Gabe was finished dressing about the same time she was, today, and she caught herself humming almost inaudibly. She couldn't wait to get to the warehouse, couldn't wait to put her hands to a terminal again. She hadn't realized how much she missed it until it had been pointed out to her, but now she was ravenous for it.

Gabe secured the drapes again, and slipped the hammer inside his coat. "It's clear," he said. He opened the door, and set the locks to secure themselves once the door shut. "Let's get started."

The library was further into town, and walking took a good fifteen minutes. They took an indirect route, of course, and stayed on streets that were sufficiently crowded. Always Sol would lead, taking point a few meters ahead, scouting out each street before Gabe followed. She had good eyes; teaching her what to look for had taken surprisingly little time. But then, Sol learned everything quickly. She had a mind that was naturally apt to figure things out.

Once in the library, Gabe still did not relax his watchfulness. He hung back, and found a secluded corner while Sol ran a quick search of the place. Nothing too thorough; that might draw attention. Just a quick circuit, with spotting any particularly attentive characters in mind.

It was strange to Gabe, relying on Sol for these things. He was not used to allowing someone else to be cautious for him. He was trusting her to be his senses, his eyes and ears in this place. He was trusting her to see any danger there might be here, waiting for him. It made him uneasy. Relying upon others did not come naturally to Gabe. There was no one alive that Gabe trusted more than Sol. But that didn't mean he wouldn't still rather be doing the looking himself.

Sol grinned and got to work.

It took her seven minutes to find a port she could use to quietly exit the library subsystem, and another four to find the right type of login to use for the public Net that serviced this area. She was pleased to discover that the Library shared space with several other government offices. None of them were related to what she needed to know, but she made a seamless transition to their network without setting off any alarms or attracting any attention.

She began to move around a little more freely, following the server to its root and finding the tree she wanted. There wasn't much security around government warehousing. The contents were confidential, of course. She didn't waste any time looking for those. Instead, she looked at guard assignments and schedules. There were three warehouses heavily guarded enough to be considered military, and of those, only one had a landing strip.

As he said this, Gabe was wondering to himself. The investigation concerning the crash had been "suspended indefinitely". This was an investigation the IF had shut down. However, they had suspended it, instead of terminating it. That bothered Gabe. It was possible that it was politics, that they didn't want to explain having closed an investigation into a possible act of terrorism. But Gabe wondered. It wasn't as though the IF was truly accountable to any higher power. They might bring suspicion upon themselves by closing the investigation, but no one would be able to do anything about it. And by simply "suspending" the investigation, they denied themselves the ability to destroy all evidence. They had to keep everything intact and in Juneau.

So that all of this was simply waiting here for Gabe.

Gabe was beginning to have doubts about this. There was something strange about the IF's methods in this matter. There had to be a reason why the IF would have chosen to simply suspend the investigation. There must have been something they needed before moving on. Some piece of evidence they needed.

Or perhaps the order for termination had been given, but someone along the chain of command had changed to an order of suspension. Perhaps there was someone who wanted the truth to be known, eventually.

Still, whatever was going on, Gabe had to see this through. He didn't trust the warehouse with an airstrip. The IF could lift wreckage anywhere; they didn't need airstirps for their salvage operations. But both of the two remaining wareohuses, Gabe could not guess which was more likely. There was nothing to point to either, except the guard schedules.

He returned to his reading. He didn't spend long on any one book. He wandered from section to section, from subject to subject. He sampled mysteries, biographies, romances, adventures, histories, anything and everything. He spent little time on each subject. He would pick up a book, flip through quickly, reading random passages or pages. Outside of their context, few made much sense. But Gabe was only sampling -- he didn't expect to take much away from any specific book or writer. Instead he was feeling through the differences and similarities between the topics, between the styles. It served no practical purpose; Gabe knew of no way this information would ever be of any use to him. He was simply feeding his curiosity. And there was a relaxing sense of freedom in that. The freedom of whimsy. Interesting.

"Can I help you with something?"

