That was something.
The fever could take his balance, his timing, his ability to process fast enough to stay ahead of the environment. But it couldn’t take the map.
Not yet.
“We cut east here, then?—”
The rest of the sentence didn’t come. For a second, the map in his head went blank. Not gone—just out of reach, consumed by static and heat.
He blinked. The world snapped back into place.
“—then we hit the road,” he finished, like there hadn’t been a gap at all.
Harper stared at him. Her eyes narrowed. She’d seen the breach.
He avoided her gaze and kept walking, forcing his attention forward, away from the drift—the way the light fractured through the canopy, the rhythm of her breathing?—
Memory surfaced. Uninvited. Her mouth on his—slicing through the noise with a clarity the forest no longer had. The softness of it. The hesitation that hadn’t lasted. The moment it had shifted into something deeper?—
He shut it down.
Too late.
His foot caught on uneven ground, and he stumbled, catching himself against a tree trunk. Bark bit into his palm as the world swam then righted. He pulled in a controlled breath.
“Pav.” Her hand closed around his arm. “Let me?—”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. You nearly?—”
“I know where we’re going.” He pushed off the tree and drove his pace harder, forcing his body back into line through sheer will. “Stay close.”
Behind him, a sharp exhale—frustration compressed into a single breath.
He knew her sounds now. He’d been logging them since the helicopter—the sharp intake of fear, the controlled rhythm she forced into herself when things got bad, the quiet, involuntary sound she’d made against his mouth.
None of it was relevant. Except it kept resurfacing, disrupting everything else, refusing to stay where he’d put it.
Unacceptable.
The trees thinned gradually, the density breaking until the ground leveled and the forest gave way to a rough track—frozen mud and ice, rutted and ugly.
Beyond it, the town.
It was small, only around thirty buildings. Soviet concrete and corrugated metal, built for function and never updated for anything else. A scattering of wooden houses leaned into the cold, paint long since faded, smoke lifting from chimneys in scrappy trails.
A vehicle was parked near what looked like a shop—a Produkty, a general store that sold everything from bread to bootlaces.
“Wait.” He stretched out an arm to stop her.
He held at the treeline, assessing.
One road in. One road out. A handful of commercial structures. The shop. A building that might be an Apteka—pharmacy—the faded green cross just visible above the door. A low structure that read as a Stolovaya—a workers’ canteen. He counted three vehicles in a small central square—a rusted Lada, a flatbed truck, and a UAZ-469 that set every alarm in his system ringing.
The UAZ was military-grade and way too clean for this town. Fresh mud on the wheel arches, hood clear of snow, exhaust pipe still breathing faintly in the cold. Recently driven. Maybe still warm.
His fever-addled brain ran the math and arrived at the same result. The hunters had been here. Might still be.
