novelraw Chapter 125: The Law Of Survival
Chapter 125: The Law Of Survival
Sera looked around at the loose circle in front of her... she looked at the men who were waiting for her to pick what food she wanted before they started to eat.
This was what was getting to her. She was more than capable of surviving this harshness, she could get her own food if she was hungry. She did have her own space with more than enough supplies.
But, the creature whispered to her, they don’t know that. This is the way it should be. This is the way it needs to be.
Still, Sera didn’t reach forward to grab anything... and still, the men continued to look at her.
The creature rolled its eyes... it felt like a soft head-butt against her sternum. Feed alpha first, it hissed. This is the way it is done in a horde.
Again, the human part of Sera refused to back down, she refused to let herself be seen as someone that needed to be protected or that was more important than the others.
Feed. Alpha. First. The creature was getting upset, and Sera could feel it. She could almost read the creature’s mind, feel the approval that it had for the men’s actions. You have to pick something, it hissed. Or they will not eat.
Finally, Sera gave in and took the brownie from one of the MREs.
The seal gave with a flat little gasp. Sweet, false chocolate rose faint and thin against the cold and still managed to be too much. She bit, chewed, swallowed. The creature hummed approval, smug.
The moment she swallowed her first bite, Zubair snapped a cracker once and spread it with cheese. Elias dosed something with hot sauce because some habits survived extinction. Alexei ate from a cold pouch like it didn’t matter, and Lachlan over-sauced just on principle.
"Any threats?" Zubair asked when wrappers went back into packs.
"None," Elias said. "No prints, no debris fields, no heat shimmer. Microfractures typical of freeze/refreeze cycle. If something lives under this, it isn’t showing yet."
"Yet," Lachlan said, cheerful out of spite.
"Yet," Elias agreed.
Sera scanned the white until her eyes watered from light more than feeling. The emptiness didn’t comfort. It clarified. If there were teeth under them—and there could be—their first mistake would be thinking silence meant safe.
The creature stretched like a cat and purred because the thought was correct.
They moved again when Zubair did.
He adjusted their angle ten degrees off return, marking a different line across the plain. Every hundred yards he paused half a heartbeat, listening with his soles, heat tapping at the skin of the world. He didn’t announce decisions. He didn’t explain himself.
The plan was the plan because it worked: test reach, test glare, test wind, test sound, test themselves, come home before the light went weak and the temperature decided to be mean about it.
Somewhere past the place where the tower should’ve reappeared and refused, Alexei’s hand came up again at the exact moment her weight found a slick pane. She took it without looking.
Reflex beaten into muscle, not thought. Acceptance, the creature murmured, pleased. Good horde.
"Glare’s going to blind you if we make a habit of this," Elias said from behind her shoulder, a note of irritation in the clinical. "I can rig something with smoked plastic. Or salvaged lenses."
"Just make me look handsome," Lachlan said.
"Impossible," Alexei said mildly.
"Rude."
The wind shoved laughter flat. It didn’t matter. Sera let the corner of her mouth tick anyway. Lachlan’s shoulders went loose in that almost-laugh way he had; he didn’t need sound to know he’d gotten what he came for.
They pushed out farther than she liked by a hair and then Zubair set his hand down like a full stop.
"We have enough," he said. He looked at the sun: bright, useless, sliding toward evening. "Return."
There was no argument from the rest of the team.
The penthouse was high, dry, locked. The plain was none of those things. You didn’t trade warmth and stock for a flimsy tent and a lecture from the wind because your pride wanted to sleep under stars.
They turned. The formation rebuilt itself without them noticing it had fallen apart: Zubair ahead, Elias behind, Alexei right, Lachlan left. Sera in the hollow of all of it. The rope hissed and bumped and hummed whenever wind caught it.
At a seam polished so smooth even their treads stuttered, she felt her center slide. Alexei’s palm was already there. She let him steady what didn’t need steadying because it wasn’t about need. It was about the world feeling correct in her bones.
Closer in, the tower admitted it existed—first as a smear, then as the memory of straight lines, then as black teeth gnawing at a sky going gray.
"Same order," he said once they had returned to their make-shift entrance.
"After you, Peaches," Lachlan said, bowing just enough to be a little irritating.
She ducked to the ledge, palms grinding frost off stone. The cold still counted as a fact—abrasion, friction—no more. The window rasped under her glove. The creature took inventory as her boots found the frame: four heartbeats close, all where they should be.
Alexei’s palm pressed warm between her shoulder blades for a breath and lifted again when she began to lower herself. She didn’t need it.
She let it be there anyway.
Inside, the silence changed shape. Tight instead of endless. Metal clicked somewhere deep in the building, water thawed and froze behind concrete, the air carried ghost hints of dust and old electricity. They climbed in, one after the other, and the white world vanished like a trick of light.
"Map it," Zubair said, not loud. "Tomorrow we take the other line. We’ll need to find sunglasses or smoked lenses. Extra rope. We’ll also have to check to see how much supplies we have. The last thing we want is any surprises."
"Two dozen and change," Elias said. "Six day’s margin if we’re stupid. Twelve if we’re not."
"When are we ever stupid?" Lachlan said, affronted.
Alexei laughed once, low. "I have list."
Sera set her gloves on the sill and looked at the white pressed flat beyond the window glass. The creature rubbed against her mind like a cat along a shin and purred at the shape of the day. Territory had edges now.
Not many, but they were enough.
She didn’t thank them for the hand she didn’t need. She didn’t reject it either. She didn’t tell Elias she couldn’t feel the cold. She didn’t tell Zubair his pace had bent to hers and stayed there, precise and unconscious. She didn’t tell Lachlan that his mouth keeping up a steady noise mattered even when the wind ate it.
Law, the creature said, pleased. Feed first. Accept what is offered. Keep the center. This is what a good Alpha does.
"Tomorrow," Zubair said again, already turning plans over like knives in his hands.
Sera nodded and the creature purred and the day sat right in her bones.