He shut his eyes and let himself be held by her, for one breath, then another, and the trembling in his frame eased under her small hand the way nothing else in the world could have eased it.
“Um,” came a rough voice from beside them. Tess. “Not to interrupt whatever this is. But I would very much like to not die in a hole.”
A laugh cracked out of him, ragged and real, and he felt Polly shake with her own against his chest.
“No one dies in the hole,” he said, and his voice came back to him then, deep and level, the clan leader returning to a body that had been, for a moment, only a terrified male. He set Polly gently from him and turned to Tess, and although every part of Tess flinched at the sheer size of him leaning close, she held her ground—for Polly’s sake, he suspected. “Can you climb?”
“I can climb better than I can lie here and think about it,” Tess said.
“Good.” He rose, filling the small space, and lifted his voice towards the corridor. “Rjmar. We bring them up the way I came. No one hurries. No one.” He looked down at the two females, the small dark-haired one and the ragged red-haired one, huddled together in the wreck of dead offworld cruelty, and something in his chest that had been clenched to breaking finally, fractionally, loosened. “We’re going home now.”
The trip back was a long agony of patience.
He would not permit speed, and speed was the only thing his heart wanted. The route up out of the collapsed laboratory was narrow and half-choked and treacherous with new fracture-lines; every stone had to be trusted before they put any weight on it and every handhold tested. He carried her because he could not bear to put her down, her small hands fisted in his fur, her face buried against his throat, and he moved up through the crumbling dark one careful hold at a time with his precious burden pressed to his heart.
Rjmar and Doren brought Tess up with them, as gentle as they could be with a female who couldn’t bear to be touched, coaxing rather than carrying.
“Rjmar.” Doren’s voice came quietly from behind him. “What’s that?”
Njkall looked back.
A section of the wall had split open when the chamber collapsed, exposing a narrow cavity behind it. Something gleamed inside, reflecting the torchlight in an odd shifting pattern. A small dark object, half-buried beneath the rubble.
Rjmar stared at it.
“I’ve never seen anything like that before.”
“Leave it,” he ordered.
“Njkall—”
“My mate is freezing.”
Rjmar’s gaze lingered on the object for another heartbeat. Then he nodded. “I’ll come back for it.”
He didn’t waste breath objecting. They kept climbing. When they came out into the open at last—into cold, clean air, and the vast grey sky over the mountains—Polly turned her face up to it and breathed like she’d been drowning, and he felt her small body go loose against him with a relief so total it frightened him nearly as much as the fall had.
“I’ve got you, little one,” he murmured into her hair. “I’ve got you. We’re out. It’s over.”
He would not let her walk. He carried her the whole way, while they bundled Tess in furs and pulled her in a makeshift sleigh, bruised and silent but alive. Polly slept for most of the journey back to the caves, but every so often her hand would tighten in his fur, as if to check he was still there, and he would press his palm over her small cold fingers, and she would ease again.
He handed Tess into Cera’s keeping the moment they reached the healer’s cave. The clan healer took one look at her, at the grey exhaustion, the shaking hands, the eyes that hadn’t fully come back from wherever terror had sent them, and began issuing quiet orders.
“And this one?” Cera turned her practical, compassionate gaze on Polly, still cradled in his arms. He kept her there while thehealer did a quick examination, then grunted. “Bruised. Cold. Exhausted. Nothing broken.”
“I’m all right,” Polly said. “Really. I just want to get warm.”
Cera studied her face for another moment, then looked at him. “Then go get her warm. Go.”
He carried her all the way to the hot springs.
The clan’s caves ran deep and warm around the heated pools, the walls slick and dark and glistening, the air thick with steam and the faint mineral tang of the water that came up boiling from the heart of the world. The pool where he took her was set apart, screened by a curtain of falling water that hushed the rest of the caves to a distant murmur. Steam curled up off the surface into the golden light of the bioluminescent lichen covering the rock overhead.
He set her down at the water’s edge only long enough to strip the ruined, filthy clothes from her chilled body. She let him, her arms lifting when he needed them lifted, docile with exhaustion. Then he shed his own harness and gear and lifted her again and carried her down the smooth worn steps into the water.
She made a small sound of pure animal relief as the heat closed over her. Her body shuddered once, and then she went boneless in his arms. He settled onto the submerged ledge with her cradled in his lap, her side against his chest, the hot water lapping up around her shoulders, and for a long while neither of them said anything at all. He simply held her in the heat and watched the grey disappear from her skin and the shivering slowly stop, and let his own galloping heart, at long last, begin to slow.
“You went down into it,” he said finally, his voice low and rough. “The dark. The buried place. After what was done to you, you climbed straight down into it. For her.”
