by Elsa Jade
“Aim the dat-pad at the glow,” he said. “I think we’re almost—”
The line went taut and yanked her hard enough that she stumbled. Her boot broke one of the icicles with a crystalline pang, opening a wider hole to see down.
The Heart’s Flame and the Body’s Hunger were burning through the ice toward the purple glow. With every penetrating inch, the light of the Soul’s Dream brightened until the entire glassy funnel was awash in blues and violets. A faint hum echoed, amplifying with every pulse of light, and in a heartbeat, the whirlpool was singing with each pure tone on the scale.
Suddenly, the line slackened.
“Oh no,” she moaned. “The tether burned through.”
And still the Flame and the Hunger reached for their long-lost Dream.
The sound and the light were almost paralyzing now. Like being trapped in the heart of a cascading firework that never finished exploding
Her heart, though, was about to rupture from freezing fear. Her lips were numb with cold, and she could barely form the words when she told Luc, “I’m going down there.”
If he told her no this time, she couldn’t hear it over the crescendoing passion of the reuniting gemstones. This wasn’t the age-old science of fireworks that Ye-ye had kept alive, and it wasn’t the high-tech, faster-than-light universe she’d come to discover. This was mythology and magic, pure and simple and utterly terrifying.
She clawed her way past the spike she’d broken with her boot. The trio of gems weren’t as far down as she’d feared; the hazy glow of the Soul’s Dream frozen into the ice had made it seem deeper. All she had to do was—
The harness jerked tight. “Shit.” She glared over her shoulder to see her tether tangled in the crisscrossed spears.
“Amy,” Luc shouted through the comm. “Don’t you dare…”
Where had she heard that before? But it was just another yard or so. She could climb down the icicles as easy as a ladder. A slippery, frozen ladder. Made of deadly spikes. She unlatched the line from her harness.
As if echoing Luc, her dat-pad beeped an alarm, more felt though her jacket than heard over the gemstones’ jubilant song of union. She ignored it and crouched down into the hole. The very bottom of the funnel was right there, the Flame and the Hunger melting a rainbow puddle above the Dream. If she just turned upside down, she could reach into the hole…
Wedging her hips between two icicles—yay for that lingering freshman fifteen!—she stuck her head and shoulder down into the fissure. If only she had the arm length of the glamorous real explorer back in Mr. Evens’ shop…
But that woman would never have fit this far. And maybe she wouldn’t have even thought to use the synthesized kyapa-sho to freeze the whirlpool.
Amy grabbed the dangling end of the second tether. The end that had bound the gemstones was seared clean. Not even a puff of ash remained to spoil the rainbow puddle or the golden haze freezing the ice. With cold-numbed hands, she quickly looped a good-luck knot that would serve as a basket for the prism. In another second it would be melted free. And not a moment too soon—she was going to be blind and deaf from the cacophony.
As if the gems heard her, the tones cut out abruptly and the exuberant glow dimmed, leaving her blinking behind her darkened lenses.
Just as the goggles automatically adjusted to let her see, the faintest ping—like a fingernail lightly flicking a crystal goblet—chimed up through the frozen whirlpool. The Flame and the Hunger settled into the melted pool as the Soul’s Dream emerged from the ice.
A soft sigh—like a breath held for a thousand years—whispered up from the gemstones as the prism fused. All the colors played across the surface in a wild rainbow.
“Oh…” Forgetting the tether for a moment, she reached down to touch the nearest facet.
And a silent explosion of pure white light burst from the prism.
Her goggles didn’t have a chance. The light seared across her eyes—she felt the burn, hotter than any peppercorn, across her lips—and she might have screamed. But in a split second after the light, the resounding tones that had nearly deafened her before resumed, merging into major triad chords that would’ve made her long-suffering music teacher cry. But she didn’t have time to fear dying inside this icy firecracker.
