by eden Hudson
“It’s just after midnight.” Carina leaned across the dip in the tent floor—the cold well I could vaguely remember digging out—and handed me a Rational Gourmet ration. “I slept through my first few alarms, didn’t even hear them go off. Luckily, I’d say the pipe hasn’t clogged and cut off our oxygen yet, judging by the way we’re both still breathing. I was about to go check it when you woke up.”
“Sounds like somebody being tortured out there.” I pulled the ration’s heating tab and waited while the chems in the bottom reacted, quick-boiling the contents. “Tie your rope to my ankle before you go out. Then you can follow it back inside if you get turned around.”
“Good idea.” Carina brought the climbing rope out of her bag. Through my many layers of socks, I couldn’t feel the rope, just the yanking as she worked and the pressure as it tightened around my ankle.
“Take it easy, Carina,” I said between bites of turkey and noodles. “I’m not your fiancé. I’m not going to abandon you without an explanation if you don’t hogtie me down.”
Her green eyes snapped up to meet mine.
Heat flashed through my body as I realized what I’d said.
The only person who can catch you is you, Lorne taunted me.
I kept my face straight and made sure not to hurry through my next bite or my next move.
“I’m serious,” I said as if I thought her expression was meant to convey disbelief. “I’ll always answer your messages. Well, as long as you don’t start ignoring me again like you did after you got out of that prison pit. I won’t be a party to anybody’s childish pouting, Bloodslinger, not even yours.”
Seconds passed. I kept eating as though nothing significant had happened.
Doubt flickered across Carina’s face. She couldn’t be sure what I’d meant by “abandon,” and she was starting to wonder whether she had only heard what she’d been hoping to hear.
“What?” I paused with a bite halfway to my mouth. “Did you wuss out on checking our vent?”
“No.” Carina looked back down at her work to hide the uncertainty, but I saw her dark brows slide together.
When she was done, she wound the other end of the rope around her wrist, tied it off, and crawled out of the tent and into the howling night.
Unacceptable! I slammed my head back onto the mattress a few times. I could’ve blown the whole plan because of one poorly chosen word. Absolutely unacceptable!
Black, crawling treble hooks twisted deeper into my muscle fibers. My shoulders twitched and jumped. I licked off the little fork that came with the ration, then dug the tines into the inside of my left bicep. They punctured the biothermal material and stabbed into my arm.
I felt one tine break the skin, but I didn’t let up. The extra layers would hide any visible damage, and this was too important. When you’re evenly matched, it’s not the person who plays best that wins, it’s the one who blunders least.
FIFTEEN:
Jubal
The next day brought more terrible deep-snow hiking with the added bonus that our muscles were stiff, and every step was agony. The heat that seeped into our muscles as we hiked eased some of the stiffness, and the cold that crept into our extremities numbed a little of the pain, but cramps were the main problem, debilitating us when we least expected it. A combination of supplement overdose and violent pounding of the affected areas were the best either of us could do to treat them. In this environment, the occasional PCM fit actually came as a relief.
But the plague and cramps weren’t the only things slowing us down. We’d made almost six miles the day before. At approximately seven miles from the dispatch station, all the easy hiking ran out. Jagged mountains grew up where the ice sheets had run into each other, and endless crevasses lurked below where the sheets had pulled apart. Some of the fissures were narrow enough to step over. Others were way too wide, and forced us to go hundreds of yards out of the way to get around.
After Carina almost walked into one well-hidden chasm, we tied a rope from her waist to mine with about twenty feet of slack between. If one of us slipped while climbing a jagged peak or broke through the snowpack into a hidden crevasse, the other could anchor their ice ax in the snow and stop the fall.
Near mid-morning, we stopped on the far side of an icy mountain for a quick break and round of Qal-O-Run bars.
“Good visibility.” Carina squinted at the horizon. “This must be the tallest peak for miles. Should get a little easier from here on out.”
