Free Hunt Beyond the Frozen Fire by Christa Faust, Gabriel Hunt

crevasse. The pack was not so lucky. It slid past Rue and out the open door.
    A moment later, Nils’s voice called up from below. “What was that?”
    “Your pack,” Gabriel shouted. “It didn’t happen to land near you by any chance…?”
    “No,” Nils said. “Gabriel?” There was a long echoingpause. “I’m becoming somewhat concerned about my situation.”
    “We’re working on it,” Gabriel said. What he didn’t say was that he was becoming somewhat concerned about their situation, too. He could feel the Spryte still gently teetering and could hear the ice beneath them groaning. “All right,” he said, “forget the packs. Everybody out. Rue, you go first, out this side.”
    “But Gabriel, if we don’t have any supplies…” she began.
    He cut her off. “No time to discuss it, Rue. We may only have seconds—”
    But they didn’t even have that.
    They all felt it as the lip of the crevasse crumbled beneath the Spryte’s weight. The vehicle tipped forward and smashed through the fragile surface. There was a silent instant where Gabriel felt suspended in midair, like a baseball at the top of its trajectory in that infinitely brief, motionless instant before the descent begins. And then they were plunging into darkness.
    Gabriel felt himself thrown sideways, over the back of the driver’s seat. He fell against the others in a tangle of limbs, heard Millie’s grunt as their heads collided. The vehicle glanced off one sheer icy face of the crevasse and then the other before it came to an abrupt stop with a massive grinding crunch. They were tightly wedged between the narrowing walls of ice. The crevasse went on, as they could tell from the sound of chunks of ice continuing to fall into the darkness below—but the truck was too wide to fall any farther.
    The faint light filtering down from above showed that the front end of the Spryte was smashed inward as if they had been in a severe head-on crash. If Gabriel had not been thrown into the backseat, he would havebeen pinned—or, more likely, crushed to death. The radio below the accordioned dashboard was twisted into useless scrap. The glove box had dropped open, dumping out a miscellany of maps and tools, including a large flashlight. Gabriel grabbed the flashlight and switched it on, driving back the blue gloom and illuminating the pale faces of the huddled team members.
    “Everybody okay?” Gabriel asked. “Anyone hurt?”
    Before anybody could answer there was a thud and a crash from above. Bits of safety glass rained down around them from a shattered window. Gabriel shone the flashlight upward to reveal a booted leg dangling through the window.
    “Nils?” Gabriel said.
    “I’m all right,” Nils said, though his voice sounded otherwise, like he was speaking through gritted teeth.
    Gabriel helped pull Nils down into the cabin. The big Swede was shaken and sported a bloody bruise on one cheek, but he seemed at least not to have any broken bones.
    “You really thought jumping down here from that ledge was a good idea?” Gabriel said.
    “I wish I could tell you that I did,” Nils said, “and that this was all part of a clever plan on my part—but really it was the ledge’s decision, not mine.”
    “Got it,” Gabriel said. He shone the light upward. It only penetrated so far into the deep blue walls of ice. The sky was barely visible in the distance.
    “We’re going to have to try to free up some of the gear from the back and make the climb to the surface,” Gabriel said. “Won’t be easy, but we should be able to get back to the station on foot and then radio to the Pole for help. Nils, do you think you can make it?”
    “I’m not sure,” Nils said. “My leg—”
    “I can do it,” Velda said. “My father took me on tougher climbs than this when I was a kid.”
    Gabriel doubted it. Any father who’d take a child on a climb even half this hard would’ve deserved an arrest for endangerment. But Gabriel appreciated the