Chapter 112: Frost
I walk back across the lane with the ring closed in my fist.
Lola has her cheeks packed full of her second skewer, chewing hard and slow like the food is trying to argue back. I crouch in front of her and open my hand.
Her jaw stops mid-grind.
For about two seconds her brain visibly locks up. Her eyes are on the ring. Her mouth is full. Her hands are halfway to the skewer for another bite. The whole machine stalls, and she just stares at my open palm with the food still bulging in her cheeks.
"Slow down. Swallow first, then tell me what you think."
She chews two more times, careful and mechanical, like she’s hitting a quota she set for herself before she started. Then she reaches for her canteen, takes a swallow, wipes her mouth on her sleeve.
She leans in.
"Looks like Rhayne’s eyes," she says. "But without the storm."
Rhayne, sitting beside her, doesn’t react. Or reacts in the smallest possible unit—her gaze drops a half inch to the ring, then drifts back to the lane.
Lola’s fingers hover over my palm. Stuck halfway.
"Come on. Take it. I told you you needed a present."
She takes it between her thumb and forefinger like it’s made of ash. Holds it up to the lamplight. Turns it.
"It’s beautiful..."
Then she reaches into a pocket I didn’t know she had and pulls out a thin silver chain. I assume she’s going to put the ring on her finger and the chain is for something else entirely.
I’m wrong.
She threads the chain through the ring, fastens the clasp behind her neck, and lets the ring settle against her collarbone as a pendant.
The rainbow metal catches the blue light from the lanterns overhead and throws a thin, shifting halo across her chest.
I will never understand this kid.
"Shines like the pot," she says.
"Sounds like you miss Veric. You keep bringing him up."
"The pot was loud and annoying. But reliable."
"We’ll be back soon. You’ll see him again. No complaining to me when he starts getting on your nerves."
Lola makes a face. The whole top half of her scrunches up and the bottom half stays neutral, so her expression looks like two different faces stacked on top of each other.
"Come on, girls. Let’s find a place to stay tonight. I saw a couple of inns on the way in."
I stand up. My shoulder sends a short, sharp protest down the arm. I ignore it. Rhayne notices and doesn’t say anything.
I’m halfway turned toward the main lane when Lola’s voice comes up from behind me.
"Uncle..."
"Yeah?"
"Thank you."
Something wrong happens to my face.
Not wrong in a bad way. Wrong like a door I thought was locked swinging open under its own weight. A small, involuntary smile slips past whatever checkpoint I keep at the front of my mouth.
I turn back. Ruffle her hair. Don’t trust my voice to say anything else.
The inn is called Sand Arches and it’s the best-looking building on the lane. Whitewashed stone, carved wooden shutters, a sign above the door worn smooth by however many hands have pushed through it over the years. I open my comms channel.
"Oliver. Sand Arches Inn. Come find us when you’re done."
"Copy."
Five chitin per person for a bed. Oliver arrives five minutes later, jingling with so much material you can hear him a block away—he says he got ten chitin off each Wiver carcass on Boris’s battlefield.
He pays without blinking.
I take a room with Oliver. The girls get their own room. They’ve earned privacy more than I’ve earned supervision.
I run a bath for myself in the wooden tub they bring up, water heated over a stone hearth in the corner. The water goes brown before I’m halfway through. When I climb out, the bandage on my shoulder needs changing.
I change it. The wound is still angry and wet at the edges even if it’s closed.
Oliver is facedown on the straw mattress, already snoring like a pig with a grudge against silence.
I drag the only chair in the room across to the door and wedge it under the handle. Check the window. Check the shadow under the door. Only then do I let myself drop onto the second mattress.
The ceiling has water stains shaped like continents I’ve never seen.
One night. Just one.
The Pearl applies a small amount of cold pressure to my thigh through my pocket. I don’t take it out. I don’t look at it. I just let its weight be there and close my eyes.
♢♢♢♢
I’m awake before the light through the shutter changes.
Oliver is still out, a string of drool running from the corner of his mouth to the straw.
How does this man sleep like that anywhere he lands?
I kick his boot on my way past.
He grunts. I kick it again.
He sits up like someone dropped a rock on his chest.
I ping the girls on the comms.
"Everyone out in fifteen."
We meet at the front door of the inn ten minutes later. Lola still has the ring on the chain around her neck.
Breakfast is functional. Scales for OXI. A slab of dense, dark bread. Strips of cured meat. A clay jar of water with a stopper.
I’d have made OXI Drop into the canteens if the effect held, but OXI drop only works on the first sip—the moment the water cools and settles, the charge is gone. Fresh or nothing.
We head for the stable.
Jacob is already up, coaxing one of his Ferredons through a morning stretch. He looks up when we walk in and lets out a long sigh, like he’s been expecting us and dreading us in equal measure.
"Four mounts," I say. "We’re heading out."
"Boris already told me." Jacob runs a hand down his lead animal’s neck. "He said you’d be back. Said to put whatever you needed on his tab."
"He’s not charging?"
"Not today. Told me if I tried, he’d have my hide for a coat." Jacob cracks a half-grin. "Boris doesn’t make threats twice. So no, I’m not charging."
"Tell him thanks."
"Tell him yourself when you get back."
He doesn’t say ’if.’ I notice.
♢♢♢♢
The Ferredons move at a slow, rolling pace. I’m keeping them there on purpose. Speed attracts attention in open desert, and whatever the Tide Worm was, I’d rather not audition for a repeat performance.
Nobody talks.
Oliver’s eyes sweep the dunes in a steady rhythm, left to right, right to left.
Rhayne is a shadow on her mount, barely shifting with the animal’s gait.
Lola is humming something under her breath that isn’t quite a melody—a three-note pattern she keeps repeating, low enough that it wouldn’t carry past our formation.
The tower grows on the horizon. Two miles out, by my estimate. The twisted coral helices are clearer now, and for the first time I can see details—branches splitting off the main column, pale nodules along the ridges like growths on old bone.
We keep riding.
Everything is going fine. Which is when I notice.
Something is wrong.
I can’t place it at first. The wind hasn’t changed direction. The Ferredons aren’t agitated. The horizon hasn’t moved. But something in the back of my throat is tight in a way it wasn’t thirty seconds ago, and my skin along the forearms has gone tight with it.
I exhale.
A thin, pale cloud of vapor curls out of my mouth and drifts away on the still air.
My breath is fogging.
In a desert that never dropped below ninety degrees.
I pull up sharp on my reins. The animal under me stops without protest.
Boris’s voice, from two nights ago, returns word for word in my mind: "You see ice forming in the air, you turn and you sprint."