“Know what I like about you?” I said, fighting my Qal-O-Run’s packaging. My fingers didn’t want to grip it. The cold seemed to be exacerbating the beautiful corpse’s calcification in my finger joints. “Your blatant disregard for reality.”
“I’m right,” she said. “Look at the angles. They’ll be easier to get up and down.”
I gave up trying to open my Qal-O-Run bar with my fingers, and ripped the packaging open with my teeth. I spit out the shiny bit of plastic.
“Easier is subjective, mainly to sanity level,” I said, then took a bite.
Carina shrugged. “Whatever it takes.”
We finished our break and refilled our hydration bladders in silence.
As we were staggering back to our feet, she asked, “The target area’s over a mile wide. How will we know what to look for once we get inside it?”
“Anomalies in time,” I said. “If the looped weather patterns here aren’t a side effect of the Garden of Time, then I’m a slime-whore’s grandson. Our anomalies will probably be similar, but on a more concentrated scale.”
Carina nodded. “And once we’ve found a concentrated anomaly? According to all your ancient texts, the Garden of Time is a cave. It’s bound to be with the rest of the land, buried underneath the ice cap. How will we get to it?”
“By digging, obviously,” I said. “Maybe explosives if the area isn’t an avalanche risk, but mainly we’ll dig.”
“Speaking of sanity level,” she said, turning to lead the way down the mountain.
She wasn’t looking my way, but it was my turn to shrug, so I did. “Whatever it takes.”
***
We managed to avoid slipping into any fissures in the ice or breaking our necks falling from mountaintops long enough to get our seven hours of hiking in, but because of the terrain, we only covered a total of two and a half horizontal miles.
Getting our shelter together took longer than the day before because we had to test the depth of the snow on all sides to make sure we wouldn’t break through into an unseen crevasse in the middle of the night.
Carina had just popped open the tent when the blizzard slammed into the world outside. It hit so hard in our new location that I could feel the force even under the snow. But I was too tired to worry about the weather for long. I had just enough time to roll out my ThinSuL8 mattress and flop down before exhaustion dragged me into sweet nothingness.
This time when I woke in the middle of the night, I knew where I was and what was screaming. Carina was still asleep, though. I couldn’t figure out why I’d woken up until I realized that I was shaking, and my body felt like a block of ice.
There must’ve been a hole somewhere in my ThinSuL8 mattress. While I slept, the piece of junk had deflated until the only thing between me and the ice was the mattress’s thin insulant layer and the tent’s floor.
I’d never felt that kind of deep-down cold before. I was so cold that my bones ached. There was no telling what kind of damage I would’ve sustained if I hadn’t woken up right then.
I groped around in the dark until I found my bag at the foot of my deflated mattress. Working from memory, I located the twelve-pack of mattresses and tried to pull out a new one. My fingers didn’t want to grasp the material. Every time I flexed my fingers to squeeze, I felt a clicking in my knuckles.
I resisted the urge to growl and tossed the mattress packaging back at my bag. Screw it. Who needed a new mattress when there was a perfectly good one already inflated and warm?
&nbs
p; Still shivering, I felt around the floor for the hollow spot that indicated the cold well I couldn’t remember digging before I passed out. Just past that, my fingertips bumped into the edge of Carina’s mattress.
I grabbed my sleeping bag and climbed over.
Carina jerked awake. “Hm? Van Zandt? What’re you doing?”
“Freezing. Scoot over.”
“What—” She lurched up to sitting. “Why are you getting in my bed?”
“Mine’s got a hole in it.” I had to shove half of my sleeping bag underneath hers to fit them both on her side of the tent, but I was okay with that. It was warm in there.
“So go inflate another one.” She pulled my arm out from under her. “Stop that!”
I glared at her. “I am dying, Carina.”
“Not fast enough.”
“Can you seriously justify leaving a dying man to sleep on the ice because you were too selfish to scooch three inches to your left? If you were really a Jesusfreak—”
Carina made a sound halfway between a grunt and a huff and flopped down on her side, facing away from me.
