The wind cut through the pass again. A fresh gust lifted a sheet of snow off the ridge above us and sent it spinning down across the path. Kira’s hair whipped sideways across her face.

She didn’t move it.

Her dark eyes had gone wide. The composed line her mouth usually held had broken, the corners pulled down, the lower lip trembling once before she caught it between her teeth. Her hand came up to grip the strap of her bag and the knuckles went white at once.

"This is a gate mutation."

Her voice came out thin. The words barely made it past her lips.

"We’ve entered a hidden mutated gate."

Tom’s head turned toward her, fear in his eyes, "A what...?"

"A mutated gate." Kira’s eyes stayed fixed on the peaks. "A gate that changes its tier and its environment after entry. The library has many recorded cases in the last decade. All cases killed everyone inside."

Lena made a small sound in her throat.

She’d been holding herself together since the cold hit. Now her hands came up to her mouth and she took a step back, her boots sliding in the snow, her eyes filling fast.

The colour she’d lost in the cafeteria a week ago came back twice over, only this time it was the colour of someone working out the distance between where she was standing and the body bag at the end of it.

Edgar dropped to his knees in the snow.

He was breathing fast through his nose, his hands pressed flat against his thighs, his head down.

"I shouldn’t be here." His voice cracked. "I shouldn’t be, I’m an E-rank wind user, my mother said this exam was a bad idea, she said, she said..."

"Edgar."

He didn’t hear me.

Tom was staring at his own hands. He hadn’t moved since Kira had said the word. His mouth hung open in the small slack way mouths hung open when the brain had stopped feeding them instructions.

I watched them give up for a moment. My mind raced. My next words were going to make or break the team, I needed them to count.

Clap!

My two palms struck each other, the sound cracked across the pass.

Four heads snapped toward me.

"Calm down. We’re not dead yet."

Lena’s hands dropped from her mouth. Edgar lifted his head off his chest. Tom blinked twice.

"All of you. Listen. We are not dead. We are standing in the snow with all our limbs attached and nothing trying to eat us. The longer we spend panicking, the more time we waste. So we stop. Right now."

II jerked my chin up the pass, toward the nearest curve where the slope rose into a rocky outcrop that broke the wind.

"It’s better to focus on the issue at hand. We’re in a snowy mountain area. The cold’s already biting into our skin, and standing here arguing about what kind of gate we entered isn’t going to warm anyone up. We need shelter. That’s the first problem."

I tapped the storage ring on my hand.

"Food, we have. We are carrying three days’ worth each and we can stretch it. So we don’t need to worry about that just yet."

"We can do this."

Five minutes I spent on them.

I tried it the calm way first. Then I tried the firm way. Then I tried the half-joking way. None of it really worked.

Lena kept shaking her head. Tom kept staring at his hands. Edgar had stopped crying but his breathing hadn’t levelled out, and Kira’s eyes kept drifting back to the peaks like the answer to our problem was written somewhere in the rock.

The cold wasn’t helping. Every minute we lost in the open was a minute the cold ate through their uniforms.

I exhaled through my nose.

Then I took a badge I hid in my uniform.

I held it out flat on my palm so they could all see it.

The grey F had been there last week. The colour had changed a few days ago, after the association office had run me through the formal evaluation in front of three witnesses and reissued the disc with a fresh enchantment.

The badge in my hand was green now.

C-rank green.

The four of them went still in a way they hadn’t been still for the whole conversation.

Tom’s mouth opened first. "H-how... you’re a C-Ranker?"

"Yes."

Lena’s eyes moved between the badge and my face. Her hands had dropped from her mouth a minute ago, but now they hung at her sides limp, the colour returning slowly to her fingers.

"I managed to re-awaken. The association pulled me in for a mandatory evaluation. Turns out I’m a C-Ranker. So calm down, okay? We can get through this. Even after the mutation, this is probably a low D-Rank gate. I can deal with that. I’ve awakened some powerful skills since the second awakening. We can do this."

I clipped the badge to my chest, no longer hiding it.

Edgar lifted his head. His eyes were red around the edges but the panic had drained out of them. He was looking at me the way Tom and Lena were looking at me, the way people looked at a man holding a rope at the bottom of a pit.

The colour came back into their faces.

Tom turned toward Edgar and Lena.

"We have hope. Right?"

His voice was small but it wasn’t shaking anymore.

Edgar nodded once. He drew a breath through his nose, steadier than the last twenty he’d taken. "C-Rankers are really powerful. With Ash around, we, we might be able to get out of here alive."

"Of course we will. Now get up. We’re looking for shelter before the wind decides to take a layer of skin off all of us."

I crossed the snow to where Edgar was kneeling and held my hand out to him.

He stared at it for half a second.

Then he reached up. His fingers were cold through the fabric of his glove. I pulled him to his feet in one motion and clapped him on the shoulder as he found his balance.

"Stay close."