Chapter 36-Outside(1)

Chapter 36: 36-Outside(1)

His fingers were still curled into a stiff, frozen claw, bruised purple along the knuckles where the thirty-pound pig-iron splitter had been ripped out of his grip by the rapids three miles back.

The second thing he noticed was the weight on his chest.

Valera was curled into a tight ball on top of him, wedged into the narrow, dry pocket of gravel beneath the low arch of the collapsed concrete bridge.

Her knees were tucked up against his hips, her Night-iron gauntlets were lying discarded in the dirt beside them so the metal wouldn’t leech his warmth, and her bare, freezing hands were shoved straight inside the torn front of his coat, pressed flat against his ribs.

She was shivering so violently her teeth clicked together in the dark.

Sol didn’t try to sit up. His muscles felt like they had been beaten with iron rods and then soaked in vinegar.

The Override against Lord Cassian Vane had chewed him down to the bare bone, literally.

His progression sat at a pathetic 1% High-Stage (Flesh and Bone), and the tiny coal of his Sun’s Believer core in the center of his sternum was flickering so weakly it couldn’t even push heat up to his optic nerves.

He was completely blind again.

No thermal blues.

No glowing orange outlines.

Just the heavy, wet roaring rush of the Slag River ten feet from their boots.

"Val," Sol croaked. His throat felt like it was lined with broken glass.

Valera didn’t answer right away.

Her forehead was pressed tightly against the hollow of his throat.

When she finally spoke, her voice was slurred and thick with hypothermia.

"You’re awake," she mumbled against his skin. "Don’t move. You let the cold air under the coat and I’ll stab you."

"With what?" Sol rasped, slowly lifting his stiff, bruised arms to wrap them around her shivering back, pulling her tighter against his chest. "Did you keep the spear?"

"Dropped it in the river when I had to grab your belt so you wouldn’t sink," she muttered, burrowing her nose deeper into his collarbone.

"I only have the gauntlets. You dropped your big ugly cleaver too."

"Shame. That was good pig-iron."

"It was a piece of rusted garbage, Sol."

"It cracked a Master’s arm," Sol pointed out quietly, feeling a tiny, stubborn spark of pride warm his chest.

"Foundation Establishment. Level 2. Look at them up in the Second Ring, acting like gods, and thirty pounds of slaughterhouse iron still makes ’em bleed."

Valera let out a weak, shaky breath that warmed his neck.

"You’re crazy, aren’t you? Your skin feels like rough and cracked. I almost thought you died an hour ago."

"I’m too cheap to die after eating Lyra’s core," Sol said. He closed his blind eyes, focusing everything he had on that tiny, fingernail-sized ember behind his breastbone.

He didn’t try to flare it.

He just breathed slow and deep, drawing oxygen into his battered lungs and feeding the coal like a boy blowing on dry tinder.

"Go to sleep, Val. I’ve got the fire going. It won’t go out."

"I’m almost a peak-stage, but we were just lucky this time," Valera whispered in the dark, her freezing fingers flexing slightly against his bare ribs as the first faint trickle of warmth finally began to seep out of his sternum. " If we didn’t have the water cushion..."

"We made it," Sol said, his rough chin resting on the top of her damp, pale hair. "No horns down here. No Enforcers. Just mud."

"And the Crowned," Valera murmured, already slipping into exhaustion as his body heat slowly stabilized her plummeting temperature. "Level 2 beasts run these banks, Sol. If one smells us tonight..."

"We smell like shit," Sol whispered back, pulling the ragged edges of his coat over her shoulders as best he could. "Nothing’s eating us tonight. Sleep."

For the next eight hours, they didn’t move an inch.

Under the low concrete arch, hidden behind a tangled wall of rusted pre-collapse car frames and dead silver-wood roots washed down from Hearth City, they simply survived.

As the night wore on, Sol’s Ash-Forged body slowly recovered from the backlash of the Override.

The coal in his chest grew back into a steady, fist-sized knot of heat, pushing a slow, continuous wave of warmth into Valera’s chest and keeping her Permafrost curse from creeping back into her lungs.

By the time the gray, miserable twilight of the Deep Wastes began to filter through the river fog, Sol was able to push a low trickle of heat to his eyes.

Flash.

The world didn’t strobe anymore, it hummed into view in muted, steady shades of thermal gray and blue.

Sol looked down.

Valera was fast asleep on his chest, her breathing deep and even, the healthy golden threads of his heat once again woven lightly through the pale blue of her neck and cheeks.

Her lips weren’t blue anymore.

Sol carefully shifted his weight, wincing as the scabs across his chest pulled tight against his shirt.

Valera’s eyes snapped open instantly, her bare left hand coming up in a defensive guard before she registered Sol’s glowing orange eyes looking down at her.

She blinked, rubbed her face against his shoulder with a quiet groan, and rolled off him onto the gravel, immediately reaching for her matte-black Night-iron gauntlets.

"My everything hurts," she announced to the concrete ceiling, sliding her hands into the cold metal gloves and fastening the leather straps at her wrists.

"Better than the meat pen," Sol said, sitting up and rolling his shoulders until his spine gave three loud, satisfying cracks.

He looked out through the gaps in the rusted car frames at the wide, foggy expanse of the riverbank. "So. This is the outside."

Valera crawled over beside him, peering out through a rusted windshield frame.

To her normal eyes, the world outside Hearth City was a bleak, endless painting of ash-gray snow, black basalt boulders, and dead, twisted trees coated in glittering lunar rime.

Above them, the colossal stone walls of Hearth City were barely visible three miles upstream, swallowed up by the permanent bank of freezing fog that separated the canyon from the flatlands.

"Eighty percent of the world looks just like this," Valera said quietly, pulling her knees up to her chest.

"When I was ten, my tutor in the Noble Estate showed me the old maps from before the Silver Eye opened. There used to be oceans that didn’t freeze. Forests that grew green leaves from sunlight instead of pale wood from lunar mist. Now there’s just Hearth City, the crazy zealots in the White Choir down south, and the cannibals in Gomorrah to the west."