Scraping her shoulders through the icicles, she lunged down and grabbed the prism, still brilliant in her dazzled gaze, like the afterimage of a blazing sun. Her fingers—minus one—closed around it, cutting down the glare, although one beam still shone through the gap of her ring finger. Her hand spasmed around the prism, and agony shafted up her arm. She arched back, smacking her head on the ice.
She was burning again…
In her mind’s eye, white dragon wings spread wide across the rainbowed sky, and thunder bellowed. The Firestorm Queen.
The dragon would burn her alive.
And she would die ecstatic.
From a million miles away, Luc’s voice was a syncopated call underlying the pure tones—“aye-em-ee”—and there was another noise too: a deep rumbling crackle followed by a melodic tinkling. An icy gust blew back her hood, and the chill extinguished her burning.
The whirlpool was melting.
Amy snapped back into herself as a droplet of near-freezing water traced across her cheek like one of those tears she hadn’t shed. Since she was still upside down, the salty, kyapa-sho-laced tear was trickling in reverse toward her eye. Aw hell, that was going to sting.
Tucking the prism into the good-luck knot at the end of the second tether, she lifted the dat-pad to her mouth and screamed an order at the Blissed. The tether—with the prism attached—recoiled upward toward the waiting ship.
It took the sound and bright fury with it, leaving her behind in the melting whirlpool.
Ice creaked and groaned all around her as the removal of the Soul’s Dream collapsed whatever strange equilibrium had existed here for a thousand years. She squirmed backward out of the hole, accidentally peeling out of her heavy jacket and knocking off her goggles as she wriggled past the dripping fangs of ice. The cold stabbed into her: a preview of what would happen if any of the breaking icicles rained down on her.
Grappling for the remaining tether, she yanked herself upright and clambered through the crisscrossed spears of ice at the bottom of the hole. She stared up at the belly of the Blissed high above her, maybe fifty feet above the surface of the polar plain. The prism flashed like a smaller but infinitely more powerful disco pyramid, casting shards of rainbow in every direction. Luc, his heavy white fatigues bright against the ship’s dark underbelly, snagged the line and drew it into the airlock. He waved to her, and his voice from the dat-pad was tensed but calm. “Now get your Earther ass back up here.”
With her teeth clenched hard to stop their chattering, she answered him with a wave. It took her three tries to reattach the line to her harness, her hands were shaking so badly from cold. And fear. But whatever, she’d done it. She’d helped find and reunite the Firestorm Queen’s Prism. Even if no one on Earth, no one else in the whole universe, knew it, she’d always remember this moment.
She slapped the auto return-to-ship command of her dat-pad and the slack in the line lifted toward the ship. In just a moment, she’d be lifted too, back to the Blissed, back to Luc. To whatever the future would hold for a fake, infamous interstellar explorer.
As the tether grew taut, the freezing meltwater swirled up to her knees. Luckily, she still had on the heavyweight pants for protection; even though the space-age material, the chill was aching.
Wrapping her hands in the harness, she braced herself as the line hauled her off her feet. Suspended in midair, she had nothing to do but turn helplessly, staring up at Luc, blinking her dazzled, stinging eyes. He was leaning out through the open hatch—who was flying the ship?—his gaze fixed on her as if he might levitate her right into his arms.
She might not know exactly what that future held, but for the first time in her life there was a light at the top of the whirlpool.
/> She was smiling up at him when a screel from the ice—like a hundred Mongol sabers rattling—surrounded her. Spikes of ice began to crack away from the sloping walls of the funnel as the whirlpool broke free of the kyapa-sho’s thrall and spun slowly to life.
Rocking frantically, she managed to avoid one crashing column of ice, but another and then another fell past her, plummeting into the deepening pool below with a brutal splash. One chunk barely nicked her boot, but she cried out as the blow seemed to crack her ankle and spun her sideways toward the churning wall. The tether sang with high tension as Luc must’ve increased the speed.
So close…
A white saber of ice sheared off the rim and plunged downward. Silhouetted against the bright sky, the huge saber turned black as it aimed right at her.
