Page 42 of Elanie & the Empath
“Is that a lake?” I asked, pointing my chin toward the icy plane we’d walked over last night.
“I think so,” he said. “Good thing it’s frozen, or we might have gone swimming.”
The thought sent a chill through me, but when I looked at him, he was grinning.
“Why are you smiling?” I asked, because he did this. Whenever everything seemed to conspire against us, he smiled.
Despite the cold, his laughter was rich and warm. “I’m smiling because if that’s a lake, then there might be fish.”
“Fish under meters of solid ice,” I pointed out.
“True. But that’s where you come in.”
“Me?” I crossed my arms over my chest. “How? I don’t even know how to fish.”
He waved a hand through the air. “Leave the fishing to me. I just need your bionic superstrength to chisel out a hole in the ice.” Turning toward the mountains, he frowned. “But first, we need wood. You might survive another cold night, but without fire, I’m not sure I will.” He gazed down at his boxers. Which meant that I did too. “I should probably get dressed.”
“How do you expect to get wood?” I asked while he stepped past me back into the cave.
He reached down for his pants, hissing while he pulled them on. “Saints alive. These are freezing.”
“Sem, we don’t have an axe.”
Sliding his arms into his shirt, he covered up his skin one button at a time. “After that storm, I bet I’ll be able to find plenty of sticks on the ground.”
“We also don’t have a lighter or matches or flint.”
His eyes twinkled. “You’ve never made a friction fire before?”
“No.” If I had access to the Vnet, I’d do a search. But I couldn’t even connect to the weak SBN signal this far back in the cave. “I don’t even know what that is.”
A corner of his mouth hitched. “A friction fire is when you take combustible materials and grind them together hard and fast enough that you get a spark.”
“Oh?” I squeezed the back of my neck, halting the tiny shiver working its way up my spine at the thought of Sem at the same time as grinding and combustion. “That sounds…hard.”
His right brow ticked. “It certainly can be.”
“You’ve done it before, though? Made things combust by”—I cleared my throat—“grindingthem together?”
“I have.” His face seemed rendered in ultra-high definition, the silver stubble dotting his jaw, that navy freckle under his eye, his eyelashes casting shadows along his cheekbones when he said, “But not for years.”
I wasn’t sure, because subtext wasn’t my strong suit. But I didn’t think we were talking about fire anymore.
But then he took a breath, which was more like a sigh, and said, “Besides, we need to eat. And the MREs taste a lot better when they’re hot…” He trailed off, noticing my feet. “Stars above, Elanie. Your toes. Are you in pain?”
My toes were swollen, even bluer than his. But they didn’t hurt—probably because I’d raised my pain thresholds so high an oorthorse would have to stomp on them before I’d feel much of anything. “They’re fine.”
“They are not fine.” He pointed to a small ledge in the rock wall. “Sit. Let me take a look.”
I did as he asked, watching him as he knelt in front ofme. He was very fluid for a non-bionic. Graceful, like the ocean.
“I should have given you my shoes,” he muttered while he pulled my feet into his lap.
“You’d have frostbite if you had.”
His hands brushed over the tops of my feet, gently moving each of my toes back and forth, checking the skin between them. “No frostbite for you,” he said. “But you do have some severe swelling, several abrasions, and a few blisters. And I think you might lose a toenail.” Holding my right big toe carefully, showing me the bruise at the base of my nail, he said, “This one here.”
“They grow back,” I said. “I heal quickly.”
