HEARTHBOUND: THE LAST WARM MAN

Chapter 4: The Ice Trap

The radio went quiet, but nobody in the depot moved.

Fifteen people stared at the speaker as if it might bite. A woman near the barrel pulled her toddler tighter. Gus Perrin, who had made a joke about everything since the moment Rowan walked in, had gone gray around the mouth.

"Okay," Rowan said, and was surprised that his voice held. "Everyone stay calm. Please."

"Calm?" A man in a torn ski jacket shot to his feet. "That was Voss. The Citadel Voss. He wants you, so give him what he wants and let the rest of us sleep."

A few heads nodded. Rowan felt it in his stomach, the same old ache of being the one people could afford to lose.

"Sit down, Darren," Tess said.

"He's going to kill us."

"He's going to try." She still hadn't looked away from the radio. "Sit down."

Something in her voice put the man back on his bench. Rowan watched her set her rifle against the bus seat and rub her face with both hands, hard, like she was scrubbing off a memory.

"You said you served under him," Rowan said, quietly enough that only she and Mara could hear.

"Two years. Convoy security, overseas." She let out a breath that clouded in the air. "He was the best contractor I ever worked with. Calm in a fight. Funny, even. Then one night a supply column got hit, and we had a choice between dragging eleven wounded men out through a kill zone or leaving them. He chose to leave them. He said the math was the math." Her jaw worked. "I never forgot how he said it. Like he was ordering lunch."

Mara shifted Pip on her lap. The boy was asleep now, pink in the cheeks, wrapped in three thermal blankets that Rowan had bought with nineteen Ember and a prayer. "And now he runs a mall."

"Now he runs the only warm place in the city," Tess said. "Same man. Bigger math."

Rowan thought about the frost growing on the Vance windows. The fire shrinking in the hearth. *Whatever Voss had become, it had started before the freeze or because of it.* He didn't know yet. But he knew one thing for certain.

"He's going to send people," Rowan said. "Tonight. Not Voss himself. Scouts first, to see what I am."

"How do you know?"

"Because that's what I'd do."

Tess finally turned and looked at him, really looked, and something close to respect flickered across her face. "Then we have about two hours. What can you do?"

He pulled up the Exchange. His reserves read 187 Ember after the blankets, the antibiotics, and a crate of ration packs that had made half the room cry. He could not buy a rifle. The Exchange only listed warmth, food, medicine, and shelter. Whatever the System was, it fed people. It didn't arm them.

But it did something else.

Rowan walked to the north wall, where a loading door looked out over a frozen drainage canal, two hundred feet of flat ice leading to the road. He pressed his palm against the metal and felt the Hearth stretch inside him, six meters of warmth pressing against the cold.

*Six meters.* It was the zone's edge, not its limit. He could push it, if he had somewhere to push from.

"Tess," he said slowly. "Where would a scout team approach from?"

She was beside him in seconds, studying the ice. "Snow crawlers. Open ground. They'd come straight across the canal because it's flat and fast."

"How thick is that ice?"

"Probably two feet. Minus thirty, it'd hold a tank."

"It would hold a tank," Rowan agreed. "Unless something very warm sat on one end of it."

Tess stared at him. Then, slowly, she began to smile. It was the first real smile he'd seen on her, tilted and dangerous.

"You're an engineer," she said.

"Thermal. For my sins."

"Well, Thermal." She slapped his shoulder, hard. "Let's go sink some trucks."

* * *

They came at 1:40 in the morning.

Rowan lay flat on the concrete beside the loading door, his cheek against the metal, a thin gap open so he could see out. Tess lay next to him, rifle propped on a sandbag stuffed with seat foam. Her shoulder pressed against his. Neither of them mentioned it.

Two snow crawlers growled out of the dark, long tracked vehicles painted white, headlights dimmed to slits. Eight men, maybe ten. Rifles, white fatigues, silent hand signals. They spread across the ice in a neat wedge.

"Textbook," Tess whispered. "Idiots."

"Wait," Rowan said.

"I know."

"Wait."

The first crawler rolled into the middle of the canal. Rowan closed his eyes and pushed.

It felt like leaning against a wall that gave way. Heat poured out of him in a long, rolling pulse, through the door, through the concrete, into the frozen ground. He felt it travel. He felt the ice answer.

**[HEARTH ZONE: EXTENDED. EMBER COST: 18 PER MINUTE.]**

**[WARNING: RESERVES LIMITED.]**

Under the lead crawler, the ice made a long, groaning sound like a ship turning in its sleep.

Then it cracked.

A spiderweb of black lines raced out from beneath the tracks. The crawler lurched forward. Men shouted. Water came up gray and fast through the fractures, and the vehicle tilted nose-first into the canal, its engine screaming. The second crawler tried to reverse and slid sideways as the ice buckled under its treads.

"Now," Tess said, and fired.

She was good. Rowan hadn't known what *good* meant until he watched her work. Every shot was one breath. A man scrambling off the sinking crawler dropped. Another dove behind the wreck and she hit the rifle in his hands, and he howled and ran.

Rowan's vision swam. His Ember was bleeding faster than he'd expected. He pushed harder anyway.

*Hold it. Hold it. Hold it.*

Five minutes later, it was over. Two crawlers lay half-sunk in black water, steaming. Six men sprawled or crawled across the ice, groaning. A few had fled into the dark.

Rowan let go. The Hearth snapped back to its normal radius and he nearly passed out against the wall.

A hand grabbed his collar and hauled him upright. "Hey. Hey! Look at me, Thermal."

Tess had dropped the rifle. Her face was inches from his. Her pupils were wide, her breath smelled like cold and adrenaline, and her fingers hadn't let go of his jacket.

"Don't you pass out on me," she said. "You hear me? You're the only warm thing in this city."

"I'm fine," he lied.

"You're gray."

"I'm *tasteful*."

She laughed. It came out startled, a short real sound, and she seemed as surprised by it as he was. For one second, the war went somewhere else. Then the blue text rolled across his sight, and he gasped.

**[TRUST: SERGEANT TESS CALDER. 44%.]**

**[MISSION 2 ISSUED: EARN THE TRUST OF CALDER, TESS. REWARD: HEARTH TIER 2.]**

"What?" Tess asked, watching his face.

"Nothing. I'll tell you later."

"You'd better."

A crackle came from the radio on her belt. She frowned, thumbed it on, and the static cleared into a voice Rowan had not expected to hear again so soon.

It was soft. It was wet. It was Delphine.

"Rowan?" she whispered. "Please, if you can hear me, come out. Garrick says he'll stop if you come. He promised. Please, Row. Nobody else has to be hurt."

Rowan went cold in a way that had nothing to do with the weather.

"Don't," Tess said.

"I know it's a trap."

"Then why are you looking at the door?"

He didn't answer. He didn't need to. Because from the far side of the depot, over the whisper of the burn barrel and the cry of one frightened toddler, came the flat, dry crack of a rifle shot.

Not from the canal. From the roof.

Gus Perrin, standing by the barrel with a thermos in his

hands, looked down at the red blooming on his coveralls. He frowned, like a man who had lost his keys.

"Huh," he said.

Then he folded to the floor.