Gabe's insides jumped. He remained perfectly still, of course, and outwardly there was no sign he'd been surprised at all. He glanced over at the elderly librarian. How could he have missed her? How had he allowed himself such carelessness? What if she had been an IF spy?

Gabe shook his head. "No, thank you," he said as he turned and started away at full stride.

"Shakespeare is one of my favorites," the Librarian said.

Gabe slowed, and glanced at the book he was still carrying in his hands. Within the privacy of his own mind he swore at himself and returned with the book, slipping it back onto the shelf. The librarian smiled at him. Gabe turned and strode away.

Instead of three, she came up with around fifteen. Sighing, she began to work.

Of those fifteen, two were functioning hospitals. She took those out of the loop. Military hospitals were almost always cramped for space. They wouldn't waste it by sticking a chopper wreck into someplace where unsecured personnel were constantly moving in and out of.

Thirteen left. She ditched the academy and the three research labs. The academy's open spaces were too public. Unless it had been some sort of superior secret weaponry that had taken the chopper down, they wouldn't have sent it to the labs. Six down, nine to go.

After a moment's hesitation, she also cleared the four active military bases. Active was the key word. Whoever had hidden this had wanted it kept quiet. The mystery was that they'd wanted it kept at all. You didn't keep things quiet by throwing them out into a middle of a bunch of soldiers and saying, "Shh!"

Five left, three of which were the warehouses Gabe had already turned down as possibilities. Two others. A de-activated communications bunker left over from WWIII that they'd emptied out and sealed thirty years ago in favor of new construction and an old training facility that was waiting to be torn down. They each still had a guard complement, and would, until the government got around to actually knocking the buildings in. Tax dollars at work.

She pulled up some more information on each of her targets. The training facility seemed the likely prospect. It had the room and it was in a more remote location. She was about to dismiss the bunker as a possibility when the old codename of the communications post floated past in an article and caught her eye.

Gabriel's Horn.

These were better. Out of the way military sites, secluded enough to be a good hiding place, and inactive now. Very promising.

Gabriel's Horn. Gabe didn't like it. He didn't like funny coincidences. He had an odd feeling of inevitability about that name. Like he was going to end up there no matter what. But didn't like that, didn't like the idea that he didn't have a choice in the matter. In his mind he rebelled against it, and looked to the training facility. It was extremely promising. Easily the more likely of the two. If the comm station had been named something else, there would have been no question.

"Let's look at those maps a little more closely. Maybe we won't have to walk it."

They paused in a park, full of children enjoying the sunny day, and sat down on a bench there to look over what she'd found. She had just settled into "review" mode when she frowned suddenly and looked up.

There was a balloon vendor working the park, and many of the children were already running around and screaming with them. Another little boy was tugging at the seller's sleeve, but it was a full second before he looked down to deal with the boy. Down at the boy, and away from her, the surprised recognition she'd caught now out of sight.

She'd said that the man had been looking at her and only her. And while it was possible that the man had been looking at them both, and that Sol had only glanced up when the man's eyes were on her specifically, Gabe was inclined to trust Sol's instincts. She was absolutely right; even if the IF knew that Sol was with them, it made no sense for the man to have been looking at only her.

It made Gabe think that perhaps the man had not recognized Gabe at all. And he highly doubted that his little beard was what had thrown the man off. No, this man knew Sol's face, but not Gabe's.

This was very bad. At a time like this, in a situation like this, the last thing they needed was to have unforseen complications cropping up.

It was fairly clear that Sol had no idea who the man might have been, or why he would know Sol's face, and so Gabe didn't ask any questions like that. Anything she knew, he trusted her to tell him. Besides, she seemed just as uneasy as he.

Gabe placed a hand on her shoulder. He'd seen the gesture used before, to calm, to pacify, and Gabe hoped that it was right. There was a power in even the most simple of gestures, Gabe was coming to understand. He did not necessarily know what that power was, or exactly how to use it, but he thought he ought to at least try.

