So she skated with Nicole, up and down Broadway from Union Square to Thirty-fourth, feeling the chill air in her lungs, nose tingling, feeling all the glorious feelings of being out in winter under a pale sky, the sun just barely clearing the horizon to the south, casting long shadows to the north from all the buildings. It was like they had all been transported to an ice planet somewhere, and yet there were the same familiar buildings and delis and kayak stores, with the only difference being the canals were a solid if dirty white. The city had even put some real buses back on the streets, old buses with new motors. That made the views up and down the steel canyons look like old photos, but with ice skaters replacing taxis. Walkers had to stay near the buildings or risk the fate of inattentive jaywalkers during the old days.
Amelia skated at speed, going faster than the taxis of earlier times would have been able to, because she could dodge through traffic like a motorcyclist. Nicole could not keep up with her. If someone walked in front of her she yelled “BEEP BEEP BEEP” and dodged them with inches to spare.
But then she found herself going so fast that she accidentally skated through a stretch of red tape crossing the intersection of Broadway and Twenty-eighth, and below her the ice got thin, and she thought of her father’s saying, Skate fast over thin ice, but even skating as fast as she could, the ice broke under her. Not only was she dumped instantly into cold water, but a broken chunk of ice caught her right under the ribs and knocked the wind out of her just as she plunged completely under. The shock of the cold would have driven the air from her lungs anyway, but it was already gone, so she choked and in doing so took some water into her lungs, so she coughed and choked again. And then she was drowning.
Flailing, panicking, she swam hard upward and banged into ice—there was a clear ceiling of ice between her and the air! She had slid under the unbroken ice! And now would drown for sure! A huge adrenaline surge shot through her body, turning her blood to fire and making her more desperate than ever for air. She elbowed the ice above her as hard as she could, but it was a weak blow. Now she was only seeing a blur of blacks and grays. She didn’t know what to try next, where to swim next. She knocked the back of her head up against the ice. That hurt, but nothing more happened. She was doomed.
Then there was a loud crashing around her, and she was grabbed and dragged upward by she knew not what. There she was, hanging in the air, dragged sideways, held up by several people moving around her and shouting—she was gasping, freezing, coughing, choking, drowning still although in the air, and being shuffled away from a big jagged wet hole in the ice, which these passersby had apparently bashed to get to her. They had seen her under the ice, they told her loudly, seen the accident and followed her momentum, and smashed the ice with shoes and ski poles and elbows and foreheads, and pulled her out. People were so nice! But she was freezing, really freezing, too cold to shiver even, or breathe, so her gasps were balked as she tried to breathe in, craving the air as she tried to get it in her, but only managing to cough out canal water. The air seemed to stick in her throat. “C-c-cold!” she finally managed to choke out with the water.
“Come on, get her in here,” someone shouted. Everyone was talking at once, she was lifted into a building, even she could tell it was warmer in there, maybe, and then they had her in a ladies’ room, no, a locker room of some kind, maybe it was a gym, a spa, and they were taking her clothes off. Someone remarked very cheerfully that it was just like one of her shows, that it wasn’t every day you got to strip a cloud star to save her life. Everyone but Amelia laughed at that, although she would have too if she could have, because it had of course been a major feature of her shows during those first couple years in the cloud. So it was like old times to get stripped down and thrown in a hot shower, and a few people even got in there with her, not naked, just getting wet in their clothes while propping her up and encouraging her, laughing and talking animatedly, and hopefully enjoying her nakedness, as she would have herself if she could have felt or thought anything. The shower water they kept lukewarm, so that her capillaries didn’t expand and drain her heart of blood, they said, good idea, but it wasn’t as warm as she would have liked, and she was shivering more than ever. Nicole was just outside the shower door, keeping dry but also checking her out and Amelia supposed filming her. The strangers were more blunt about it. “Come on gal, stand up and get that warm water on the back of your neck.” “Someone get this woman some dry clothes.” “Where we gonna do that?” “Here’s a towel, she can dry off and wear it till they find some things.” “Little warmer now, she’s coming around. Not too fast though, don’t kill her like those Chilean sailors.”
She was coming around. She was still painfully cold, her skin mottled red on white in a kind of pinto or Appaloosa fashion, it probably wasn’t her best look, although it could possibly be taken as orgasmic or something; the water was hotter now, and she was feeling better and better. She had only been submerged in the canal for a couple of minutes, they said, so now the water on her skin began to feel kind of painfully hot, actually. Like burning hot. “Hey!” she said. “Ow! Hot! Hot!”
So they cooled it a bit, and slowly they brought her back to a safe temperature internally, and dried her off, and got her into some clothes borrowed or bought on layaway, or put-’em-on, as someone said it should be called. Layaway, put-’em-on, lots of laughs at this. A very friendly crowd. “You are all so nice!” Amelia said. “Thank you for saving my life!” And she burst into tears.
“Let’s get you home,” Nicole said.
When Amelia had recovered from her dunking in the canal, she got in the Assisted Migration and flew from New York to the northeastern coast of Greenland. On the triangular island of hills between the Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden Fjord (which had been a glacier before the First Pulse) and the Zachariae Isstrom Fjord (likewise) stood a rather spectacular city called New Copenhagen. Given the state of old Copenhagen many people said this city should just be called Copenhagen, acknowledging that the city had in effect been relocated. Back in Denmark people sniffed at this presumptuousness and insisted their city was just fine, that it had always been a watery place. On the other hand the idea that there was another Copenhagen on the northeast corner of their old colony was not actually very objectionable, and the truth was that as the two places had little to do with each other, the names were not important. There was a Copenhagen in Ontario too.