And then there is a splash and another swirl of movement and motion around me, and I can feel more of it this time, because I just keep getting warmer. I look over, and there’s Callie, leaving Emily’s side and making her way over to me, and then she reaches me, and then she’s embracing me, and the warmth increases tenfold. And now I remember: That’s why. Callie is why. We did this because of Callie, and Ted, and all the other Icelings, because it was the only thing that could be done. They needed to come here. We didn’t know this—any of this—would happen. I try to smile at her, but her face is not at an angle where she can see mine, and anyway I can’t hold my face like that for too long, and then a new wave of cold settles in and I start shivering and shaking.
And then the roaring in my ears dies down a little, and I can hear something, a calm sound, soft and low, and I try to stretch my neck up as far as I can to see if I can make it out any better. I follow the faint sound and find Emily again. She’s awake, and right next to me, closer than I would have thought, and the sound is coming from her. It’s louder now, and I make out that she’s urging Stan to kick. I realize I can hardly feel my toes, an improvement from when I first woke up and couldn’t feel anything but pain, and I start trying to kick too. Emily sees me and gives me as much of a smile as our bodies will allow right now, and then we kick together, trying to move toward Stan, the Icelings still clinging to us and moving along with us. We close in on Stan and Greta, who is wrapped around him, and we nudge him with our legs as best we can until he starts to kick too.
Our world’s on fire, or maybe it’s drowning. We’re on fire, and we’re drowning. And because we don’t know which disaster is the right one, we stay like this for a long while, silent and treading water, half-conscious and drifting in and out of it all, blinking back and forth between flashes of the dock wreckage, the island, what we thought of as our lives until now. Our Icelings and Bobby’s Iceling continue to take turns keeping us alive until we’re warm enough to look around and think about what to do next. My periphery’s on fire. Flames lick at the fuel depot by the docks, all lit up and spitting sparks and burning bits of metal and wood and gas all over the sea. My ears are still roaring, though thankfully it’s quieted down quite a bit, and now I can hear the splashes our own bodies make in the water.
When my vision starts to come back and I no longer have to blink and squint to tell the difference between Emily and Stan, I begin to take stock of our surroundings. We can see the boat. We know we can make it now. Emily’s the only one with a backpack. I’m sure we’ll regret it later, but our parkas were weighing us down. Thank God for layers, but still. Floating on a plank that Ted’s holding on to are two of the five containers of fuel we brought. I twirl around to see if the others might be near, and I see a flash of red bobbing up and down a little ways off. I try to swim to it but can barely make it a foot under my own strength. Then Ted grabs me, not ungently. I start to point to the big red-and-yellow container, but before I can he’s already gone, swimming out to the bobbing beacon, and Callie’s got one arm wrapped around me and the other holding on to the plank that’s holding the other two tanks. Ted comes back and plops the third container on the plank with the rest of them, and Callie lets go and brings her other arm around me again. I look over to the island. And every inch of it that I can see is on fire.
And I guess that was all too much, because I’m exhausted again. Emily was apparently on the swim team and the gymnastics team, because she’s looking strong against all the struggling. Stan’s beat but mostly breathing, and me, I’m in shock and shocked that I’m still breathing. And so we’re quiet again for a while, and we all just let ourselves drift, let ourselves be held by the Icelings and the freezing water, clinging to whatever’s left to cling to, while the home our siblings have been dreaming of their whole lives burns to the ground.
When I’m warm enough to cry, I cry. My tears mingle with the water. But I didn’t have to tell you that.
TWENTY-FIVE
AFTER AN UNKNOWN stretch of time during which I’m hovering in and out of various states of consciousness and feeling, I come to, sharply and for good, when a drone with spinning helicopter blades crashes into the sea about fifteen feet away from us. Its propellers smack the water first, and the water smacks back, forcing the fighting blades to send a few sad sparks into the air, like a flare gun to its friends, and then slow down to a desperate stop. In movies, things explode on impact. But in the water, nearly drowning things just sort of spark a bit, and then the blades try sadly spinning, but they can’t do it right, and it just kind of floats there, partially submerged and whirring until it can’t.