Though they did some quick scouting about the more populous part of the city, Gabe knew that there was no way they could use a vehicle for this trek. Neither of them knew how to drive, and anyway, they didn't look old enough to be certain that they wouldn't be pulled over. Besides, Gabe had never learned how to hotwire one, and unless Sol had taken car stealing as a hobby during her early years, she wasn't likely to know either.

No vehicle that Gabe could think of was truly practical. Snowmobiles wouldn't just be lying around, and anyway, they were far too noisy for an covert work. The idea of a bicycle appealed to him briefly, until he considered the fact that he'd not ridden one since he was five years old, and wasn't counting on the old saying about never forgetting to carry him on icy roads and snowy landscapes.

So vehilces were impractical. That left walking. At this time of year the snow was not terribly deep -- there would be no need for snowshoes or anything like that. And although it would be cold, certainly, the temperature was not necessarily life-threatening, as long as they didn't get lost. Still, Gabe worried about Sol. She hadn't been faring well so far in this weather. She wasn't used to it.

Still, what choice did they have?

So they left the city behind. There was no obvoius boundary to the city. The metropolis gave way to smaller residential areas, little cozy suburbs, and then to smaller and sparser houses and cabins. Eventually the road was flanked by white for as far as either could see.

It was cold. Even Gabe thought so, and he considered himself used to this. It was interesting, how much warmth the city lent -- Gabe would never have noticed it if they had not left it behind.

Nevertheless, they trudged along the side of the road, bound for this comms outpost suspiciously named Gabriel's Horn. Gabe didn't like this. He didn't like the whole situation. But he knew that this was not the Giant's Drink. One of these cups was not poisoned. One would set him on the track he wanted. And unlike the Giant's Drink, this time not choosing either was the most foolish choice at all. The worst thing that could happen would be for the IF to catch him. He intended to go back anyway; if he chose wrong, then all he lost was his chance at this information. And if he chose right...

"If it rained right now, that rain would be snow. But there isn't enough cloud buildup to make that likely." He glanced up at the sky. "Not for another few days, at least."

Gabe ran out of words then. He wanted to be saying something right this moment, wanted to keep talking, because when he stopped he kept becoming uncomfortably aware of how close Sol was to him. He wasn't entirely sure why this made him uncomfortable; Sol was the last person in the world who should have made him uneasy.

Gabe found himself doing something very uncharacteristic. He tried to fill the silence, even though he had nothing to say.

The drift provided some cover from the wind, and she sank gratefully to the ground. It was cold, too, just like everything else here, but she almost didn't notice anymore. She'd slept well last night, better than she had in days, and that was all that kept her from falling asleep.

"It's just a few more kilometers," he said. "And if there are in fact guards stationed there, then that means there's going to be heat. Can you make it?"

How could anyone be that logical in this cold? He knew she needed heat, and so he gave her a viable reason to continue when all she wanted to do was stay here and wait for the climate to change sufficently to support human life. Just another area for her to be weaker than him.

What Gabe felt, however, was relieved and a little sad at the same moment. His discomfort was over of course, which was good. Or so Gabe would have imagined, a few moments before. Now, he wasn't so sure.

It was remarkably easy to gain entrance to the bunker. There were no guards at all outside, no cameras, just a single security man asleep in his little shack outside the compound. If the place had been locked up tight when in active use, it was anything but now, and the fifth outer door they tried was open, letting them into a small exterior room that was empty, half of the blinding white lights blown out...and heated.

Sol leaned against the wall and took short breaths, trying to acclimatize slowly as her fingers became painfully awake and alive again. They were finally inside. Whether Gabe's chopper was here or not remained to be seen, but she felt like they'd won already. they'd arrived at their first destination, they weren't going to freeze, and they weren't dead.

Yet, anyway.

Gabe was inspecting the room. Once, it had been a small antechamber, where the soldiers stationed there could suit up into attire better designed for Alaskan winters than their IF uniforms. There were a few small lockers, and some hooks along the wall -- though many had either fallen or been pulled off the walls. What caught Gabe's notice, however, were the lights. Many were broken, and there was very old glass on the floor. But most importatnly, they were on.

