“You froze us out, Jack. You’re more a part of Winter than you know.” She met his gaze with a direct one of her own. “That ends now.”
Act V: Awake
Well, here we are again. Jack squirmed under Lin’s direct look.
The Advisor saved his bacon. “Majesty has entered Iceberghaal!” Her flair for the dramatic was new to him. Lin made the two-fingered gesture for ‘I’m watching you’ then pushed him through the doors into the great hall.
The Mother Glacier was there, as he remembered her. “Black Ice.”
Jack nodded his head in her direction and ignored what appeared to be her pet name for him. He didn’t think he could handle another earth-shattering revelation today. “Where’s the leak, ma’am?”
Later, he realized that either his question was really stupid, or really prescient. The leak, it turned out, had been inside him. At age twelve, he knew nothing about load distribution or structural stress points. His idea of sound structure was to use tape on a house of cards when the middle collapsed. He had good instincts, but lacked the knowledge to know you didn’t stack all your bricks in one straight line upward, or count on balance to keep a roof held up on four sides with no support in the middle. And when you were twelve—and an apartment-dweller, the idea of a basement was simply ‘scary, stinky place where the coin-op laundry was, and the older kids sometimes waited to take your laundry money.’ The ideas of concrete footers, stabilization, and structure settlement were as foreign as flying cars.
When he returned to the middle of the great hall, dozens of pairs of inhuman eyes looked up at him, awaiting a verdict. His stomach curdled at the news he was going to have to deliver. One pair of warm brown, very human, eyes met and held his, and he took strength from her, along with the first, cleansing breath. “Okay people. Er, Oddlings.” No, that wasn’t right, either. “Winterkin.” He rubbed his hands together. “We’ve got a major reno on our hands, and that means a lot of work.”
“Child.” The Mother Glacier’s voice echoed from the walls, the floor, the air itself. Behind and within her icy wall, her pregnant figure shifted until she was up close, just on the other side of the ice from the main hall. “Move with care.” Her ice-glazed eyes held his. The very pressure of her scrutiny made him feel small. And made the task ahead seem that much larger. “This Realm…has suffered.”
“I know.” Because I neglected it. He straightened his shoulders and nodded his head. “This place wasn’t well-designed. I know better, now.”
Her smile, when it graced him, was everything peppermint was ever meant to be, in the most primordial sense. “You have been…active, child.”
Jack scratched his chin. “Yeah, I think I pissed a few people off. They’ll have to get over it. In the meantime, think of me as your contractor. I’ll retro-fit the place with better supports, shore up the cracks, and get out of your hair.”
The smile faded from the Mother’s lips, replaced by a grimace and a groan. She drew her massive legs up and threw her head back. Her cry thundered through the entire building. I almost forgot about that for a second. The Mother Glacier was a mother because she was constantly giving birth to iceberg-babies. And this place was no labor and delivery ward.
He met Lin’s eyes over a group of short Winterkin. He shook his head. “We have to move her.”
She glanced towards the gargantuan woman. “What’s this ‘we’ shit?” Her words were almost drowned out by the Mother’s next moan. A wail that shook the walls.
Jack glanced down at his jacket to find it covered with a fine dusting of snowy powder. “This place is shaking apart. It can’t hold her.”
The next cry ended with a long, low, animal groan that made Jack slap his hands over his ears. A low rumble traveled through the floor and up through his feet. The Mother fell back with an exhausted sigh as an iceberg floated out from between her legs. Jack sagged as though he’d been involved in the birthing process. “Congratulations, ma’am.”
“Great Mother!” The Advisor leaped up. “Look!”
The baby iceberg—listen to me, anthropomorphizing it all—had begun to flounder. The floor rumbled again. Dusty-looking chunks dropped from the ceiling of the Mother’s chamber, landing on the iceberg with wet splats, marring its snowy whiteness with shiny, yellow-green patches. The yellow-green began to move, wriggling and squirming over the surface of the iceberg, leaving behind slimy trails that glowed with faint, biological phosphorescence.
