Through Ice

by Parker Jaysen

  Jane seems to sense that, or at least she’s not as impatient as Dorie traces the shape of her. Her eyes stay on Dorie’s, her gaze awestruck and slightly distant, like she’s memorizing Dorie’s face as Dorie memorizes her body.

  Of course, her impatience returns. She pushes up into Dorie’s hand and closes her eyes, and Dorie moves her fingertips, not cold at all now, back to Jane’s clit and zeroes in on her essential rhythm. She’s not just a biter. She yells as she comes, and then smacks Dorie lightly when she laughs.

  I think I love her.

  Dorie leaves her fingers inside her, enjoying aftershocks for a long while, until Jane’s breathing returns to normal.

  When Jane settles back down, she snuggles into Dorie and then reaches unerringly for the panel at the side of her suit, and then the one at her hip.

  It’s a long warm night.

  Dorie’s unsure why it’s so, but rider trysts are rarely awkward. Maybe because it feels more like survival than anything messy, like a relationship. You share this small dark space and become a couple, separate from everything outside the journey.

  But this time, the morning after does have some weirdness, and it takes Dorie until after Molly and the pack are set up and they’re underway again to realize: it’s not a tryst. They’re deciding how they feel about each other.

  Dorie smiles at nothing, and Jane notices.

  One of the unwritten rules is that you don’t really talk about the trysts. You’re going to be stuck together a lot longer, and if you argue, it will be very unpleasant.

  “Dorie,” Jane says, because she doesn’t seem to know about unwritten rules, “last night was awesome.”

  Dorie smiles even bigger.

  I like her so much. I’m too distracted.

  The dogs are not as fast today. At first Dorie doesn’t think much of it. It’s the middle of the lake, and there won’t be much relief from Uther’s pressure for at least two more days.

  But they’ve been so fast.

  “Is your shield working the same?” Dorie asks Jane, and looks out through the front port. The dogs look fine. No one’s stride is off.

  But Dorie’s resistance, which she knows can make her seem rigid and skeptical in life, really shines now. She can’t trust even her own observations when Uther is working so hard to freeze them in place.

  So they stop to check the team.

  The dogs pile into their section of the sleigh as soon as Dorie opens the chute. They think it’s lunchtime already. Silly pups. She measures out a morning snack ration, enough to reward them for having their feet checked, and not enough to give them cramps when they’re back out there.

  But there is something wrong with one of the dogs. Her gums are not quite white, but they are pale, far too pale. She has something eating her food from within.

  Jane follows Dorie’s gaze, then reaches for the tablet with its knowledge base of everything from veterinary first aid to how to rig a litter for an injured rider. If Uther ever learned how to corrupt guild tablets, they’d really be in trouble.

  But without clinical tools, all it tells them is what they already knew – the dog has a parasite, and they don’t know what it is.

  So they treat everyone, including themselves, with a broad-spectrum pill that has to be jammed down each dog’s throat with bare hands, because they’re so bitter. Jane and Dorie gag at the taste, too.

  And to keep the team even, they have to pull a second dog. No one else has any sign of anemia, so they pull the second strongest, saving her in case Molly gets sick.

  Four dogs would not be enough without Jane’s shield. It might not be enough anyway. By Dorie’s reckoning, they can try it for one day. With luck by then they’ll be in radio range of Marsh Station and get more medical advice.

  Dorie hears Jane through the barrier, crooning at the sick pup. “What’s this one’s name then?”

  Dorie meets Jane’s eyes uncertainly. “I only name the lead dogs.” It’s hard enough to get attached to one. She doesn’t know what else to answer.

  “Her name’s Betty,” Jane says. She lifts her chin.

  She has no idea how much loss there is out here.

  Betty seems completely unfazed by the parasite wreaking havoc on her guts. She wags wildly at Jane.

  “And this is – ” Jane tilts her head. “A little more standoffish, are you, girl?” Molly’s second, she’s a tall girl, sturdy, with a white ridge down her back that blazes when she hackles. “You’re obviously Skunk.”

  Dorie shakes her head. “Nice. No wonder the place always stinks.”