Of course, they'd known that the base would be occupied. It was being guarded, assumably because it held the chopper somewhere inside. But it seemed odd to Gabe nevertheless. If he had been the one in charge of capturing himself and Sol, he'd have been much more discreet. No lights on, no outward signs of inhabitation, and most importantly, no records of the troops stationed there.

But then, that was what Gabe would have done if he hadn't wanted himself to find this place. If he had . . .

If Gabe had wanted himself to find this place, he'd have done exactly what the IF had done so far.

It wasn't just a doubt anymore. They were here and they were waiting. And Gabe almost took hold of Sol's sleeve and bolted right then and there. Except that he didn't necessarily know that the chopper wasn't here. And if the IF was waiting for them and they tried to escape, they would be caught. They couldn't get very far very fast in this snow. And Sol didn't look like she was in any condition to go back out into that again.

And besides. Gabe didn't want to have to tell Sol that they'd just walked through Cocytus to get here and now he'd decided that they should go back without at least having a look around. He couldn't do that. This had been too uncomfortable for her for Gabe to say it was a mistake.

Standing away from the wall, she gave herself a final shake and stood still and silent before she trotted to the door to peek out.

A long empty corridor, full of hanging lamps, most with their bulbs burned out, but a few still with the lights lit. The one farthest down the hall that remained lit was swinging gently, casting crazed shadows on the surrounding wallspace and floor and hinting at more dusty desertion in the dark rooms in that direction. She turned back to Gabe and gave him an all clear symbol and -

...swinging?

So far, everything that he'd decided he would have done, in the IF's position, the IF was doing. Gabe could not necessarily count on that to continue, but at least it gave him a base for his plans now. There was no doubt in his mind that the IF was going to try to take them here. But the questions were how, and when?

If Gabe were them, he'd put the chopper in the center of the facility. He'd let himself and Sol get in close to it, and then spring the trap. His troops would be hidden a short ways north, waiting. Once Gabe and Sol arrived at the chopper, he'd have his troops surround the place, close off all exits, and have his forces sweep inward toward the chopper.

If they ran now, they would still never make it. The troops would simply hunt them down. No, for the time being, Gabe would play along.

The lamp had almost stilled itself. Whoever had been there had only left moments ago. They knew they were there, but appearances had to be kept, and she crept down the hallway stealthily, keeping to the shadows until she reached the landing where the stairs were to take them down the main level.

The stairs were open air to the bunker below, and should have been covered in dust, like the rails...but they were swept clean. Someone had gone to great lengths to hide the enemy presence here. Fear twisted her stomach, and she crouched down to get a better view of the main bunker space below.

Gabe's chopper was in the middle of the room, the mangled metal and glass exactly as the Mind Game had depicted it. The shock knocked the wind from her, and she sat down slowly on the metal step beneath her, staring. The glass was spiderwebbed in hundreds of places, the seats in the front and left sections of the chopper riddled with shards from the shattered frame.

The right seat wasn't even in the chopper, just leaned against the side, and remained almost entirely intact.

For a moment, the threat of capture was forgotten. For a moment, Sol was forgotten. Gabe wasn't thinking about anything but the chopper, and what had happened that day.

He reached the bottom of the stairs, and crossed the concrete floor. There was a dazed look on his face as he circled the chopper. There he could see the the fist-sized holes in windscreen, with tangled and craggy lines radiating out from each.

. . . there was a crash. Something had punched right through the cockpit glass. And Gabe felt himself falling . . .

Gabe could see the piece of twisted metal sticking up out of the floor inside the chopper. It had once been attached to Gabe's chair, but it had been sheared off. There was a large section of glass missing from the lower half of the windscreen on Gabe's side. Large enough, roughly, for a metal chair to fall through.

. . . the glass shattered. One moment there was a little hole in the glass only about the size of a quarter, down near his feet. The next, most of the glass was just gone, blown outward. It was very cold. And Gabe realized that he wasn't falling with the rest of the chopper. His seat was no longer attached to the floor . . .