“See, this is why nobody likes you religious fanatics.” I pushed and wiggled until I was wedged into my sleeping bag between Carina and the mattress. I grabbed the corner of her bag and dragged it across the bottom half of mine. “Here, put your legs here.”
“There’s enough room for both of us to sleep on our sides, not touching,” she said.
“I’m a back- or stomach-sleeper only,” I said. “You’re welcome to stay crammed up against that wall and lose your tits to frostbite—as if anybody would notice—but I’m going to be over here sleeping in a warm, cozy pile with all the handsome people in the tent.”
Carina didn’t move. I grabbed her sleeping bag and rolled her onto her back, leaving her right shoulder lying across the left side of my chest and my left hip planted in what felt like the crack of her ass.
“For crying out loud,” I said. “You’d think eighteen months’ near-starvation would’ve helped you drop a couple pounds.”
She jabbed me in the gut with her elbow. The air whoofed out of my lungs. I clutched my stomach.
“Still pretty soft around the middle, huh?” she asked.
I winced. “Starting to stiffen up. Try that again a little lower.”
That wiped the smirk off her face.
“Just shut up and go to sleep, Van Zandt.”
I grabbed her shoulder before she could roll off me and retreat to the edge of the bed.
“Come on, Carina, I almost froze to death. All I want is to bring my core temperature back up. Just try to be an adult about this for one night.”
She sighed, but after a few heartbeats, she shook my hand off and lay back down, the right half of her body and sleeping bag blanketing me in heat.
After a while, our wristpiece lights timed out.
I wiggled my back and butt until I was comfortable, then made a big production out of sighing contentedly. “Thank dry land you’re fat enough to keep us both warm.”
Carina’s head whispered against the sleeping bag material as she shook it.
“You literally have no redeeming characteristics,” she said.
I grinned into the darkness. “You know, that would only be a problem for somebody who was looking for a reason to redeem me.”
SIXTEEN:
Nick
Nick folded his arms across his chest and scowled down at the muddy ground around Re Suli’s ash pit. What he really wanted to do was grab the witch by her neck and choke the life out of her, but he couldn’t. The soul jar wouldn’t let him.
Handing over the schematics for the Tect’s new mech suit had made Nick sick to his stomach. The wave of relief at being released from the compulsion had crashed against his anger and shame that the best work he’d ever done was in service to betraying his oath to the Guild. The Guild was his family—literally, in the case of his fiancée, parents, and siblings—and Re Suli was forcing him to build up the defenses of the tribe that wanted to wipe them out. It was only a matter of time until she started asking him to list the Guild’s mechanical weaknesses and build weapons that would exploit them.
Right on the heels of that came the crushing realization that the witch’s order not to talk unless she or the Tect asked a question meant Nick would never be able to talk Het into getting his wristpiece. Nick had to face the fact that he was Re Suli’s bitch until he found a way to retrieve his wristpiece himself—a long pole or branch was starting to look downright plausible—or somebody realized he was missing and started looking for him.
He’d been in Courten for eight days now. Carina had to know he was missing. Even when one of them was on an active, they messaged each other multiple times a day. She would be searching for him. He just hoped to God that when she figured out where he was, she sent somebody else to get him. Showing her beautiful face in Soam would bring every rabid anti-Guild asshole running. She would end up back in a prison pit or worse.
A crinkle of paper from across the ash pit got Nick’s attention.
The Tect had finished studying the schematics. Now she was looking at Nick. Her face never changed expression. Maybe it couldn’t. But he got the feeling she was looking at him with a new respect.
“Right pretty, ain’t it?” Re Suli said.
The Tect ignored the witch. “These are all the components you need to build this suit?”
Nick nodded, still scowling, before the blanket order to answer every question they asked forced a “Yes” out of him.
“Then let’s us get goin’,” the witch said, slapping a hand on her bare thigh. “Het, fetch us a ride. Four-passenger. Sol, have some a the faithful pick up the groceries, and tell ’em to meet us at the factory.”
