WE COME TO after who knows how much time has passed, and the pain is piercing hot and striking me at every angle. At first I think I must have washed ashore, that my body is frozen stiff and the piercing pain is actually just the process of my body freezing over. But then I force my eyes open, and the first thing I see is water, and then I take a weak look around to see more of the same, and then I realize that this is still happening. It’s not over yet. We still have to keep going. Our raft is smashed to pieces, and we’re still hanging on to planks, bobbing up and down. At first I think I am alone, but then Emily bobs into view and then Stan. But I still don’t see Callie or the other Icelings, and if my heart could beat any faster—assuming it can even keep beating after this beating we’re taking—it would be pounding out of my chest.
Just about the only thing I can reason out right now is that this should have killed us. We should be dead. But we’re not. Why aren’t we dead? And then I see a flutter on the surface of the water, and that flutter turns into Tara, and she’s swimming from Emily toward me. And then I see a second flutter, and it’s Callie, swimming from Stan to Emily. And then Greta, and Ted, swimming all around from one of us to the other. Tara closes in on me, and I try to move but can’t, and then she makes contact, and all at once I’m hit with a very faint sensation of warmth.
The Icelings go on like this, taking turns wrapping themselves around us, kicking and pushing their way toward us and then away and away and away. This makes no sense, I know it makes no sense, but somehow . . . they’re keeping us warm. They’re keeping us warm, and I can tell by the way they kick and breathe that they’re not at all cold. It makes sense how Greta could go out after Alex like that. Could try to keep him warm and save him. It’s what they’re doing right now.
I’m feeling warmer by the second, slowly regaining my ability to take in the world around me and try to make meaning out of it. The sea is no longer calm. My ears are roaring. I open my mouth and try to say something, a test to see if my ears still work, but then a little wave bobs up and my mouth is full of water, cold and salty and I’m almost choking on it, so I start spitting it out. I have no idea why I had to think about it in order to do it, or why my eyes and brain and muscles couldn’t work together to see the wave and react by closing my mouth so my lungs didn’t fill with water, and then I try to close my eyes against all these thoughts, because if my brain and body aren’t really working right now, then I don’t want to waste what energy I have worrying about why and how my brain and body don’t work. I’m worried that if I worry anymore, then I’ll lose my grip on this plank and plummet to the bottom of the sea, because it’s just too overwhelming for my broken brain, the sheer amount of things there are to worry about right now—like drowning, or hypothermia, or death by bullets or fire or U.S. military missiles, which we might have avoided but which might still be seeking us out right now, there’s no way to tell because I can’t hear anything except my own thoughts, which are screaming, screaming about things like how many people and Icelings Jane’s team just murdered, or why we didn’t just stay home, why we thought this was even a good idea to begin with. Why did we think this was a good idea?