The wilderness of Blizzaria did not ease you in.
Levi had understood this intellectually from Winters' briefing — the two-page list, the thermal underlayers, the instruction to keep your core warm at the cost of everything else. He had understood it the way you understood things before they happened to you.
By the third hour he understood it differently.
The cold was not the cold he had known in Frostilia. The city cold had edges — the edges of a built environment that mediated between the wilderness and the people living in it. Out here there were no edges. The cold was total. It came from every direction simultaneously, from the ground through his boots and the air against every exposed surface and something deeper than either, a quality of the landscape itself that seemed designed to remind anything warm-blooded that it was a guest here and not a particularly welcome one.
He was managing it. His lightning ran warm by nature — Zoe had noted this in the pre-departure vitals, the specific thermal output of his Flux creating a layer of protection a non-electric user wouldn't have. He kept it at low idle, just enough to maintain the warmth, feeling it steady in his chest like a banked fire.
Ahead of him, Winters walked without apparent effort.
That was the thing Levi kept coming back to. Everyone else in the group was working — visibly, continuously, the specific focused energy of people managing their bodies against an environment that wanted to win. Priscilla had her telekinesis running a subtle warm-air circulation around herself that she'd worked out within the first hour. The twins moved with chi-enhanced efficiency, minimising heat waste. Even Levi was consciously monitoring, adjusting.
Winters had his hands in his pockets.
"Does it not bother you at all?" Levi asked, falling into step beside him.
Winters looked at him sideways. "Does what not bother me."
"The cold."
A pause. "No."
"At all?"
"It's home," said Winters, as if this were sufficient explanation, which for him it apparently was.
Levi looked at the landscape — the flat white expanse broken by rock formations and the occasional dark conifer that had committed to surviving out here through sheer stubbornness. The sky was a low grey ceiling pressing down on everything, and the snow was the kind of deep that made distances deceptive, the horizon further than it looked or closer depending on the light.
"It's beautiful," Levi said. He meant it.
Winters looked at the landscape. Something in his expression that wasn't quite warmth but was adjacent to it. "Yes," he said. "It is."
✦ ✦ ✦
The mood of the group was not the mood of the sparring sessions or the café or the training yard.
Halvenmoor sat on all of them. Not spoken about — there was nothing left to say that hadn't been said in the silence after Curwyn read the report in Veldmoor's street — but present, in the specific way that things were present when they hadn't been resolved, just set aside because the mission required it.
Priscilla walked mostly in silence, her spear floating in the easy orbit of something that had been alongside her long enough to feel like an extension of herself. Her eyes moved across the terrain at a pace that suggested she was aware of more of it simultaneously than the rest of them — the spatial awareness running passively, reading the wilderness the way other people read a room.
"There's a rock shelf about two kilometres east," she said at one point, to no one in particular. "South-facing. It would block the wind."
"We're not going east," Winters said.
"I know. I'm just noting it."
"Noted," said Winters.
The twins were quieter than their HQ selves — conserved, the specific economy of athletes who understood that energy spent on anything other than movement was energy not available for movement. Kiyandra walked with the focused inward expression of someone running mental drills. Kylie caught Levi's eye at one point and gave him a look that communicated, without words, something in the vicinity of: this is fine, we have done worse, keep moving.
He kept moving.
✦ ✦ ✦
Winters called the halt at a flat area between two rock formations that broke the wind from the north and west. He looked at it for a moment, turned a slow circle assessing, then crouched and pressed both palms flat against the snow.
The igloos rose.
Levi watched it happen and filed it in the category of things that would have been remarkable in any other company and in this company were just Winters doing a thing. The ice came up from the ground in sheets and curved and met itself at the top, the architecture precise and unhurried, five separate structures forming in the time it might have taken someone else to unpack a tent. The interior surfaces were smooth. The entrances faced south, angled away from the wind.
"Temperature inside will be about fifteen degrees warmer than outside," Winters said, straightening. "Not warm. Warmer." He looked at the group. "Eat. Rest. We move at first light."
"What about watch?" Kylie asked.
"I'll handle it," said Winters.
Kiyandra looked at him. "You need sleep too."
"I sleep differently out here," said Winters, which was not an explanation but was delivered with sufficient finality that it functioned as one.
✦ ✦ ✦
Inside his igloo, before he took watch, Winters reached into his pack for the map.
His hand found something that wasn't on his packing list.
Small. Flat. A disc of dark material, dense, with a specific quality to its surface that wasn't natural. He held it between two fingers for exactly the time it took him to identify it. Then he put it back exactly where he'd found it — in the bottom left corner of the pack, beneath the secondary rations — and took out the map and laid it flat against his knee and studied the route as if he'd found nothing.
A listening device.
His pack had been in the HQ the night before departure. He had packed it himself and left it in his room. The door had a lock. He was one of three people with a key — himself, Captain Curwyn, and the HQ's maintenance officer. The maintenance officer was sixty years old and had served the HQ since before Winters joined it.
He folded the map. He tucked it away. He did not look at the listening device again.
Someone had wanted to know where he was going. Who was going with him. What they were going to find.
Let them listen. Winters would decide what they heard.
He went outside and climbed on top of the central igloo and sat with his legs folded and his hands on his knees and his eyes closed.
✦ ✦ ✦
The cold pressed against him from every direction and he received it the way you received something that belonged to you — without resistance, without management. The wilderness spoke to him in the language he'd been born speaking: rock formations cooling at different rates, wind moving through the gap between the northern outcroppings in a specific pattern, the thermal signatures of five people in five igloos, each one a slightly different warmth.
He reached into the cold with his awareness and let it extend outward in rings. A kilometre. Two. Three.
He found the pack at approximately the same time as he found what was moving in the dark.
It moved differently from myths — or rather it moved like a myth that had learned to move like the cold itself, with the quality of something that had originated in this environment rather than passed through it. Slow. Patient. Unhurried in the way of things that knew their prey couldn't go anywhere.
He opened his eyes.
The Wendigo was at the edge of the igloo village — a shape that was tall and wrong in the specific way of things that had once been something else and had been remade by hunger and cold into something new. It moved through the snow without disturbing it the way ordinary things disturbed it. The temperature dropped another three degrees in the immediate radius of its body.
Winters stood up.
Inside the igloos, the temperature drop registered. He felt the others' thermal signatures shift — alertness replacing rest, the Flux signatures of people who had been sleeping and were now not.
✦ ✦ ✦
Priscilla felt it first.
Not the cold — though the cold changed, a quality shift in the air that pressed against her spatial awareness like a wrong note in a familiar song. What she felt was an aura. Dark and cold and ancient and hungry, moving through her extended awareness with the weight of something that had been in this wilderness long before any of them had arrived.
She opened her eyes.
"Something's outside," she said.
Levi was already sitting up.
—
Kylie felt the temperature drop and looked at Kiyandra.
"Winters is letting it get colder? " Kiyandra asked quietly.
"Winters doesn't let it get colder," said Kylie. "Not when we're camped."
They looked at each other.
"Then something else is making it cold," said Kiyandra.
They were already reaching for their weapons.