shoving dried food and blankets into them.
‘We can’t stay here,’ he said, in response to her unspoken question. ‘They’ll go through the whole town. It’s what they do.’
‘We . . . I’m not . . . I’m not going out there!’ Jez said through juddering lips. She could hear screams and sporadic gunfire from outside.
He pulled the packs tight, hurried over and shoved one towards her. She could see his eyes through the glass of the goggles. He was staring at her hard.
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘When the Manes hit a town, they don’t leave people to tell the tale. The ones who aren’t taken are killed. You understand? We can’t avoid them by hiding down here.’
‘Where can we go?’
‘The excavation. The ice caves. We can survive there for a night. If we get out of town, we can wait till they’re gone.’
Jez calmed a little as his words sank in. Professor Malstrom, their employer, was obsessed with the search for a lost race he’d dubbed the Azryx, whom he believed had once possessed great and mysterious technology. Based on slender evidence and some cryptic writings, he’d divined that they died out suddenly, many thousands of years ago, and their civilisation had been swallowed by the ice. He’d persuaded the university to fund him on various digs over the past year, hoping to uncover relics of that ancient people. So far, he’d not found a thing. But the excavation would provide them with the shelter they needed, and the Manes might not look there.
‘Yes!’ she said. ‘Yes, we can hide out in the caves!’
She clutched at the sanity he offered, soothed by the strength and certainty in his voice. Riss had held a candle for her ever since they’d started working together, as pilot and navigator for Professor Malstrom’s expeditionary team. She liked him as a friend, but had never been able to summon up any feelings deeper than that.
He’d always been protective of her. It was a trait she found annoying: she interpreted it as possessiveness. But now she was ashamed to realise she wanted a protector. She’d crumbled in the face of the horror bearing down on them, and he hadn’t. She clung to him gratefully as he lifted her up and helped her put on her pack.
The thoroughfare was eerily deserted when they emerged. The dreadnought had gone, and the blizzard was closing in, cutting visibility down to fifteen metres. The chill began to seep into them immediately, even through their protective clothing. From somewhere in the skirling melee of snowflakes came distant yells and the report of shotguns. Piercing, inhuman howls floated after them.
They stayed close to the buildings. Jez hung on to Riss as he led her towards the edge of town, where a crude trail led up the mountain to the glacier. The excavation site was up there.
They’d not gone far when there was the roar of an engine, and a blaze of light up ahead. Gunfire erupted, startlingly close. Riss pulled Jez into the gap between two domed Yort dwellings, and they hid behind a grit-bin as a snow-tractor came racing up the thoroughfare. The boxy metal vehicles were usually employed to haul supplies and personnel back and forth from the glacier, but someone was trying to escape on one. The Manes had other ideas: there were four of them swarming all over it, trying to drag the doors open or punch their way in through the glass. Jez glimpsed them in the backwash of the headlamps as they passed - ghoulish, feral approximations of men and women - and then the speeding snow-tractor fishtailed on the icy ground. It slewed sideways for an instant before its tracks bit and flung it into the wall of a building.
The Manes abandoned the snow-tractor as several Yorts, wielding shotguns, came backing up the thoroughfare, firing into the blizzard, where more shadowy figures were darting on the edges of visibility. Manes prowled on all fours along rooftops or slunk close to the ground. They flitted and flickered, moving in fast jerks. They jumped from one spot to another without seeming to pass through the distance between.
Jez cringed as she saw the Manes spread out to encircle their victims.