“Sunsplotches!” The Advisor cried.
The mother’s mouth opened in a gasp. Her head tilted back and her eyes rolled towards him, silently beseeching. He lifted his hands. “What’s a Sunsplotch?”
He was sorry he asked. As he watched, the Sunsplotches bloomed and grew, turning into sluglike creatures that ate into the iceberg. Tension began to coil in his gut, and some part of him wanted those things out of his domain with the same urgency he wanted ants out of the kitchen.
That part of him moved his hands over the surface of the ice wall, seeking entrance. He found a seam and, perhaps stupidly, began to tug at it. He didn’t know what he expected—if the wall were, in fact, able to be opened, then they were all doomed as the structure would collapse for sure.
But his fingers found purchase and the ice retreated, rolling back into itself on essentially hydraulic tracks. Ingenious, he thought. A pocket door, of sorts. Had his twelve-year-old self really designed this? Of course, now that he thought about it. Who didn’t love secret doors and hidden passages at twelve? I think I even used this concept in the Overlook redesign. He glanced up. Only as an adult, he’d used it with lintels and proper fortification according to building codes.
He dashed through the opening, not really knowing what he was doing, but aiming to do it anyway. His feet slipped over the slick ice.
He reached the iceberg as it was floundering in the mouth of the tunnel. Beyond it, he could see navy blue open water that somehow was both a glacier melt and the Ohio river at the same time. The sluglike creatures had grown and were chewing into the iceberg.
He felt something slimy and warm land on his shoulder and turned to see the creature. “Ugh!” He panicked and smacked it off his shoulder and the thing splatted to the floor. Besides the boneless body, the creature was just mouth. Vestigial legs wavered helplessly in the air while the mouth gaped. His shoulder itched and he turned to see his blazer had been eaten through. Faint, acrid tendrils of smoke still drifted off the singed fabric.
The Great Mother’s moan echoed through the chamber. He returned his attention to her baby. The iceberg now floated in a shallow puddle that had begun running into a crack in the floor. He steeled himself against nausea and started grabbing for the slugs, throwing them off the iceberg and onto the floor. He stomped one, and it popped under his heel. “Ugh.”
“Gross.” Lin stepped up beside him and glanced upward. “Shit, Jack. They’re all over!” She wrinkled her nose and drew back, but she’d stuck her hands inside the cuffs of her sweater and began swiping the slugs off the iceberg and onto the floor. She glanced behind her. “What are you all waiting for? Get in here and help us!”
The Advisor stood at the opening to the Mother’s chamber, a distraught look on her face. “This one cannot. Summerkin are as poison to our kind.”
Jack finished clearing off the iceberg. He placed his foot into a depression on the back end of it and held onto a low, mounded bulkhead for balance, then gave the iceberg calf a shove towards the open water. The inanimate object floundered, resembling for all the world something sentient when it groaned when it hit the water. He felt a small sense of triumph when the icy mass righted itself and continued a stately drift away.
But while the iceberg was out of danger, the rest of them weren’t. The sluglike Splotches left slimy trails in their wake, and the slime, he now saw, had sprouted a faint, greenish fuzz of algae which off-gassed something that smelled like godawful death.
But worse than the smell, were the holes they left in the floor. He glanced
up again.
A sudden groan whited out the rest of the sound in the place. He couldn’t tell if it came from the structure itself, or the fifty-foot Oddling woman—whose toes, he realized, were the bulkhead he thought he’d been standing next to. Oh God, don’t turn around.
“This place is going down, Jack! What do we do?”
Don’t look behind us. Very aware of the potential Freudian nightmare behind him, it took him a minute to focus on Lin. Unfortunately, it was a minute his mouth had already engaged. “Reinforce the structure with pillars at forty-five degree angles to each other and put up buttresses.” He looked around to see if maybe there was something—a beam, a giant icicle, anything—to act as reinforcement for the sagging ceiling.
She smacked him in the arm and rolled her eyes. “No, jackass! What do we do right now?”
