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belt—and felt insanely vulnerable, as he bent to pick up the loose wood. The spindly twigs and branches were good tinder. Enough to get things started. Big, living fir and pine swung in the roiling murk, promising a slow-burning, smoky fuel that might be wet enough to last through the night.
    Once Buckle turned back toward the cave, his arms jammed full of twigs, his heart missed a beat when he could not see the entrance through the dense snowfall, even though he knew it was there. He stopped. He should procure a big chunk of wood now, or else he was going to have to come out and get one later: later, when night had fallen and the sabertooths would have had time to sniff them out again.
    Buckle waded through waist-deep snow to reach the tall pines growing along the base of the cliff. Placing his tinder sticks in a pile, he shoved a raft of snowy branches aside to get ahold of a limb that he could snap away. As he rocked the branch back and forth, chunks of snow fell on him from the branches overhead, accompanied by the clatter of falling icicles.
    The branch broke off with a satisfyingly loud snap, and Buckle ripped it out of its tangle with its brothers. He tucked the heavy limb under his arm, picked up his kindling sticks, and loped through the snowdrifts back to the cave. Max lay where he had left her, bundled deep in her coat, and the mournful wail of the wind made her plight seem even more grave, as if she lay in a tomb.
    “Max! You stay with me, you hear?” Buckle whispered as he knelt beside her, expecting no response and getting none. Her eyes were shut inside her goggles, her lips slightly parted, the ashen paleness of her face startling in its nest of black fur. Buckle bashed each wooden stick on the floor to break away its casing of ice, and rushed to stack his kindling.
    Max had lost what seemed like gallons of blood. The wounds had to be stanched. But to strip her down in subzero air invited death by hypothermia. To attempt to clean her wounds without boiled water invited death by infection. And infection was the biggest specter haunting the kind of wounds she had taken. If she survived the shock and blood loss, which Buckle believed—maybe desperately—she would, the sabertooth claws and teeth that had penetrated her body were infamously infective, rotten with death as they were, not to mention the bits of leather and bear fur they had driven deep into the flesh. If the wounds were not properly treated, if they were not flushed and cleaned before they closed, then even the expertise of the Crankshaft physicians might not prove enough against the fester and gangrene.
    Buckle reached for the fire horn Pinter had given him—poor, unfortunate Pinter—and was surprised to find the horn warm to the touch, the flame still alive within it. There was a tinderbox inside the survival pouch on his belt, but the ready flame of the fire horn would be faster.
    Max gasped, suffering a violent bout of shivers. Buckle unbuttoned the front of his parka—the wad of papers he had salvaged from the Founders’ wreck spilled out onto the floor—and laid his fur on top of her. He still had on a sheepskin undercoat and his leather aviator coat beneath that, so the cold was of no concern to him now that they were out of the wind. “There you go, girl,” Buckle whispered close to Max’s face. He did not know why he felt the need to whisper, but he did. “We shall have you warm as toast in a few moments.”
    Max stopped shaking, but her sleeping face looked tense with pain.
    Buckle removed his survival pouch from his belt and, unfolding the neatly squared oilskin they were packed in, arranged the contents on the floor: one tinderbox, a small box of sulfur-tipped matches, six paraffin candles, a foot of coiled kindling hemp, five squares of chocolate, one knife, one flare gun with three cartridges, one roll of gauze, one roll of heavy bandage, three vials of morphine, one steel-and-glass syringe, one tin of Dr. Fassbinder’s