by Ellie Cypher
“I…” I didn’t know what to say. And so, stupidly nodded. “I will Dev, I will.” I placed a hand on his arm. His mouth set in a firm line as he placed his, callused and cracked, atop mine.
“I know you will,” he said. “You aren’t Kit and Harrow’s daughter for nothing.”
The howl of wind outside filled the stretching silence with a strange anticipation.
“Right.” Dev gave a sniff and rubbed his nose. “You, Southerner, grab those bags and let’s get you two the stars out of here. You’ve got a sister to find.”
CHAPTER 25 This Midnight Sun
Dev were more helpful then he gave himself credit for.
“Nocna Mora. Now that’s two days northeast. If you take the straight line, there should be only one ice stream that crosses that path. It’s breaking up real quick, but I were out there not two days ago and it is still passable. If you push it, you might just have a chance,” Dev said.
“Got it,” I said.
Cody emerged from the tent. A funny look on his face. I didn’t have time to worry on it as Dev pressed his hand to mine.
“And I pinched this back. Fixed it for you too. Just in case,” he said, taking his fingers away and leaving Cody’s silver compass in my palm. “No one should get lost out there.”
“Thanks, Dev.” I slid it into my pocket before settling the new pack on my shoulders. It were a little too big and I had to tie the shoulder straps together across the front to keep it from slippin. I took a deep breath. Each cold inhale of air filled my lungs, each pump of blood rolling through my veins, clearing my head.
“Ready,” I said.
“Good. Cause to outrun Bass, you’re gonna need to be. If she wants to find you, Jorie, she will. She’s as tied to this land as the snow. Your only hope is that you can move faster than she can hunt. Those wolves of hers aren’t called Tracers for nothing.” Dev spun on his heel and strode away. He didn’t look back. Not once. I didn’t blame him. It was always easier that way.
“You ready, Cody?” I asked, turning.
“Ready as I’m ever going to be,” he said, staring off to the north. A muddled whiteness was beginning to blot out some of the stars. Another storm were coming. Fast.
“That’s not good.” I pressed my lips thin, eyeing the vapors. Even for the Flats this were getting ridiculous. We’d bare a break from the last one and now more were building fast over the horizon. It were like breaking waves out at sea. The closer they got the shore, the faster and more furious they came.
“Can we outrun it?” he asked.
No. “Yes.”
He looked me over. He heard the lie. A twitch of his lips as he ran a hand over his face.
“I shouldn’t have followed. I’ve only slowed you down. It was selfish. I didn’t…” He stared out at the bleak white, at the gathering storm. “I didn’t understand what I was asking of you, but I do now. And I’m sorry.”
I waved a hand. “Maybe that were true at the start, Cody. You know finding that Rover isn’t just about Bren for me, right?” Not anymore. I were as surprised by my words as Cody were. Interesting.
“You mean that?” he said, eyebrows high.
“What’s done is done. Besides, you ain’t been all that useless. If you weren’t here, who else would I have to tell to stop talkin?” With a twitch of a smile, I took out his uncle’s compass, flicking its face open. East of north. Nocna Mora. “I said I’d help you, Cody Colburn, and I still mean to. We’ll find that Rover. For the both of us.” Together. I placed the compass in his hand.
He took it and gave me a grin, a little rock of a thing, but it were from the heart. Raw. And that were enough for me.
To say the going were rough were an understatement. The soft undulating rises we’d covered on the way here soon became steep walls of slick ice. More than once, both of us had either slipped or fallen through what should’ve been a stable ledge. Legs bursting into a dark hollow of ice below. Right unnerving. All the while the sunlight grew lower and lower.
If the dimming stillness alone weren’t bad enough, there were the other things too. Snaps and creaks and whispers that weren’t really there. Voices that brushed across your skin when there weren’t no breeze. More than once I shot glances over my shoulder. Searching. There were never anyone there. We were alone. Nothing but our own tracks filled with the echoes of starlight rolling over the snow. Right unnerving.
