Alexei tilted his head, smile sharper. "We have neighbors."
"Focus," Zubair said, sa word he used for gun drills and not faintly different here.
He let the rope have four inches and took them back. The door held under the seal. The bridge stopped trying to pull like an animal on a leash and settled into complaint.
"Lachlan," he said. "Give a hold knot at the first mark. Double check yourself."
"Yes, sir," Lachlan said cheerfully, and cinched with a speed that still looked sloppy until you felt it and realized it wasn’t. He put his weight in to test it. It answered well. He grinned at Zubair like a kid who’d gotten the right answer on a quiz he hadn’t studied for. "Teacher’s pet."
"Don’t be a pet," Zubair said. "Be useful."
"Useful pet," Lachlan said under his breath, but his hands were right.
"Elias," Zubair said, "number that fixture chain. We’ll need it later."
Elias took the grease pencil out and wrote a small neat 1 on the glass near the rattling light through the crack they’d made earlier. It felt ridiculous and necessary, both.
Sera hadn’t moved from the fra. He noticed when she did sothing with her fingers that wasn’t strength and wasn’t heat. The frost at the edge of the seal stopped trying to creep into the seam and lay down like she’d convinced it no fun would be had there today. He filed it along with everything else he wasn’t going to ask about until he had to.
The low sound under the steel rolled again. Not identical. Not echo. Movent, then rest. Movent again.
"Ti to move," he said. "We’ve got what we ca for. We don’t stand here waiting to be told sothing we already know."
He had them wrap the line for a clean exit: Elias on the cap, Lachlan on the coil, Alexei holding the door exactly where Zubair needed it to take the last gust and the one after. Sera slipped her hand away and the seal didn’t complain.
"On six," Zubair said again, eyes on frost, on glass, on the slight lift-and-settle of the rope in Elias’s hand. "Three... two..."
He didn’t say one this ti. He moved. Alexei shoved and released. Lachlan pulled and locked. Elias fed the last loop into place so nothing could snag. The door t the fra and stayed. The latch settled deep.
Silence would have been nice. The storm didn’t give them that. It gave them a different rhythm—less rattle, more hiss.
"Check," Zubair said.
Elias ran a glove along each carabiner. "Good."
"Good," Lachlan echoed, already starting to bounce like he had to bleed off the extra electricity or it would eat him. "Can we go upstairs and argue about hot chocolate now?"
"Move," Zubair said.
They didn’t leave; they backed out, cleaning as they went. Rope off the floor, hardware where hands would find it, grease circles still clear. He had them reverse the door exactly as they’d opened it, with the sa patience. The hinge sighed. The cold in the corridor imdiately turned from knifepoint to rely hard.
As they turned into the hall, the building did its long, slow stretch. The sound ca up the studs and through the floor and into tacarpals. Zubair listened with his hands on the wall the way he always did.
"It holds," he said.
"Today," Elias said.
"Yes," Zubair said. He didn’t scold him for the echo. They walked.
On the stairwell, the wind sang down the well again because it couldn’t help itself. Lachlan put his palm over the rag in the seam and felt it vibrate like a string. He winked at the door as if to promise it he’d co back with a better song.
"Up," Zubair said, and led.
They climbed the two flights to their floor with the kind of tight-limbed quiet that made Zubair’s blood like oil in his veins—smooth, steady, no knocks. At the top, he killed the whistle with a second rag, even though it didn’t need it, because not needing it was a bad reason to do nothing.
Inside, the living room looked like it had an hour ago: blankets on chair backs, greenhouse glow, generator hum. The TV over the fireplace watched them without judgnt.
"Report," he said, even though he’d been there for the report.
"Anchors good," Elias said. "Glass noisy but not broken. Fra is the weak point."
"Door needs love," Alexei said, rolling his shoulder. "She will get it."
"Sothing under the ice," Lachlan said, all the humor gone out of his voice for one second. "Not seal-small."
"Not small," Zubair agreed. He scrubbed his glove over the line of frost still stuck to the seam of his sleeve and shook it off. "We reinforce the anchors and the door. We bring plates, secondary bolts, and straps. We test from here again before we put a foot on that bridge."
"Now or after food?" Lachlan asked.
"After water," Elias cut in, already turning toward the kettle. "Hands first. Sera, your glove seams are cracked."
She shrugged one shoulder. "It’s fine."
"It won’t be fine when you slowly freeze-bite the joints," Elias said, which was as close to snapping as he got. He held out a tub of balm anyway. "Ten minutes."
She held out her hand like a queen and let him work the salve into the leather. Alexei watched too closely, amused. Lachlan watched them both and pretended he wasn’t.
Zubair stood at the window and let the storm throw itself against the glass. The sound under the ice wasn’t in the room anymore, but his bones rembered it.
Not just wind. Not just ice.
"Elias," he said without turning. "Start a list."
Elias had a pencil in his hand before Zubair finished the sentence. "Plates, bolts, straps. Wedges for the hinge. Secondary line. Ear protection if the rattle gets worse."
"Good," Zubair said. "Alexei, pull the plates from the freezer room—bottom shelf, left. Lachlan, you and I will cut straps from the cargo webbing."
"And ?" Sera asked, amused.
"You sit there and let Elias fix your glove," Zubair said, and then, because he could feel Lachlan winding up to translate that into sothing ridiculous, added, "Then you check our packs for line tangles and throw out what doesn’t et your standard. If it catches here, it catches there."
She nodded once. "Done."
The wind hit the glass and the pane knocked twice, like a knock at a door. Zubair looked at it and then away. He couldn’t deal with what lived under the ice yet. He could set a line straight and make a door shut and get his people up and down a stairwell without dying.
"Work," he said.
They moved.
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