“You’re a dragoon?” Mustang asks, unable to hide the surprise.
“Was. Point is: PFR—Praetorian field regulations—mandate survival gear in long-range mission transport enough to last each squad a month in any conditions. They’ll have water, food, heat, and gravBoots.”
“What if they survived the crash?” Mustang says, eying Holiday’s injured leg and our paltry weapons supply.
“Then they will not survive us,” Ragnar says.
“And we’re better off hitting them when they’re still piecing themselves together,” I say. “We go now, fast as we can, and we might get there before the storm lands. It’s our only chance.”
Ragnar and Holiday join me, the Obsidian gathering the gear as the Gray checks her rifle’s ammunition. But Mustang’s hesitant. There’s something else she hasn’t told us. “What is it?” I demand.
“It’s Cassius,” she says slowly. “I don’t know for certain. What if he’s not alone? What if Aja is with him?”
The storm falls as we climb along a rocky arm of the mountain. Soon we can see nothing beyond our
party. Steel-gray snow gnaws into us. Blotting out the sky, the ice, the mountains inland. We duck our heads, squinting through the sealSkin balaclavas. Boots scrape the ice underfoot. Wind roars loud as a waterfall. I hunch against it, putting one boot after the other, connected with Mustang and Holiday by rope in the Obsidian way so we don’t lose one another in the blizzard. Ragnar scouts ahead. How he finds his way is beyond me.
He returns now, loping over the rocks with ease. He signals for us to follow.
Easier said than done. Our world is small and furious. Mountains lurk in the white. Their hulking
shoulders the only shelter from the wind. We scramble over bitter black rock that slices at our gloves while the wind tries to hurl us down gulches and bottomless crevasses. The exertion keeps us alive.
Neither Holiday nor Mustang slow, and after more than an hour of dreadful travel, Ragnar guides us into a mountain pass and the storm breathes. Beneath us, impaled upon a ridgeline, is the ship that shot us from the sky.
I feel a pang of sympathy for her. Sharklike lines and flared starburst tail indicate she was once a long, sleek racing vessel of the famed Ganymede shipyards. Painted proud and bold in crimson and
silver by loving hands. Now she’s a cracked, blackened corpse impaled upside down on a stark ridgeline. Cassius, or whoever was inside, had a nasty time of it. The rear third of the ship sheaved off half a kilometer downhill from the main body. Both parts look deserted. Holiday scans the wreck with her rifle’s scope. No sign of life or movement outside.
“Something seems off,” Mustang says, crouched beside me. Her father ’s visage watches me from
the razor on her arm.
“The wind is against us,” Ragnar says. “I smell nothing.” His black eyes scan the peaks of the mountains around us, going rock to rock, looking for danger.
“We can’t risk getting pinned down by rifles,” I say, feeling the wind pick up again behind us. “We need to close the distance fastlike. Holiday, you lay cover.” Holiday digs a small trench in the snow and covers herself with the thermal blanket. We cover that with snow so only her rifle’s peeking out.
Then Ragnar slips down the slope to investigate the rear half of the ship as Mustang and I press for the main wreck.
Mustang and I slink low over rocks, covered by the renewed vigor of the storm, unable to see the
ship till we’re within fifteen meters. We close the rest of the distance on our bellies and find a jagged hole in the aft where the back half of the fuselage was shredded by Ragnar ’s missile. Part of me expected a camp of warColors and Golds preparing to hunt us down. Instead, the ship’s an epileptic
corpse, power flickering on and off. Inside, the ship is hollow and cavernous and almost too dark to see when the lights crackle off. Something drips in the darkness as we work our way toward the middle of the craft. I smell the blood before I see it. In the passenger compartment, nearly a dozen Grays lie dead, smashed into the floor above us by the rocks that speared the ship as it landed.
Mustang kneels next to the body of a mangled Gray to examine his clothing.
“Darrow.” She pulls back his collar and points to a tattoo. The digital ink still moves even though the flesh is dead. Legio XIII. So it is Cassius’s escort. I manipulate the toggle on my razor, moving my thumb in the shape of the new desired design. I press down. The razor slithers in my hand, abandoning its slingBlade look for a shorter, broader blade so I can stab more easily in the cramped environs.
There’s no sign of any life as we move forward, let alone Cassius. Just the wind moaning through