by Elsa Jade
This was his last chance.
Without another word, he landed the Blissed where she had indicated.
“Recommend against this shore excursion,” the ship announced fussily. “Such careless choices are sure to lead to divorce. Or death.”
Amy snickered under her breath. “Where was all this useful advice when I was looking for a boyfriend on Earth?”
“Its recommendations were never calibrated for Team Prism.” He led the way to the airlock where they rifled through the locker for a set of heavier ships fatigues to compensate for the lower temperatures and the threat of storms. He was half inclined to wear the EVA suit as well. As they stood in front of the hatch, he muttered, “Have I mentioned how much draklings hate the cold?”
She sidelonged a glance at him past the ruffled edge of her white hood, the corners of her dark eyes crinkling in amusement. “You look like a panda.”
“What’s a panda?”
“A furry, black and white creature from my home.”
“I am not furry,” he said with great dignity. “I am scaled.” He lifted his chin. “With purple highlights.”
She finally smiled. “Pandas are good luck, but dragons are better.”
“I would like to see your world someday,” he said as he unlocked the hatch.
“That would be an adventure,” she muttered.
The airlock cracked, letting in a harsh swirl of icy air. They both gasped and instinctively moved closer together, as if to share their last little bit of heat.
She raised the dat-pad strapped to the forearm of her fatigues. “Ready?”
He gestured for her to step down and followed her out to Farewell.
It was cold, exactly as he hated, but as his fatigues adjusted around him, he found it tolerable. Maybe that was just because Amy was at his side and their focus on the task ahead of them made their discord irrelevant.
She pointed, he nodded, and they headed off.
The sun glared down at them—and up at them, bouncing off the jagged ice. The planet’s two moons were both pale crescents in the crystalline vault of the sky marred only by a few high streaks of cloud in the shape of feathering ice crystals. He pulled his goggles into place and she did the same. The lenses compensated for the glare and made him realize how much the frozen waste looked like one of the deserts at home. Draklings had beautiful, soaring cities and garden spaces, but the vast stretches of untamed land still called to their wild souls.
They didn’t go far before her dat-pad beeped a warning.
She halted and he came to a stop beside her. “The ice is thinning,” she said as she swept the dat-pad scanner across the way ahead of them. “It should still hold us, but…I think we should spread out a little.”
The urge to object, to keep her close, welled up in him, but he swallowed it back. She was right. Reluctantly, he took a few steps to one side while she did the same, and they continued on.
They climbed a flat sheet of ice that had been pushed higher by forces underneath, and he tensed at the almost imperceptible creak beneath his boots. It was more menacing than the click of mite mandibles or the proximity alarm of the Blissed for incoming plasma bursts. Despite the buffer of his heavy fatigues, a shudder iced his spine.
Amy reached the top of the rise first and recoiled. A second later, he did the same, wincing at the blinding light glaring through his darkened goggles.
He sighed. “Let me guess. The Soul’s Dream is down there.”
She peered at the dat-pad. “At the very, very bottom.”
It was a whirlpool of ice, and the churning funnel went straight down, deep enough that the bottom—wherever it was—was obscured by the spikes of ice that clashed against each other with a cacophony louder than brittle swords, breaking and refreezing like immortal fangs trying to swallow the world. The sword-fangs of ice reflected the polar sun in blinding shards of light that nearly overwhelmed his goggles.
He sighed. “The very, very bottom?”
She nodded. Then giggled, a slightly hysterical sound. “Can you believe it?”
“Unfortunately, yes.” However the queen’s prism had come to be shattered and scattered, the forces in effect had a perilous whimsy even more perverse than Octiron’s. But whether the impossible icy whirlpool was a natural phenomenon or a deathtrap left by Farewell’s cruel creators didn’t even matter. If they wanted to get out of Paragon alive and force Octiron to honor at least some of the lies the assistant producer had told, Luc needed to retrieve this last gem.
