“I cannot be certain. The vibrations are difficult to interpret at this distance.” He pulled her upright, already gathering her clothes from where they’d been discarded the night before. “Perhaps an hour. Perhaps less.”
“Shit. So much for forty-eight hours.” She was moving before the words finished leaving her mouth, quickly pulling on the thermal layers. “The snow crawler. We need to?—”
“I have already prepared it.”
She paused, looking at him with something like wonder. “You’ve been awake this whole time?”
“I could not sleep. My mate required protection.”
For a moment, her expression softened. Then the urgency returned and she was all business, jamming her feet into her boots and reaching for her outer layers. “Right. Okay. We stick to the plan. Southwest to the ranger station. If we push hard, we can be there by nightfall.”
“And if they follow?”
“We make sure they can’t.”
They moved through the habitat like a well-choreographed machine, two people who had somehow learned to anticipate each other’s movements in the space of just a few days. She gathered the last of the essential supplies while he performed a final check on the cargo sled’s connections.
The snow crawler was a squat, ungainly vehicle, but its treads were wide and its engine powerful, and she had assured him it could handle the polar terrain.
They would have to trust that she was right.
“Ready?” she asked, her hand hovering over the door controls.
He took one last look around the habitat—this small dome that had become unexpectedly precious. Not for itself, but for what it represented. Here, he had awakened to a new world. Here, he had found his mate. Here, he had begun to understand that even after so much loss, there might still be a future worth fighting for.
“I am ready.”
The cold bit straight through to the bone. Even with his natural resistance to temperature extremes, he felt the brutal bite of the polar air. It must have been exponentially worse for her, despiteher layers of thermal protection. But she didn’t hesitate, quickly climbing into the crawler’s cab.
He folded his wings tight against his back and squeezed into the nominal passenger space—a space that was not designed for someone of his size, much less someone with wings. The confined quarters pressed against his scales from all directions.
“Sorry about the fit,” she said, her fingers dancing across the control panel. “The crawler’s not really built for passengers.”
“I have endured worse.”
“Have you?”
“I do not remember. But I suspect so.”
The engine coughed to life with a grinding roar, and then they were moving, the treads churning through ice and snow as the habitat fell away behind them. The cargo sled followed obediently, its runners hissing against the frozen surface.
He turned in his seat—no easy feat in the cramped space—and watched their refuge shrink in the distance. Such a small thing to have meant so much.
“Don’t look back,” she said quietly. “It doesn’t help.”
“You should take your own advice.”
A ghost of a smile touched her lips. “When have I ever been good at that?”
They drove in silence for several minutes, the crawler’s engine providing a constant mechanical undertone to the wind that had begun to pick up again. Her eyes were fixed on the terrain ahead, navigating by some combination of instrument readings and instinct that he couldn’t quite follow.
“The ridge,” he said suddenly. “There. We should be able to see them from that position.”
She glanced at him, then at the rocky outcropping jutting from the ice to their left. “You want to watch them arrive?”
“I want to know their numbers. Their equipment. How they move.” He met her gaze. “Know your enemy.”
She hesitated, then nodded and angled the crawler towards the ridge.
