The cave ran deeper than the outer seam had suggested. Past the tight throat of the entrance, the walls opened out into a chamber wide enough for the five of us with space to spare. The ceiling was low but not crushing. Two, maybe two and a half metres at the high point.

Dark stone all around, dry underfoot, with a shallow slope down toward the back wall.

There was no wind. That was the first thing I noticed.

I let the four of them file in behind me and started a slow sweep of the interior. Nothing on the walls. Whatever had lived here had lived here alone, and whatever had lived here was currently in my storage ring.

Edgar was at the back of the chamber.

He’d crouched near the slope where the stone dipped into a shallow bowl. His hand was hovering over something on the ground.

"Ash."

I crossed to him to find a pile of bones pushed against the base of the wall.

Some were small. Rodent skulls the size of my thumb. A few longer bones that looked like they’d come off something with hooves, cracked open at the marrow. A rib cage half-collapsed under the weight of the pile on top of it.

Then, at the bottom of the heap, a jawbone.

I crouched beside Edgar and turned it over with the back of my knuckle. The teeth were still set in the socket.

"This is...without a doubt, a human’s jawbone."

Further down the pile, we found a femur and a smaller skull, cracked along the crown.

"The beast was clearly a predator in the region," I muttered.

Edgar had gone quiet beside me. His face was pale but he wasn’t panicking anymore. He was just staring at the small skull, working something out behind his eyes.

I stood up.

"Kira. Get a fire going. We’ll rest here for a bit and figure out the map before we move again."

After receiving no answer from her, I turned around to find Kira hadn’t moved from the middle of the chamber. She was standing with her hands hanging at her sides, her bag still slung across her shoulder, her body dead still.

Her face had lost all colour.

A fine sheen of sweat had broken across her forehead in the small span of time between our entry and now, the drops visible from what little light came in through the cave mouth. Her pupils had narrowed to pinpoints in the middle of her dark eyes. Her chest rose and fell in shallow uneven pulls that didn’t sound like breathing.

"Hey."

I crossed to her in three quick strides. My hands came up to her shoulders and I squeezed gently, giving her a small nudge to bring her back from whatever she was going through.

"Hey. Are you okay?" I asked, ready to feed her the healing potion in my storage ring instantly.

Her lips parted, but nothing came out at first. Then her arm lifted slowly, and her finger extended past my shoulder toward the pile at the back of the chamber.

"I-It’s human bones."

I turned my head to follow the line of her finger. Then back to her face. My brow drew together.

"Yeah. It is. What’s wrong with it?"

"H-Human bones shouldn’t exist here."

It took me several moments to understand what she meant. When I did, my eyes widened.

"Well, shit..."

A mutated gate rewrote its entire history in the moment of mutation. That was the whole point of the phenomenon, and the reason mutated gates killed everyone inside them: they generated a fresh environment on entry, with no prior human contact or kills.

We were meant to be the first people ever to set foot on this snow. The frostpanther was meant to have never seen a human before it saw me.

Seeing human bones inside the cave meant one of two things.

Either this wasn’t a mutated gate but something else. Or there were humans living in here. Or there used to be before they became prey to the predators of this gate.

Neither answer was good for our current situation. The humans in this place could be hostile, predators in their own right. And, if this gate isn’t a mutated gate, but something of its first kind, then that was even worse.

My hands were still on Kira’s shoulders. I could feel the tremble running down through her collarbone into my palms.

I lowered her to a sitting position against the near wall, careful with my movement, keeping one hand on her back until she settled. She let me guide her down without resistance. Her legs folded under her at an angle. Her pack slid off her shoulder and hit the stone beside her with a soft thump.

"Take a seat. Relax your body, breathe in and out. I’ve got the fire."

She nodded once.

Tom had come up behind us, his baton tucked under one arm, his face reading the room. He caught my eye. I jerked my chin at Kira in the small way that meant sit with her, and he moved to her other side without asking why.

Lena hung back near the entrance, her arms crossed over her chest. Her eyes moved between Kira and the bone pile and me. Whatever she was working out, she was doing it in silence.

I crossed to the middle of the chamber and opened the storage ring.

A few of the branches I’d stripped off dead pine trees on the walk up came out in a small stack. Dry enough to catch fire.

I arranged them in a loose pyramid against the flat stone, worked a small piece of the frostpanther’s fur into the gap at the base for kindling, and struck a spark off the flint I kept in the ring.

The kindling caught on the third strike.

The fire crawled up the underside of the branches in slow orange lines, threw its first real warmth into the chamber, and painted the walls in a soft flickering yellow that reached almost to the pile at the back.

Kira’s eyes were on the flame.

Everyone sat around the campfire lost in their own thoughts.

"Okay, we need to understand this place. After resting for some time, we will explore our immediate surrounding."