HEARTHBOUND: THE LAST WARM MAN

Chapter 6: Ivy's Secret

"Say that again," Tess said.

She had Ivy Lin pinned against a bus seat with one forearm, the rifle hanging loose at her side. It looked casual. It wasn't. Rowan had known her for six hours and he already understood that Tess Calder was never more dangerous than when she looked relaxed.

"I said Voss sent me," Ivy croaked. "But not like that. I didn't..." She shut her eyes. "Let me explain. Please."

"Let her breathe, Tess," Mara said from the bench.

Tess eased back one inch. Ivy slid down the seat and wrapped both arms around her knees. Up close she was prettier than she had any right to be after a blizzard, with big dark eyes and a green scarf knotted at her throat.

"I was a student at Harrowgate U," she said. "Chemistry. Third year. I did some modeling on the side." She gave a tiny, bitter laugh. "Turns out being the girl everyone looks at is a skill. When the freeze hit, Voss's people took me in. I thought they were saving me. I worked in the Citadel for two weeks. I carried messages. I smiled at the right men."

"And then?" Rowan asked.

"Then I found the basement."

The depot had gone quiet again. Even the barrel seemed to burn lower.

"Voss has forty people down there," Ivy whispered. "Not prisoners, exactly. They're...warm. Like you. Not as strong, I think, but warm. He keeps them in cold rooms. The cold makes them burn harder, and he drinks it. That's how the Citadel has lights. That's how he stays alive. He doesn't make heat. He takes it."

Rowan thought of the frost on the Vance windows. The fire in the hearth, shrinking.

"I tried to run," Ivy said. "Three days ago. I made it out through the garage. I thought I was free. I walked for hours." Her voice cracked. "I just kept thinking, *he let me go. Why did he let me go?*"

Mara's face shifted. She crossed the room and knelt in front of Ivy.

"Ivy. Take off your scarf."

"What?"

"Slowly."

Ivy untied it with shaking fingers. Mara turned the fabric over, felt along the hem, and stopped. Her thumbnail dug into the stitching and pulled out a flat gray disc the size of a coin.

"There you are," Mara said grimly.

Tess let out a very quiet, very ugly word, the kind Gus would have been proud of. "A tracker."

"A thermal beacon," Rowan said. He took it from Mara and turned it in the lamplight. It was still faintly warm. "It pings off body heat. That's how the Rimehounds found her. He didn't send her to talk to us."

"He sent me to bring you to him," Ivy whispered. Tears slid down her face. "He used me. He let me escape on purpose and I led them right to you. Oh my God. I'm so sorry."

Nobody moved.

Rowan looked at her, small and shaking and ashamed, and what he felt wasn't anger. It was recognition. He knew exactly what it was like to be used by someone who smiled at you.

"Hey," he said. "Ivy. Look at me."

She did.

"You didn't know."

"That doesn't matter."

"It matters more than anything." He crushed the beacon in his fist. The Hearth flared once, and the little disc went soft, glowing, and melted into a bead of useless plastic between his fingers. "Nobody here blames you. You're standing in a warm room because you walked through a blizzard for hours with nothing. That's not weakness. That's about the hardest thing I've heard of anyone doing."

Ivy stared at him as though no one had said anything kind to her in a month. Her lip trembled. Behind him, Tess glanced away and pretended not to notice.

**[TRUST: IVY LIN. 28%.]**

**[MISSION 3 ISSUED: SECURE THE ALDOUS COLD STORAGE COMPLEX.]**

**[OBJECTIVE: ACQUIRE FUEL AND SUPPLIES BEFORE VOSS'S ARRIVAL. TIME REMAINING: 3 HOURS 12 MINUTES.]**

**[REWARD: 2 EMBER CORES. HEARTH ZONE +10 METERS.]**

"We're out of coal in six hours," Rowan said, mostly to himself. "Then the barrel goes dark, and even the Hearth can't carry fifteen people on twelve Ember an hour. I need fuel and a lot of it."

"Aldous Cold Storage," Ivy said suddenly, wiping her face. "Sabine Aldous's family owns it. It's a food and fuel warehouse by the harbor, twenty minutes from here. Voss's men were negotiating for it the whole time I was in the Citadel. She never agreed. She's locked herself in with enough supplies for a hundred people."

Tess's eyebrows rose. "That's very specific."

"I made coffee for the men who planned it," Ivy said. "People forget the girl with the tray."

Tess grinned. "I like you."

"Everyone does," Ivy said, with the weakest, most honest smile Rowan had ever seen. "It's my whole problem."

* * *

The depot's old snowplow hadn't started in a week. Gus, wheezing on his bench, told Rowan how to bully it awake anyway. It took one frozen carburetor and a burst of focused heat. The plow roared.

"Engineer," Tess said, climbing in. "I'm starting to enjoy having you around."

"Starting?"

"Don't push it."

Ivy squeezed into the back with a blanket around her shoulders. Mara stayed behind with Gus, Pip, and a rifle she didn't know how to use and had been taught to hold in about four minutes. Pip had made her promise to bring Rowan back for the duck song. Before he left, she caught Rowan's sleeve.

"Come back," she said.

"I will."

"I mean it. I've lost enough people." Her thumb pressed, very briefly, against the pulse in his wrist, as if confirming it was still there. "Come back."

The drive to the harbor took them through white canyons of buried trams and dead streetlights. Rowan kept his eyes on the road and tried not to think about the Vance Estate, or Delphine on that cream carpet, listening to Voss tell her she'd made the right choice.

*Survival isn't personal, Rowan.*

He gripped the wheel harder.

The Aldous Cold Storage Complex rose out of the snow like a concrete cliff, six stories of windowless gray with a loading dock the size of a football field. The perimeter fence stood open. Fresh tracks ran in and out of the yard.

"Those are recent," Tess said, narrowing her eyes. "Boots. A lot of them."

"Voss got here first?"

"Maybe not." Ivy leaned forward. "Maybe those are her guards. Sabine keeps a private crew."

They parked the plow behind a stack of shipping containers and moved on foot. Tess led, rifle low. Rowan followed with Ivy behind him. The Hearth glowed around them like a lantern, melting a path through the powder.

The side door was unlocked.

"That's wrong," Tess whispered.

"Very."

Inside, the warehouse was colossal and dark. Steel shelving rose into the gloom. Pallets of canned food, bottled water, and sealed drums of fuel stretched away in every direction, more supplies than Rowan had seen in his entire life, enough to feed the whole depot for years.

It should have felt like a miracle.

It felt like a trap.

At the far end of the floor, a single light was on. A glass-walled office, raised on a platform. Behind the glass, a woman in a long camel coat stood with a shotgun, pointed straight at them.

"That's far enough!" she called, her voice carrying through the cold. It was clipped and refined, with the kind of accent that had grown up around servants. "I've had four visitors this week. Three are dead. I would hate to make it a perfect score."

"Miss Aldous?" Rowan raised his hands. "My name is Rowan. We're not here to rob you. We need..."

"I know exactly who you are."

Her gaze slid past him, over his shoulder.

Every light in the building went out.

The darkness was total. Ivy gasped. Tess swore. Rowan's Hearth flared on instinct, painting the nearest shelves in orange, and in that tiny circle of glow he watched a hundred small red lights switch on above them, one after another, like eyes opening along the rafters.

A speaker crackled. The voice that came out of it was smooth as oil

and warm as a knife.

"There he is," Garrick Voss said. "The boy who learned to burn. Welcome, Rowan. I've been so looking forward to this."