He shuddered at the thought of descending through the not-quite frozen maelstrom, but he took the first step down from their viewpoint.
“Wait.” Amy was typing at the dat-pad, so fast he barely noticed the place where her finger was missing. “The whirlpool is actually a supersaturated, supercooled salt solution. That’s how it stays in motion even as it’s freezing.”
“Colder than freezing,” he muttered. “I can’t wait to jump in.”
She gripped his elbow hard enough that he felt her fingers through the thick layer of fatigues. “That’s what I’m telling you. You can’t jump in at all. The air itself is barely above freezing, and those shards would bore right through you like a drakling popsicle-kabob.”
“We need that last gemstone.” Frustration sharpened his voice almost as much as the frozen spikes.
“Not that badly.” She set her jaw. “Luc, it’s over. We failed.”
“No. Two out of three is not enough.”
Her brow furrowed over the dark goggles. “I’m sorry the math isn’t working out for you this time—”
“It’s not the math,” he said. “It’s us. We’ve been told so often that we aren’t enough that now we believe it.”
She clamped her hands on either side of her hood as if she wanted to block out his words. “What does me being stuck in Sunset Falls, Montana, and you wanting to show off at your brothers’ weddings have to do with deadly ice harpoons? This is reality.”
He shook his head hard enough to make his own hood fall back. “I won’t be stopped this time. I’m not even going to quote the odds against it. Because I know we got this.” The practical accountant side of him was aghast, baffled at the boldness welling up inside him. “We found all three gems. It’s like the Firestorm Queen and her blacksmith want us to reunite the prism.”
“Only if they want us to die too!” Amy twisted away from the whirlpool. “Maybe we just have to face the facts: We weren’t meant to win.”
“Is that what your ye-ye would’ve said? Or would he have told you to be brave?”
She twisted to face him, her lip lifted in a silent snarl. “I got burned up in the fire once. Now I gotta freeze to prove myself to you? No. Just no.” She stomped away from the edge of the incline, her infamous interstellar explorer boots raising puffs of brilliant snow in her wake.
“Amy.” He strode after her, even as the call of the Soul’s Dream seemed to reach for him. “You don’t have to—”
He oofed as she crashed to a halt in front of him and he slammed into her back. She whirled so fast she was facing him within the circle of his arms before he could catch his breath.
“It’s a salt solution,” she said slowly. “Ye-ye used different salts in his fireworks—strontium salt for red, calcium salt for orange, sodiums for yellow, bariums for green, copper chloride for blue.”
Luc looked down at her, confused. “That’s…interesting. How did he make purple?”
“Purple is really hard,” she said distractedly. Nestled in his arms, she typed at the dat-pad. “But he used to do tricks for me with salts. He had one called hot ice that sort of pretend froze salt solutions at room temperature.” She looked up at him, and though he couldn’t see her eyes behind the darkened lenses of her goggles, the warmth of her breath as she exhaled touched his lips. “Luc, I think I have an idea.”
***
The Blissed bucked fractiously under his hand as he muscled the ship into place above the whirlpool.
“I
can’t hold this long,” he said into the comm. The brutally cold winds spiraling up from the center of the vortex played havoc with the atmospheric engines.
“We only have one shot anyway.” Amy’s voice was close and determined in his ear. “We exhausted all the ship’s supply of materials to synthesize more kyapa-sho. If this doesn’t freeze the whirlpool, do you promise not to—I don’t know—fly the Blissed right down the hole?”
“Honeymoon cruisers are not designed for submerged travel.” The ship’s comm sounded almost alarmed. “If more excitement is required, please consult the approved list of stimulating beverages—”
“I used up all those compounds,” Amy murmured in his ear. “This is as exciting as it’s going to get.”
“Fair enough,” he said. “Since this is going to work.”
It had to.
But the almost mystical surety that had gripped him outside on the ice had melted away. He was an accountant, not a Great Space Racer and not a chemist or even a cook playing with this fake kyapa-sho. The spice might be ‘the ice that becomes fire in the heart’, but would it work the same as her grandfather’s hot ice trick?