Leaning against the chopper's side was the chair, with it's belts still attached.

. . . and then he was outside the chopper, falling. Falling forever. Gabe didn't remember landing. Just falling . . .

"Gabe...?" He didn't respond, and she rose from the steps and followed him down.

He was staring at the chopper, at the windshield, the bloodstains, the twisted metal and the shattered glass, before his gaze slowly shifted to the chair beside it. It suddenly hit her, beyond the intellectual level, that he had been IN this when this damage was done, and the blood on the seats was all that was left of his mother and sister now, their bodies long gone and buried. She remembered what he'd been like, when she'd first met him, completely cold, incapable of anything beyond mechanized self-preservation. It had seemed like control to her then, but the longer she looked back at it while she stared at him staring at the chopper the more it began to look like...shock. What could have been expected, after living through this?

. . . when he woke up, it was very cold, and his arm hurt. Bad. He must have landed on it or something, because there was a bone sticking out, almost right through the skin . . .

Gabe was looking at the bloodstains inside now. Judging from the splash pattern, it looked like whoever had been in the left hand seat in the back -- his mother, he remembered -- had been hit by one of the projectiles that had punched through the windsceen. The upward angle made the exact location of damage difficult to judge, but Gabe would have estimated that it was either the head or the neck.

. . . the mangled heap of metal was hardly recognizable. And with the fires burning on it, he couldn't even get close enough to climb in. So he'd climbed the snow drift that the chopper had plowed into, and looked down inside . . .

The right seat, his sister's seat, was a bit shredded, but it didn't look like the clean kills of the projectiles. Debris and shrapnel had shredded her tiny body when the chopper hit the snow.

. . . Gabe had stared for a long time. The horror of it was . . . undescribable. He'd hardly noticed it at the time, but he'd switched himself off. His body had survived, he still breathed and bled. But he'd been dead already. A walking corpse . . .

She should have expected something like this. This boy she'd grown up with, the one she'd slowly been dragging towards the world of the living since she was six years old, had now come full circle. Together they'd walked away, step by tenuous step, from the icy shield he still used around everyone else, and now, together, she'd brought him back through the snow to the place that shield was born.

Had she really done him any favors? Because of her, he was looking at this chopper now in manner he'd been incapable of when she had met him. Now he could feel all that horror he'd managed to supress before, and every inch of disbelieving painful shock that he hadn't dealt with over the years was apparent now on his twisted features.

A smooth metallic click to her right made her turn her head slowly, just slightly, just enough to get that area of the room into her peripheral vision. A metal barrel, not the dusty metal of the rest of this shop, but the smooth clean metal of a modern standard issue assault rifle, gleamed quietly in the darkness.

Her senses amplified as she strained to hear the smallest noises, and she could hear them now, muffled steps in all the dark corners, less muffled as more of them descended the stairs from above, quietly climbed the stairs from below. Her fingers tightened on Gabe's arm, the nails digging into the skin. There was no way they were going to escape this, not anymore, not without risking gunfire.

Once, a young boy named Hunter had fallen right out of a chopper before it crashed into the snow, and then walked sixty-eight kilometers toward Juneau in three days. He'd been nearly dead when they found him, weakened by the pain, by the cold, by the terrain. But he'd survived. He'd survived then, and he'd kept on surviving. Through the orphanages and the streets, where children would kill for food, for shelter, for anything that could give them just a few more days of life. Through the foster homes, where he faced the scorn and fear of other children in the neighborhood, in school, in the house. And through Battle School, where all children were there specifically because they were ruthless killers, or at very least, had it in them to be so. Gabe had survived it all. Because that was what he did, better than anything else. Gabe survived.

And he was not about to give up now. He couldn't just stop swimming -- he would die. If he and Sol were caught here, if he failed at this, then the truth would be lost forever.

So Gabe pushed it all under. All the pain. All the horror. Everything. He killed it, all over again. Over time, he would release it again, he would free it; he would let himself grieve. But not here. Not now.