  Skunk wags at Jane, as well.

  Dorie turns away. She’s not sure why, but it scares her that Jane has named them.

  Uther is working overtime. They are not out of danger at all.

  Do the checklists.

  Stay inside.

  Do the checklists again.

  Let the dogs sleep.

  Checklists.

  Rest.

  Dorie can’t even get her fingers to play with her fidget toys. Her restlessness has turned to a flat lassitude. Time is losing meaning.

  “Tell me about your magic,” Jane says suddenly.

  Dorie tries to focus on her, her sharp little features, her mouth that is so magical on her own in the night.

  “Dorie, concentrate.”

  Her command works, because Dorie wants Jane to be happy.

  “I make things hot.”

  Jane laughs out loud. “Yes, you do.”

  Dorie resists squirming at the instant warmth inside her in response to Jane’s innuendo.

  “I throw heat,” she says. But it’s working, Jane’s distraction, if that’s what she’s trying to do. Uther’s influence is pushed back.

  “Can you throw it into a demon?”

  “Sort of. It’s – I can’t aim. The guild doesn’t even list me as a fire mage.” Dorie shrugs. “Don’t ask me to demonstrate. It could shoot out in any direction, like a blindfolded kid smacking an ice puck.”

  Even not having grown up on the lake, Jane seems to get the analogy. “What if someone could guide you somehow?”

  “The point is I’d just as likely hit the person helping me.”

  “So you spray out heat and hope it hits something bad.”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay.”

  Jane’s smart, obviously. She learns fast and memorizes everything. And she comes up with ideas and doesn’t mind if they get shot down.

  “What if you stood at the edge of my shield? I put a dome over most of the area that you could hit. So only where my shield isn’t is vulnerable.”

  The thing about the ice run is that the enemy is the ice itself. A fire run is all shoot, slam, run, block! Ice, even with Uther, is nothing like that.

  It’s not a battle – or if it is, it’s a battle with yourself. Don’t give in. Don’t listen to the warmth. It’s a lie. That’s the fighting that Dorie’s used to, and she’s a master at it.

  But Jane’s idea is fantastic, and suddenly Dorie is an actual weapon – or the two of them in combination might be, anyway.

  They try it outside and Dorie doesn’t hit any dogs, or Jane, though once Jane has to react quickly and throw a shield to protect the sleigh itself. But the practice gives Dorie the chance she has never had to begin to feel how to control the bolts.

  Not exactly like she’s aiming. It’s more like her power knows to “not hit the good guys.” She starts to trust it.

  Weapons training is over and it’s time to head back in. Checklists.

  Dorie stops next to a half-melted scar on the lake surface from one of her bolts, like a 20-foot skid mark in the ice, and tilts her head in concentration.

  She turns towards Jane, as animated as she’s felt since hitting the Uther segment. “I’m an idiot!”

  Jane laughs. “I doubt that. What?”

  Dorie waves behind her, wildly gesturing at the sleigh. “What has your shield been doing, all this time?”

  “Um,” says Jane. “Kee
ping heat in?”

  “What heat?” asks Dorie, grinning.

  “A bit of body heat. Some from the electronics. The dogs – oh!” Her shield keeps heat in. And now they have a real heat source.

  “What if...,” Jane says, sometime later. “No, never mind. It’s absurd.”

  “I doubt that,” says Dorie. “What’s your thought?”

  “I was thinking if we had stones,” Jane says, and ducks her face in embarrassment.

  Adorable.

  “To hold the heat,” says Dorie. “I can see why you might think that’s absurd, but – ” she grins broadly, “ – it’s not at all. We just have to go get some.”

  Dorie has but one worry: enough stones to store a useful amount of heat are a terrible idea on a sleigh. The dogs have all they can handle as it is. Travel light, pack low. It’s part of the checklist. And they’re down to a four-dog team. How can this possibly work?

  But there are stones.

  Even 30 kilometers past the worst of Uther, dawn is still an uncertain affair. Dorie senses, rather than sees, a brightness to the east, slightly less gloomy than all the rest of the gloom. The two riders leave the dogs in their enclosure and venture out onto the ice.

