Cole startled awake as if from a bad dream. His arms and legs jerk-ed reflexively but wouldn’t move; they were pinned in place. He blinked, gradually bringing the world into focus, fearing more of the bright light. What he found proved worse.

He was strapped to an inclined platform, his legs tied down a meter apart, the thick ropes looped around his ankles and through holes in the solid steel. He glanced up at his hands, which were similarly bound high over his head. He tried jerking down on them and felt his bruised ribs sing out in pain, jolts of electricity lancing from his chest to every new bruise across his body.

“Good luck with that,” someone said.

Cole turned to his side. He had to lean his head forward to look around his own arm, then saw Riggs tied up a few meters away, strapped to an identical structure: an angled sheet of steel halfway between flat and vertical. He also noticed several empty racks scattered about the small room, all roughly arranged around a gated drain in the center of the floor.

“Couldn’t tell if you were breathing or not,” Riggs said. “Was gonna be pissed if you’d already died on me.”

Cole grimaced. It felt like the room was swaying, but it could’ve been a problem with his head. He leaned it back against the steel and thought he could hear the crunching of snow reverberating up through the metal contraption and into his skull. He assumed they were still on the move, just in a bigger craft. Above, a ceiling of dark plastic allowed a wan glow of light to filter into the room. The spots were gone from his vision, but his headache lingered.

“How long have I been out?” he asked.

“No clue,” Riggs said. “Longer than I was, obviously.”

“Yeah,” said Cole. He tried to push up with his restrained ankles to take some of the pressure off his ribs, but every movement caused him to wince in pain.

“Doesn’t feel too good, does it?”

Cole looked over and saw a smirk on Riggs’s face. He decided to roll with the jab, stunned that Riggs could actually take pleasure in Cole’s condition as if he had nothing to fear himself.

“What do you think they want with us?” Cole asked, changing the subject and also trying to remind Riggs that they were on the same side and had a common enemy to worry about.

“I’m guessing it’s nothing good, but at least they seem to want us alive. Maybe ransom. Surely they’re not dumb enough to kill a Navy pilot, which means I’m probably safe. You still got no clue where you jumped us?”