Gabe reached into his coat, and brought out the hammer from within. His fingers tightened on the handle.

He looked about. There were three corridors leading out of the room. Gabe knew that none would lead to the surface. That was the whole point -- they were trapped. But that didn't mean they were beaten. An animal is always most dangerous when cornered.

The swinging lamps that remained lit cast nightmarish shadows on the metal walls of the bunker, and the sound of boots on the steel flooring hastened their steps. Gabe took another turn, and another, and the steps grew fainter, muffled by the walls inbetween. She stifled a yelp as he dragged her into a side room, leaving the door open as he pulled her down into the dark beside him with a desk between them and the door and became absolutely silent. She tried to do the same, her breath ceasing until she could draw it in and out without a sound through her open mouth, but her heartbeat was thudding in her ears and she was sure it was audible for a good four feet.

Gabe was looking at the vent above. It was not a large vent. If he and Sol could fit, it would be very narrowly. Once inside there would be no room to maneuver, no leverage, not space. No way that it would be useful to them.

But Gabe soon realized that that was not true. He stood up, hefted the hammer, and swung. The grating smashed inward, and then fell down at them. Gabe caught it, and dropped it on the floor, making no attempt to muffle the sound. He then reached down and took Sol's hand, and pulled her up. Not roughly, necessarily, but not exactly carefully either. There was no time for pleasantry right now.

He could hear the lull in the boots, and then the sound of them reversing direction, coming back toward them. Gabe ran as quickly and as quietly as he could, pulling Sol after him. He rounded a corner, two corners, until he came to a small kitchen area. That would do. Gabe looked around wildly inside. There were metal cupboards, tiled countertops, and a tall freezer. Gabe frowned.

The cupboards were small. Too small for him. But not too far for Sol. Without a word he opened one and pulled her toward it. She didn't resist, nor did she ask any questions. She climbed in, and shut it behind her, setting the latch.

The kitchen he finally entered held dusty cabinets and countertops. She saw him glance around wildly, and then focus on the cupboards, looking at her sharply and then back to the metal doors. The next second he was yanking open the door and half-shoving her inside, and she didn't resist, not even when he closed the door behind her, locking the latch. She heard another bump and some shifting, and then silence, and she was alone in the tight, unyielding dark.

She tried to shift and found she could not. Claustrophobia began to set in, and she tried not to move. Moving reminded her of how tightly she was squeezed in, how close the metal was to her, how little she could move if someone tried to shoot the cabinet...

The boots left.

Gabe waited. It was very cold in the freezer. At least as cold as it had been outside, and this time Gabe wasn't moving. his body was having trouble producing the heat he needed. But still he waited. He could not guess how long. At least an hour. Gabe would have guessed two, or perhaps even three. It was a long time to be locked in a freezer. Again and again Gabe caught himself nodding off. He couldn't keep his eyes open. That was a bad sign. Gabe decided he could not stay in any longer.

The door was much harder to open from the inside; he didn't have the leverage he'd had before, and he suspected that it had iced over a little. He gave it a kick -- or at least, as close to a kick as he could manage, cold and confined as he was -- and the door shuddered open.

Gabe fell out onto the floor, and lay there for a long moment, his breath stirring up dust. His whole body was shivering violently. Gabe felt cold all the way to his bones.

He lay there for a minute, at least. He then dragged himself to the nearest counter, and pulled himself up to his feet. He could hardly even stand. His legs would not support his weight, and his arms weren't doing too great a job either.

But Gabe wasn't going to accept that. He made his body do what he wanted it to. He'd been cold before. Much colder than this. He had been only five then. He could damn well stand on his own two feet now.

Gabe did. He crossed to Sol's cabinet, and pulled open the door. Her eyes swiveled to look at him, but she didn't move otherwise. She was curled up in a ball and rocking on her heels.

Gabe swore under his breath and helped her out. She didn't say anything. She was blank. She'd gone internal. Gabe would have tried to talk to her, to comfort her, but there was no time. They had to get out.

