Page 48 of Wilde and Untamed
Tyler, still pale and coughing, staggered ahead of Mia, who had his harness clipped to hers with a short haul line. Keene and Noah were next, Keene stumbling as the wind caught him broadside, Noah steady as a fencepost. Elliot brought up the rear, his hand gripping Rue’s shoulder.
For five minutes, they made progress. The flagged safety markers were half-buried but visible, neon orange snaking over the field. Then, with a single apocalyptic gust, the world erased itself. A drift slammed into Rue’s knees, and when she looked up, the flags were gone. Just gone.
She jerked to a stop, holding her hand out for Elliot. His glove found hers instantly, anchoring them together in the hurricane.
“Stop!” she bellowed, voice shredded by the shrieking wind. “Regroup!”
Shapes coalesced in the white—Mia dragging Tyler, Noah upright with Keene clinging to his sleeve. They converged, bracing against each other’s bodies for a second of precious, shared warmth.
Rue forced herself to breathe. “We lost the markers. Noah, compass?”
He pulled it, hands shaking. “Wind’s shifted. North-northeast.”
“Station is due east,” Rue said. “We’re a hundred meters from the gear room, maybe less. If we cut across the snowpack?—”
Elliot finished her thought. “We could miss it completely.”
“Better than staying put,” Mia said, but her voice quivered. “Tyler’s getting worse.”
Rue studied him. His lips were cyanotic, eyes glazed. “CO2 poisoning?” she yelled.
“No. It’s a panic response. He can’t breathe, but his lungs are clear,” Mia replied, checking his mask. “He just needs to get inside.”
“Everyone clip to the main rope. Tight,” Rue commanded. “Elliot, you’re rear anchor. Noah, you and Keene take point. Mia, Tyler between us.”
They moved, hunched low, bodies pressed together, inching across the snow in a blind, battered procession. The cold seeped through even the best insulation, and with every step, Rue felt her energy drain. Antarctica was a vampire—sucking heat, then hope, then everything else.
The blizzard worsened. Visibility collapsed to less than a meter. Rue tried to keep count of steps, but the rhythm blurred, and the snow underfoot was uneven—ridges, dips, a sudden hollow where Tyler nearly vanished before Mia hauled him upright.
Keene started shouting something, but the wind ripped the words away. Rue caught only, “Landmark! Light!”
She craned her head, but all she saw was the undifferentiated white. Noah yanked the rope, gesturing forward, and they staggered ahead.
They’d just crossed a shallow ridge when it happened: a blast of wind so strong it lifted Rue off her feet. She slammed down hard, goggles filling with packed snow. Instinctively, sheclamped both hands on the rope, but when she looked up, the line was limp.
The others were gone. The blizzard had swallowed them.
Rue’s heart seized. For a second, she couldn’t breathe. The rope in her hand was snapped, sheared clean by the wind or by a panicked tug. She couldn’t see more than her own arm, couldn’t hear anything except the shriek.
She twisted. “Elliot!” she screamed. “El?—”
His arms closed around her from behind, pinning her elbows to her sides, hard and tight. “Rue,” he shouted, his mouth inches from her ear. “We lost them. We lost them!”
“We have to find?—”
He spun her to face him. The snow was so thick, his face was a mask of frost and fear. “We can’t. Not in this. We have to dig in. Now.”
She blinked once, twice, then let the survival training click into place.
“Leeward side,” she managed, pulling his hand and dragging him toward a drift that would offer the tiniest bit of shelter from the wind. They crashed behind it, carving out a pit with gloved hands, burrowing down until they were below the surface. Their bodies pressed together, face-to-face, heat pooling in the microclimate between them.
Elliot cradled her head, his lips at her ear. “They’re trained. They’ll find shelter. Right now, you’re all I care about.”
She wanted to bite back, to tell him the whole point was not dying, but instead she just said, “Same,” and let her body shake with the adrenaline and cold.
They hunkered there, breath mingling, the snow closing over the pit until the world narrowed to the tiny space between their chests.
Elliot cupped her jaw, careful and firm, and forced her to look at him. “Talk to me, Rue. Stay with me.”
