The room. The station. The godforsaken continent. He’d seen this horror movie and had no intention of living it, especially not with Rue.
He tugged on her hand. “Now.”
“We can’t,” she whispered and broke away from him. He tried to catch her, but she was already moving deeper into the freezer.
Jesus fucking Christ on a crutch. Did she have a death wish?
She moved closer to one of the bodies—a man whose lab coat pocket still held a pen and ID badge. The badge bore the logo of the Atlas Polar Institute.
Of course. That rich fucker named everything after himself.
“Look, some of them are wrapped up,” she said, staring across the rows of bodies. “Someone was trying to take care of them after death…” She knelt beside one of the bodies that hadn’t been offered the same kind of care as the others—a woman who looked like she’d fallen and died right where she lay. “She took care of them all until she couldn’t.”
Rue reached out to touch the woman’s frozen hand.
Elliot’s heart leapt into his throat, and he darted forward to stop her. “Don’t. There’s a contagion in here.”
“It’s not active in the cold. If it were, we’d have been exposed back at Thwaites or in the caves. We’d be dead by now. But I bet Tyler was exposed when he cut himself in that crevasse.”
“Fuck.” Cold realization washed over him. The kid’s deteriorating condition, the coughing. All of it made terrible sense now.
Rue glanced back at him, and he saw raw terror in her eyes. “He could be spreading it to the others as we speak, and they wouldn’t have a clue.”
His Rue was fearless, but the naked vulnerability in her expression now made something primal roar to life in his chest. He moved to her side, crouching next to her. “We’ll get back to them and make sure everyone gets out of here alive.”
She smiled sadly and looked down at the body lying before her. “I’m sure she thought the same—” She broke off and shot to her feet, crossing the room to a body on one of the gurneys. It had been covered by a sheet, but the sheet had slipped halfway off, revealing the face beneath.
Rue’s entire body went rigid. “No,” she whispered, her voice cracking. “No, no, no.”
She pulled the sheet back with trembling fingers. There, preserved by the cold, lay a woman with high cheekbones and dark hair streaked with premature silver at the temples. Her eyes were closed, unlike most of the others, and someone had carefully folded her hands over her chest. She wore an expedition jacket with the Atlas Frost logo, the name “Portillo” stitched above the breast pocket.
“Maren,” Rue choked out, her voice so small and broken that it shattered something in Elliot’s chest. “Oh God, Maren.”
She reached out with shaking fingers to touch her friend’s frozen cheek. He wanted to stop her, to pull her away from thebody and the danger it might still pose, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it.
This was her moment of grief, and he had no right to take it from her.
He watched helplessly as something inside her seemed to shatter. She didn’t cry—Rue Bristow never cried—but the sound that escaped her was worse than tears: a raw, broken noise that seemed torn from somewhere deep and vital.
“I came to find you. I was supposed to save you.”
Jesus, she was killing him, slicing his heart right in two. He placed a hand on her back, feeling the tremors running through her body. “Rue, I’m so sorry.”
He wanted to pull her into his arms and shield her from every goddamn thing that had happened here, but there were no words big enough, no hug warm enough to make up for the slab of ice that was all that remained of Maren Portillo.
Rue’s breath came with a wheezing sound, rawer than he’d ever heard it. For a long time, she stayed bent over the gurney, her gloved hand resting on the sleeve of the corpse, as if she might rouse her with sheer force of will. He couldn’t see her face, but she was rigid with tension, the energy rolling off her as palpable as static.
Finally, she scrubbed her face with the back of her hand and straightened, not looking at him.
“I need to—” Her voice broke. She drew a breath and tried again. “I need to find her notes. She was meticulous. She’d have documented everything.”
“I’ll look.” Maybe he couldn’t give her comfort, but he could give her something else: answers. “You don’t need to stay in here.”
She turned toward him, and he braced for the inevitable argument, but she only stared at him for a long moment like she couldn’t understand what he was saying.
Those wide, tear-filled eyes gutted him. He’d never seen her like this, never seen Rue Bristow—wild, fearless, impossible Rue—look so small.
“Listen,” he said, voice low, roughened by everything he wanted to give her and couldn’t. “I scavenged some supplies earlier. Clothes. Blankets. And, I checked, there’s hot water—miracle of miracles. You can clean up, get warm. Let me hunt for her notes. You don’t have to stay in here.”
