The snow is deeper than it looks in places, of course. And the cold is bitter, of course. The loss of the protection he’d had against it is… strange. The chill is hateful, tiny knives against his face and neck and ears, aching in the joints of his fingers and scraping against the inside of his throat, but just as the feelings should tip over into something worse than they were before, there’s something… not warm. He isn’t warm. But that’s the word that comes to mind anyway. Something inside him that’s resisting it.

Maybe he’d only been expecting this kind of cold to feel differently from what it is. It’s convenient, anyway, because what matters is getting the man beside him to shelter safely, and Raju doesn’t have to waste any thought on himself when he doesn’t feel too differently than he did before, when he’d been out here purely for himself, for something to fight against. He can focus on Francis this way.

He keeps a hand on the man’s shoulder, trying to steady him, letting go only those times the snow tricks him into expecting solid ground and getting a hand back on Francis once he himself is steady again. It isn’t comfortable, keeping his hand out that way, but he wasn’t going to be comfortable anyway.

Raju pushes the dead branches of a bush aside for Francis, looking away from him long enough to look over the cabin ahead. “Here. This must be it.”

It does at least look abandoned. But it can be impossible to tell that, here. Raju will have to go first in case of waking someone who would probably be more inclined to attack the two of them first and ask questions later.