Gabe knew the way back. He pulled Sol along by the hand behind him. They were almost to a door when Gabe heard the shout.

"Stop!"

A soldier had appeared from around a corner, and caught hold of Sol's jacket. If Sol noticed she gave no sign.

Gabe didn't hesitate. He swung the hammer. The soldier was lucky he was wearing a helmet. It knocked him on his ass. His grip on Sol's jacket didn't release; the jacket slid right off her shoulders, and he took it with him. The soldier wasn't out for the count. They had to go. Now.

And so Gabe pulled Sol out of the bunker, without her jacket. They headed north -- away from Juneau. The IF would be watching this road. He and Sol were going to have to hitch a ride the long way.

They trudged until the bunker was out of sight. There Gabe stopped. Sol was shaking again, worse than she had been earlier. Gabe didn't even think. He shed his jacket, and put it around her. He didn't bother with the sleeves -- just zipped up the front, and tucked her hands into her pockets. Now he was cold, but he wasn't thinking about that.

He was tired. Very tired. He needed to rest. Gabe found a spot out of view of the road, and sat Sol down. He lay down beside her, shivering. The snow was cold also, but Gabe needed to rest. He was so tired. So very tired . . .

Reality returned with a shock of cold air, and she was running next to Gabe, his hand on her arm. The sunlight was blinding on the snow, dazzling her as she ran. It wasn't until they slowed to a walk that she began to feel the cold. Before, it had seemed like she was slowly being frozen from the outside in. Now it felt like her entire body was frozen already, and she was moving entirely out of habit. When Gabe stripped his jacket to give to her, she was too cold to notice anything but her slowly clearing perception as warmth began to return.

He sat her down under some trees, and slumped next to her. She leaned against the tree trunk, her eyes closing and opening slowly.

A branch from another tree was in her direct line of view, so heavy with snow that the tip was near the ground. The visible leaves were impossibly green. How could leaves be green in this cold? How could anything grow? Her mind revolved hazily around these questions, but no real connections were made.

The tip of the branch was frozen, ice encasing the slender wood. Blearily fascinated, she reached a hand out to touch it, pushing through one of the dangling arms of the coat, missing the first time, but catching it in her fingers the second. The heat from her hand melted a single drop, and it rolled to the end, but didn't fall.

It refroze.

Sol was suddenly very, very awake.

She pushed her other arm through the jacket and gathered her hands to herself. She was cold, but no longer incapacitatingly so. Adrenaline and the collecting body heat from the jacket were thawing her as fear sharpened her senses. They needed to keep moving. It took her nearly twenty seconds of fast calculation before she moved her head enough to spot Gabe. He was sitting slumped against her side, his jacket gone, his eyes closed. Tiny crystals of ice shimmered in his eyebrows, his copper hair, weighted his lashes. He was pale and still and his skin was cold to the touch.

No...Gabe...

Her horror and utter disbelief spurred her into action. Of course he was cold. She was cold. Everything out here was cold, but she had to get him warm before it did him serious damage. The ice didn't mean anything. Her own eyes had nearly frozen over, and she'd been conscious and moving. They needed heat, and they needed shelter, and they needed it now.

She moved, and saw the muscles of his eyelids twitching as they tried to flutter open. She could have screamed with relief, and channeled that into the strength within her as she turned to face him, hold him up and away from the snow. "Don't," she said shortly, but they didn't stop twitching. He wasn't receiving auditory input, or he wasn't processing it. But he wasn't dead, and that meant he'd be alright. It had to. She didn't have time to defrost him right now. He'd have to move blind.

Latching onto his arm, she dragged them further away from the road, into the wilderness. Little trees, rocks, covered bushes...she passed everything until she found what she was looking for, a large tree with a crowning cap of snow, the leaves visible only at the edges. The snow at the edge of the greenery was unstable, and she kicked enough down to make a shallow messy ramp and then pulled Gabe down into the treewell after her.