Pumping her legs, she crashed into the opposite wall and clung to the rotting ice, hugging tight though the freezing water drenched through her tunic. The ice would miss her, but she’d never be warm again—
The saber caught the tether instead.
With a scream, she was plucked from the wall by the force of its descent. Her harness snapped, but too late. She was already falling.
The line whizzed upward without her.
She caught a second-to-last glimpse of Luc reaching out in horror to the empty space where she should have been, if she hadn’t been so hellbent on proving herself.
Her last glimpse of him—just as the icy water at the bottom of the whirlpool closed over her head—was him diving out of the Blissed after her.
Chapter 19
The artic surface where the whirlpool had been stilled, the circular wound healing over in a scrim of lacy ice. The Blissed automatically scanned the hole where its honeymooners had descended.
In its onboard catalog of recommended honeymoon activities, the “polar plunge” was extremely far down the list…
With a tinkling crash, the ice exploded upward, and a winged shadow, as black as obsidian against the pale background and touched with violet shimmers, soared into the sky.
If only the Great Space Race viewers could see this…
Luc dragged a searing lungful of bitterly cold air into his suddenly huge chest, swelling the aching new muscles that strained against the glacial gusts burping from the whirlpool’s maw.
This was unbelievable. When he’d hit the churning slush of water, he’d been sure he and Amy would die in the icy depths. Instead, in the darkness, his hands—no, his claws—had found the last guttering vestiges of her warmth. And now they were arisen.
He pumped his wings—wings!—hard, struggling above the iced-over whirlpool. It was an empty grave now, not his and Amy’s, and not the Soul’s Dream. They were free. Free!
Exhilaration gave a renewed burst of strength to his wings, and he surged higher toward the Blissed. He wasted a single moment to snake his long neck down for a quick glimpse at her limp form dangling from his claws. Her wide, dark eyes stared back at him in wonder, terror, and awe. His heart slammed fiercely against the struggling musculature that hadn’t existed there before. She had given him this.
The cruiser’s hatch was too small to admit a shifted drakling, and he hovered awkwardly at the open door, on the verge of falling again.
In his claws, Amy twisted, reaching for the handles alongside the airlock. He boosted her closer, and she grabbed ahold. Not a moment too soon as his muscles failed, but he’d saved her, and that was enough.
With an agonized gasp, he felt his new shape collapsing back into himself. Wings reduced to fingers, and he found himself grasping at nothingness, about to fall.
Amy’s hand smacked into his, and he managed to jam his bare foot against the freezing gangplank.
With a shout, she heaved backward, yanking him into the Blissed, to safety.
He sprawled on top of her, his old, familiar shape heaving and shuddering from the cold, from the change he thought would never happen.
She wrapped her arms around him, even more tenacious than her four-fingered grip had been, although she was shaking from cold and from the near disaster too.
“You were a dragon!” She squeezed him so hard, he felt as if his heart was naked in her hands. “You were a larfing dragon!”
He curled into her for a rapturous moment, and though their bodies were too exhausted to spark any heat between them, having her in his arms was all he needed.
From where they lay entwined, the Firestorm Queen’s Prism rested directly in his line of sight. He stared at the legendary gems—no longer mythical—and wondered not at its value but at its pricelessness. This was what he’d come for, even though he hadn’t believed it was real.
He tightened his embrace around Amy.
For another breath they rested before she wriggled sideways.
“We have to get warm,” she said. “And we have to get out of here.”
When he nodded, his neck felt strangely short. “We might have gotten rid of that tracker, but Rickster and Idrin are smart enough to figure out our rough coordinates since they already know the first two.”
“You fly the ship, and I’ll get us something to drink.”
“Hot coffee,” he murmured as he pushed himself upright.
“We used up all those components to synthesize the kyapa-sho,” she reminded him. “How about a glass of water?”
“As long as there are no ice cubes.” He staggered to his feet—just feet, no claws—and levered her up too, then leaned down to grab the prism. He hesitated with his fingers a hair’s breadth from the joined gemstones.