He glanced to the left and right. “Go to the light. Everybody! Out this way!” His hand around her waist, they started towards the light of the open water.
“You want us to go swimming?” She clutched at his sleeve, her boots skidding over the slick ice as she tried to avoid the slime patches. “It’s freezing out there!”
The structure rumbled. In his feet—in his bones—he could sense the tortured groan of walls crumbling under too much weight. The Sunsplotches on the ceiling had begun to melt the ice from the rooftop. The rush of trickling water grew more insistent, and tiny rivers ran past their feet, small waterfalls spilled from ever-growing holes in the roof.
Behind him, the Mother moaned again and a pressure wave sent him staggering. A second later, another iceberg bumped against his calves.
Lin bent down and scraped the Sunsplotches off the baby and sent it on its way. “Ow!” She shook her hand free of the slimy things. “They’ll eat through everything. How did something Summer get into Winter anyway? You can’t even go to Starla’s without causing an incident.”
“Who cares?” Now wasn’t the time to be curious, anyway. Not when the dripping of water had turned into too many streams. He could feel the structure getting softer all around him, like ice turning to slush.
“Jack, this is your Realm!” She looked up into his face. “You have control of it. You should care.”
“I do care! But I don’t have control!” A strange pull formed in his gut. This place was as much his as his loft. I can’t control this place—I can’t even keep the bugs out! “I—”
“Sleeping child.” The Mother spoke. Jack flinched and was about to turn around to face her until he remembered where he’d be facing. “I came to your realm seeking solace and peace.”
His chest tightened. “I’m...sorry, Ma’am. I couldn’t give you those things. I don’t know how—”
“Quiet.” Her booming voice was not doing the structural stability any favors. “This is my doing. I escaped the parasites once before, but they are persistent once they have a scent. I believed your dormancy would sustain the trespass accords between the realms. It is clear now that I was wrong—you are no longer dormant, and the trespass accords have been breached.”
“I’m sorry,” he repeated. “I didn’t know—” The creatures had been nagging him for three years to acknowledge them. And now that he had, he’d failed their goddess. I can’t win for trying, can I?
“A singular failing on Amaryllis’ part, but through no fault of her own. Look at me, child.”
He couldn’t resist the command in her voice—something in him pulled—but at the last second, he managed to jump over her foot so at least he was looking up the mountain of one bent leg, and not right into—Oh, let’s not go there.
Her gemlike eyes caught his and bored into his very soul. “Thousands of my children live their lives outside the Realms. I am sorry that you cannot be one of them.” She bent her knee higher, turned her face away, and moaned as another contraction wracked her giant body.
Jack clapped his hands over his ears as her anguish roared through him. Only once before did he feel so helpless—at his mother’s bedside when she’d moved from hospital to hospice, and her care shifted from finding a cure to running out the clock.
The brightness of the ice, the Mother, the edifice, burned through his eyelids. Her pain ate into his brain. Lin put her fingers on his sleeve and they felt like claws, but he was too immobilized to do anything but endure the sensory overload. At his limit, his teeth grit together, all he could think was StopstopSTOP!
And just like that, it stopped. Everything. The noise, the pain, the motion, the wretched smell of the Sunsplotches—everything froze over into a deathly silence of dead space. Jack lifted his head.
~*~
In the blank dark, the flutter of a robe disrupted the stillness. “It is as Majesty commands.”
Jack took his hands from over his ears and straightened. “You froze her, too?”
“Not I...”
“Well, what are you doing here, anyway? Haven’t I got enough trouble with a fifty-foot woman giving birth and an infestation of—of—Sunshine Slime Slugs?”
“The fluidity of borders formerly solid creates imbalance.” The Seneschal folded its sleeves. The dark robe shimmered briefly, reminding him of a high-flying cloud on a cold night. “This realm is Awakened. As goes Majesty, so goes the Realm.” The Seneschal turned.
The edge of its robe brushed against Jack’s shoe. Deep, freezing cold traveled up his leg, leaving numbness in its wake and a chill hard enough to burn his sinuses. “What do I have to do?” he asked through streaming eyes. He pinched the bridge of his nose and waited for the answer.
