Page 86 of Code Bound
“I think you enjoy getting a rise out of him,” I tell Cipher as I wrap my arms around my middle to try and keep warm and follow.
“Is it obvious?” Cipher replies.
“Glaring,” I reassure him.
“Perfect,” Cipher says. “I want him to know how much I dislike him.”
I shake my head and smile, blown away by the system capable of so many emotions.
An hour later though, I’m no longer smiling.
“We’re not going to be able to, to, survive . . . for much . . . longer,” I say, my teeth chattering aggressively. I’m shivering violently now and my fingers and toes are numb from the cold. My thin jacket isn’t doing shit against the cold and my body isn’t liking it.
“It’s not much . . . further,” Locke chatters back, his hands tucked under his armpits tightly. “This, this section . . . isn’t very . . . large.”
I’ve never felt cold like this before. In Dross, it’s always hot, like we’re slowly being cooked by the red dwarf star at our center. The Verdant Nexus was hot, too, but in a different way. The humidity made it almost unbearable, the moisture in the air drawing your sweat to the surface the moment you stepped into it. Now, I miss it, because nothing could have prepared me for the bone deep cold of The Shatterlands. Even had someone warned me, I wouldn’t have believed them.
My teeth are chattering so hard, I’m not sure I can get the question spoken out loud so I think about the question in my head, hoping Cipher can pick up on it.
How do we get better gear?
“Loot caches are hidden around the Shatterlands,” Cipher responds. “Defeating enemies can also drop valuable loot.”
There’s no way we can fight an enemy right now, I think.
“Correct. Your vitals are growing dangerously erratic, Vespera. I recommend you pick up the pace. If you do not make it to the safehouse or other viable shelter within the next thirty minutes, you are going to freeze to death.”
Svetlana has gone quiet since she burrowed into my shirt. Currently, she’s nestled against my chest beneath the jacket, trying to absorb my body heat. She hasn’t cracked a joke about heads in an hour. I’m starting to worry that I’ve killed my familiar before I’ve barely had her.
In front of us, the white starts to ride upward into a ridgeline broken up by brown. Steam rises from the edges of it, creating the illusion of a smoking pistol. It seems to trail as far as we can see into the distance, skirting the water we’d slowly been traveling around. In the distance, about one hundred meters away, appears to be an opening of some sort.
“T-t-there,” Locke chatters out, starting to move a little faster.
I follow after him, stumbling over the deeper ice here. It’s soft and powdery, built up as if?—
“Snow,” Cipher supplies helpfully. “You’ve never seen it in Dross, but you know what it is. You’ve likely seen it on Luxe propaganda posters.”
Cipher is right. I have seen snow before, but I didn’t realize that’s what this is. In the propaganda posters Luxe pushes at us, there are parts of Luxe that are covered in the frost during certain times. There, it had looked like a pleasant landscape. Here, it’s a nightmare.
The snow is at least a foot deep now. My boots sink into the powder, bits of it getting inside my boot and making my feet impossibly colder when it melts. They’re numb now that I think of it, just as numb as my hands.
The opening grows larger, and it’s only as we stumble into it that I realize it’s only a small natural room, not a safehouse opening.
“F-f-fuck,” Locke says, clearly having thought it was the safehouse, too.
It’s not. It’s just a fucking cave.
“Build a fire,” Cipher orders. “Immediately.”
My hands are shaking so bad, it makes it difficult to pull items from my inventory. It takes me three tries to get the sticks I’ve been saving out dropped to the ground in a pile. It takes me another four to get the flint we’d found in The Red Bloom Court. The two of us work on lighting the fire together, but we struggle. Neither one of us are stable enough and Svetlana is no help at all. She’s still nestled against my chest as she desperately tries to keep warm. Unfortunately for her, I don’t have much warmth to give her. My entire body is as cold as the ice we just left.
Finally, after what feels like hours, but can only be a few minutes considering we’re not dead yet, the first spark catches and grows. Both Locke and I put our hands in front of the fire, but it doesn’t quite reach our bones.
“Your vitals are still elevated,” Cipher says.
Shivering, I rub my hands together trying to warm them up. “What am I supposed to do about that?” I grit. I don’t have experience with this sort of cold. I don’t actually know how close I am to dying, let alone how to warm up thoroughly.
“My parameters prevent me from helping you fully,” Cipher grits out, as if it pains him to say it. “I cannot—” He cuts off, and for a moment, it feels as if he’s abandoned me. Which is silly. Cipher is the machine that runs this place. He’s not a person, not really, but . . . he also is. To me at least.
