“We can’t stop,” Nai says. “We’ll get stuck in the ice.”
“You should have thought of that before your goon ordered the other vehicle to shoot at us,” Dash says. Nai starts to respond, but thinks better of it. Most of the people in this vehicle answer to Dash.
Sasha sees me sitting nearby, and looms over me. “You,” he spits. “You’re supposed to be the magic talisman that gets us through the night in one piece. That’s what we were promised.”
I just look up at him. Whatever Sasha sees in my face, it makes him back away, hands raised in a defensive cower.
“Stop bothering Sophie,” Bianca says. “She’s not an all-purpose protector. She’s good if we run into crocodiles.”
“Oh god, spare me. Bianca! Everybody swoons whenever you open your mouth, like you’re some Xiosphanti princess out of an old storybook.” Sasha grunts. “This whole mission was your idea, and we’re depending on your friend’s so-called magical powers, and I can tell you’re just a cheap grifter.”
Bianca smiles up at Sasha, as if he just said something innocuous about Zagreb opera, and I can’t help feeling a sugary rush of pride in her.
Everybody else in the Command Vehicle goes quiet, not even moaning anymore. We’ve stopped driving already, because our engines need to cool down. Dash breaks the silence. “Sasha, put on some protective gear and go outside to look at the damage you caused. Take a few engineers with you.”
Sasha starts to say, “I don’t answer to you,” but Nai just gives him a look, and he trails off. His face falls, and he slumps forward. After a moment, he says, “Fine, great. See you soon.”
“We’ve lost number-five troop transport,” Marcus says as Sasha puts on the gear, accompanied by two men and a woman from the engine section.
“What does that mean, ‘lost’?” Nai says.
“It’s just not there anymore. Maybe it fell down a crevasse. The ice is full of fissures.”
I can smell the smoke from the cracked engine, and my head swims.
“We … lost a vehicle,” Nai says.
These are the people that Bianca decided to trust with everything. She tries to give me a conspiratorial smile, cocking one eyebrow. But I just stare past her, at the instrument panel that’s gone bright pink with warning lights.
Sasha has his survival gear on, helmet in hand, and he hesitates at the inner hatch. “Okay,” he says. “I’m going outside now. If … if you still think I should.”
“Great,” Dash says. “We’ll keep it warm for you.”
Even though I hate Sasha, this loud stupid bully, I still feel nauseous watching Dash ordering him outside, likely to his death, on a mission that doesn’t require his supervision. I kept thinking I had never seen the real Dash, but maybe I just caught a glimpse. Bianca smiles at Dash, and they hold hands.
“I’ll be back soon,” Sasha says, still hesitating.
But everyone just looks at Sasha until he opens the hatch, bows his head, and goes into the outer chamber with his team, then seals the inner hatch behind them.
“Everybody keep your eyes open for more wildlife,” Dash says.
While we’re stopped and our engines silenced, the sounds of the night come through. This close to midnight, the wind makes a keening sound, but our exterior visibility is a series of illusions.
Bianca kept saying she had lost everything, right before she showed me this machine for the first time, and maybe this is her way of getting it all back. The social status, the brilliant future, the luxury of idealism in a comfortable chair among friends, all the things she had when I first knew her. I miss that life too, maybe even more than she does and in a deeper cavity of my psyche, but the increasingly thick air of this icebound assault vehicle (sweat and farts and gun residue and engine coolant and terror) is leaving me surer and surer that this whole enterprise says something indelible about her.
My bracelet thrums harder, and I adjust it under my sleeve, trying to send a response, like, I’m here. I’m sorry about before. I’m here now. I’m sorry for bringing these intruders to you.
The voices of Sasha and the engineers come over the radio.
“Why is this taking so long?”
“Give us a moment, Sasha. Inspecting the damage.”
“I saw something move.”
“There are snowdrifts. Motion is pretty much constant out here.”
“No, really. I saw—”
“Just keep working. I want to see their faces when I come back in one piece.”
“Did you hear that?”
“It’s so cold my ears are frozen shut.”
“Just keep working.”
“Watch out, there’s a—”
And then a high shriek, and no sound but the wind again for a while.
“Nikki. Shit. Nikki. Did you even see what got—”
“Stop asking if I see things.”
“Nikki’s just gone.”
“We’re seriously all going to die here.”
“Stop saying that.”
“Okay, I think I sealed the damage. Let’s get back inside before—”
And then more screams, which grow louder and more indistinct, a chorus. Then they cease, and we’re left with just the wind again.
“Let’s go,” Dash says to Marcus. “Start the engines.”
Everybody looks at Dash for a moment. The radio stays silent. So Marcus takes a deep breath through his upper teeth, eyes stretched open, and then we roll forward. As soon as we’re moving again, I feel someone pulling my wrist once more.
The engine seems to hold up, and we tear through the night as if the ghosts of Sasha and the dead engineers are chasing us. The scream of our hastily repaired drive chamber sounds higher and more ravenous than the wind. We catch up to the other vehicles in our fleet, and even pass them, racing forward until our engines protest.
“Gotta slow down,” Marcus says. Dash tosses his head.
My bracelet thrums, as if in warning, but before I can make sense of it, I feel a sickening twist, as if the world has come apart underneath us. For one stomach-dropping moment, I think we’ve fallen into a sinkhole. But no—a splintering, shattering sound comes from two kilometers behind us, and the rear topographic scans show the ice shelf breaking apart. The layers of permafrost unfold like wings, spreading open to reveal the naked ocean below, and all the other vehicles are caught in the middle of it.
mouth
At first, they thought some seismic event had torn through the ice. Or maybe some submerged mine left over from one of those ancient wars, a final revenge from some dead sailor. They bickered and debated, even as the road rose up vertical in front of them. Sweated, spat, pleaded, prayed, boasted, grandstanded. The grav-assist treads pawed at the unsteady fragments of tundra, groping in vain for some purchase. But the mist cleared, and Alyssa spotted the cause of the eruption: one tentacle, covered with iridescent feathers and tipped with a leaf-shaped barb the size of a tenement, had burst upward from the frozen ocean, filling the space like a new monument. One of the giant squids that lurked at the bottom of the Sea of Murder had detected food on the surface, and decided to go hunting.
Alyssa unsnapped her harness, while all the Perfectionists in the number-seven transport wasted time bemoaning their fate, and pushed through the passenger compartment until she reached the cockpit. She leaned over an older Perfectionist loyalist named Winston, who sat in the pilot’s seat, and unfastened his safety harness for him. “You better let me drive,” she said. Winston hesitated, and she added: “Do you want to live, or do you want to feel good about yourself in your final moments? One of us here knows the Sea of Murder, and it’s not you.”
Winston slid out of his chair, and Alyssa climbed in, securing herself inside. Mouth came and stood next to her, mostly to watch what promised to be an excellent show.
The fleshy protrusion rose thirty meters over their heads, its tip swaying as if searching for prey. Then it curled, whip-fast, and ensnared two vehicles in a single fluid motion, dragging them back through its hole in the ice.
“Bloody hell,” Winston breathed. “Those poor people.”
“Pretty quick death. Better than most.” Alyssa kept her eyes fixed on the topographic scans, looking for any tiny fluctuations or perturbations in the ice, while easing the ATV forward at a tantalizing speed. They crawled ahead until they reached one of the darkest blue spots, and then Alyssa spun them almost 90 degrees and sped up, so the terrain streaked past for a moment. Then she pulled back on the throttle again, and they were back to baby steps.