Worse though were the aurora tipping over the horizon. The farther we went, the more the verdant glow of the northern lights overhead shifted, changed. At first I thought I were hallucinating. But soon there were no denying that the comfort of the once soft greens and blues were gone. The night sky burned with red. As if we were walking not into the night but into the heart of a raging fire. As if, just over the curve of the world, great flames raged. And the brighter it became, the darker the red in the white snow bled under our feet. The world began to take on a wicked, menacing feel. Nothing felt… right.
As if the very world had begun to bleed.
I lost track of time as the sky raged in that unsettling bloom of unwelcome color. Finally, when I were near to collapsing, I squeezed Cody’s arm. He started, missing a step. I mimed drinking. I could feel the relief wash out from him. With heavy legs, we both lurched to the ground.
Cody and I slumped back to back, sitting on our packs on the hard ice below us. My whole body ached with the cold. Cody handed me back the flask of water. I slugged back a long pull, the liquid running down my throat like fire. I stumbled to my feet.
Cody groaned. “Jorie, I don’t think I can get up.”
I stretched out my hand toward him. “You can. We can rest at first light, I promise.” We were still too close to Bass to stop now.
Gritting his teeth, Cody grasped my arm and I yanked him up. We hefted our kits up onto our shoulders and with groans got to walking. One foot in front of the other through the uneasy night.
Dawn hit like a sudden shock. A burst of golden light, it cut across the path, cascading across the skin of the world, mixing the reds and greens and whites, torching them away.
We ate a little of what dried meat Dev had given us. It were salty and sweet. I really hoped it were deer. As I pulled at the last stringy rips, some of which found their way to catching in my teeth, I’d an idea.
“Cody, move your pack over here, will ya.”
“Why?”
“Just do it, alright.” With stiff arms and a hiss against the pain, Cody complied, mouth still working slowly against his portion of our beggar’s feast.
When I’d finished we’d a shallow curved hole in the snow three feet wide. I maneuvered his pack and mine around the outside, balanced like a set of timber beams. A frame.
“What are you…?” But then Cody got it, grabbing his own handful of snow. Insulation.
Within no time, we had a rounded, hollowed-out dome of snow. It weren’t a tent, and it weren’t really out of sight. But it were a shelter.
Dropping to my belly, I slithered through the narrow entrance and drug myself inside. Cody were in a moment later. He kicked up snow across the entrance, sealing us in. I pushed my finger through a couple of places in the roof, to let in air and breath out. Protected from the cold but suffocated under the snow were no better than being froze. Dead were dead.
Cody gave me a tired smile, which I returned, shifting around to sit back to back. My fur-covered head resting against Cody’s, his shoulders curled close against mine, I finally let my eyes close.
No howls came as we rested. No one broke down the snow around us. I had more than half expected to be yanked from our sleep kicking and screaming. Instead, when I awoke, I had to kick my way out through an extra foot or so of freshly fallen snow.
It was midday, the weak sun at its zenith. Not a long sleep, but long enough.
All around our shelter, the Flats were blank. Not a scrape or footprint—animal or otherwise—marred the perfect snowy surface of the land. Like the porcelain skin of a doll, it were white
against white, low clouds coating the horizon. Merciful, the wind had died in the night. Though along the horizon the gray-green promise of yet another ice storm were blowing in from the west. Usually we’d a day at least between them. Now we’d only hours. Faster, harder. The storms were getting worse.
Cody handed me the compass. “I think it’ll work now.”
I flicked open the cover. The three happy little metal hands pointed south. I turned round in the snow till those hands found home. Pressing a palm to the comforting warmth of the stone at my neck, I spun, coming to a dead stop facing our new path. Facing Nocna Mora. I marked the path and snapped the cover closed and held it out.
“Keep it,” he said, eyes fixed as hard as mine.
“Ain’t mine to keep.” I shook my head and pressed it into his palm.
With a faint shadow of a smile, Cody slid it into his coat.
