Read Chapter 21: Jules' Fever

The wound on Jules’s thigh had gone from angry red to a sickening purple-black by the time the first shiver rattled his teeth. Declan pressed the back of his hand to Jules’s forehead and pulled away fast. The heat was furnace-grade.

“He’s burning up,” Maya said, crouching on the other side of the alcove. She had her brother’s letters fanned out on her knee, but her eyes were fixed on Jules. “That’s not just fever. That’s infection eating him alive.”

Jules’s eyes fluttered open. They were glassy, pupils blown wide. “The fragment,” he mumbled. “Did you… did you destroy it?”

“Not yet,” Declan said. He stripped off his outer glove and ran his fingers along the edge of the wound. Jules hissed through his teeth. The flesh around the gash was hot and swollen, weeping a thin yellow discharge that smelled wrong, like spoiled meat left too long in the sun.

“We need antibiotics,” Maya said. “Real ones. I have a small kit but nothing for this. If we don’t get him something within—” She checked her watch. “—twelve hours, maybe less, that leg is coming off. Or he’s going to die out here.”

Declan dug into the journal, the one he’d been carrying since Lindqvist’s cabin. He flipped past pages of scrawled observations about track morphology, past the sketches of half-formed beasts, until his thumb landed on a set of GPS coordinates circled in faded ink. Underneath, in Lindqvist’s blocky handwriting: *Ranger station. Cache. Emergency supplies.*

“There’s a ranger station,” Declan said. “It’s marked in the journal. Old line shack, maybe still stocked. If we can get there, they’ll have a med kit.”

Maya leaned over to look at the coordinates. Her lips moved as she calculated. “That’s… that’s almost a day’s hike from here. And it’s off the route to the Nest. It would add significant time.”

“Damned if we do, damned if we don’t,” Declan muttered. He looked at Jules. The man’s face had gone pale beneath a sheen of sweat. He was shivering now, body wracked with violent tremors. “We can’t carry him. He can’t walk. We have two options. We all stay here and watch him die. Or we get to that station and bring the medicine back before he does.”

Maya’s jaw tightened. “That’s not two options. That’s one option with extra steps.”

“No,” Declan said. “There’s a third option. We split. You and me, we go faster alone. We make the station in half a day, grab the kit, come back. Jules stays here, in a shelter, with a gun and supplies.”

Maya stared at him like he’d suggested setting Jules on fire and calling it dinner. “You want to leave him alone. In this wilderness. Bleeding and feverish and, in case you forgot, there are *things* out there that are hunting us.”

“I know what’s out there.” Declan’s voice came out harder than he intended. “I’ve seen what they do. And I know that Jules is dead weight right now. He’s not going to get any lighter. If we drag him along, we all die. If we leave him, he gets a chance—a fighting one—and we get a chance to end this.”

Jules made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a cough. “He’s right.” His voice was thin, barely there. “Leave me. I’ve… I’ve done enough damage. Sent you all out here. Got myself shredded by a monster my own employers created.” He tried to smile. “Seems almost fair, doesn’t it?”

Maya’s face twisted. She looked from Jules to Declan, and for a moment Declan saw the calculation happening behind her eyes. The same calculation he’d made a hundred times in the field. Who lives. Who dies. Who gets left behind so someone else can make it out.

“Where exactly is this station?” she asked.

Declan tapped the coordinates. “Due east of here. Then we double back north to the Nest. It’s out of the way, but not impossible.”

“And Jules?”

“There’s a trapper’s cabin two hundred yards west.” Declan pointed through the opening of the alcove, toward a dark smudge of timber against the snow. “I saw it on the way in. Door’s intact, roof looks solid. We can secure it. Big enough to hold heat. If we stock the woodpile and leave him the flare gun and the shotgun, he can hold out.”

Maya was silent for a long moment. Outside, the wind picked up, funneling through the rocks with a low moan that sounded almost like an animal. Jules’s shivering grew worse. His teeth chattered audibly.

“I don’t like it,” Maya said finally.

“No one likes it,” Declan said. “But it’s the best we can do.”

They moved fast. The trapper’s cabin was cramped and smelled of mouse droppings and damp ash, but the walls were solid and the stove was intact. Declan checked for holes, sealed the worst of them with a torn tarpaulin he found in the rafters, and got a fire going within twenty minutes. The woodpile outside was half-buried under snow but dry underneath.

Jules was shaking violently by the time they got him onto the cot. Declan packed the wound as best he could, changing the dressing with the last of the clean gauze, and layered every spare blanket he had over Jules’s body. Maya found a bottle of iodine in the cabin’s small cabinet—old but still sealed—and tipped half of it into Jules’s wound. He screamed, a raw animal sound, then fell back into a feverish doze.

“Hey.” Declan shook Jules’s shoulder. “Hey, stay with me. You have to stay awake. I need to know you’ll stay awake.”

Jules’s eyes cracked open. They were unfocused. “The corporation… they don’t know about the Nest. Not the real location. I… I made sure of that.” He gripped Declan’s wrist with surprising strength. His fingers were burning. “If you find the fragment… don’t let them have it. Don’t let them use it. Destroy it. Whatever it takes.”

“I will,” Declan said.

“And… Ansel.” Jules’s voice dropped to a whisper, so faint Declan had to lean in. “What’s wearing his face… it wants the fragment too. It will… it will use it to become something worse. Worse than what it already is.”

Maya made a small sound behind them. Declan didn’t turn. He pressed the shotgun into Jules’s good hand and closed the man’s fingers around the stock.

“You use this if anything comes through that door,” Declan said. “You don’t aim. You just fire.”

“I know how to shoot a gun, Cross.” Jules’s lips curled in a ghost of a smile. “I was an expedition leader, not a bureaucrat.”

Declan almost laughed. He settled for a tight nod, then turned and gathered his pack. Maya was already at the door, her breath fogging in the cold air. She had the map in her hand, folded to the right quadrant, and she looked at it with an intensity that said she was already planning the route to the station and beyond.

“He’s not going to make it, is he?” Maya said quietly, so Jules couldn’t hear.

Declan zipped his jacket to the chin. “He’s got a better chance than we do of meeting a clean end out here.”

Maya’s eyes flicked to him. “That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one I have.”

They left before the sun dipped behind the ridge, moving fast over the frozen ground. Declan’s legs burned with the pace, but he didn’t slow. The coordinates burned in his skull. East first, then north. Medicine first, then the Nest.

They’d gone maybe a mile when the pendant around Maya’s neck began to warm. She stopped, pulling it out from under her jacket, and stared at the faint green glow emanating from the stone.

“It’s moving,” she said. She turned in a slow circle, then pointed north. “Ansel. It’s still heading toward the Nest. But there’s something else.”

Declan listened. The wind had dropped. In the silence, he heard it—a high, thin cry that wasn’t a human voice and wasn’t quite an animal’s. It came from the east. The same direction they were heading.

Maya’s face went pale. “That’s not the station. The station’s the other way.”

“I know,” Declan said.

The cry came again. Closer. And then another voice answered it. And another. Three separate points of sound, converging.

The map was wrong. The station wasn’t empty. It was waiting.