CHAPTER 30

The wind picked up somewhere around what should have been midday, though nothing in the sky had changed enough to mark the hour passing. Snow that had been falling gently began coming sideways instead, hard enough to sting any bare skin left exposed.

“That’s new,” Owen said, pulling his hood tighter.

“Everything here’s new,” Lisa said. “That’s rather the problem with the place.”

“Is it getting colder, or does it just feel that way?” I asked.

“Both, probably. I stopped trusting my own sense of temperature an hour ago.”

Priya checked something on a small device strapped to her wrist, frowning at whatever it told her.

“Temperature has dropped eight degrees in the last twenty minutes. That isn’t weather. That’s something deciding whether it wants us moving faster or not moving at all.”

“Cheerful thoughts.”

“I specialize in those, apparently.”

Callum stopped walking, head tilted. Something in the wind had caught his attention before the rest of us noticed anything.

“More of them,” he said. “Several. Moving fast, closing from three sides.”

“How many is several?”

“Six. Maybe seven. Hard to separate them out with the wind this loud.”

“That isn’t the same one from before,” Priya said.

“No. That one watched. These aren’t watching.”

They came out of the whiteout almost on top of us, pale shapes low to the ground. They moved faster than the first one, teeth already bared.

We had been in the gate long enough that everyone was running on fumes. Priya had stopped throwing light at anything under four feet. Owen was favoring the side the first wolf had opened.

I was counting mana draws in my head the way you count matches in a box you can’t refill.

A D-rank gate didn’t do this to a party. It was meant to be over before anyone’s reserves became a question. This one had turned into survival, and the math was getting worse.

I put Nadir through the nearest one’s throat before it finished closing the distance. The fight became six separate problems happening at once instead of anything resembling a plan.

They didn’t fight like the first one had watched. The first one had been alone and curious. These arrived already knowing where each other were.

Two came at me and only one committed. The other stood off my left at eight feet and waited, moving four feet to keep its angle every time I turned.

It was herding me toward Lisa. It took me a minute to realize it wasn’t trying to reach her either, but trying to get us close enough together to be one problem.

Lisa’s bones rose fast, catching one clean, but a second got past her guard entirely. Only Owen’s shadow snapping up between her and its jaws kept the miss from costing what it should have.

“Thank you,” she called.

“Do not mention it. Genuinely. My arm is currently doing something I’d rather not examine too closely.”

Priya lit the air around her hands, and for a moment I thought the fight was about to end much faster than it had started.

Then the wind caught the light and scattered it, the blizzard swallowing half the beam’s force before it ever reached a target.

“What the hell,” she said, sounding startled for the first time since we had met her.

She tried it twice more, smaller each time, and the wind took most of both.

“Priya.”

“I’m aware.” The third attempt reached about half the distance she had aimed it.

“Then stop asking it for distance,” I said.

“That’s the entire thing I do.”

There was a pause with a wolf in the middle of it. Then she came forward instead of back, which isn’t the direction light-users are taught to go. She put a burst into something at four feet that had been about to reach Callum.

It worked at four feet. It worked very well.

“I hate this,” she said.

“It’s working,” I said.

“I know. That’s why I hate it.”

“Wind is eating your light,” Callum called. “Save it for something you can actually aim for.”

“Copy that.”

Callum himself had gone quieter than usual, jaw tight with concentration. The wind that scattered Priya’s light was doing something similar to whatever let him hear and smell and map a kilometer in every direction. All of it was drowning under wind noise loud enough to swallow anything subtler than a shout.

“Callum,” I called. “Are you still with us?”

“Mostly. It’s like trying to hear a single voice in a stadium. I can still do it, but it’s costing me more than it should.”

He had blood at his nose and hadn’t noticed it yet.

“How far can you actually hear right now,” Priya said.

“Far enough.”

“Callum.”

“About twenty meters,” he said to the snow. “It was a kilometer this morning.”

Nobody had a useful thing to say to that.

I took the third one myself, then a fourth that came in from an angle I hadn’t expected, Nadir catching it a moment later than I would have liked.

“Do not come to me,” Lisa called, working it out about the same time I did. “Whatever it looks like it wants, don’t come to me.”

“Understood.”

“I mean it. I’d rather fight one of these on my own than have both of us cornered being polite about it.”

Lisa’s second Entomb came up slower than the first, bones fighting harder against ground gone half-frozen underneath the snow.

“Getting slower,” she said, breathing hard.

“You’re getting there. Just took an extra second.”

