Read Chapter 30: The Long Trek Back

The chamber’s last groan faded behind him as Declan shoved Maya’s body through the crack in the shaft wall. Her blood was warm on his hands, steaming in the killing cold. He didn’t look back at the collapse. He didn’t look at her face.

He pulled her over his shoulder like a pack of meat and started climbing.

The side shaft angled up through fractured limestone, tight enough that his shoulders scraped raw on both sides. Every dozen feet he stopped, listened. The tremors had ceased, but the mountain was holding its breath. He could feel it in the stone—the meteorite was gone, and something in the earth was exhaling.

Maya’s pulse was faint against his collarbone. Her chest wound had sealed itself into a black, glassy scar, but she was still bleeding somewhere inside. He didn’t have time to find where.

He climbed.

Hours passed in a blur of handholds and the suck of his own lungs. The shaft opened into a dry creek bed, and the creek bed fed into a ravine that Declan recognized from Kestrel’s map—a contour line he’d traced a hundred times in his head. He knew this route. He knew the ridge that sat above it, and the tree line beyond, and the ranger station six klicks past that.

He also knew the blizzard was breaking. The wind had shifted, pulling the storm’s guts out of the valley, and through the gap in the clouds he saw a single star. It was enough.

He set Maya down against a boulder and worked his knife through the laces of his boots. He didn’t remove them. He re-tied them tighter, wrapping cross-grain leather around his ankles to lock out the seep of meltwater. His hands were numb, but not useless. Not yet.

He looked at Maya. Her eyes were half open, glassed over, but she was breathing.

“You’re not dying on me,” he said. His voice came out cracked, barely a whisper. “Not after all that.”

She didn’t answer.

He carried her again.

The forest came slow, then all at once—black spruce packed so tight he had to push through branches that whipped his face with needles. Snow had drifted hip-deep in the hollows, but Declan read the ground the way he always had, the way his father had taught him, the way he’d taught himself after his father was gone. He found the game trails where the snow was packed hard. He found the lee side of the ridges where the wind had scoured down to crust. He moved like a ghost, one step at a time, and he held Maya’s dead weight against him and he did not stop.

He didn’t think about the chamber. He didn’t think about the meteorite, or the thing that had worn Jules’s skin, or the black light that had leaked from Maya’s chest. He thought about the next step. Then the next.

His legs were shaking by the time he broke past the last stand of tamarack. The ranger station sat in a clearing ahead, its low roof buried under snow, a single stovepipe chimney coughing a thin ribbon of smoke. Declan blinked, sure he was hallucinating.

Then he heard the rotors.

The helicopter came in hard over the ridge, a red-and-white speck that swelled into a roaring machine as it dropped into the clearing. Snow blasted outward in a hurricane fan. Declan staggered into the wash of it, and the wind that had saved him from himself all night finally took his legs out from under him.

He went down on one knee. Then both.

He saw the door slide open. He saw figures in hi-vis parkas spilling out, their shapes wavering through the snow-spray. He heard his name—faint, tinny, but real.

“Cross! Declan Cross!”

He opened his mouth to answer, but the only sound that came out was the clatter of his teeth. He tried to lift Maya’s body off his shoulder, to show them he had someone, that she was still warm, still alive—but his arm wouldn’t cooperate. It hung limp at his side, dead as the ropes of muscle that had carried him all this way.

He didn’t feel the fall. He only felt the ground against his cheek, and then boots pounding toward him, and hands rolling him over. A flashlight cut across his eyes. He blinked against it, and in that instant the light haloed a woman’s face above him—a ranger he didn’t recognize—and he thought of Maya’s scar, split open like a mouth, and the way the Jules-creature had turned toward it with something like longing.

He didn’t know if Maya had made it. He didn’t know if she’d stayed human.

But he was still here.

And the mountain had gone quiet.

The ranger pressed gloved fingers to his neck, then shouted something over her shoulder. The helicopter’s rotors were beginning to slow. Voices gathered around him, calling his name, over and over, as if the sound could pull him back from wherever he’d gone.

He let it. He let himself sink into the warmth of their hands and the noise of their urgency.

He was still alive. That was enough.