“As goes the Regent, so goes the Realm.” The world flickered back to light and life and movement, and the Seneschal’s last, repeated, cryptic instruction left the echo of silence in his ears.
Jack looked up. “Just once, I’d like to know what the hell it all means.”
Lin pulled on his arm. “Ponder the meaning of the universe later. This place is going down and I can’t get them—” she pointed to the Oddlings huddled near the hole in the wall, “—to come any closer. They’re going to die unless we do something.”
With the return of action came the marine-brined stink of the slugs and a mounting sense of desperation that had nothing to do with anything Oddling, and everything to do with building codes and physics. “Get them out of here.”
She stared at him like he’d grown another head. “And leave you here to do what, exactly?”
“Damage control.” He still registered her presence, but more and more of his mind began measuring angles, stress points, and weak spots. So very many weak spots.
He dropped his hands to his sides and his shoulders slumped. “I don’t think I can save this place.”
~*~
Lin shot an “are you crazy” look in Jack’s direction, but when she saw the set of his mouth, the fingers curled around his chin, she knew the expression. The “I’m solving a problem so don’t bother me” expression she remembered from times at EvoWorld when she’d had to hand him the reports detailing all the problems with the graphics that Quality Assurance had ferreted out.
She didn’t know anything about building codes or how to stop the quakes from bringing the ceiling down on their heads—on top of the disgusting creatures already dropping on them—but she could manage people. Even oddly-shaped ones. She let go of Jack’s arm and stepped around the impossibly large foot blocking the way between her and the hole in the wall where the rest of the fun-sized Oddlings clustered.
The slugs seemed to be keeping to this side of the building. If anything, she thought Jack might be able to contain the damage to the side of the building with the Mother. Now if we could only move her... But nobody moved a pregnant lady of regular size, let alone a giantess. One thing at a time, Sanada, she told herself as she stepped through the hole in the wall. “Okay, people. Let’s do this in an orderly fashion.”
When the Oddlings failed to listen to her, she plucked the collar of Jack’s little blue helper and yanked the critter nearly off her feet. “Hey.”
&n
bsp; “Let this one be, Stranger!” The little girl scowled up at her.
Lin set her expression. “Listen you. This place is going down and you’re going down with it unless we get out from under foot.”
“Frostling Tribe does not abandon Majesty or the Great Mother!”
“You’re not abandoning either of them.” She glanced through the hole to see Jack doing some sort of bizarre, shuffling dance, flapping his arms and sliding his feet around like a crazy, white-crested, awkward bird. “What the hell is he doing?” she muttered to herself.
The Advisor stiffened. “This one will not desert!”
She remembered something the Scarecrow had said. Something about the Oddlings and their natures. And a lot of her mother’s stories centered around semantic trickery between humans and youkai.
Jack continued his demented bird imitation while she tried to lock onto an argument that would permit the Oddlings to leave their Majesty and their goddess—I recognize a goddess when I see one. But between one blink and the next, Lin realized Jack wasn’t just flailing around on the icy floor—he was kicking the slugs into position, creating a line between the Mother’s body and the rest of the hall. So that when their acid ate through the floor—
“We need to leave now! All of us.” She grabbed the tiny shoulders. “Your Majesty gave me an order to evacuate you guys. You’re not deserting, you’re—you’re disobeying!”
That seemed to galvanize them. Like a bunch of kindergartners panicked at being sent to the principal’s office, the Oddlings scrambled for the main door. She helped them along with little shooing motions until the Evergreen girl with the bad sense of relationship boundaries joined her. “Mistress has not the power to simply exile the Kin of Iceberghaal.”
Lin ground her back teeth together. “I’m not exiling any of you! Is it your policy to go down with the ship? Is that what this is? Some honor thing?”
The Evergreen girl’s pine-needled shoulders fluffed out and settled back down in a shrug. “It is who they are.”
WinterJacked: Book One: Rude Awakening Page 31