“I saw them too,” Amy murmured. “The Firestorm Queen and her blacksmith.”
“It’s impossible.” But still he couldn’t quite force himself to grab them.
“What’s impossible? Faster-than-light travel? Men turning into dragons?” She gave him a significant look. “Or an essentially eternal, stable crystalline nanostructure matrix capable of holding a vast photonic imprint, not so different from, say, a photograph or a holo-vid?”
He lifted an eyebrow at her. Somebody had been reading up on memory crystal encoding. “It was more than that.” It wasn’t just a picture or even a vid—he’d felt the experience. But he scooped up the stones.
For a single, searing instant, the passion in the prism grabbed him. But then he was himself again. Except he was more than that now, too. His drakling spirit had been unleashed.
He followed Amy toward the cockpit, though she veered off at the galley. Throwing himself into the pilot chair, he set a course for the fastest route away from Altaria. The planet was a required stop for the Great Space Race, and he didn’t want to encounter any Octiron reps until he and Amy had a plan.
Now that they had the prism.
He put the joined gemstones on the center console as the Blissed rocketed through the atmosphere.
Warmth wrapped his naked shoulders as Amy slipped a soft red blanket around him before settling into the copilot seat just as they slipped into darkness. She handed him the goblet, and he took a grateful sip of the heated water. A hint of spice made him hum in pleasure.
“I found one bead of kyapa-sho that didn’t make it into the synthesizer,” she told him. “It’s basically all we have left except emergency provisions.”
“We should stop to resupply, but”—he finished a near-space scan: nothing—“Rickster is sure to be hunting us, with Idrin or someone worse.”
She took the goblet back from him but her gaze stayed on the prism. “We have to get it back to your homeworld.”
His chest ached, not just from the unbelievable flight, but at her selflessness. “We might need it to bargain our way out of Paragon.”
She shook her head. “It belongs to your people, nowhere else.”
The drakling inside him coiled tight. The treasure belonged to its finders, its keepers… He squelched the instinctive greed. “We could make a run for the galaxy border, but we’re low on everything, and a honeymoon cruiser isn’t meant to be an escape vehicle or a fighter.”
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��We don’t run.” Without hesitation, she reached for the prism and lifted it to the starlight streaming through the viewport.
His drakling purred, enthralled by the delicate glimmer of rainbows across her golden skin. “What’s your idea?”
“We storm the castle.” She clenched her hand around the prism, though the light still gleamed through the gap of her missing finger. “The Great Space Race ends at the winter solstice on Primaera with the Grand Gala for all the remaining—well, now we know surviving—contestants. The whole universe will be watching. Rickster won’t dare go after us there, and you can reach out to your people to bring us home.”
Home. The word rang discordantly inside him. All he’d wanted was to make it back there to face his brothers, but now… Did he want the adventure to end?
To cover his uncertainty, he checked the ship’s stats. “If we push the engines at max, we’ll barely make it to Primaera for the gala.”
“We’ll make it,” she said confidently, “if you have to fly us there.”
He set their course and then padded back to the bedroom to find replacement clothes for the ones he’d burst through in his unexpected shift. Standing naked under the slowly rotating disco pyramid, he flexed his shoulders. Could he change again without the threat of imminent death?
Although he probably shouldn’t try it in this small ship…
“What did it feel like?”
He pivoted slowly on his heel to face Amy. “I… Strange. It felt strange. Like something I’d forgotten and suddenly remembered.” He clenched his jaw. “What if I forget again?”
“I’ll never forget.” She gazed at him, the disco lights glinting in her black eyes. “It was so dark in the water, and I wasn’t sure which way was up. And so cold.” She shivered. “But then you were there.”
At her shiver, he crossed the room in two steps and enfolded her in his arms. If he still had wings, he would’ve cradled her in that tough, protective embrace. “When I jumped, I had the tether in my hand. I thought I’d grab you and it would haul us out.” He tucked his head over her. “To be honest, when I calculated the odds for success in my head, it wasn’t good.”