His back against her chest. Their hands still locked together in the dark. Her breathing keeping time with his. She couldn’t seem to uncouple it now or find her own separate rhythm.
Five seconds. Ten.
He released her hand and squeezed out from behind the trunk. The cold rushed in where his body had been—sudden and acute. A negative space in the shape of him.
He reached back and pulled her out. When she stood, her legs were stiff, her hands numb, his jacket—the damn jacket—still warm around her.
He scanned the sky, the treeline.
“They’re coming back with dogs.”
“I heard.”
He looked at her now, and he wasn’t looking at her like cargo. He was recalculating.
She hugged her middle with both arms. “How long do we have?”
“A few hours. Maybe less.” He squinted through the trees toward something she couldn’t see. “We need moving water. It won’t beat good dogs forever, but it’ll make the handlers work.”
He started downhill.
Without hesitation, Harper jogged after him.
14
Pav moved downhillthrough the trees, setting a pace that punished his ribs with every stride. He scanned the terrain as he went—tree density, ground cover, gradient, snow depth. His operational brain reduced the world to variables—dogs, river, cache, border.
The rest of his brain had other ideas.
Her forehead against his back. The slow expansion of her ribs as her breathing locked to his. His thumb tracking across her knuckles in the dark for no reason he could justify.
It meant nothing.
Except he didn’t have a place to put the hollow feeling when he moved away from her.
Focus.
Dogs. River. Cache. Border.
His ribs shifted again, sharp enough to reset his concentration. He adjusted his breathing to compensate and kept moving.
Behind him, her footsteps squeaked in the snow—the compressed sound of deep cold. She hadn’t complained onceabout the speed, the terrain, or her soaked boots. He tracked the rhythm of her stride without turning around.
She caught up and fell into step beside him. “Where exactly are we going?”
He’d been counting. Twelve minutes until the questions started.
“Mining station,” he said, adjusting his line to skirt a drift that would swallow them to the knee. “South of here.”
“A mining station?”
“I have a cache there.” One of three he kept in the region. Fox had called it paranoia. Pav called it breathing room.
“What kind of cache?”
“Water. Food. Thermal gear. Medical supplies.” A beat. “Weapons.”
She processed that for a few strides, boots crunching in the deep cold. “You buried emergency supplies in the mountains before the extraction even started.”
