Page 28

“There is a cave there. It is small, but we will not be found.”

There is not enough air for Dawsyn to answer; she can only run toward that towering crop of stone before her legs give way.

Finally, they reach it. Dawsyn presses her hands, her forehead, to a boulder far larger than her. There is a noise outside of herself and it sounds like pain.

“Slow your breaths,” Ryon tells her. “We can’t stay in the open. Come.”

But she does not move, her focus saved for standing and sucking air. So, Ryon takes her arm again, pulling her around the boulders, over smaller rocks and into a cavernous hole.

She crawls into the black mouth of it as if it were a haven, a sanctuary and there, she collapses.

Ryon follows. There is enough room for the pair to lie side by side, their legs curled to their bodies. The cave is too low to sit, let alone stand and too dark to make out if any more supplies are kept within. Dawsyn can’t find it within herself to do more than breathe, to stop the spinning in her eyes.

Ryon seems to do the same, his breaths ragged as they scrape from his lungs to his throat to his lips. “Fuck,” he mutters, seemingly to himself. “Too close. That was far too close.”

It is many minutes before the cold finds her again, through the pores of the earth, through the layers of her clothes.

At first, she shivers – singular tremors her body knows well. Her mind calls for her to move before she begins to tremble in earnest.

Stay the frost. Stay the frost.

But she can do little more than lie there, her muscles unresponsive and before long, she is quaking. Her teeth knock together and threaten to cut into her tongue if it intervenes. The cold is not alive, but it might as well be fangs and claws, for the havoc it can wreak.

“F-fire,” she says weakly. “W- we need to light a fire.”

In the darkness, she hears him shift.

“We can’t. The smoke – we’ll be found.”

Her body spasms. Her skin is not that of a Glacian’s. Her blood will not keep pumping through her veins if it cools.

“Dawsyn?”

Her bare fingers are numb; her toes shrivel painfully in her boots, fighting the frost, seeking warmth.

“Girl? You’re going to bite off your tongue.”

Groaning, she heaves her unwilling body over and attaches herself to Ryon.

He draws a sharp inhale of breath as her head thumps to his chest. “Wha–?”

She barely notices him. She will not freeze to death in a hole.

First, she slips her hands under his tunic and hears him hiss at her cold touch. She wriggles her feet free of her boots and entwines them, still bandaged, with Ryon’s legs, burying them beneath his calves. Her face presses into the space between his arm and his torso and she lets her own breath bounce back to her, somehow still warm.

“W– would it kill you to put your arm over me?” she bites out, her words venomous. “Or was it always your p– plan to watch me shiver to death in a hole?”

She feels him swallow dryly, and then a weight settles over her back, another over her shoulders. He says nothing and neither does she. She has lived long enough in the winter to know that she is close to death, that she might not last the night. She knows how quickly frost takes hold in its wicked way, sticking to the lungs if it loses the battle, ready to wage war little by little. Her grandmother, her neighbors – they died that way. The cold in their chests gained inches over months, bending their backs, breaking their ribs with wet, racking coughs.

“We’ll light the fire if you need it,” Ryon says suddenly, the words breaking free of him, like he was holding them hostage.

Dawsyn gives a breathy laugh. “Why would you give a damn? Is your conscience so fragile?”

And there it is – the conversation with Phineas suddenly between them, around them.

“Maybe I have some atoning to do,” is his answer.

“It’s about t-time you explain yourself, hybrid. You’ve done a lot and said very little.”