  Dorie has never gone for a hike, not on top of Uther, not anywhere on the lake. It’s like greeting death itself. But she’s read the geologic history, and heard stories of lost sleighs going aground, hitting a rock field like a shingle beach.

  All that the white-coats have been able to deduce is that when hell took over, there were places where demonic volcanism was hit with a deep freeze so fast, rock froze into the ice like flies in amber.

  Before they’re three minutes from the sleigh, Dorie feels the sweet call of Uther.

  Sit down, child. The lake is comfort. The lake loves you.

  But it doesn’t matter what Uther says, because now they’re not freezing. Dorie sends out bolts, and Jane’s shield covers them. They reach a patch of lake where each new firebolt reveals stone. They’re standing in ankle-deep puddles, looking at the history of the world.

  Uther is right. The lake is comfort.

  They chip stones from the surface, laughing. The stones are porous, in every shade of gray and black. Jane shouts in delight when she finds a bluish one, and Dorie grins and watches her add it to the pile. She loves color.

  Her shout doesn’t disappear instantly. Some combination of meltwater, ancient rock, and magic shield pulls it back to them, again and again, more like an embrace than an echo. They stop for a moment, enchanted.

  “Do you sing?” Jane asks.

  “Everyone sings,” says Dorie.

  Not everyone sings well, and Jane certainly doesn’t. She sings with great enthusiasm, though, a lyric from some bawdy ballad. And the lake – not the demon in the lake, the frozen lake itself – replies, the ice trembling and the tune tumbling back on itself, turning into an unpredictable harmony.

  Dorie laughs in delight. But she’s sure Jane doesn’t understand yet how much her life has changed. This run won’t be undertaken without her again. She is permanently a part of the ice world.

  Sit, stay, coos Uther.

  But when Jane lays back on the ice and splays her arms and legs, she is just being playful. “I can feel the ice singing,” she says.

  Sing with me, the demon intones. Sleep with me.

  But the lake that sings of life is more beautiful.

  They haul the stones into the sleigh, estimating their total weight.

  “We need to get rid of some stuff,” Dorie says after doing some calculating. She’s anxious to try the heating trick, but she’s just as anxious to get moving.

  They toss some empty storage bins, and a couple of Jane’s duffels. She shows no regret even as she leaves them out on the ice.

  She is a good person, Dorie thinks. A good partner. And then she smiles a little remembering last night’s – trysting? They’re enjoying each other’s company every night, but is it casual or something more?

  What if, she wonders, she were her only partner going forward? Her heart pounds at the thought.

  Molly woofs at something, and Dorie looks through a side port.

  Nothing in view.

  The sleigh is theoretically light enough to try to pull, but they want to heat the rocks first. If it’s not going to work, no sense wasting sled dog energy.

  Only now do they recognize the logical trap they’ve devised. Dorie has never tried aiming her bolts inside the sleigh, but they have no way to carry the rocks in once they’re hot. So she has to try.

  Jane shields what she can, while Dorie tries to get in the zone.

  A pillow goes up in smoke. A storage rack above the bunk melts and buckles. A bolt takes out a panel of sensors and strikes the safe, which makes them gasp. The cargo within is the whole reason they’re risking everything out here.

  If whatever is inside can be damaged by heat, they may have destroyed it. But how would they know?

  Dorie stares at the still-glowing safe in dismay before sending out a fourth bolt. It hits the stones, and the idea isn’t perfect, but it works. They can use Dorie’s heat.

  They can be warm.

  Their first discovery is that they can wear day clothes inside the sleigh. The dogs can lay on their sides.

  Unless someone had experienced a relationship while confined entirely to bulky thermal suits, they wouldn’t know how naked Jane looks when Dorie sees her in slim leggings and a rainbow-striped sweatshirt. She can see the outline of her thigh, her breasts.

  Jane grins back at Dorie brilliantly, red-cheeked and happy. “You look amazing,” she says.

  Dorie knows she does not. She’s square-built, descended from ancestors who survived cold before there was technology.

