The wrecked door banged shut.
She stood in the ransacked station as the tramp of his footsteps faded. Then there was nothing but the wind moaning through the cracked window and the creak of the building around her.
One minute passed. Then two. Silence thickened, pressing against her eardrums, filling the space where his presence had been.
He’d left.
What if he didn’t come back?
What if this was where the math finally failed?
One man with busted ribs and her in borrowed clothes with blistered feet and no useful skills beyond keeping people alive.
And Sasha was still dead.
Maybe he’d looked at the wrecked cache, done the calculation, and she’d come up expendable.
She shut it down. She was Harper Fox. She sure as hell didn’t sit in the dark and wait for someone to save her.
She searched the station, taking her time, fighting to be thorough, her brain shifting into triage mode. Assess, prioritize, and work the problem. The thieves had taken the food and the primary supplies, but they’d been sloppy. She found what they’d missed or hadn’t wanted. A half-empty box of waterproof matches in a corner, a dented tin mug. A tarp, wadded into a ball and kicked behind a pile of debris. A handful of thermal layers scattered across the floor—too big, men’s sizes, but dry and intact and warmer than anything she was wearing. And finally, the pièce de résistance. A tin of sweetened condensed milk.
She built a fire in the old stove in the corner, remembering how Pav had worked so efficiently. Dry pine needles first. Thin twigs. Then thicker branches. Her hands were stiff and clumsy, and the first match guttered and died before the kindling caught. The second did the same.
She sat back on her heels and wiped her nose with her sleeve. Pav had crouched by the river, arranging pine needles with patience that seemed impossible given the cold.
Patience. Breath.
The third match held. The flame caught the pine needles and climbed to the twigs, and she fed it carefully, nursing the heat the way she’d coax a weak pulse—willing it to strengthen.
The flames took hold. Warmth bloomed through the small space, pushing back the damp and the cold, turning the concrete walls from hostile to merely grim. She dragged the tarp near the stove and pulled on the thermal layers she’d found. The sleeves hung past her fingertips, but the fabric was soft and warm against her grimy skin. Her feet throbbed as sensation returned, each blister waking one by one. Finally she settled close to the flames with the tin mug full of snow melting slowly in her hands. She placed the tin of condensed milk close to the fire. She’d keep that for when he returned.
Because he would return. Right?
An hour passed.
The fire needed constant feeding. She rationed the wood, adding one twig at a time, refusing to let it burn too fast.
She melted snow. Drank. Melted more. The routine gave her something to hold onto.
The silence changed. Every groan of the building, every shift of wind through the broken window sounded like movement.
She checked the door more times than she cared to count. If he didn’t come back, she would die here. She hated that every calculation led back to him. And that the thought of him notcoming back made her grip tighten on the tin mug until the cheap metal buckled under her fingers.
Another thirty minutes crawled past.
A sound outside. Boots on snow.
Her heart slammed against her ribs.
Could be Pav. Or the people who’d ransacked the cache coming back for what they’d missed. Could be the traffickers hunting her. Could be anyone.
She boosted to aching legs and grabbed the biggest of the logs she’d collected. She weighed the damp wood in her hand.
Heavy enough to do damage.
She positioned herself behind the door, her back flat against the wall. Whoever came through that door was going to regret it. The footsteps stopped outside. A pause that lasted a century. The handle moved—slowly, carefully, the mechanism grinding against rust and cold.
The door opened.