“An extra second is the difference between fine and not fine in this kind of fight,” she replied.

“Then we cover the second. That’s what the rest of us are for.”

“That isn’t a fix. That’s just distributing the problem,” she replied.

“It’s the only fix I’ve got right now. I’ll take the problem over without solving it at all.”

She didn’t answer, another shape already closing from the left before either of us could say anything else.

Owen took the worst of it, a fifth wolf catching him across the ribs before his shadow could rise fast enough to intercept it.

He went down hard, and for one long moment none of us were sure he would get back up on his own.

He did, slower than he should have, one hand pressed to his side.

“I’m fine,” he said.

“You don’t look fine,” I said.

“I don’t need to look at it. I just need to keep standing until this is over.”

Priya’s head turned sharply at that. “Owen. Talk to me straight. How bad.”

“Bad enough that I’ll want the healing kit after, and not bad enough to stop moving yet.”

“That isn’t the same as fine.”

“No. It’s the version I’ve got the energy to offer you right now. Take it or don’t, I’m still fighting either way.”

She didn’t push further, though the look she gave him lasted a beat longer than the fight strictly allowed for.

I got a proper look at him afterward. The wolf had gone through the coat and through whatever was under the coat, and Owen had spent the last four minutes fighting anyway and being pleasant about it.

That was the moment Meridian stopped being a better-resourced version of us in my head.

We finished the last two together, all five of us converging on what remained. Then it was over, six pale shapes still in the snow and five people breathing much harder than the fight alone should have accounted for.

“That was worse than the file’s D-rank rating by a significant margin,” Priya said, once she had caught her breath.

“Considerably worse,” Lisa agreed.

“My light doesn’t work right in this wind, and Callum’s range is being throttled by the noise,” Priya said. “Owen took a hit that should have been stopped clean.”

She looked between the two camps. “We aren’t as far ahead of you two as I think we all assumed this morning.”

“Should that make us feel better?” Lisa asked.

“It wasn’t supposed to be anything except true.”

She is not wrong to be worried.

Whatever this gate is, it is not behaving like anything either team has real experience with. That should concern you more than it seems to be.

“It concerns me a lot,” I said softly. “I’m just not going to say so out loud in front of an audience.”

A reasonable distinction. I only wanted it confirmed you were taking it seriously, not dismissing it because the day has already asked enough of you.

“I’m taking it seriously.”

Good. Keep doing that. Something tells me the worst of this gate has not introduced itself yet.

Nobody added anything for a while.

“Say it again,” Callum said eventually. “The start-of-day thing. Say it again for where we actually are.”

Priya looked at him, then at the rest of us.

“I need line of sight and I need distance,” she said. “I’ve neither. In this wind I’m a torch that works at four feet.”

“Range is twenty meters,” Callum said. “It was a kilometer.”

“Shadow stops one of them,” Owen said from the ground. “It didn’t stop the fifth.”

Nobody looked at Lisa or me, and both of us said ours anyway because the others had.

“Right.” Priya got her pack up onto one shoulder. “Then nobody goes anywhere alone from here. That’s the whole rule. It’s smaller than the one we walked in with, and I can actually keep it.”

We checked Owen’s ribs, bound what needed binding, and pushed on into the wind.

Lisa fell beside me as we walked, quiet for a while before she spoke.

“Did you notice? Priya’s device. The one that read the temperature drop.”

“I noticed.”

“That isn’t something Zarya has ever equipped us with.”

“I noticed that too.”

“I’m not saying it to complain. I’m saying it because it’s one more thing on the pile. Gap after gap, all pointing the same direction.”

She pulled her coat tighter against a gust.

“We’re going to need to close a lot more than one of them before this stops feeling the way it currently feels.”

“We’ll.”

“Say how.” She wasn’t being unkind, merely tired of reassurance with nothing inside it. “I’d genuinely like to hear how. I’ve been listing problems for two days and I haven’t once heard myself offer a solution.”

“I don’t have a how yet.”

“Then say that instead. I can work with that. I can’t work with ‘we’ll’.”

“Fair.”

“Thank you.” She pulled her collar up. “That’s the first useful thing either of us has said since we walked into this place.”

“You sound very certain for someone who nearly lost an argument with a piece of ice an hour ago.”

“I’m allowed to be certain about the wrong things sometimes. It keeps the certainty muscle in practice.”

That got something close to a laugh out of her, worn thin but real. We walked the rest of the stretch in a quiet that had stopped feeling quite so heavy.