A momentary panic flared up in Nick’s stomach. If he left Courten, he’d never get his hands on his wristpiece, and it would make finding him that much harder for anybody who came looking.
Re Suli turned to him and smiled as if she’d heard his thoughts.
“You need to rest that pretty brain a yers, sugar,” she said. “It’s gonna be right busy soon enough.”
SEVENTEEN:
Jubal
The third day out was the worst by far. I felt as if I’d been chewed up and shat out by a needle-mouthed bass. Muscles I’d never paid any attention to before were screaming. The face skin my hood and goggles left exposed to the elements felt like it had been scoured with coarse grit sandpaper.
Carina didn’t complain—she didn’t say anything at all, actually—but it was obvious from her growing limp, determined silence, and the hard lines of her face that she wasn’t having fun, and I was too exhausted to poke her until she quit pouting.
After we made camp that night, I settled onto my new mattress and checked the nav app.
“Balls!”
From her side of the tent, Carina’s eyes flew open. “What?”
“We only made one and a half miles today.”
“We should’ve jumped that crevasse,” she said, bringing up a disagreement we’d had earlier.
“On your leg?” I closed out of the nav app and let my aching arms drop to my stomach. “You would’ve made it halfway, then we both would’ve gotten pulled in. I’m here to avoid dying, not find awful new ways to do it.”
“It’s done with now,” she said. “No way we can change it by arguing.”
“Thanks for that unfathomable wisdom,” I said, letting my eyes drift closed.
“You must really be tired,” she said, amusement giving her voice a slight upwards lilt. “You’re usually more creative with your insults.”
“I’ll think of a cleverer way to call you an ugly moron tomorrow, Carina. Right now I’m tired. Go to sleep.”
***
Day four proved Carina’s ridiculous assertion that the hiking would get easier unequivocally wrong by dropping a range of sharp-looking little hills in front of us interwoven with gaping chasms I was not about to try hopping over. The cold, exhaustion, and co
nstant exertion ground us down, and not being able to cover more than a hundred yards an hour made us both seethe.
Of course, as soon as I pointed out how wrong she’d been about the landscape, Carina went right back to pouting.
“What?” I gasped between breaths as we clambered toward yet another saw-toothed summit. “There’s no point—getting mad at—math. It’s empirical. Empirically, we’re making—half the pace—we did—yesterday. Be lucky to put—a whole mile—on the board—before camp today.”
I glanced up just in time to see Carina shake her head.
“Only person in the world,” she huffed and swung her leg over a serrated ledge, “who’d waste his breath—at a time like this—pointing out someone else’s faults.” With a groan, she pulled herself up onto the ledge and flopped down on her back. “Literally no one but you.”
“Just one of the—many services—I provide—free of charge.” I hooked my ice ax over the ledge she was on and grabbed it with my free hand.
But when I tried to pull myself up, I couldn’t. My biceps flat-out refused to contract.
“Carina,” I yelled. “Are you—gonna lay up there—and pout, or—are you gonna—help me?”
She let out a little puff of laughter, then turned onto her stomach and grabbed my wrist.
For what could’ve been a single heartbeat or the space of a hundred, I felt the movement of galaxies. This was the angle she’d had on me when she was hanging from that chopper over Soam; this was the same relief she must’ve felt when I grabbed her hand, the comprehension that she had someone on her side, ready to save her the extra struggle. A sudden warmth filled my gut and radiated outward.
Carina grunted and pulled. I kicked my legs, fighting for a foothold. She set down her ice ax and leaned forward to grab the rope around my waist.
Then Carina’s eyes went wide. “Van Zandt!”
At the same moment, a soft feminine voice said, “The electricity is about to go out,” in my ear.
CRACK
I went into freefall. Carina slammed into me, our skulls smacking together, then I was face down with a mouthful of snow and ice. Something sliced across my cheek and tried to rip my nose off. All around me, whiteness. White snow, then a flash of gray-white sky, then snow. Sky. Snow. Sky. Snow.