“Can you get us any lower?” The tension in Amy’s voice crackled in his ear. “I need to get the seed pellets as evenly distributed as possible.”
In her theory—and tentatively confirmed by the simulations they’d run—the fake kyapa-sho would bind with the salts in the whirlpool water and let the polar temperatures finish the task of freezing the whirlpool into place. At least long enough to drop through the center of the vortex to grab the Soul’s Dream.
This was not a dream; it was his nightmare.
Gritting his teeth—but keeping his touch perfectly light—he dropped the Blissed deeper into the glacial maw of the whirlpool. “A tropical paradise, and this is where we end up,” he muttered, never letting his attention waver.
“Not the end yet,” Amy replied. “Dispersing the kyapa-sho now.”
Through the ship’s airlock viewport, he watched her fling the small golden beads into the maelstrom. Despite the safety harness strapping her to the Blissed, a furious part of him wanted to drag her back inside. Larf it, he’d drag her back to the bedroom, never to emerge again… She pushed back the white hood, her black hair whipping in the wind, and raised her thumb to the viewport with a wide grin. He assumed that was a good sign.
In the white glare from the ice, even the ship’s sensors couldn’t track the beads, and for a moment, it seemed as if the “delicious calamity” was only a calamity.
Then the stabbing brilliance dimmed as the churn of the ice spikes slowed.
And stopped.
The whirlpool was frozen. As the icy teeth stopped gnashing, the silence of the polar plain poured down the gullet, and the upwelling wind from the vortex died, letting the Blissed hover smoothly.
But for how long?
“Amy,” he snapped into the comm. “Get up here and hold us steady while I drop down.”
“No. I’m going in.” The viewport showed her leaning out precariously over the white maw. “This is my dumb idea. And I’m going to need you to pull me out if…” She yanked her hood back into place without finishing.
The last of his good intentions to let her claim her inner adventuress evaporated at the sight of her tugging nervously at the tether attached to the airlock.
“Amy, no—”
She looked up straight into the viewport camera. Though her eyes were hidden behind the goggles, he imagined those wide, dark pupils swallowing his pounding heart. For a suspended instant, he saw her as the Great Space Race audience might have seen her: innocent, vulnerable, and so fucking brave.
Then she stepped backward out of the airlock and into the petrified whirlpool.
Chapter 17
She’d had dumber ideas, no doubt. She was just so fucking terrified, she couldn’t remember what they were.
And thank the Blissed for its automated tether. When they’d done their spacewalk, Luc had explained how it could be controlled from the dat-pad, and Amy unclenched her death grip from the line long enough to check the rate of descent. As the tether lowered her, the dat-pad was scanning the inverted cone of the frozen whirlpool and sending that info back to the ship and Luc to keep her centered in the ever-narrowing funnel. She wanted to stay far away from the sides where the icy spikes still looked unnervingly spiky even though they weren’t moving.
For now. A hint of gold from the synthesized kyapa-sho shimmered in the depths of the ice, but she swore the whirlpool was groaning deep inside, a low complaint at the enforced stillness.
“Luc, are you seeing this?” She tilted her head back to gaze upward at the underbelly of the Blissed.
From the dat-pad strapped to her arm, his voice was a comforting rumble. “The ship’s viewport has you,” he confirmed. “Keep the dat-pad sensor running and I’ll see you there too.” His tone lowered toward a grumble. “And when you’re back on board, we’ll discuss your penchant for spacing yourself.”
She forced out a chuckle that, to her surprise, wasn’t hard to maintain. Maybe that whole ‘fake it ‘til you make it’ thing was finally coming true. “You could just yell at me now about how disappointed you are so you don’t have to do it later.”
“On the contrary. I am proud to be your teammate.”
If she hadn’t been descending at a high rate of speed into a frozen whirlpool, her heart might’ve soared at his praise. “Go, Team Prism.”
