He hadn’t looked up yet from where he sat cleaning her dagger, though she had to assume he’d heard her approach.
“I’ve found shelter,” she announced, raising her voice to be heard over the growing wind. “And transport. And firewood.”
Tal looked at the sled. His eyes fell to the rope made of clothing and his lips tightened. “So you’re a corpse robber now.”
“That’s what you’re worried about? How about the fact that we are about to become corpses if we don’t get moving?”
He was still looking at the clothing. His gaze was intense, as if he were trying to pick out details in the bloodstained fabric. He hesitated then, looked at her and then away. “Is there…” He cleared his throat. “How many bodies?” he asked, sounding brisk and businesslike, which didn’t fool her at all.
“Around a dozen, perhaps more,” she answered cautiously. “Surely you’re not squeamish? I thought you were a soldier, from the looks of you. You have to have seen dead bodies before. But if you like, you can close your eyes while I help you onto the sled.”
“I am a bodyguard,” he said quietly, “and I have seen many dead bodies.”
She turned around and gazed across the snow. She couldn’t see all of the bodies now, as the snow was falling more thickly, but she had a good eye for detail and had given each at least a cursory glance. She had begun to understand what Tal meant to ask, and decided to help him along. “You’re looking for someone. If you describe them to me, I can tell you whether they were among the bodies I searched.”
He gritted his teeth. His jaw worked. He was trying very hard to say something difficult, or perhaps working to not say something. At last, he spoke. “She’s two years older than me. Brown skin. Long hair—” Here he stopped abruptly and took a deep breath before continuing, his hands curling into fists in the snow. “—short hair,” he corrected. “Dark brown eyes.”
Elodie quickly shook her head. “No one like that was among the bodies.”
Tal’s whole body sagged. He raised a hand as if to cover his eyes, but then saw how bloodied it was and dropped it back to his lap. “Then she may have made it back,” he said roughly, but his voice was still nearly as tense as before.
Elodie finally asked the question that had been nagging at her. “Tal, what happened on that train?”
He picked up the bundle of rabbit fur and meat and tucked it into his shirt. He rose up on his good knee, balancing with one hand on the ground and wincing as he tried to leverage himself up. “There was an explosion,” he said shortly. “It destroyed the dining car.”
Elodie ducked down to help him, pulling his arm over her shoulders so she could support some of his weight. He went stiff but didn’t protest. “Do you know what caused it?”
“No.”
His answer was sharp in a way that told Elodie he didn’t want to talk about it further. She supposed he couldn’t be blamed for that. She helped him get to his feet, hunching her shoulders against the wind as she did so. When he tried to take a step, he let out a sharp breath and went alarmingly pale. He squeezed his eyes shut. Beneath her arm, he shuddered in pain.
She tightened her hold on him, feeling strangely helpless once again. If only she had any medical knowledge at all, or even, she was willing to admit, a more keenly-tuned sense of empathy, she would be better at helping him. But no, she had to throw knives at him and accuse him of squeamishness.
She could distract him from the pain, at least. “You said you were a bodyguard. So whose body did you guard?” She helped him take a hobbling step onto the sled, where he quickly sank down, resting his back against the wood pile. He didn’t answer her question; something else he didn’t want to discuss, apparently. She dropped the subject and gave up on her attempt at distraction. Instead, she grabbed a few pieces of less-bloody clothing that hadn’t been woven into the rope and dropped them on top of him like a blanket. He gave her a strange look.
Feeling self-conscious, she shrugged. “The slope we’re going down is steep, and the wind is strong. You should stay warm.”
He didn’t answer, but he did tug the clothing more snugly around himself.
She grabbed the rope with her uninjured hand and started forward. The sled was heavier now with Tal on it, but she refused to be stymied, and threw all of her weight into dragging it toward the slope. By the time they reached it, the wind was nearly gale-force, and the snow blinded her to anything further than a few yards away.
She pulled the sled to the very edge of the slope, tossed the rope onto the metal, then sat down in front of Tal. Then she waited. She hadn’t told Tal her plan yet, mostly because her plan involved travelling at inadvisably high speeds down a dangerously steep slope with no safety belts or braking mechanisms. Any moment now, he was going to question her wisdom. She readied her retort.
Tal squinted past her. He exhaled, and he was close enough now that his warm breath brushed over her cheek before the wind snatched it away. “Where are we going?” he asked, raising his voice to be heard.
“There’s a cave at the base of the slope.”
He raised one eyebrow, still looking past her. “The very steep slope? That you are no doubt planning for us to career down, on a slab of decrepit metal, in the midst of a blinding blizzard?”
She drew herself up to sit straighter and raised her own voice above the wind.