We ate our meal in silence. The unwarmed fat crunched between my teeth, surprisingly sticky.
“How much farther?” Cody asked, swallowing the last of his food.
“A day, day and a half at most.” It’s what Dev had said, hoping it were true. But the fact we hadn’t yet been run down and weren’t dangling at the end of Bass’s bad mood were all the proof I needed. Dev hadn’t lied. Least about helping us get away.
“Good. Cause I cannot feel any of my toes.”
I winced. I had been wondering about that. He’d been limping something fierce. Like as not his toes were the size of plumped grapes, red and bloated. It were the first thing they did before they turned black. And rotted off.
I slipped off my gloves. My pinky fingers were none the better. Plump as fish left out in the sun. And they hurt. Still, red and painful weren’t black and dead. Gloves on, I stood back up. Hand wrapping tight around my revolver’s grip. Rest over.
The rolling hills soon turned into an unnerving sea of smooth sheets of ice. Freeze that should have been many feet thick. Only it weren’t. And the farther out we got, the thinner and more uneven it became. Worse if we were to be unlucky enough to meet what I knew passed silent and hungry beneath the ice. White and eyeless, sleeper sharks lurked under the ice. To make matters worse, the fresh dusting of last night’s snow added more slip than grip to our track.
Made for right treacherous walking. Cody had fallen twice. And even I had slipped. The heel of my hand still smarted wicked from my fall. Not that I were complaining. It were the least of my hurts. I rubbed the pendant between my cupped hands, letting the warmth seep slow into my palms. The white mist of my breath swirled delicate soft around the stone, leaking out and away from between my fingers.
We were only an hour out from dusk, passing in the shadow of a great glacier, when I caught it. A muted shifting. I’d heard it for about an hour, and dismissed it as just the wind. Only as I slipped off my hood, the world pressing cold and dangerous still against my skin, there weren’t no wind. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up.
“Cody, hold up! Stop!” I said, pulling my stride up short, skidding a few inches. My right hand thrust straight out in front of me. My arm. It was shaking. Not with cold, but with the moving of the ice below my feet.
Yards in front, Cody came to a slithering stop, his rifle raised quick. He turned back to look at me. His face a mask of worry and confusion.
“What is it, Jorie, are they back? We are almost—”
A low cracking, like the rumble of a sea giant’s bones, reverberated through my body. I stood motionless, my breathing taut, and looked down.
It came again. My eyes went wide and I looked up. Cody dropped his gun to his side. His gaze snapped onto mine.
The sound. It were coming from the ice.
CHAPTER 26 Under Thin Ice
Run!” But there were no need to have hollered it. Cody were already sprinting. In the wrong direction.
In front of him, big splinters of ice shot into the air, churning freezing water and slabs of crystal shot to the skies. They shuddered with a controlled violence.
“Cody! Turn back! Come on,” I screamed it. And I don’t know if he heard me over the din, but he did turn. I waved frantic. He began running toward me.
And then he reached me, slipping and grabbing my arm. I caught him.
“You alright?” I asked.
“I think so.” He brushed hair from his face.
Heart racing, I helped Cody regain his balance.
“That was—” Wicked lines of black burst into the ice under our feet. Horror seized me. The whole thing was breaking.
And we were still on it.
“Go!” I shoved Cody out in front of me. “Run.”
We ran. I darted to my left, away from the snaking black under my feet, and picked up my pace. I didn’t right know where I got the speed, but I reckon if I hadn’t found it, I’d be dead.
Panting, I collapsed, staring back the way we had come. There weren’t nothing there except a great gaping hole. Lashing water. Churning house-size ice boulders were tossed into the air with no more effort than a drunk tossing his dice.
A moulin. A vertical well of fractured ice, it plummeted down into the blue abyss below. A crack split up from the beneath, its tendrils slinking and cracking the meters thick ice all around it. Tears in the frozen skin of the world.
