of a rocky protuberance. Scout drew her own gun and fired, not aiming at anyone in particular, just driving them further back around the corner.

  They would be back, but at least Daisy had enough time to get across now.

  The dogs ran past Scout, tongues lolling as they panted, but they seemed to know what the end goal was. Scout put her gun away, and despite not having caught her breath she pushed away from the ground, forcing her legs back into the bounding rhythm.

  Just a bit further. She could see the tunnel. It was so distant it appeared tiny, but she could see it.

  Daisy gave another shout, but it wasn’t enough warning this time. The air around Scout was suddenly full of darts. How could six people fire so many at once? They were like swarms of angry wasps hissing through the air, bouncing off the rock wall behind her.

  Scout put her head down and tried to run harder. Even in the heavy boots, her ankles wanted to turn; her soles threatened to slip over icy patches disguising themselves as rocks.

  Her muscles were burning. She was getting tired. Not enough recovery time between these bouts of athletic prowess.

  Another vision invaded her mind: herself, tumbling all the way back down the mountain after falling off the edge of the road. The world turning end over end with jumbled views of the village growing ever larger as she picked up speed, tumbling towards it.

  That was silly. Surely she’d hit her head first, and everything after that would just be black nothingness.

  Scout heard the loud cracks of Daisy firing her pistol once more, but the cascade of darts plunking all around Scout didn’t slow. More bits of snow were sliding down from above, raining down on the road around Scout. Gert dodged around a particularly large clump, her wide paws stumbling frighteningly close to the edge of the road before she lurched back to the cliffward side.

  Then she and Shadow disappeared into the darkness of the tunnel. Safe.

  Scout’s legs were on fire, her muscles starting to twitch in random quirks that didn’t help her bounding at all. Even with the nanite, she couldn’t seem to get enough air. Black nothingness started to eat at the edges of her vision, closing down to a pinpoint that was just the mouth of the tunnel in front of her.

  Scout had pushed herself this hard on her bike before. She hadn’t quit then when nothing was on the line but her own pride and, to be honest, boredom.

  There was no way she was going to quit now when it actually mattered.

  Daisy yelled a fearsome cry and sent another volley of gunfire across the ravine. This time the darts did stop. Scout thought she heard Daisy give a shout of triumph, but it was hard to tell, her heart was beating in her ears so loudly.

  Then she reached the darkness of the tunnel, a welcome change from the blinding snow. Scout shoved the tinted goggles back onto her forehead, but as she collapsed against the side of the cave, she saw the effect wasn’t complete. The edges of her vision were still dark. Were her glasses broken?

  She turned her head, looking back out the tunnel mouth to Daisy sprinting toward them, and realized it wasn’t the glasses. It was her eyes.

  Or more likely something in her head. At any rate, the black closing in around her didn’t mean her glasses were broken.

  It meant she was passing out.

  Wow—she had no idea she had gotten so out of shape.

  Scout bent forward, hands on her knees, and waited for the feeling to pass, but that just made the slipping-away feeling intensify.

  The dogs were looking up at her, heads tilted in questioning concern. She tried to give them a smile, but with all the layers of scarf around her face, there was no way they could see it.

  Scout’s muscles were still doing that random firing thing. They were also tightening up, like everything in her body was trying to make a fist at once, fists so tight they ached.

  Then the ache kicked up to outright pain, and Scout groaned as she fell to her hands and knees. The dogs rushed forward to lick at her, or at least lick at her clothing. Scout tried to brush them back, but her hands had become fluttering, useless things.

  She managed to sit back on her heels and tried to massage away the pain in the back of her neck. She jerked her hand away as something sharp pricked at her finger.

  Then she reached back again, to see what that prick had been.

  Daisy reached the tunnel mouth just as Scout figured out that it was a dart there on the palm of her mittened hand. She held it up for Daisy to see.

  Then she pitched forward. She was vaguely aware of a fresh burst of pain as her still-sore nose collided with the stone floor of the cavern.

  But not even the pain could hold her in the world. Which was just as well; she felt another spasm of muscle seizures gripping her just as her mind slipped away to blissful black.

  18

  It hurt to breathe. Scout would draw air in until the knives stabbing between all her ribs made it impossible to inhale further. When she exhaled, it was like her lungs were pulling away from the sides of her chest cavity as they deflated, tearing something all around her insides.

