Tiamat's Wrath (Expanse 8)

“Mountain. Right,” Holden said. “Okay.”

A thin oval of gray the size of her pillow swam out of the darkness ahead. A drift of fallen snow blocked the way out, but not enough to stop her. Teresa stamped forward, pressing the snow down, compacting it, then scrambling forward to do it again. Somewhere in the State Building, an alarm was going off. The security forces alerted to her escape. She hoped that the battle would be distraction enough to lend her time.

“You’re going to get soaked,” Holden said.

“I’m going to get out.”

He was quiet after that.

She scrambled out into the world. The wall of the State Building was behind her, the stretch of the wilds ahead. Holden emerged more slowly, and Muskrat with him. The trees had pulled in all their leaves, and the snow stuck to their trunks like a million featureless masks. Everything was transformed. The same and not the same. For the first time, she felt a prick of uncertainty. This was her place. She knew it and how to navigate it. Or at least she had until now.

She headed down the first path. Her breath plumed white and thick with every exhalation, and moving helped to keep the cold at bay. She wished that the flashes and roar of battle were still there, if just to help light the way. She told herself that it meant the rescue ship was almost there. And that she had to

hurry.

The path through the forest seemed brighter than the sky above them. The snow was thicker here, rising up almost to her knees. Muskrat huffed and pushed, forging a path beside hers, and Holden followed along in the furrows they made. The snow was still falling. Small, hard flakes that tapped against her cheeks and melted down like tears.

There were tracks in the snow where animals had passed, and one of the trees had a long, fresh rip in its bark where something looking for food had dug deep into the hibernating flesh. Teresa wondered if animals did that on other planets, or if it was only here. For a moment, the implications of what she was doing rose up and threatened to overwhelm her, but she pushed the thoughts aside. She wasn’t going back now. Not even if she could.

Something moved in the trees to her left, and she felt a moment of panic. A bone-elk leaped across the path and away, the exoskeleton of its legs clattering like stones rolling down a hill. It was nothing.

She made what she thought was the right turn, and the path grew steeper. The mountain loomed up in the darkness. Not really a mountain. An artifact so ancient it was covered in stone. Or one that had been made that way. History so deep, a forest had grown over it, and seasons passed against it like days.

She pushed into the clearing where the evacuation ship was supposed to land. It was wide and flat, with a slope that rose toward the distant summit on one side and a clear view of the State Building on the other. In the falling snow, the buildings with their softly glowing windows seemed farther away than they were. Like something seen from fairyland. With the flash and roar of the battle gone, it looked peaceful. It wasn’t, but it looked that way.

Behind her, Holden came to the clearing. He had pulled his arms inside the shirt for warmth, the sleeves flapping empty against his sides. He squatted down in the snow.

“Are you all right?”

“Out of shape,” he said. “Next time, I’m working out more. I’ll convert a corner of my cell into a gym or something.”

She’d had enough conversations with him now to know he was telling a joke without his voice signaling that it was a joke. No one else in her social life did that, and she found it irrationally annoying. It made every exchange into a puzzle that had to be decoded to see if it was sincere or not. She pushed the irritation away. There were a lot of things people did that she’d never had to be patient about. It was time to start learning that skill.

“This is where I met him,” she said.

“Met him?”

“Timothy,” she said. “Amos.”

“Oh,” Holden said, and looked around. For a moment, he was silent. “It’s beautiful. I mean, weird. But also beautiful. I wish I’d seen more of Laconia. Not just the gardens.”

“Me too,” Teresa said, and stared at the low, gray sky. “Where are they?”

Without the trees to shelter them from the wind and the effort of pushing through the snow, the cold grew sharper. Holden seemed to fall in on himself, arms wrapped tight, head resting on his knees. Muskrat went and sat beside him, the dog’s wide brown eyes concerned.

Teresa knew about hypothermia. She didn’t feel bad herself, but Holden was older and he’d been in prison for a long time. It had weakened him. She thought about going and sitting beside him too. She remembered stories about people caught in the wilderness making structures in the snow to capture and share body heat, but she didn’t know how that worked. She wondered, if the evac ship came and Holden was already dead, what they would do with her…

A blast of frigid air came down the mountain, pulling the top layers of snow up in brief whirlwinds. Teresa took a step toward Holden. Maybe she could take him to Timothy’s cave. Just until the ship came. Take him there, and then she could come back herself and lead the rescuers to him. If there were rescuers. If this worked.

A trickle of black dread seeped through her body. This had to work.

“I’m sorry you had to find out that way,” Holden said.

Teresa looked at him. She couldn’t remember if delirium was part of hypothermia, but it seemed like it might be. “Find out about what?”

“The whole killing-you thing. Pushing Cortázar into it. It wasn’t personal.”

Teresa looked him. A miserable man, hunched in the snow. She knew that she should feel angry. She was angry all the time these days, and at everyone. She tried to summon up the rage, but it didn’t come. She could only feel sorry for him.