  But Jane’s looking at her like she thinks she’s beautiful. Dorie touches her own cheeks in wonder. They must be scarlet as well. The sleigh is full of color.

  Something about the safe niggles at Dorie, and it takes her most of the day to put it into words.

  “My heat doesn’t hit the good guys.”

  “It hits useful objects,” Jane says thoughtfully. “My poor pillow. And surely rocks are neutral.”

  “What does that make our cargo?”

  Maybe Dorie’s firebolt talent only distinguishes good from evil when it comes to life-forms, but can’t tell good tech from bad. But surely the cargo isn’t merely tech.

  Or it could be that her aim is still too random to tell yet. Or it’s a dumb theory entirely.

  But there’s still something in Dorie’s brain that tries to make sense of what she’s stumbling over.

  Meanwhile, if she thought seeing Jane in day clothes was arousing, she should have known that seeing her in a nightshirt was going to hit her like an anvil.

  Like everything Jane owns, her nightshirt is colorful. Deep green, as green as an elemental stone ever was, with glittering swirls of gold and red. It’s not the least bit childish. And it clings to her, so that no matter how she turns or what she does, Dorie sees the slightest motion of her breasts or the brush of her legs together.

  Something else the warmth provides: they can easily wash up.

  They are clean, they are warm, and they’ve been waiting.

  ACT III

  Jane is a biter.

  Dorie is sure she knew this already, but warmth in the middle of ice hell apparently has interesting effects.

  She bites like she’s starved. Dorie’s ear, her lips, she is not gentle, and her powers surely include telepathy; she keeps her on the exquisite edge, before it’s not pleasure anymore.

  She can’t quite believe Jane’s expression when she unbuttons the front of Dorie’s pajama. She looks reverent.

  Plain old me.

  “Dorie,” she says. She pushes her down into the ridiculous colorful cushions and sits across her hips, no weight at all. “Dorie, you are so gorgeous.” She carefully pushes her hands away when they start trying to cover her breasts. “Let me look?”

  Dorie knows she�
�s far from perfect yet the look on Jane’s face tells her something else. “I love these nipples,” she says. Her fingers have played with them in the night, inside the suit.

  Jane touches a fingertip to one and then the other, smiling when they respond to her by pushing upwards. “I think they like me,” she says.

  “They do.” Dorie doesn’t recognize her own voice.

  Trysting isn’t like this. This is more, bigger.

  “Are you too cold?”

  It’s not cold, not with the stones, not with the shield. That’s not why Dorie was shivering. She shakes her head.

  Jane unbuttons her own shirt, still sitting astride Dorie’s hips, poised above her, and pushes her hands away when she tries to help. “Watch, wait.”

  Like she could tear her eyes away. Her breasts are perfect. Dorie doesn’t know if she even had a notion of perfect breasts until she sees Jane’s. They are small, unbound, pink nipples. Perfect. She shivers again, and Jane touches her stomach.

  Dorie wants to slow everything down.

  She wants everything.

  Jane leans forward and nips at her collarbone. Her teeth are like her – small, cute, and deathly sharp. She nibbles a path to Dorie’s breast before leaning forward onto her chest.

  “I want everything, and I want to kiss you,” she says.

  And then all Dorie can concentrate on is Jane’s mouth. Their lips together, her tongue feinting, pushing, withdrawing. Her teeth pulling a nipple, once, twice, each time almost to the edge of pain, but never quite, until she pulls Dorie into her mouth and suckles. She suckles slowly, like she is drawing on her essence, and something starts to tug a corresponding rhythm in Dorie’s womb.

  Dorie is frozen.

  “Taste me,” Jane says, close to Dorie’s face, and she realizes she’s closed her eyes, the better to feel everything. She opens her mouth and Jane’s breast is there, small, tasting of melted ice and something ineffably Jane.

  She sucks in a breath, and the tug in Dorie’s womb is a heat now.

  Dorie realizes she’s lost all of her normal control. She’s like her bolts – going off in all directions. “I’m going to touch you,” Jane says.