"Blisters! Was it this bloody cold the last time?"

Alek, who has lost the feeling in his fingers and his feet, sighs through the scarf tugged over his mouth. His breath puffs out, white against the blue sky. "Yes, I'm afraid."

The Alsatch glacier stretches out in every direction around them. From the air – or, for that matter, from the walls of his father's castle – the field of white looks smooth. As Alek already knew, that appearance is a lie, but he is rediscovering just how much of a lie it is.

At least this time he's had Deryn to trudge alongside him, and Bovril to warm the inside collar of his shirt.

"Stormwalker," the loris says now. Its voice is muffled by the scarf.

Alek and Deryn draw to a halt. She shakes one snowshoe free and puts her hands on her hips, squinting at the tumbled snow and ice. "Where, beastie?"

Alek consults his map and compass. Yesterday, from the castle parapets, they'd worked out the Leviathan's approximate position at the time of its crash; the scars of its impact are still visible here and there, even with the better part of five years of glacial movement to erase them.

Reckoning the location of his Habsburg House Guard Stormwalker had been an even less certain endeavor. It had wrecked somewhere in between the castle and the Leviathan, near the blackened ribs of the burned German zeppelin, but of course he had not made a record of the exact coordinates. Additionally, there's no way to know if the Germans had salvaged it after the great airbeast's departure, or destroyed it completely to keep it from enemy hands.

"Over there?" Alek says, nodding at a particularly large tumble some ten or fifteen meters away. Then he frowns and checks the map again. They seem to be slightly too far east of the zeppelin. "Possibly."

Deryn is wearing her scarf at a haphazard angle that covers nothing more than her chin; her breath wreaths her face. "Let's cross our fingers it is," she says, starting in that direction. "There's snow in my boots already, and I don't fancy any frostbitten toes."

"Blisters," Bovril says.

"Aye, exactly."

Alek falls in beside her as they struggle across the ice. "Thank you for this," he says. "I know you would have rather stayed at the aviation conference in Bern."

She shrugs, then grins. "You can thank me tonight, Clanker. Anyway, I don't mind. I've some fond memories of this glacier."

He looks at her, remembering a skinny, unconscious boy with a black eye curled in the lee of the airbeast's immense bulk. Alek had gone on a mission of mercy that night, but in the end, he knows who truly saved who.

"So do I," he says.

As they draw closer, it becomes obvious that the large mound of snow and ice is in fact concealing machinery, and not a stray boulder. Alek's pulse quickens. He tells himself not to hope. It's altogether very unlikely –

"Stormwalker!" Bovril exclaims. It wriggles until its nose pokes out of the scarf beside Alek's ear, shortly followed by the rest of its head. "Bloody cold," it adds, ears flattening and fur rising.

Alek reaches up and pats the loris with a gloved hand. It purrs and burrows down into the scarf again. He doesn't blame it; burrowing sounds like a splendid idea. He's looking forward to doing just that when they return to the castle.

"Bovril seems convinced," Deryn says. She stops, stuffing her hands into her jacket pockets, and jerks her chin in the direction of the derelict. "But you're the expert on this particular Stormwalker, Mr. Hohenberg – what d'you think?"

He carefully approaches the wreck. The bomb had knocked them starboard and onto their side; Klopp and the Leviathan crewmen had removed the engines without shifting the walker. The pilot's cabin should be right…

Here.

Time has buried it another foot or more, but the viewport is much the same as it was the last time he saw it – snow spilling inside, making a hazardous slope in and out. One edge of the double-eagle's wing is visible on the large Hapsburg crest below the viewport. A thrill runs through him: excitement and dread all at once.

"This is it," he calls to Deryn as he removes his snowshoes.

She grins, wide and brilliant, and starts toward him. "Can we get in?"

There's only one way to test, so Alek grabs both sides of the rusting viewport and half-climbs, half-drags himself up the snow pile. He can indeed fit, though it's far tighter now than it was at fifteen. "Yes."

She sheds her own snowshoes and clambers up after him; they're both aware she can manage perfectly fine on her own, but he can't resist catching her hand and helping her step from the frozen snow to the ruined metal of the cabin.

Deryn ducks her head, whispering, "Barking spiders, I'd forgot how small it was in here."

They are standing rather on top of one another. "It seemed larger then," he says softly, looking around. At least the temperature is marginally less frigid now that they're out of the wind.

She hmms in agreement. "And not half as dark. Do I have the lantern, or -?"

"No, I have it." He takes off his pack and draws out the glowworm lantern, setting it on what used to be the wall and is currently the floor. He whistles and the glowworms come to life, one by one, a bit sluggish in the cold. Alek looks over his shoulder at Deryn, who's smirking at him.

"Darwinist," she says.

"Your fault entirely," he says. He pulls his scarf down and rubs his hands together. Now that they're inside, he hasn't the slightest idea of what to do next. Finding the Stormwalker seemed so unlikely that exploring it – well, he hadn't given it much thought. But it's ridiculous to have made the trek only to do an about-face and return to the castle. "I think I'll look around the cabin."