She sucked in a harsh breath as one of the icy spikes, longer than the others, struck her shoulder. The impact sent her into a tight spin.
“Amy, what happened? The visuals just went sideways.”
Although her stomach tightened with nausea, she couldn’t close her eyes for fear of hitting another spike. “I’m fine,” she said through gritted teeth. “I hit the side, but the tether is compensating for the spin.”
“Are you hurt?”
“Just bruised, I think. I’m almost at the bottom.” She peered down between her boots, and the nausea seemed to trickle weakly through her limbs. “Oh no. Not the bottom.”
“I see it. The icicles are frozen almost all the way across. Amy—”
She knew what he was going to say, and she couldn’t listen. It would be too easy to give up. “I’m small enough. I can fit through.”
In the eerie silence of the whirlpool, she could almost hear him shouting no.
So when his voice echoed softly off the icy walls, she would’ve fallen if not for the tether: “Go for it.”
With a signal through the dat-pad to the Blissed, she dropped another few tentative feet until her boots brushed the crisscrossed ice spikes. The daylight from the mouth of the whirlpool didn’t reach past the spikes, so she turned on the glow from the pad and aimed it into the darkness below.
Carefully, she squirmed past the icicles as if she were a mouse clambering past the blades of a garbage disposal. A brutally cold breath of air whispered over her exposed lips, like the kiss of death. Damn, if only the Great Space Race viewers could hear her voiceover…
Below the spikes, the funnel narrowed to coffin sized—okay, she had to stop thinking about death. “There’s a glow,” she whispered. Why was she whispering? But the echo of her voice seemed too loud in the tight confines. “It’s blue…no, purple.”
“The Soul’s Dream,” he said. “The final facet of the prism.”
Wriggling past the narrowing spikes, she twisted, exhaled hard to squeeze through another drop…and stopped, one boot wedged between two icicles, her other dangling above an impossibly tight fall.
As small as she was, no matter how deeply she exhaled, no way would she fit. The violet glow under her feet mocked her.
Her heart froze inside. “No. No, it can’t stop here. Luc…”
“Zoom in.”
Swallowing back the sour bite of defeat, she aimed the dat-pad toward the glow. On the screen, the glow intensified but didn’t quite come into focus.
“The gem is f
rozen in the ice,” Luc murmured.
“My fault.” She squeezed her eyes closed. “My dumb idea.”
“We wouldn’t have gotten this far if not for your idea.” He was silent a moment. “Now it’s my turn. Just…stay there.”
Like she was going anywhere. Hanging in the violet-touched darkness, she refused to let tears fill up her goggles. She’d be damned lucky to be able to squeeze back out again. And once she did, she’d forever remember how close she’d been to finally—
A touch on her shoulder made her flinch. An icicle falling…
The first two gemstones spun hypnotically in front of her eyes, spattering flecks of color—red-orange and yellow-green—across the ice. She grabbed for the gems, only to realize they were suspended on the second tether, the one that had attached Luc to the Blissed during their spacewalk. “Luc. What—?”
His face appeared on the screen of the dat-pad strapped to her arm. He was standing in the airlock, the bright arctic light turning the edges of his scales to brilliant amethyst. “Remember how the Heart’s Flame and the Body’s Hunger joined together as soon as they were close enough? Lower them to the Soul’s Dream.”
“That’s crazy.” Since when had her rational, pragmatic accountant become a mystic?
Well, she wanted to believe too.
Grabbing the second tether, she unspooled a length and hovered the two-thirds prism over the fall. “If we lose this, we lose everything.”
“Not everything,” he said cryptically.
Though every nerve in her body resisted the thought of letting go, she dropped the gems into the hole.
The tether zinged through her gloved fingers with more than the force of gravity, as if something was pulling the line downward. She gasped and tightened her grip, but the tether almost smoked in her hands, it was going so fast.
“I’m going to run out of line,” she warned.