novelraw Chapter 129: Blood In The Snow
Chapter 129: Blood In The Snow
The wind had teeth.
Zubair felt them first, biting at the edges of his hood, dragging at the rope with a steady pull that hadn’t been there an hour ago. While he didn’t feel the cold, that didn’t mean that the wind wasn’t frustrating in and of itself.
But the way that it blew, the direction it was coming from, even the way it smelled, told him more than he wanted to know.
A storm was coming.
He kept his hand up, signaling to hold formation, and let the line tighten again before pushing them forward.
South line. Ten degrees from yesterday. Each step weighed, each pause a conversation with the ice. The others didn’t need to understand how he listened. They just needed to follow and obey his orders.
He knew when the wind shifted. He always did.
But it wasn’t the wind that caught his eye first—it was color.
A smudge broke the white ahead.
It didn’t look like a shadow. I wasn’t a crack in the ice.
It was the wrong shade. Wrong shape. He slowed, fist raised. The rope hissed to stillness.
"Contact," he said. Not loud, but just enough for everyone to hear him.
The rest of the men came up behind him, their heads turning in unison. Even before they reached it, he knew what it was. Red against white, blooming vivid and sharp: blood.
The carcass lay half-submerged in snowdrift.
A leopard seal, one of the big ones. The skull was half-shattered, ribs cracked open like a crate. Flesh ragged, meat gone in chunks. Not scavenged. Hunted.
Zubair crouched, boots planted, eyes scanning the horizon even as he studied the wound patterns.
The breaks were clean. Teeth like a vise. No hesitation. Whatever had done this hadn’t been desperate. It had been efficient.
He’d seen kills like this before — not in ice, but in sand and shadow.
The Country I military had taught him early: efficiency speaks of experience. A child with a rifle will spray bullets everywhere. A trained shooter puts one round through the skull.
Predators worked the same way.
Behind him, Lachlan let out a low whistle. "Guess we’re not the only ones dining out here." His tone tried for light, but Zubair heard the thin edge under it.
Alexei knelt on the opposite side of the carcass, his fingers brushing dried blood frozen into ice. His grin was thin, sharp. "Da. Beautiful work. Efficient hunter."
Elias’s voice came clipped. "This isn’t scavenging. It’s competition."
Zubair’s jaw tightened. He didn’t need Elias’s words to tell him that. Leopard seals were apex predators where they came from.
If one was prey here, then it only meant that it was no longer the one with the biggest teeth.
Sera stood behind them, her head cocked to the side, and her eyes unreadable.
She didn’t flinch at the gore. If anything, her lips parted in the faintest curve, like satisfaction.
The air around her seemed to hum.
Zubair stood slowly, scanning horizon again. The world beyond Country I meant little to him most days, but now the thought crept in: What is happening on the other side of this?
Was everything that he knew? Was City V under ice? He hadn’t heard a broadcast in weeks. For all he knew, his home was already bones beneath snow.
He took in a breath, sharp in his chest.
There was no fallback base.
No embassy to call, no safehouse where an extra passport waited.
No informants, no black sites.
All he had was here: four men, one woman, one rope line, one building half-broken by flood.
They needed information.
Even if it wasn’t what they wanted to know.
The seal carcass was intelligence. Ugly, but useful. A message written in blood: predators larger than this existed, and they hunted here. That was something.
The wind shoved forward again, coming from the east. Snow kicked sideways, stinging his cheek.
"Storm," he said. His voice cut through the white. "Coming in now."
They didn’t argue.
The blizzard came fast, like everything did out here.
One moment horizon stretched pale and endless; the next it collapsed into gray, sound swallowed, vision gone.
"Formation!" Zubair barked, the rope around his waist jerking tight.
He took point, his fists clenched, every ounce of training anchoring him forward.
The military had drilled into him since he was a boy: control the line, control the unit, control the outcome. Out here, the rules were the same.
The rope was their lifeline.
He counted heartbeats as steps. Anchor, anchor, anchor. Behind him, weight shifted in rhythm.
He imagined their silhouettes as positions in a stack: Elias steady, Alexei wolf-grinning, Lachlan restless, Sera the calm in their middle. His job was to keep them from scattering into nothing.
The blizzard screamed, trying to peel them apart. Snow plastered his lashes, froze against his mask. He didn’t blink. He didn’t waver.
Lachlan slipped toward a fissure—Zubair’s hand shot back, iron grip yanking him upright with a snarl. "Hold line!"
"Copy!" Lachlan shouted back, laughing even with ice on his teeth. Mad bastard.
Elias’s voice tried to rise—measurements, probabilities—but the wind shredded it. Zubair glimpsed him hunched low, rope steady, eyes narrowed to slits. Good. The medic knew when to shut up.
Alexei hummed, rope taut in his grip, a Country K tune nearly devoured by the gale. Zubair didn’t waste breath asking why. Everyone needed their own way to fight fear.
Sera walked like she was untouchable, her hood back, her brown eyes turned into the storm as though daring it. She was their axis. He didn’t like relying on something he didn’t understand, but he couldn’t deny the truth: she steadied them without a single word.
He pushed them onward, fire burning under his skin, begging for release. He didn’t let it out. Fire would eat the ice. Fire would kill them faster than the cold could.
Discipline. Always discipline.
The black smear of tower teeth broke the white at last. He guided them in, rope angling home, breath harsh in his mask.
The window yawned open, heatless but welcome. They spilled inside, boots striking stone, snow shaking loose in clumps. The storm howled behind them, denied its prey.
Zubair leaned against the wall for one breath, then another, before forcing himself straight. He counted the rope line again. Five weights. All present.
Only then did he allow the image back: red against white, ribs cracked like wood, blood frozen into ice.
If a leopard seal was prey, then they were ants walking across someone else’s dinner table.
He took another deep breath, fists unclenching slowly until the heat bled off his skin.
Information was survival. And survival meant listening, even when the answer wasn’t what he wanted.
The ice doesn’t just have teeth.
It has something larger that feeds it.