"I'll see if the Germans left anything below. Well, bloody sideways now. Where did you have the gold stashed…?"

"There," he says, gesturing at the open – decidedly empty of gold; decidedly full of drifted snow – compartment.

"Those bum-rags," Deryn says, wrinkling her nose. "We could've sodding used that money."

Alek isn't fooled. "You hardly need another balloon, Liebe," he says with a smile.

She huffs a laugh. "I'll always need another balloon."

Still smiling, he turns to make an examination of the pilot's cabin, while she climbs through the hatch to the gunners' cabin.

Time, harsh weather, and an open viewport have not been kind to his Stormwalker. The leather of the three chairs is water-stained and ragged, split in many places to reveal the metal frames beneath. Rust is eating away at whole of the structure: brown patches have spread in a way remarkably similar to certain fungi.

The control panel is likewise in ruins. Alek runs his hands over the frozen, rusting gauges. He's thought of this machine so many times in the last five years. The desperate month he'd spent in the pilot's chair has largely blurred into one jumble of hazy recollections. Darkness, fear, exhaustion, determination.

Somehow, being here again lends the memories a fresh clarity – a sharpness of focus that is almost palpable. He can smell the hot metal, the permeating sickly-sweet odor of the fuel… can feel the saunters coming alive beneath his touch… can hear the German bullets pinging off of the armored plating, the men around him calling out…

Alek lifts his hands away and takes a breath of mercifully cold air. It dispels the ghosts.

Most of them, anyway.

He adjusts the lantern with the full knowledge that it will do nothing: the glowworms will not produce enough heat to warm the cabin. Still, the brighter green light does its own dispelling, and he feels better.

In the other cabin, Deryn thumps against the wall, shaking snow and rattling ice. She hisses in pain. "Blisters!"

Alek straightens from the lantern. "Are you hurt?" he asks, still keeping his voice hushed. This seems the place for quiet tones. Too haunted. A memorial to a future, a plan, that destiny erased before it could begin.

She appears in the open hatch, rubbing at her head. "Just knocked my skull."

"Ah," he says, mock-serious. "No chance of damage, then."

She snorts. "The Germans took everything that wasn't bolted in place," she says. She puts one hand on either side of the hatch and hoists herself up and through, landing with another shake and thud in the pilot's cabin again. "And some of what was, if I remember correctly."

"Yes, here as well," Alek says. He looks around and feels hollow. Suddenly, he wishes they had stayed in Bern; barring that, he wishes they had stayed in the castle. "I suppose we should be grateful they didn't set fire to it."

"Aye," Deryn agrees.

"I suppose," Bovril says. It cautiously wriggles the tip of its nose out and then the rest of its head, peering around the cabin. The loris has to shuffle around Alek's neck to do so, of course keeping its body tucked inside the scarf. Alek smiles down at it, then glances at Deryn, who's likewise watching the creature's antics with amusement.

"Anything else you'd care to do?" she asks Alek. "Have a picnic, maybe?"

He exhales. "No. I only wanted to see it again, but -" He breaks off, searching for the words, and switches to German: "There isn't anything here."

The words echo against the empty metal shell around them. He shivers, and tells himself it's only the temperature.

She gives him a sympathetic smile. "If you ask me," she says in German, soft, reaching for his hand, "there's plenty here."

Their fingers, thick in their gloves, nonetheless catch each others'. Alek squeezes once, hard, then relaxes his grip, though he doesn't let go. Deryn above all else is worth holding on to.

"I stand corrected," he says in English.

"Aye, as usual," she says. She presses a kiss to his cold cheek; her lips aren't any warmer than his skin, and he shivers again. "Let's go back to the castle, then."

"I'm rather looking forward to a nice fire," he says as he stoops to retrieve the lantern.

"And dinner," she says, taking the lantern from him and securing it to her own pack with quick, deft movements that, unfortunately, involve letting go of his hand.

"And dinner," he agrees.

"And dessert, love," she says, flashing a wicked grin that would, under less frigid circumstances, warm him from head to toe.

He clears his throat. "That as well," he says – and she laughs at him. The sound echoes and bounces in ringing peals, almost deafening. The knot of old ghosts unwinds in his chest, leaving him infinitely lighter, and he smiles at her.

"Dessert," Bovril says, burrowing into Alek's scarf again. Muffled, it adds, "Strawberries and cream!"

"Aye, beastie, all you can stomach," Deryn says. She winks at Alek, and he finds he is also able to laugh.

They climb out of the Stormwalker and refasten their snowshoes. Alek lays his hand on the double-eagle crest for a moment longer than necessary, then dusts the powder from his gloves and squints at the horizon.

"What," he asks as they begin the long, exhausting return trek to the castle, "would you even do with another balloon?"

Deryn tells him, her hands outlining plans in the air, and in the end Alek is too busy thinking about the future to even once look back at the past.