Winter, White and Wicked - Shannon Dittemore Page 0,95
my boot.
Instead, I keep busy, working, trying not to feel all the things Kyn’s feeling and trying not to see the ancient Shiv frozen beneath the Desolation. There’s even a part of me that tries to stay wedged between these two things—like if I let Kyn catch sight of the Shiv images floating through my mind, it’ll increase his misery or, worse, prime him to take up Mars’s cause. To insist I can send Winter away with a simple command.
I’ve dug out the compressor and am refilling the slow-leaking tire on Mars’s trailer when Kyn pushes himself to a stand. Hyla and I both stop what we’re doing and watch as he plods heavily out into the snow. I’m bundled up tightly to keep out the cold, but Kyn’s wearing nothing but trousers and boots as he steps out into Winter.
Hyla meets my gaze from atop the trailer, her hands tangled in something metallic and oily. The grease drips to the ground in big, slow globs. “Should I go after him?”
“I’m not your boss, Hy.”
She blinks at me and looks around. Mars disappeared a while back. Presumably to do that thing only he can do. Hyla bore up well under the instruction to stay behind, keep an eye on Kyn and make sure “that damn gun is working,” but now that Kyn has wandered out of sight, it seems she can’t decide which of these tasks takes precedence.
“But should I? I know what my girls would want. They would want their mother to follow, to comfort. But my husband? He would want to be left alone, to sort things out in his mind. Kyndel is somewhere in between, is he not? Young and yet a man. I do not know—”
Relief bursts through me, bright and fresh as the first snow after a muddy Blys. The relief isn’t mine, I know, but I feel it vivid and open as a clean stretch of road. Kyn’s fine.
“Finish the gun,” I tell Hyla. “If Kyn needs us, we’ll know.”
Hyla nods and turns back to the lookout. “Thank you, Sessa.”
I’ll know if Kyn needs anything. The realization does something strange to my skin. I ignore it and flip the knob on the compressor. It hisses and spits as the motor turns, pumping air into the tire and flooding my head with enough noise that I can almost ignore the pleasure rolling like rain over the dry, craggy places in Kyn’s heart.
When he returns, the lookout has been reassembled and, pending an actual test, the gun shows every likelihood of firing. I haven’t let Hyla shoot the thing before now, but there’s no risk of an avalanche out on the Seacliff Road. And, aside from Lenore’s face, I can’t think of anything that would bring me more joy than seeing an ice monster blown to pieces by a Paradyian turret gun.
Hyla and I are finishing the final welds on the doors. The welds were my idea, but I don’t like it. As sparks fly and metal glows, it feels like we’re constructing our own cell with fewer and fewer escape routes.
“I’m running low on clothing,” Kyn says as he wanders back inside. He’s dripping wet, standing there half-naked and smiling. Water races down the red rock of his shoulders, slowing as it strikes the skin of his forearms. Beads of melted snow sit like pearls on his stone cheekbone. His chest is a crosshatching of puckered pink scars, but the wounds have closed. Winter wants me to resent him, and perhaps I should, but I meet his gaze and realize there are worse boys to be shackled to.
He’s the only person I’ve ever known to choose his emotions so completely. After all the bleeding and the dying and the slap-dizzy reality that his existence could very well be tied to my proximity, I cannot imagine another soul choosing to be happy. But I feel it, in my gut, the choice that squashes the other, more complicated emotions. They’re still there, buried beneath his choice, but happy wins out. Because he’s told it to.
“There’s always the hatch,” he says.
“Excuse me?”
“I’ll kick the welds clean off before I let you die in the cab, Sylvi. And there’s always the hatch.”
He can feel my emotions too. Inconvenient is not the right word—it’s something bigger and more complicated than that—but inconvenient is the word that swallows me whole as I stare down at his face, clean and drenched and happier than I’ve ever seen him.