  Then she’d breathe in again.

  She couldn’t draw a full breath; the knives made that impossible. She almost wished she could just stop; the pain was so unrelenting.

  But she had a vague sort of memory that she had stopped breathing at some point a moment before her awareness had returned, and that had been an entirely different kind of horror. So she kept moving the tiny amounts of air in and out and tried to figure out what was happening to her.

  It felt like something was sitting on top of her chest, pinning her down. Or maybe her whole body; her arms and legs felt cold and remote. Had there been another avalanche?

  No, there had been a dart. She remembered that part clearly.

  Scout struggled to open her eyes. It hurt, like her eyelids had become adhered to her eyeballs and were tearing away bits of flesh as she lifted them. But she couldn’t whimper or cry.

  Not with those knives digging into her chest.

  At last she got her eyes part of the way open, the most she could manage physically but more than she needed given the blinding whiteness of the world outside.

  She had forgotten about that, the brightness of it. She blinked a few times, not as fast or as hard as she was trying to, but enough to be sure her eyes were really focusing.

  Her glasses and goggles were gone. No protection against the sunlight reflecting off the snow.

  She was just about to close her eyes again, to shut that brightness out, when a shadow eclipsed the light and she realized she wasn’t out in the snow. She was in the tunnel, several meters away from the mouth.

  “Scout,” Daisy said, and Scout realized it was Daisy’s body blocking the light. “Just rest easy. I gave you the antidote, but I was nearly too late. The dart was loaded with a paralytic. Reversible, and every assassin carries the antidote. It was in both of our packs. Which tells me Shi Jian really does want to take you alive.”

  She leaned closer, and Scout felt Daisy’s warm, bare hands on her cheeks as she gently lifted Scout’s eyelids and looked into her eyes.

  “Which leaves one question,” Daisy went on as she continued her examination. “These assassins fired on you when you were too far away for them to reach you in time, especially as they knew I was there and prepared to stop them getting to you. And unless they did a post-battle inventory, which isn't protocol, they didn't know I have the antidote to their new paralytic. Risky. So, did they mess up on accident or on purpose?”

  Scout heard Gert make a soft whine, then her field of vision jostled back and forth. Gert was leaning up against her? She couldn’t feel it at all.

  “Don’t worry, girly-gir
l,” Daisy said to Gert. “She’ll be okay in a few hours.”

  Scout heard another groaning noise but realized this time it was coming from the back of her own throat. A few hours was nearly all the daylight they had left.

  The other assassins had to be closing in on them even as they sat here hiding in a tunnel that was the most obvious hiding place, being directly on the only road Scout had seen.

  Daisy moved out of Scout’s field of vision. Scout heard rustling sounds, like Daisy was digging through her pack again. Then there was the skitter of dogs’ nails on the stone floor as the two of them left Scout’s sides to rush to where Daisy was setting something down on the floor.

  She must have heated it up, whatever it was. Scout could smell roasted meat and carrots.

  Her stomach growled. That must be a good sign, right? That her stomach wasn’t paralyzed?

  Daisy came back to where Scout could see her, still smiling a smile that Scout knew was meant to reassure her.

  Scout gathered all of her energy and just managed to croak, “Go.”

  Daisy frowned. “No,” she said.

  Scout narrowed her eyes, drawing her brows down sternly. She had practiced a lot of nonverbal communication during her time with the tribunal enforcers. Daisy clearly understood that Scout was trying to repeat her command for Daisy to go on without her.

  “No,” Daisy said again, more firmly. “Not even. I already told you, I came to get you because I need you. I’m not going on without you, so you can stop glowering at me like that. No.”

  Scout gave up with a sigh. At least the knives were easing now. She could breathe something closer to normally.

  “Why?” Scout managed to whisper.

  Daisy moved out of sight, then returned a moment later with a steaming mug in her hands. She sat down on the tunnel floor turned sideways so she could see both Scout and the world through the mouth of the tunnel beyond the feasting dogs. She glanced both ways as she took a first tentative sip from her mug.

  She grimaced. “Low air pressure is a bitch,” she said but drank her tea anyway. “I’m not sure which why you mean, but I’ll give it a shot because I need you to stay awake and keep breathing. The antidote works faster if you’re awake and trying to do things rather than lying inert. Understood?”