Page 83 of Run Wild Omega

I know this without checking. I know it the way you know things in dreams, not with your brain but with your bones, with the deep, animal part of you that recognizes death when it sees it.

I start running toward her, but the ice is slick and my boots can’t find purchase. I fall. I get up. I fall again. Each time I hit the ground, the cold seeps through my clothes, through my skin, into my chest, turning my lungs to stone.

“Tess!” I’m shouting, but the sound doesn’t travel. It dies the moment it leaves my lips, swallowed by the ice.

I’m close now. Close enough to see the individual crystals of frost on her eyelashes. Close enough to see the blue tinge of her lips, the rigid set of her jaw, the way her fingers are curled slightly inward, frozen in the shape of the last thing she was trying to reach for.

I reach for her hand.

My fingers close around hers, and she shatters.

Not dramatically—no explosion, no crack. She just… comes apart. Like a porcelain figure dropped on a hard floor. Her fingers break off in my grip. Her arm fractures at the wrist, then the elbow, then the shoulder. Her face cracks down the middle, the two halves sliding apart to reveal nothing underneath.

No bone. No blood. Just more ice, smooth and blue and empty.

I’m holding a handful of frozen fragments where her hand used to be, and I can’t scream because the cold has reached my throat, and I can’t breathe because my lungs are ice, and I’m falling forward into the space where she was, and there’s nothing⁠—

I wake up on the floor.

Not in bed. On the floor, beside the bed, tangled in a sheet that must have come with me when I thrashed awake. My heart is pounding so hard I can feel it in my teeth. My skin is drenched in sweat. The room is dark, and for three disorienting seconds, I don’t know where I am.

Then I see the ceiling—the water stain in the corner, the crack that runs from the light fixture to the wall—and I remember. My cabin. The SAR station. Sweet Creek.

I sit up slowly, bracing my hands on the cold floorboards. My breathing is ragged, each inhale a conscious effort. I press the heels of my palms against my eyes until I see stars, trying to scrub the image of Tess’s shattered face from the inside of my eyelids.

It doesn’t work.

I’ve had the nightmare before. Three nights running, actually—the same dream with minor variations. Sometimes the ice is a river. Sometimes she’s standing instead of lying down. But the ending is always the same: I reach for her, and she breaks.

I know what it means. I’m not an idiot. The dream isn’t about Tess dying—I know she’s alive. I’ve seen her breathing, seen her eyes open, heard her voice.

The dream is about the moment I almost lost her. The millisecond where I wasn’t sure if the body I was pulling from the snow was alive or dead. That uncertainty, that hairline fracture between hope and despair—it’s lodged itself in my subconscious like a splinter, and my brain keeps picking at it.

I get up from the floor. The clock on the nightstand says 4:47 a.m. I’ve been asleep for three hours. That’s the most I’ve managed since the avalanche.

I don’t bother trying to go back to sleep.

I shower—cold, because the hot water heater in this cabin takes twenty minutes to warm up and I don’t have the patience. I shave by touch, nicking my chin because my hands aren’t steady. I pull on clean clothes: dark jeans, a gray henley, my boots. My turnout gear is in a pile by the door, still stained. I should wash it. I should burn it.

I grab my jacket and step outside.

The morning is bitter. The snow from the storm has been packed down by foot traffic and plows, but the air still has that raw, biting quality that comes after a big weather event—the kind of cold that gets into your lungs and stays there. My breath plumes white in the predawn dark as I walk the path from my cabin to the main station.

Wyatt’s truck is in the lot. Of course it is. He’s been living at the station since we got back from the hospital—going home felt pointless, he said. Too quiet. Too far from anything that mattered.

I let myself in through the side door. The station is dark and cold, the heat turned low for the night. I can hear Pip before I see her, a small, demanding meow coming from the direction of the break room.

I find Wyatt at the counter, a can of wet food in one hand and a fork in the other, scooping pate into a bowl on the floor. Pip is circling his ankles, her tail straight up, vibrating with the particular intensity of a cat who believes she hasn’t eaten in weeks despite the fact that Kyle fed her before he left last night.

Wyatt looks up when I come in. His eyes scan me the way they always do, quick and assessing, and I can tell he’s reading the exhaustion, the tension, the set of my jaw that says I didn’t sleep well.

“Nightmare,” he says. Not a question.

“Yeah.”

He doesn’t ask for details. That’s one of the things I’ve always appreciated about Wyatt. He understands that some things you don’t talk about because talking doesn’t help. You just endure them until they stop.

He sets the bowl down, and Pip dives into it with a fervor that borders on religious. Wyatt leans against the counter, arms crossed, watching her eat.