The wind had teeth.
Zubair felt them first, biting at the edges of his hood, dragging at the rope with a steady pull that hadn't been there an hour ago. While he didn't feel the cold, that didn't mean that the wind wasn't frustrating in and of itself.
But the way that it blew, the direction it was coming from, even the way it smelled, told him more than he wanted to know.
A storm was coming.
He kept his hand up, signaling to hold formation, and let the line tighten again before pushing them forward.
South line. Ten degrees from yesterday. Each step weighed, each pause a conversation with the ice. The others didn't need to understand how he listened. They just needed to follow and obey his orders.
He knew when the wind shifted. He always did.
But it wasn't the wind that caught his eye first—it was color.
A smudge broke the white ahead.
It didn't look like a shadow. I wasn't a crack in the ice.