After the wind whistling above, the treewell was eerily silent. The snow nearest the trunk came away easily, and she cleared a swath away to reveal brown packed dirt underneath. Sol had never been so happy to see dirt in her entire life. Moving the snow away for a good three feet, she braced herself and took off the jacket.

Even if he hadn't felt her beneath him, Gabe would have known that Sol was near. He didn't understand it; it was just a sense he'd had for a long time now. He could always feel when she was close. Any time she was with him, he was always aware of exactly where she was and what she was doing. It didn't take any conscious effort; he did it automatically. But that didn't make it any less reliable.

For a long time Gabe didn't move a muscle. After feeling so cold for so, so long, he didn't want the so much as breathe. Right now he felt perfect. And . . . well, Gabe didn't want to think about it any further than that.

He was alive. He was warm. And he could feel that Sol was warm and breathing also. That was all that mattered right now.

If he could have thought of nothing at all, he would have. He would have liked to simply go back to sleep, to soak in the warmth of Sol's body, and think of nothing at all. If only he could have.

Unfortunately, if there was a single thing about himself Gabe had no control over, it was his thoughts. He control what he said and what he did, but what he thought, what he felt, he could not control. He was too long used to giving his thoughts free reign, and as for his feelings . . .

For a long time, he'd been unable to feel anything. Somewhere along the way that had changed. He had no experience coping with emotions. He could hide them, cover them up from those around him, but not from himself. That was something he could not control.

Now, both his feelings and his thoughts were venturing into territory as yet unexplored. This closeness, this warm feeling inside him that Gabe was beginning to suspect had nothing to do with physical temperature -- they felt good. They felt right.

But Gabe didn't know what any of that meant. It was input that he simply could not process.

Gabe knew, logically, that he should get up. That he should open his eyes and get to his feet, and wake Sol so they could get moving. And he would. In another minute or two.

There was still more to be done. Much more. They had learned nothing from the chopper. They'd been interrupted to soon. Not that there would have been much they'd have found if they hadn't -- Gabe hadn't been playing detective right that moment. They hadn't learned a thing yet. Nothing that Gabe didn't already remember with photographic clarity. There was still much to be done. Gabe had to get up. Any minute now, he was going to get up.

At first she thought that perhaps her eyes were frozen shut again, but though her lashes felt a little heavy, she could open and shut them without difficulty. She tried to move a hand to her face, but it wouldn't come. She flexed her fingers and encountered warm skin. Her eyes widened in the dark. A hand. Gabe's hand...and it was warm.

She extracted her right hand carefully and followed the arm of the jacket up to touch the small exposed bit of his cheek. Warm. She could hear his breathing now, deep and even, and she let out a long, silent sigh of relief. He'd looked dead, back there in the snow, but he wasn't, and neither was she. Her eyes finally adjusted enough to accommodate the tiny bit of light that had managed in through the hole she'd knocked in on the other side to let them through. New snow had done much to cover it up, but there was still enough of a space to let air and a trace amount of weak sunlight in. Trapped in Alaska in the open without any survival equipment...and they were safe and relatively warm.

Miracles were pleasant company.

Until finally, Sol shifted beneath him. She was awake. Gabe exhaled softly, slowly. Then he rolled aside, and got to his hands and knees very, very slowly. Every single joint in his body was stiff and sore. He then sat back on his heels, ignoring his body's complaints, and looked at Sol. Her color was back again. She didn't look frozen. Gabe guessed that he wouldn't anymore, either. He looked aroung him. They were inside a tree. Or, to be accurate, inside the blanket of snow that covered the tree. Damn, that was smart. He looked again at Sol. He'd have frozen if not for her. She'd saved his life.

Again.

He shed the jacket, a little sluggishly, because his joints still ached. Wordlessly, he held it out to Sol. He expected that she wouldn't take it without an argument. She was stubborn like that. Not that Gabe would have had it any other way. If she were less stubborn, she would never have pushed herself so far today. If she were less stubborn, she'd never have insisted on coming with him to Alaska in the first place.

If she were less stubborn, she'd never have stuck with him long enough to become, not his ally, but his friend.