"Fuck," Diego muttered. "That's not ours."
We kept moving, but the sound was getting closer, more defined. There wasn't just one helicopter. Multiple aircraft were approaching, judging by the overlapping rhythms.
Then Constantine's voice came through a PA system. "Lorenzo. How disappointing. Did you really think I wouldn't know the moment you set foot in Alaska?"
"How did he know?" Rafael whispered, moving faster.
"Doesn't matter," I said, though my mind was racing through possibilities. Tracker on one of us? Mole in Jasper's network? Maybe Constantine had just been waiting, patient as death, knowing we'd come eventually.
Constantine's voice continued, unhurried. "Dionysus trained you better than this. All those years teaching you to think three steps ahead, and you walk into the most obvious trap imaginable."
The casual invocation of Dionysus's name made my jaw clench.
"Keep moving," Diego ordered, repositioning Eight in his arms for better mobility. "We're not stopping."
We burst out of the culvert into the brutal Alaskan night. The temperature drop was immediate and vicious, so cold it seared my lungs. My breath crystallized instantly, hanging in clouds that caught the strange light overhead.
The sky was alive.
The aurora borealis rippled across the darkness in sheets of green and purple, dancing and writhing like something sentient. It would've been beautiful if it weren't illuminating the nightmare waiting for us.
Circling overhead, silhouetted against the aurora like something out of a fever dream, were Constantine’s two massive golden eagles.
Caesar and Augustus.
In the distance, Constantine's helicopter hovered just beyond weapon range, a black insect against the green and purple sky. Two more helicopters flanked it, searchlights beginning to sweep the tundra.
Constantine's voice continued through the PA system, still conversational. "You're trying to save children. How noble. How sentimental." A pause. "How very much like Dionysus in his final days."
"Load the kids," I ordered, already moving. "Now!"
The facility's heavy maintenance snowcat sat where Jasper's intel said it would be, a boxy tracked vehicle with a covered passenger compartment and two bench seats facing each other. Diego had gotten us the key codes days ago. Beyond it, two snowmobiles waited for the escort riders.
We worked frantically, carrying sedated children into the enclosed cab and arranging them on the benches. The machines were designed for maintenance crews, but we could make it work. Diego positioned himself inside to brace the children, Eight still cradled against his chest. Jasper moved to the driver's seat without a word, already starting the ignition sequence.
"Lorenzo, Rafael, take the snowmobiles," Diego ordered from inside the cab. "You're faster, you can draw fire. We'll push straight for the tree line and onto the extraction point."
The enclosed cab would protect the kids from the eagles and the brutal cold, but it made them slow. Maybe ten, fifteen miles per hour across the tundra at best. Rafael and I would be completely exposed, but we could move three times as fast on the snowmobiles.
The eagles banked, descending in a lazy spiral that was somehow more terrifying than a direct attack. They weren't in a hurry. They knew we were trapped, knew we couldn't outrun them on open tundra.
The searchlights swept closer, illuminating patches of snow and frozen earth. Rafael's eyes met mine for just a second in the darkness, and I saw the same calculation I was making. We were the bait.
The searchlights found us, three brilliant beams converging on our position. We were fully exposed now, lit up like a stage.
Rafael threw his leg over one snowmobile, engine roaring to life. I mounted the second. The snowcat's engine coughed once, then caught, deeper and louder than our smaller engines.
"Go!" Diego shouted from inside the cab.
Jasper hit the throttle, and the snowcat lurched forward, tracks biting into snow and ice.
"Caesar. Augustus. Jagen!"
Both eagles folded their wings and dove.
I twisted the throttle,and the snowmobile lurched forward. My stomach dropped with a sick, weightless feeling. Cold air slammed into my face mask and burned my lungs.
"Split!" Lorenzo's voice crackled through the radio, distorted by wind and distance. "Draw them apart!"
