Rue shot him a look that was pure challenge. “When have I ever been heroic?”
“Jumping after me was pretty heroic.”
“That wasn’t heroism. That was—” She stopped, looking away. “That was instinct.”
Something warm unfurled in his chest despite the cold. He didn’t push it.
They gathered what remained of their gear. His ice axe had survived the fall, but Rue’s was nowhere to be found. They had one working headlamp between them, a single canteen of water,and a few energy bars. Not much to survive on, but it would have to do.
“Ready?” he asked.
Rue nodded, her face set with determination. “Lead the way, Wilde.”
He started down the slope, testing each step before committing his weight. The ice beneath the snow was slick, treacherous. One misstep and they’d slide straight into whatever waited below.
As they descended, the walls of the crevasse narrowed, forcing them to edge sideways through tight passages. The temperature dropped with each meter, the air growing stale and heavy with minerals.
“Look,” Rue whispered, pointing to the wall beside them.
Elliot aimed his light where she indicated. Black filaments, like the ones they’d seen in the samples, threaded through the ice in intricate patterns. They seemed to pulse faintly in the beam of his headlamp, though he told himself it was just a trick of the light.
“They’re everywhere,” he murmured.
Rue reached out with her bare hand, but he caught her wrist before she could touch the wall.
“Don’t,” he said. “We don’t know what these things are.”
She pulled away but nodded, tucking her exposed hand into her armpit for warmth. “Dr. Keene would lose his mind down here. It’s like the whole glacier is infested with them.”
Infested. The word sent a chill down Elliot’s spine that had nothing to do with the temperature.
They continued down.
The tunnel widened suddenly, opening into a chamber that echoed with the sound of dripping water. Elliot swept his headlamp across the space, revealing a cathedral of ice—walls that soared upward until they disappeared into darkness, andformations that hung from the ceiling like frozen chandeliers. The beauty would have been breathtaking if he wasn’t so focused on survival.
“This is incredible,” Rue whispered beside him, her voice muffled by her face covering.
“It’s a dead end.” The chamber had only one entrance—the passage they’d just navigated. “We need to go back, find another route.”
Rue shook her head, already moving toward the far wall. “There’s always a way out. Nature doesn’t build boxes.”
He wanted to argue, to pull her back and force her to be practical, but exhaustion weighed on him. His shoulder throbbed where he’d landed on it, and the cut on his forehead had stopped bleeding but left a sticky trail down his temple. He followed her instead, boots crunching on the crystalline floor.
“Here,” she said, crouching near the base of the wall. She pointed to a narrow fissure, barely visible behind a column of ice. “Feel that?”
Elliot knelt beside her, wincing as his knee protested. A faint current of air brushed his face, warmer than the frigid stillness of the chamber. “Air flow.”
“Which means there’s another opening somewhere.” Rue’s grin flashed in the beam of his headlamp, quick and fierce. “Told you.”
The fissure was tight—too tight for him to squeeze through with his pack on. He hesitated, calculating angles and risks.
“I can fit,” Rue said, already shrugging out of her pack.
“No.” He caught her hand. “We stick together, remember?”
“I’m just going to check if it opens up on the other side. Two minutes, tops.”
Before he could stop her, she was on her stomach, wriggling into the narrow gap like a snake. Her boots disappeared from view, leaving him alone in the blue-white glow of his headlamp.