As I stared, a wicked-sharp horn thrust through the surface of the sapphire-clear water. A massive gray narwhal, his back covered in scars and red slashes, crested bright and proud.
I gaped as the beast tossed his giant head, spraying water and ice into the air all around him. I’d never seen them that big. The whale could have fed an entire village on meat and oil and fat. For years.
Then as quick as he materialized, he were gone. Swallowed whole into the blue heart of the freezing waters below. Cody and I exchanged a long look. The serenity of the moment only ruined by our laughter. Hiccups and hollers dispelling the sharp cut of adrenaline snapping through our bones, making it easier to breathe.
“Did you see it?”
“A whale!”
I wiped the frost from my eyes and stood up, sobering quickly when my vision, blurry with the flush of flight, broke sudden into focus. My stomach dropped.
The ice were unstable for hundreds of yards around. Fractured. In every direction. Save one. The way we’d come.
“We’re gonna have to go back.” A deep groan escaped my lips. Wincing, I hefted my pack and got to walking. Cody following quick at my side. From the sky overhead, little flakes of snow began to fall. Cold and pure and picturesque. And very much unwanted.
We broke for lunch late.
“Who do you think we’ll find in Nocna Mora?” Cody asked.
I glanced in that direction and away. “I—I don’t right know. Bren, I hope.”
A flicker of a smile played across his lips. “I know, me too. Hoping, I mean. But do you think we will find the Rover?”
“Yes.” We had to. There weren’t no other options to entertain.
“Do you think he’ll be waiting for us? Him and that wolf?”
“Yes.” It certain weren’t a pleasant thought. True ones hardly ever were.
Cody looked thoughtful for a long time. “I just can’t shake the feeling we are running into a trap. One we can’t see.”
“Worse comes to worst, we fight. You shot that ox well enough.” I ran a hand over my bruised ribs.
Cody snorted. “I guess I did. But that was different. We didn’t have any other choice. It came at us, not the other way around. If I hadn’t shot it, the beast would have killed you.” He pushed the snow in a circle at his feet. “I never have been very good at fighting. My uncle always said so. Told me I’d not the aptitude for it.”
“And you think I do?”
Cody looked at me doubtful.
“Fair enough.” My stomach gave a funny little lurch at that. But I’d no right to it. The notion that I were anything but that uncaring, that hard. I’d given him no reason to think anything else. “Whatever happens, you and me, we’ll handle it, alri
ght?”
Cody frowned.
“I’ll just figure it out when it comes.” Like I always did.
“When it comes is not a plan. You said you had a plan.” Unappeased, Cody sunk his teeth into one of the last pale yellow fish Dev had given us.
“I said I would think of something and I will. We’ve been a bit too busy trying not to die, if you ain’t noticed.” Even to me my words came out defensive and harsh. I cringed. Cody were right and I knew it.
It were long odds, us makin it alive. Even longer were the chance of us making it there with all our wits intact. High risk, high reward. Sometimes one bad shot were all you got. Way I figured, if you had it you took it. From over his dinner, Cody looked up at me expectant like.
“Well, I ain’t planning on taking ’em by force, if that makes you feel any better.”
He raised an eyebrow and smartly held his tongue.
I tossed my hands into the air.
Only thing worse than a man who were right was a man smart enough not to tell you so.
CHAPTER 27 A Hollowing Light
It were there. Right there.
I’d swear to it, though in the two days we’d been out here, I could bare tell what were real and what were delusion. I rubbed at the ice covering my eyes, at the pain of the crystals forming at the edges of my skin, the cracks in my lips. Though it did no good. My vision, it didn’t right change. There weren’t no mistaking it.
A light. Bright and burning.
From out in the misty darkness, a single lantern shone. So small and dim at first that I could bare understand what I saw. I stumbled in the snow. Cody, not three paces behind, staggered to catch me. We had walked near to all day and all night, though I could no longer be sure, as the heavens had become more and more alight until naught but red skies burned overhead. It had been alright, until a storm had blown in.
