The wind outside the low roof wall didn’t blow. It struck like an iron shovel.
Arthur vaulted over the forward sandbags into no-man’s-land. Then, the world collapsed into a swirling vortex of black ash and razor-sharp stone-glass crystals. The heat sat at nineteen degrees below zero. Every breath in through his woolen filter mask tasted of frozen sulfur and powdered dark rock, burning the wet inner skin of his throat with dry, chemical frostbite.
Grimm was already three paces ahead, his black dark shape half-swallowed by the raging blizzard. The hound’s broad head stayed low to the frozen muck, his nostrils flaring as he parsed the scent trail through the howling gale. His jet-black bone marrow radiated a faint, dense deep ring that Arthur felt through the soul-sync bridge—a steady physical compass in the blinding whiteout.
Above them, Pip flew at breast height, skimming barely six feet over Arthur’s right shoulder. The falcon’s eyes were shielded by semi-clear nictitating membranes. That let him pierce the stinging grit. Every beat of Pip’s wings shed faint golden sparks. That created a tiny hall of thinned soot in the whirlpool.
Three hundred yards across broken shell craters and twisted barbed wire.
Arthur checked the pressure gauge on his air-powered gauntlet. The needle hovered steadily at two crushing deep-sea pressure. In his left hand, the Transfixer was loaded with heavy frost-hardened steel darts. In his right thigh pocket, his heavy dark metal-hardened carbon-iron body razor knife rested in its sterile felt wrap alongside three…
